Gentle reminder that you can be 100% pro choice and still understand that aborting a fetus because it will be disabled as a human is a eugenicist idea that comes from absolutely horrifying ideas that have been placed in western culture as a result of more overt eugenics movements in our past.

Fun fact: by just using imaginary numbers, some Evil Math, and 101 rotating vectors You Can Create a shitty approximation of a fish.

Free sushi at the bus stop on 10th st east in downtown at paul. For those who are interested

So, what exactly was the conversation when Jack announced he was going to be leaving the asylum for an undetermined amount of time?

"I'm going on an unplanned vacation with my acclaimed former professor, a Texan man of unclear occupation, a literal Lord, and a middle-class married couple."

"The couple whose door you've been sleeping outside every third day?"

"Exactly. We're... going camping. Unrelated, my updated will is in my desk drawer. If there are any questions about the recent death suspicious death of a patient, I won't be available."

perhaps top 10 most influential tweets of all time for me

you know when irish people were fighting for freedom the rebels were never considered revolutionaries or freedom fighters. we had only ever been called terrorists by the british government, because when you call a people fighting for their rights and their freedoms terrorists you can distance yourself from them. people aren't fighting because they've been radicalised by 800 years of colonialism or 75 years of brutal settler imperialism, they're fighting because they're dirty terrorists trying to hurt our democracy and kill our children. and now we don't have any responsibility to reckon with the years of subjugation and settler violence and attempted genocide, because how can you expect us to deal with terrorists? the same story repeats itself over and over n it's shocking how people will eat it up every time when it comes to protecting and maintaining western power.

can’t stop laughing at this fucking tweetlwlwkjshajalajdhdjdlsj

okay I'm hacking on the House MD DS game. it's nice of them to include a cast option in the credits, in case you bought the game without knowing the show.

That was easy. Good news: text is very, very injectable.

So, here's a bit of info about how the DS works: It has two GPUs, one for each screen. Each screen can show 4 separate background layers, and one sprite (object) layer. So that's a total of 10 layers, across two screens.

But you can also copy from one to the other, at the expense of lower framerate. So some games that do stuff like render 3D on both screens do it by having the main GPU (which has the 3D graphics functionality) render both screens, which means the framerate has two be half, as you're doing twice the renders.

So here's House MD DS, with all layers enabled:

And here it is with the 1st background layer of the main GPU turned off:

Yeah. For some reason this game DOES NOT AT ALL use the layer system of the DS, and renders ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING into the background layer 1 of the main GPU, then copies that onto the second screen. What the hell? Was this made by some company that had never touched a DS before?

I thought it just might be the dialog screens, and the other gameplay sections use layers and sprites and such...

NOPE! works exactly the same.

all the images are just PNGs. They implemented a PNG loader on the DS and just load them at runtime.

This is a prank, right? this game isn't real, one of ya'll just made it up to troll me?

THERE'S A PANTIES SORTING MINIGAME?

I don't even need to extract all the portraits: they're just in a folder called "layouts\ui\avatars"

well I still need to extract the font, I guess..

MOTHERFUCKER!

(also: all the sound effects are just WAV files)

this image is labeled "bottom.png".

No comment.

the game has all the screens defined as XML files for "layouts".

each one has a group of polygons defined in it, and the <layout> element has an attribute called "num_ploys".

THIRTEEN YEAR OLD TYPO DISCOVERED

yep, there's a panties sorting minigame. watta hell

WAIT

The font is shaped the same, but it's 1-bit, not the several-bits that the game's font is! SO IT'S WRONG! so I actually still have to do some work!

motherfucker. it IS the right font, they just set all the colors to the same. It's palettefucked. Easily fixable.

I decided to skip the font image so I could just use my existing methods (aka AVFE*) which'd give me widths as well, and then I finished that.

but then I realized something:

these two shades do not match. This font is SEMI-TRANSPARENT. oh no...

* Automated Visual Font Extraction, my patented** method for extracting fonts from games

** not really

Look at this background. Look at how it's got, like, smooth gradients and shit.

Now let's compare to the actual game:

It looks like shit.

You can especially see on the ground between the medical thingy and the bed. It's because the DS has a limited number of colors and is converting this file at runtime. That's right, the first image is the actual texture that the game is loading... it then has to down-convert it to be able to display it at all.

This means that the death generator is going to accidentally LOOK BETTER THAN THE GAME ITSELF

annoyingly they didn't define the shadow-color with a distinct color. They just used a specific palette index. So I can modify it to make it useful... but then I have to somehow do dynamic palette manipulation on 142 PNG files which have different palettes.

That's not going to be fun. Palette support is a fucking mess in most image editing programs/image manipulation libraries.

So I hacked some new backgrounds in and overwrote some images, and it turns out that they've done all of this in a very weird way:

There are 32 colors per avatar, except the avatar actually has 256 colors. When loaded, they're converted so that some of them have alpha transparency.

Why they did this, rather than just using PNG's built in transparency? I don't know.

Left is how the sprite renders on a white background, right is what it looks like in the sprite file.

OKAY I wrote some code to fix the transparency. Here's all the avatars

BTW check out @plorpl's two posts that got me looking at this game:

okay the death generator is done!

*grandfather clock appears in ofmd*

The black sails girlies: