[VGz] hot tubbing with my absolutely shredded step-mom witch

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KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

Jon Irenicus posted:

gently caress you I look great

Dollar store cenobite looking mfer

# ? Aug 5, 2023 14:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 20, 2024 15:19

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

Bro Dad posted:

is this a fortnite holocaust museum

# ? Aug 5, 2023 14:46

MeatwadIsGod: Sep 30, 2004; Foretold by Gyromancy

croup coughfield posted:

congrats and wb brother. peace walker for sure

This. Godlike game

# ? Aug 5, 2023 14:47

Communist Thoughts: Jan 7, 2008; Our war against free speech cannot end until we silence this bronze beast!

Frosted Flake posted:

Somehow we've got to get it to Obsidian.

Followed by Alpha Protocol 2.

Modern obsidian tho...

# ? Aug 5, 2023 14:53

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

hows the voice acting in jade empire? im asking cuz i looked and the voice cast is 99% white and the game was made in 2005

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:07

Mr Hootington: Jul 24, 2008; I'M HAVING A HOOT EATING CORNETTE THE LONG WAY

Al! posted:

is this a fortnite holocaust museum

Civil rights museum. I WISH they did a holocaust museum

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:08

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

Al! posted:

hows the voice acting in jade empire? im asking cuz i looked and the voice cast is 99% white and the game was made in 2005

Oh hohohohohoho oh hehehehehehe

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:09

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

Al! posted:

hows the voice acting in jade empire? im asking cuz i looked and the voice cast is 99% white and the game was made in 2005

it's no yakuza (just go look it up you'll be surprised)

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:10

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

jade empire is funny cause they have a shmup section that is so bad the game is like yo this is bad you wanna skip it for the rest of the game after the first time?

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:10

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

Al! posted:

hows the voice acting in jade empire? im asking cuz i looked and the voice cast is 99% white and the game was made in 2005

Upon review, it wasn't that bad. Like 99% in regular white people voice, they only slip into Asian accents sometimes as a treat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8VJcscZn3o

My memories of the content is getting unrepressed and I should cease my recollection.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:14

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

They had a linguist from the University of Alberta develop a language for the game, which I always thought was interesting.

There are whole sections of dialogue delivered in it, though I don't know anything more about its development. Really interesting idea though.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:14

Substandard: Oct 16, 2007; 3rd street for life

I've never finished Jade Empire. I bought it on a steam sale for a couple bucks years ago though. Maybe I'll check it out in like November when there are no more games for the year.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:15

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

NYT: Do You Speak Tho Fan? It's All the Rage in Jade Empire

The language Tho Fan sounds ancient and distinctly Asian. Its "sh" sounds come from the back of the throat, as they do in Chinese. Its "r" sounds are made with a tap of the tongue, echoing Mongolian.

But Tho Fan comes from Canada and was invented only last year. Created in four months, for just over $2,000, it is a real language spoken by unreal people in the Xbox game Jade Empire, released this week. Perhaps it is a sign that, these days, languages are not so much discovered as invented.

Early last year, developers at the game maker BioWare were working on a heroic role-playing game set in a mythical Asia and began thinking about language. "We were sort of writing a love song to the history of China," said Jim Bishop, Jade Empire's producer.

Still, they wanted to avoid using Chinese or any other Asian language that might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events. At the same time, they did not want to resort to unintelligible nonsense.

"We wanted to make this world seem as real as possible," Mr. Bishop said.

Ultimately, more than 90 percent of Jade Empire's 15,000 lines of recorded dialogue were in English, but Mr. Bishop's team, based in Edmonton, Alberta, also decided to add the exotic aural flair of an Asian-sounding language, subtitled in English.

The attempt to create a language from scratch is rare in modern fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien, a linguist as well as a writer, created several for the "Lord of the Rings" saga. In 1985, another linguist, Mark Okrand, codified the "Star Trek" language Klingon in a published dictionary, which in turn led to Klingon editions of "Hamlet" and the ancient Babylonian epic "Gilgamesh."

