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"The Art and Secrets of " - a digital 92-page heavily illustrated with yet unpublished sketches, drawings, paintings and locations from the game - is now out!

Agata (@holypangolin) reveals her thoughts on the curious fruity characters’ personalities and backstories, as well as some difficult decisions she had to make during the design process.

Buy on or @itchio:

store.steampowered.com/app/317

holypangolin.itch.io/the-art-a

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The newest game I've been working on, ODGŁOS, is finally available to play! A cute owl, the history of electronic music, shapeshifting snakes and intergalactic journeys inside the Polish Radio Experimental Studio - all in a stop-motion interactive story :) You'll need a browser, headphones and 30 minutes to spare. Have fun!
holypangolin.itch.io/odglos

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time!
My name is dos; some call me Sebastian. I made dozens of small silly video and some slightly less small ones too. I'm one half of @holypangolin studio. Sometimes I pretend to be a musician, but don't get fooled. I'm also a living encyclopedia on a Polish rock band "Perfect". Trams are cooler than trains. The more caramel, the better. I've been using GNU/#Linux on phones for ages, which led me to work with @purism on the Librem 5. btw I use Arch, but I ❤️ Debian!

If you're near Los Angeles County next week, I invite you to visit Long Beach and attend DIY Film Fest, where @holypangolin's short "The Flight of the Quirky Owl" is going to be screened on Sat, Aug 9th ☺️ diyfilmfest.life/

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One more thing to note is that DCP-o-matic's Encode Server just worked flawlessly - you simply launch it on another computer in the network and it automatically participates in ongoing encoding. Turns out that Steam Deck is the most powerful PC we own, as its participation has sped the process up considerably 😆

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This NYT quote about “AI” in 80s Pac-Man is comically bad.

But rather than dwelling on that, the way the ghosts work to make it feel like they were “thinking” is a really cool example of the exact opposite. It's a series of really simple deterministic rules:

web.archive.org/web/2019110702

Take a few things happening in parallel in a highly specified way, throw in a little randomness (no more complicated than rolling dice), and we start assigning agency to the ghosts in the game.

This happens because 1) our brains love to anthropomorphize, and 2) we don't perceive the rules immediately.

And that's today's AI in a nutshell… More simple rules, more rolling dice—just massively scaled up!

Now you can do 10,000x more in the same time, so the result is again indistinguishable from magic, and we trick ourselves into assigning agency and even “intelligence” to the outputs.

(“Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior” is a favorite article from some years ago, so it's fun to have an excuse to share it again. My thanks to the author and his original sources; most of the originals seem to be offline, but thank god for archive.org…)

If you're near Los Angeles County next week, I invite you to visit Long Beach and attend DIY Film Fest, where @holypangolin's short "The Flight of the Quirky Owl" is going to be screened on Sat, Aug 9th ☺️ diyfilmfest.life/

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However, DCP-o-matic had troubles with our slightly unusual source material (variable frame rate stop-motion). The video was blinking.

So I looked into its source code and it turned out that hacking it into duplicating missing frames instead of injecting black ones was a matter of a single line change.

Now try fixing a thing like that when your Adobe suite is acting up 😂

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A film festival has asked to provide the video to screen in a cinema-specific format (DCP), "created using a reliable tool e.g., DCP-o-matic".
Deadline: two days 😱

My first thought: great, I'm going to spend two days wrestling with Wine and some barely working "industry standard" tooling, am I?

But looking closer, it turned out:
- DCP is a stream of JPEG2000 frames in MXF container and some XML metadata 🤔
- the cinema expects a ext2-formatted drive 😮
- DCP-o-matic is GPLv2+ and multiplatform 🤩

We obtained a mysterious box of 1960s electronics. I reverse-engineered it and with much effort, we got it running. It turns out to be a test unit for testing NASA's Up-Data Link, a system from the Apollo moon landing to control the spacecraft from the ground. Let's take a look inside... 1/n

My 128bit format emulation - needed for GLES3 - is starting to pass the first CTS.

#etnaviv #mesa #Librem5

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uint8x16_t vector1 = ((uint8x16_t){1} > (uint8x16_t){0}) >> 7;
printf("%d\n", vector1[0]); // 1 in clang, 255 in gcc

uint8x16_t vector2 = (uint8x16_t){1} > (uint8x16_t){0};
vector2 = vector2 >> 7;
printf("%d\n", vector2[0]); // 1 in both gcc and clang

🤔

Aren't you glad that sfghefaes (@dawlkjr27898) has added you to a group conversation on Twitter?

is about to reach its millionth signature as we speak, a month before the deadline. A tiny, but very necessary step in the right direction.

If you hurry it may be yours 😁 eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/

SLUDGE-based games are ready for testing!

Do you want to expose the deepest secrets of the Tremendous Corporation® and save the games industry?

Are you interested in helping a young man who's out of order in an alien future?

Or will you join the story of Nathan, who wants to get a second chance in life?

scummvm.org/news/20250629/

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