Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nova @novasquirrel.com · 18h

I wanna get a group together for the Splatoon 3 Splatfest next weekend. I'm planning on being on the ghost team. Is anyone interested in joining on that?

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 3d

I really like how that glass effect looks! Of course I really like translucent materials in real products so that's going to translate to realistic rendering too

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Reposted by Nova

PocketPaws (🔞NSFW) @pocketpaws.bsky.social · 4d

Mimigas are absolute underrated CUTIES and I had such a wonderful time drawing this lil guy <3

✏️ Commission for lagombi!
Thank you so much! 💖

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Reposted by Nova

Sheeb 🍓🦭 @critterheaven.moe · 6d

keychain comms!!! please message me if youre interested or have any questions. these will be open until around the 15th or if i get a Lot of interest (so more than like, 5 slots)

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 7d

I created github.com/NovaSquirrel... which takes a Furnace file or an Impulse Tracker file, and converts it to MML that will work with TAD. I previously used a similar approach on NES with github.com/NovaSquirrel.... Turns out tracker-->MML conversion is a viable strategy.

GitHub - NovaSquirrel/fur2tad: Furnace to TAD converter

Furnace to TAD converter. Contribute to NovaSquirrel/fur2tad development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 8d

Yeah I was about to go comment about GoToSocial. It doesn't look like it needs a separate web server either?

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 8d

Probably would have to make drastic changes to the protocol to support that; AT Protocol seems designed to just throw all privacy away in the name of trying to avoid federation jank, and the federation support itself seems to primarily be an excuse to downplay unpopular moderation decisions.

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Reposted by Nova

Arilin Thorferra @giants-club.net · 9d

New post: “Look, just fucking use Mastodon already” https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/

A short, unnecessarily profane rant about modern social media, not really serious but not really a joke, either. With apologies to McSweeney’s.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 12d

It could be a space where I just sketch out articles about whatever, but often there's a better place (like SNES articles/guides can go on snes.nesdev.org/wiki/SNESdev...) It could document Tilemap Town stuff but I dunno what really needs to be documented (and it has its own website already.)

SNESdev Wiki

SNES Development Wiki

snes.nesdev.org

Nova @novasquirrel.com · 12d

Trying to think if there's a better use for my MediaWiki installation than documenting an RP group that doesn't do stuff anymore. I already set up novasquirrel.com/world/ as a standalone thing that just focuses on my own worldbuilding, and that's probably better when collaboration isn't needed.

Nova's site: Worldbuilding

novasquirrel.com

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 13d

I'm happy with Terrific Audio Driver, especially now that I have a setup where I can use Furnace to compose for it. Furnace is a lot nicer than SNES GSS's tracker. @undisbeliever.bsky.social has mentioned wanting to add sample swapping of some kind to TAD.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 19d

Did you know that none of my original games have a formal concept of an animation? Everything that wants to display multiple frames has hardcoded logic to pick what frame to display right in its code, often just using a timer (usually the global frame counter) as a table index, ANDed with something.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 19d

Thinking that maybe my feelings about the viability of working without a game engine are actually influenced a lot by the strong debugging tools that you get for free by making a game that can run in Mesen, and just how simple the systems my games are built on actually are.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

That had me thinking "It would be cool to make a social game that's specifically made to be used with netplay" but that's just making an online PC game with a lot more effort and less control over dealing with latency. I'm sure I'll eventually do a cool social game with USB2SNES though.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

I got to play Sliding Blaster 2 over Mesen netplay and was surprised to see that it does support two mice that way, though mouse control isn't friendly to lag. We spent a lot of time just goofing around and pretending the bouncing characters were like the DVD logo, or moving in silly ways.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

On cells where the garbage target overlaps with something, I'm flickering between the two to deliberately get a blending effect, since the Game Boy Color's LCD takes more than one frame to fully change a pixel. I do have accessibility options for a slower blink effect instead, and no screen shake.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

Working on the versus mode in Petal Crash for Game Boy Color again, now working on finishing the garbage mechanic. Instant drop garbage was already in because of Trash Trial, so I implemented the normal kind, with targets for where garbage will fall in a few turns.

#gbdev #homebrew #gamedev

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

It's fun that the 65c02 (without RMB, SMB, BBS, BBR) leaves so many opcodes free that you can make your own custom expansion to it without needing prefixes. I've played with doing that myself, though nowadays I always end up thinking "would I really prefer using this over a 68020 or 6809?"

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 24d

Something that happens to me pretty often as I write Game Boy code is that I'll write a conditional branch to skip over a return or a call, and then go "oh right I can just make the call/return conditional"

You would think that my 6502/65816 familiarity would cause more issues but it's mostly this.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 25d

I do appreciate seeing your posts on there and following your game dev progress; I guess I should interact with it though

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 27d

There's details about exactly what's being checked at tcrf.net/Super_Smash_... - it looks like it's more anti-tamper than anti-piracy. A lot of games specifically check to make sure the copyright notices have not been modified and I assume the intent here is something like that.

tcrf.net

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 28d

I hope SAGE 2025 gets me some feedback on Sliding Blaster 2, since I don't think many people have actually played it yet. A lot of people have told me the graphics are cute though, and compared the art style to lots of different games (none of which I've played much of.)

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 28d

I've been using my Raspberry Pi Zero W as a baseline to compare against for writing software that works on very weak hardware. Seems that if I want to do that, and have a GUI alongside arbitrary graphics, a pretty reasonable design is to use Qt with a custom widget that draws itself with QtPainter.

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 29d

I like the idea of writing software that runs fast on a $15 computer and makes it useful, though I think things are at a point now where even cheap normal computers are reasonably powerful, and you really have to go out of your way to get early 2000s or 90s specs (and 90s computers can be pricy!)

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Nova @novasquirrel.com · 29d

I think a lot of my interest in old computers is actually part of a larger interest in getting computers with low specs to do interesting/useful/entertaining work, which also applies to single board computers. Though I am also separately very interested in computer history and old Windows aesthetics

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