But these were exceptions. The alien languages in science fiction and fantasy books and movies largely consist of nonsense: grunts and chirps arranged to convey the illusion of exotic intelligence. Occasionally, as in the "Star Wars" films, writers will introduce a few alien words to which they have given meanings but that don't constitute a working language. "You could use them to find a bathroom and that's about it," Mr. Bishop said.

Games have even fewer functional tongues. The denizens of the hit computer game The Sims, for example, speak in Simlish, a caffeinated warble that is more mood-appropriate gibberish than real language.

In its quest for a new language, BioWare contacted the linguistics department at the nearby University of Alberta and came across Wolf Wikeley, 32, a Ph.D. candidate with a weakness for Japanese animation and first-person-shooter video games. He seemed like a find.

"Not many people have funny anecdotes about Klingon," Mr. Bishop said.

Mr. Wikeley had grown up in a language-rich household. His parents taught German, French and Italian and could speak several other languages. Japanese lessons had played on the family phonograph. And then there was the linguistic influence of Mr. Wikeley's favorite fiction.

"A huge event in my life was seeing 'Star Wars' when I was 4," he said. "Probably a lot of my ear came from that." He said he took to mimicking the film's alien languages, noting that at least one seemed to consist of just three overused words.

If one set of fictional characters had given him his ear, he was eager to answer BioWare's call to give others their voice. He set about asking Mr. Bishop's team questions. He wanted to know the speakers' physiology. If they had no teeth, they wouldn't be able to make a "t" or "th" sound. They had teeth.

He wanted to know the speakers' demeanor. In a willful violation of a fundamental tenet of linguistics, his invented language would reflect its speakers' cultural character.

"If they're a violent race, I'm going to give them a lot of really harsh sounds," he said. "If they're an ethereal race like elves, I'm going to give them a whispering, hushing sound."

According to the initial plan, speakers of Tho Fan (pronounced THOH-fan) would be a servant class. Mr. Wikeley made their speech soft and deferential.

He invented an alphabet and began making words, 50 a day and then 200. "Person" would be "uyu" (pronounced OO-yoo). Blood was "kawisrihr" (caw-wee-SHEER). Some words were inside jokes: Rabbit was "punihrapith" (POO-knee-raw-peeth). Similarly, the word for "director" was "wankaawayi," sounding somewhat like Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong film director.

As the words took shape, Mr. Wikeley set about bonding them into sentences. Here he saw a rare opportunity. He could invent grammar and rules that had never been used before. That way Tho Fan wouldn't completely match the rhythm of existing languages, which, he said, is an easy way to spot a fake language. In a twist, Tho Fan would do without the verb "to be"; instead, articles -- words like "a" and "the" -- would be used to mark tense.

After testing his new language's functionality by translating the first chapter of John's Gospel, he delivered a 2,500-word language to BioWare. Then a plot change recast the speakers of Tho Fan as imperialists. The language's deferential softness would no longer imply servile humility, but rather the elegance of the elite.

Since then, Mr. Wikeley has created four more languages for another BioWare game, Dragon Age. In the interest of a verisimilitude that perhaps only a linguist would notice, he has invented a history that explains how and when each tongue borrowed or modified a word from another, across thousands of fictional years.

Mr. Bishop reflected on whether the effort was worth it for Jade Empire. He said new languages help make the creative process feel more real; it helps the game's makers feel as if they had rich, existing culture resources from which to draw.

But would players notice?

"I can hear the difference," Mr. Bishop said. "But I don't know if anyone can tell the difference between this and gibberish."

https://naviklingon.blogspot.com/2020/10/2005-jade-empire-tho-fan-language.html?view=flipcard
https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/2meiqj/cant_seem_to_find_anything_anywhere_about_tho_fan/

A linguist who looked into it posted:

Summary:

The last 15 years, I go around deciphering and documenting conlangs and "pseudo-conlangs" and conscripts from famous books, tv, movies, video games, etc. because I have a BA Linguistics (Language Science) and nobody else was doing it back then and nobody has been doing it since. So it's an amateur scholarship specialization. I mostly do forgotten conlangs from long-ago popular or not-so-popular works which have not otherwise been deciphered yet. I also study ones deciphered by others or presented by their creators (like Klingon by Marc Okrand).

