So I thought I'd try a little experiment here. Here are 2 songs I like from the same band. They're very different songs, and here's why I like them:

I Got You - This is a song about infatuation. It conveys that feeling I had when I was smitten with someone as a teenager. It feels very intimate to me, like the singer's directly expressing his innermost feelings to the person he's infatuated with. Or perhaps thinking of what he would say if he had the guts. It's very much a new wave pop song, and is probably the most well-known of Split Enz songs, at least where I live in the US.

I See Red - This is very much a song of rage. To me it's about a guy who's been dumped, or maybe who was infatuated with someone, and now they're with someone else. Whereas "I Got You" was very poppy, this is more punky. (I mean it's still pop, but with a punk flavor.) Putting it together with the previous song makes a lot of sense to me, even though they have such different tone. It's like the 2 songs together tell a story. I also love the phrase "down the drain like molten toothpaste." There's just something so illustrative about "molten toothpaste."

Anyway, just thought I'd share these random thoughts.

As life slowly returns to normal in the UK, I've felt the need to look after my fitness more. I lacked discipline throughout lockdown to workout at home and keep my fitness. As a result I've got a nice COVID-gut, and my endurance and strength are shot. I swam regularly before quarantine hit, at least 4 times a week, and I'm keen to get back into that. But I'm also looking at picking up a martial art, for a more intense workout and fitness, as well as just to pick up a new skill. However I have no idea where to begin with martial arts, so I figured I'd start a thread for some inspiration, and go from there.

So are any tilderen martial artists? If so, tell me about it!
What do you practice?
How long have you done it?
How does it benefit you?
Do you attend classes or practice solo?
Would you recommend your martial art to a beginner?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Suppose I am trying to iteratively produce a completed image from some subset using a combination of convolutional/DNN methods. What Image norm is best?

The natural (for me) norm to ascribe to an image is to take the bitmap as a vector with L₂. If the input image is anime or something else, the uniform coloring makes this very likely to be a good fit in a low dimension - that is: no overfitting.

However: pictures of fur. Given a small square, the AI, set to extrapolate more fur from that single image, should be expected to get that stuff right next to the given subimage right, but further away, i want it to get the texture right, not the exact representation. So, if the AI shifts the fur far away from the image left by just the right amount, it could get an incredibly poor score.

If I were to use the naive L₂ norm directly, I would be guaranteed to overfit, and you can see this with some of the demo algorithms for image generation around the web. Now, the answer to this is probably to use a fourier or a wavelet transform and then take the L_N norm over the transformed space instead (correct me if I'm wrong.)

However, we get to the most complex class: images with different textures in them. In this case, I have a problem. Wavelet-type transforms don't behave well with discrete boundaries, while pixel-by-pixel methods don't do well with the textured parts of images. Is there a good method of determining image similarity for these cases?

More philosophically, what is the mathematical notion of similarity that our eye picks out? Any pointers or suggestions are appreciated. This is the last of two issues I have with a design I built for a Sparse NN.

Edit: For those interested, here is an example, notice how the predictions tend to blur details

I know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

Hey, all. I'm back four weeks to the day after you guys gave me a lot of great advice about potentially making a 2D RPG out of my tabletop RPG. I decided to try both Godot and Unity given what people told me and I completed two tutorials for each over the last few weeks. After completing these two tutorials, I have some questions that I hope maybe some of you can answer to help me choose between the two.

TL;DR at the bottom. This is a long post.

For context, here's the tutorials I did:

Godot - https://www.davidepesce.com/godot-tutorials/
Unity - https://learn.unity.com/project/ruby-s-2d-rpg

To be frank, the Unity tutorial wasn't really an RPG. There were no stats, no quests, XP. It was much more of an adventure game. That's fine, it still gave me a lot of time inside the engine to learn a lot of basics.

So, working with each one had it's own up and downs.

Unity's use of an external scripting program seemed to hurt me quite a bit, from simple things such as forgetting to save before going back to Unity (I did this way too much) to having to declare public variables in the script and then filling them in the Unity GUI rather than just doing it all by script. The editor itself also seems to be kind of heavy, I was get the spiral beach ball for a second or two every time I went between the script editor and Unity and I have a machine that can edit 8K video without proxies. These general load times and stuff like that seemed to come up regularly. Tilemapping in the tutorial didn't include autotiling, I assume Unity has this somewhere built in? Or do you need to purchase an asset to get this functionality?

On the plus side, Unity overall seemed easier to use for a non-programmer. A lot of things are done through the GUI. Animations seem easier to handle for sure. The Unity tutorial was also more written for someone that hasn't coded much as it explained what specifically the code was doing (so I assume more resources for Unity will be helpful in that way that perhaps Godot will not).

For Godot, GScript was easier to use than C#, but I do feel like it was easier to get my head around prefabs in Unity than the Node system in Godot. The Godot tutorial took almost twice as long as the Unity one, but I don't know if that's because Godot is more difficult or the combination of the Godot tutorial being more thorough (I feel like I mad an actual, if very uncomplicated game, plus I did Godot first, which probably helped me just learn more about scripting and thinking like a programmer that I took into Unity). The node/scene system seemed more difficult to get my head around than game objects and prefabs. That said, my Godot program felt very tight. There weren't things happening that I was having a tough time explaining or figuring out why they weren't working quite right, at least at the graphical level (this might have more to do with the Godot tutorial using 8-bit graphics and Unity using a more modern sprite look). Having the scripts in the editor meant I never ran into a case like in Unity where I couldn't attach code to a game object because it was failing to compile, but it was failing to compile because it wasn't attached to a game object (that headache took at least a half an hour to sort out).

Overall, I was able to finish both tutorials mostly understanding what the code I was given was doing and was able to edit it to get some different affects and kind of just play around. So, on that level, I'd say they're about equal.

One big thing I want for sure out of the engine we use is to be able to handle a lot of conversations and variables there from. We're hoping to make a "choices matter" (TM) game, and very story/dialog heavy. Ink seems like a good plug-in to do this in Unity, but implementation doesn't seem easy (though I did find a pretty good looking tutorial that may help de-mystify). Godot seems to have some assets available for handling dialog trees, but i haven't had a chance to really dig in to them yet. So, that could definitely be a decider for me: which engine has assets that make a dialog/choice heavy game easier to make.

While I had originally thought about making a tactics RPG for this project, looking around at both the Godot and Unity scenes, it seems like few people are making these types of projects that are giving out free advice on how to make them work in those engines. After talking with my team (I have a team!, see my post from a while back), it seemed like a good idea both to keep the game within the scope of a novice, but still tell the story we wanted, to do a skill role system instead. Since this came from a tabletop session anyway, seemed to make the most sense to do skill rolls rather than develop a whole combat system.

TL;DR - Looking for advice on which engine, between Godot and Unity, would be handle a 2D RPG that relies on a lot of dialog and choices along with skill rolls for the gameplay. Thanks in advance!

The final results would look something like this.

Ours here wouldn't be tailored to obscure music like that though, just the best albums of the year with no other qualifications. There hasn't been one on reddit since 2017, you can find the 2011-2017 sets in the archive. The first one was just me putting up 15 albums. I believe the highest number we ever hit was 287 albums. It's heartening when the artists show up to thank you for shining a light on their little corner of the music world, too. A good list is good press for Tildes, it'll make the rounds.

Frankly, the people who were instrumental in those roundups are here on Tildes now, so hitting past 300 isn't outside the realm of possibility, not that we need to get that extreme (it's just fun). There are several new type two listeners here too, so potentially we've already got more music lovers and more help here than we've had doing the previous set. General input from tens of thousands of people like you see on reddit isn't as important to this process as the hardcore music lovers, we'd get like 3 solid recs out of 1000 comments, and small/forgotten /r/letstalkmusic always kicked everyone else's ass when it came to album picks.

These things can be rather a lot of work, which is why they are hard to do. It's not the playlists that eat up the time, though - it's collecting all of the albums and getting enough ears on them to give them the stamp of approval for the final list. The way to make that easier is to get started on it early and spread the work out over several months. That way come November you're looking for late releases and overlooked gems rather than panicking and trying to do it all in a single week. Been there, that's the worst.

The way we'd do it before, we'd run roundup threads on reddit periodically (in several different subs) then sift the comments for album recommendations, listen to them to see if they passed muster. That's hardly necessary on Tildes, especially with the long-lived threads here that bump with activity and never truly lock. We also used a google docs spreadsheet so we could tally everyone's votes up, but that was a major pain in the ass I'd like to skip. Tildes' own votes should be more than enough, and exemplary tags can highlight the must-listen set that goes at the top.

I think the best way to do it is put up a collection thread that everyone who is interested can then bookmark or ignore, and then drop albums in the comments between now and mid-November. No, not in this thread, I'll post a thread for it during the first week of October. We just let that roll and keep dumping new albums into it, listening, and leaving comments there. Come late November I can whip that into a set of playlists in a weekend, that's the easy part.

I enjoy doing this because it's been my experience that most music publications would rather argue about what numerical order the same 50 albums should be in than round up all of the best and let the listeners decide for themselves. They also have an incentive to pimp bands that are industry darlings or that they are being paid to boost in the recommendations. We don't.

So, are you folks interested in getting the ball rolling on this in October? Leave a comment if you are interested in contributing (even if it's just a single album) so we can get a sense of how many people are down for this before we get started. If there isn't enough interest we can try again next year. I'd also like to invite the folks who have done this before to share their experiences, you know who you are. ;)