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   Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Saturday, 13-May-2023 02:00:19 JST Alex Gleason
   The Blood Moon in Zelda is a perfect example of harmony between engineering and design. It's essentially a cache busting mechanism that NEEDS to happen to conserve system resources. Instead of trying to make it something "the user doesn't notice" by trying to hide it from them, they interwove it into the story, the experience, and the lore. It actually has consequence for the player, which is SO much more interesting. They took a technical limitation and flipped it upside down. This is how you can tell their engineers were designers, and their designers were engineers. It's a cohesive unified vision for the product that perfectly balances design with technical excellence. Even if the hardware was 10x more powerful we'd still want the Blood Moon.
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     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 13-May-2023 02:01:26 JST feld

     in reply to
     cache busting how? do you have more details?
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     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Saturday, 13-May-2023 02:07:03 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • feld
     @feld Every time you kill an enemy in the world, or destroy a barrel, cut some grass, or place an item, it becomes preserved that way in RAM (and maybe even saved in your save file?). When you mutate the overworld it stays that way, and there are tens of thousands of diffs that could happen, each with an internal state. The Blood Moon resets all that with a cutscene, so the game doesn't consume too much RAM. I don't have a source, but it's kind of obvious if you think about it while playing it.
     feld likes this.
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     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 13-May-2023 02:09:21 JST feld

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     Makes sense
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     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Saturday, 13-May-2023 02:10:45 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • feld
     @feld Anyway I have a cron job on the Mostr bridge that restarts it every night and resets all the infinitely growing cache. So I do a Blood Moon on my software all the time, I just don't interweave it into the experience so excellently.
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     Frondeur (frondeur@poa.st)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 12:10:50 JST Frondeur

     in reply to

     @alex so majoras mask…

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     LukeAlmighty 🇨🇿 (lukealmighty@gameliberty.club)'s status on Sunday, 14-May-2023 12:11:06 JST LukeAlmighty 🇨🇿

     in reply to

     @alex
     Breath of the wild is insane game because of the pure ammount of "intuitive" physics based gameplay and interactions.

     But I am still not sure why so many of them are so well hudden. It might even be good, but for me, this game is peak "just google it".

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     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2024 02:40:45 JST feld

     in reply to
     @alex Nintendo engineers exist on a whole different spectral plane from us. We're truly not worthy of their ingenuity.
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     KaiserKitty (kaiserkitty@clubcyberia.co)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2024 03:45:37 JST KaiserKitty

     in reply to
     @alex It also allows for weapon durability to be balanced since it allows for you to regather any weapon you want. Which is why its funny to me when people bitch about weapon durability since you can just mark caches of good weapons and go back after a blood moon.
     Alex Gleason likes this.
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     lamp (lamp@kitty.haus)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2024 06:41:29 JST lamp

     in reply to
     @alex whats the blood moon do
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     Alex Gleason (alex@gleasonator.com)'s status on Monday, 22-Jan-2024 06:41:29 JST Alex Gleason

     in reply to

     • lamp
     @lamp cache.clear() with a nice cutscene