Tho Fan is actually interesting and complex. I contacted its creator, c 2005 PhD Linguistics student (Japanese loanwords from English, thesis topic) Wolf Wikeley of Edmonton in western Canada, via his facebook like page Wolf Wikeley Composer (what he does now). He said and gave some evidence that he made an approximately 2,500 word conlang with (a small?) reference grammar and translated about 3 pages of sentences into it. These were then spoken by voice actors and assigned to about 1,500 different lines from the video game. But the Tho Fan sentences mean something totally different from the lines in the video game. So I call these "Pre-Game Tho Fan Conlang" and "Game Tho Fan Pseudo-Conlang". The video game also contains many pseudo-conscripts (asemic writing, pseudo-writing) based on various historic and modern Chinese writing systems (which I happen to be an amateur expert on, focusing on all 50 or so known logographic writing systems from all time).

Tho Fan seems to have been made somewhat quickly by someone without much contact with online conlanging communities. Wolf Wikeley had had a course each in Japanese and Mandarin and then looked up some phonological things about Mongolian and Classical Tibetan. He also seems to have had coursework in something like linguistic typology. His conlang is a lot like Mandarin but with words of the length of Japanese. It mostly works off word order and even has an article, like English, French or German. Only Austronesian languages in east Asia have articles and it seems the original name of the language was not "Old Tongue" but "Original Language". So while the New York Times article presents it as a mix of Asian languages, it's maybe supposed to be a mix of all languages or at least European ones and Asian ones.

The heads of phrases, so almost every word in every sentence, are marked with an -ihr / ii rr / Non-Past Tense suffix. There's a Possessive (like Genitive) suffix -sa, and pluralization is marked by vowel lengthening or reduplication (which seems again Austronesian to me, Indonesian). Reduplication is also used for word formation and pronoun pluralization (which is very rare). Articles may be pluralized instead of nouns, which is very European. But check out the grammar I made for the language from what he said, the above is just from memory.

Japanese notably has several locatives, suffixes or particles, an object marker, a topic marker, a possessive (like genitive) marker, and verb negation suffixes. Mandarin just uses word order. Actually, I don't think Wolf Wikeley or anything else ever clarified if Tho Fan has prepositions or postpositions or what.

...

I have made and put online an expanded grammar for "Pre-Game Tho Fan" and "Game Tho Fan".

"Game Tho Fan" ends up being a lot more like Classical Chinese for word length, with about each English word corresponding to one Tho Fan syllable. So I worked with this.

And then for "Pre-Game Tho Fan", I set up an array of Kutenai (Native American, western Canada and western USA), Classical Japanese, Classical Manchu, Classical Tibetan, Ritual and Archaic Korean, and Old Jurchen words to draw from, in addition to the expanded grammar I made. But I'm fluent in an Austronesian language, Hiligaynon, so I might not pull from any of those so much. Plus, they're on the south side as far as all these languages go. Vietnam is about as far south as the "Ancient China" vibe proper goes, though I suppose exceptions could be made.

For words, I'm thinking of pulling from the above for Pre-Game Tho Fan and from the analytic languages of eastern Asia for Game Tho Fan.

For the grammar of both, I pull from actual languages of eastern Asia but also from all over the world and many obscure languages, and then also heavily from "language theory" and unlikely typological things, just for fun in case anyone ever happens to study as many languages and historic literatures as I have.

...

I made several logographic writing systems for these languages, also. One is phenomenally complex and also a (gentle and reverent) satire on eastern Asian logographic writing systems in particular, and then all 50 or so known logographic writing systems more generally. So I'll be sure to chuckle about that one from time to time.

...

So, aside from interviewing the creator, Wolf Wikeley, at length, and finding someone to ask the long-time employees at BioWare if they could find anything (they could not but implied it might be there somewhere, though the offices in a video from 2005 looked very small):

Aside from this, I transcribed about 10-20 sentences from the video games and made notes on a 50 part, 30 minutes each, walkthrough of "Jade Empire" on YouTube. I noted every part I could find where the dialogue was in Tho Fan. And maybe around Chinese New Year 2021 (about February 12?), Year of the Ox, I will try to trascribe and compare another 100 lines, painstaking as it is.

The art in the video game, and I watched many hours of it to make my notes, was notably delightful and harkened unto me my own youth when I would join my friends in playing a variety of old school and then-modern video games, that being in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

For the lines that I transcribe, I also match each syllable to the English in such a way as it creates new words for the "Game Tho Fan Conlang" that I have invented from the original "Game Tho Fan Pseudo-Conlang".

...

I explained my methodology and theoretical approach to conlanging and famous conlang decipherment in my previous post. However, I will make more clear here that I do all this for public outreach regarding my own amateur research into language science and anthropology and that I conlang as a way of exploring language science and anthropology myself, as well as other topics, and especially the Jerry Norman "Classical Manchu Lexicon" and "Chinese Languages" book, as well as the earlier, c 1920s, English translation of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead", as well as an obscure c 1980s bilingual translation I have of a Classical Tibetan classic on ritual dances, and other such works that I have on hand and have been meaning to study.

...

But maybe I won't return to this language further. I'm already quite swamped with months and months of deciphering and doing translations and expansions of various other famous conlangs and still quite tired out from my decipherment (on-going) of Pakuni from maybe 2013. Transcribing lines from tv etc is not easy, even if you're quite into language decipherment.

But even if I do, I have no plans for short or long translation projects. Though I have prepared some short (?) texts I could translate into either Tho Fan conlang.

I've recently been doing some very short translation posts on facebook into my own version of "Pre-Game Tho Fan Conlang" but I actually like "Game Tho Fan Conlang" more because it's more like the final result and what people have actually experienced from the game. Maybe I will continue splitting my efforts. The texts I chose were Chinese myths. I've also been working on Chinese myths for my work on Pakuni.

Old Bioware really put the work in.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 15:48 on Aug 5, 2023

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:44

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 78 days!

skyrim modpacks are too big now

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:48

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

the milk machine posted:

what's the official video games thread take on octopath traveler 2 and/or live a live

the octopath demo is fun and im a sucker for the graphical style I guess

Both games are good but Live A Live is loving amazing go for it.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:50

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 78 days!

the modpacks are too big, the weed is too strong, the women are too free. i was born decades too late

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:50

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

croup coughfield posted:

the modpacks are too big, the weed is too strong, the women are too free. i was born decades too late

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:51

croup coughfield: Apr 8, 2020; Can't post for 78 days!

nearly 350 gigs for living skyrim 4

# ? Aug 5, 2023 15:53

Yardbomb: Jul 11, 2011; What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

Jade Empire was rad and every few years I end up wanting to replay it again, because there hasn't been a fantasy china RPG that felt as neat since.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 16:38

Yardbomb: Jul 11, 2011; What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

Also I end up using Henpecked Hou as my companion again after a while every time, because I love the zui quan/drunken boxing moveset he enables for you.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 16:39

Bro Dad: Mar 26, 2010

the most powerful martial arts style in jade empire is musket

# ? Aug 5, 2023 16:48

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

haha, nvm.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 16:52

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

so the cast of all white actors pretending to be asian speaks fake chinese? never heard that one before

# ? Aug 5, 2023 16:58

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Bro Dad posted:

the most powerful martial arts style in jade empire is musket

Art imitates life

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:01

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

jade empire was one of the few games that were on steam and constantly on sale in the early days so everybody probably has a copy in their library

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:02

0 rows returned: Apr 9, 2007

i dont have a copy

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:06

Lpzie: Nov 20, 2006

Cuttlefush posted:

wtf... chris avellone is credited as a writer for into the breach?

what in the gently caress

when you're a superstar they let you do it

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:12

Yardbomb: Jul 11, 2011; What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

I'm that person where Into The Breach just completely slid off me and I only kept going "Just make FTL 2 for fucks sake"

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:20

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

It sounds like it was interesting, but it's definitely a design decision that that generation of guys like Will Wright would make, and I can only think of the Dwarf Fortress guys having that level of curiosity and dabbling in such diverse subject matter just for background stuff today.

Someone who worked or works at BioWare said this posted:

Yeah, for Jade we hired a linguist to create the foundation for the Tho Fan language. I'm usually bad with names, but his name was Wolf, so I remember that. It was kind of a dry run for the much larger potential of creating real languages for Dragon Age for the elves, dwarves, and qunari.

But after the experience on Jade, we decided it just wasn't worth it. The exposure to players is so short, it's functionally no different than gibberish. And it slowed all the writing down, because it created Localization delays for English because the team couldn't learn it. We had to write the lines, then wait for the linguist to translate them. And if lines changed, they had to be retranslated again. And it was a pain just getting Voice Actors to match Tali's made-up accent in Mass Effect, imagine having to talk them through the hard rules of an entirely new language.

It created a lot of drag for not much payoff. Ultimately it got a couple articles on gaming sites, and was noticed by an incredibly small number of people. Unless the game is actually about navigating the language, like some really focused Indies do, it just isn't worth the hassle. Especially for DA which needed 3+ languages.

It was far more efficient to create solid rules for how the different races speak, the rhythm and percussiveness and "feel." And then we focused our efforts on basic grammar and key phrases. So since DA1 we've added to confluence pages for each language that have built up a few hundred example words and phrases for each. We have rules for construction and using tenses, and how they should sound and be assembled lyrically.

It's much easier to describe that intent to voice actors. And we let people continue to add to the "dictionaries" without needing hard translation. If we do something big, like a song or larger codex entry, we'll run it by each other for "feel" and to make sure we aren't stepping on past definitions. And there's a number of key words that are repeated for players so when they come up, then know the impact. Qunari words for friend, the elven face tattoos, etc.

The fact that they started out wanting to do something Tolkien would do, invent languages for all of the cultures of Dragon Age, it's a bit hilarious considering what Dragon Age became.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:51

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

Yardbomb posted:

I'm that person where Into The Breach just completely slid off me and I only kept going "Just make FTL 2 for fucks sake"

unless youve completely broken its back ftl is still the best version of itself out there, because its balanced. ive seen other ftl type games but they all add in too much extra unnecessary systems. if anything id enjoy an ftl that was even a bit more stripped down

# ? Aug 5, 2023 17:54

smarxist: Jul 26, 2018; by Fluffdaddy

phew. finally got BG3 down the gullet

the intro was viscerally repellent with the eye bug thing, christ

i rolled a drow wizard, i don't ever really play full magic classes or even heavily magic, i'm trying for a fuckery build with lots of tricks and shenanigans, it seems like the game will reward you for it.

the intro cinematic was loving rad, and this starter dungeon is nuts, the poo poo you can do and interact with is super cool, really looking forward to digging in

# ? Aug 5, 2023 18:28

Pepe Silvia Browne: Jan 1, 2007

croup coughfield posted:

pepe tell me all about your mgs3 experience

man

1 and 2 hold up so well, but

MAN

I went for a non-lethal playthrough and got all the bosses that way. The stealth in this one really clicked, it's amazing how they use the fact that it's a prequel to dial back all of the advantages you have in 1 and 2 but still make the systems in those games feel like they're natural extensions of how the original Snake operated. It all just works, perfectly.

# ? Aug 5, 2023 18:39