Terminology

Some people have asked what some of the words/abbreviations I use in the casts mean. Here's a quick cheat sheet for the lazy.

Collision Meshes

The physical representation of an object in the game world. Includes hitboxes, depending on the subject. These tend to be 3d models based on the source objects, so the insane amount of inaccurate collision we see everywhere is generally a direct result of incompetence.

I-Frames

"i" Frames are the invulnerable frames typically associated with certain animations such as dodging/rolling, though many animations of various types may have them. The more frames of invulnerability a frame has, the greater the window to "absorb" attacks is, and the less frames it has, the greater the difficulty in avoiding certain types of damage becomes. Note that some games don't use this system.

In the most rare case, which I will surely specify, I may also refer to an encoding feature within x264 called "I-Frames". These are similar to Keyframes.

Inverse Kinematics. Remember when Blizzard spent half the sc2 announce talking about how IK is so great? Yeah. It's pretty basic technology that, in layman's terms, is generally used to keep feet and stuff on the surface of angular and multi-level terrain. Problem is, almost no developer rigs their IK or collision meshes properly and shit freaks out. IK has other applications, but this is the most commonly noted.

LOD/LODing

Level of detail. 3d games generally dynamically downgrade texture resolution (mipmapping) and mesh triangle count based on distance. In a good game you never notice it. In most games, it's really obvious and badly done, especially console games. Most engines automate LODing, such as Unreal, but have configurable thresholds. Default settings tend to be aggressive, and most developers don't understand their tools enough to change defaults.

Z-Axis

When I talk about Z-Axis, I am making specific references to the way games or game content handle vertical objects or mechanics. For example, Starcraft 2 is 3d but doesn't have a real Z-Axis in its engine, thus you can't have units walking over and under bridges (other than through physics objects). Another example is units hitting you through the floor/ceiling in World of Warcraft, because their attack range is only looking for horizontal adjacency. Extremely few engines support mechanical Z-Axis, and fewer yet feature Z-Axis elements in their games. This is a great way to determine incompetence or laziness or both. Generally speaking, most 3d games aren't actually 3d and should never have been built as 3d to begin with.

Something developers almost never configure properly.

Culling

Methods used by games to remove objects or occlude them from view, usually for performance reasons. This can be abused/broken in many ways, depending how badly the engine is programmed (see: Conan).

Reference material -

Aggressive UDK distance culling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IZRz0LF04
Unreal 3 Culling options - http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html

Occlusion Culling done through the GPU is often slow and leads to several frames of objects not existing, because it is usually done through screenspace which is inaccurate and slow. There are "techniques" (rug sweeping exercises) to try to reduce the garishness of this gross behavior, but rarely does it help much. In such cases we must always point and laugh.

Furthermore, extensive culling actions, such as those that may occur in a complex outdoor scene, can often be far more expensive than just allowing the objects to continue rendering, as seen in World of Warcraft. The same is the case for LOD'ing - both involve moving resources around the system which isn't free.

Z-Fighting

When Goku faces off with an antagonist of exceptional power level. Both individuals are layered on top of each other in a steamy bloodbath, causing things to flicker in and out in a wild display of Chi. When a Developer is especially lazy and sticks objects inside of each other in such a way that their surfaces occupy the exact same space, the engine may not know how to cope with the legendary battles to ensue. In particularly shitty engines (Sins of a Solar Empire) you may also see Shadow Z-fighting or things that resemble it, which can result from things like the shadow maps being so low res that huge pixels flicker all over the place and give them same appearance, or the engine can't handle certain things, like fake fog, overlapping the shadows, and they fight for sorting dominance. Go get em, Brolly!

Z-fighting can also occur from sorting issues in general, and not just objects intersecting. In many games, they do not attempt to sort more aggressively at a higher distance. One example provided was Just Cause 2, in which entire bodies of water flicker in and out of existence if you are in the air. "Sorting" is how a game handles the "layer" on which objects are rendered, and is likely to be the issue when simple intersections aren't responsible (such as shadows).

Blending

Many textures, such as those used in particles, cheap chain link fences, and all sorts of overlays and glows, utilize Blending to achieve transparency, brightness, and general "cutoff" through Alpha channels or settings such as Addative. Many developers, such as those we struggle to call developers who cobbled together Darksiders 1 and 2 in a weekend drinkoff, don't actually know how to set up blending properties correctly, resulting in weird looking blood, water, fire, so on so forth. We also see a lot of super lazy alpha maps that don't properly mask the texture, allowing outlines to appear everywhere. Also, the lazily copy pasted google image ferns in games like Lords of Game Testing, where they have this white outline, is due to anti-aliasing no one ever removed before putting it in a game. Glorious!

Better yet is when you have games like Warframe who can't handle layers of objects with any kind of blending over each other, like that weird as hell waterfall shown in one of the XXE's. It's not like we have a DirectX specifically built to solve issues like this, or anything! It's actually really, really hard to create blending or sorting issues, so these developers are generally so lazy that they never playtested their game a single time, didn't change default values, and plainly didn't care what the end product looked like.

[To] Blizzard / [To] Westernize

To Blizzard a game is to perform a series of actions in the most incompetent manner possible by human hands. Interchangeable with "To Westernize" a game, as Blizzard represents the West and the West generally turns everything it touches into shit. Ultimately, the decisions made behind westernisms are either as a result of greed or laziness, both of which create incompetence, which then creates Blizzard. Reducto Ad Buttzardum.

Laziness

The prime contributing factor to capitalism and the greatest source of suffering in the human world.

Penis

An artifact coveted by interns that can only be granted by the socialist party upon acquiring enough achievements. The opus magnum of an intern's accomplishments and a gateway to becoming a human later on in one's existence.

Rancid

A term to describe a game that is objectively terrible. Reserved only for the worst of titles.

A fat person that often falls asleep unpredictably. An unreliable individual. "dat hks" is a way to ascertain incredible instability in a person. Also possesses cat-like qualities and may, in fact, actually be a cat.

Hipsters, Honesty, and Effort

Hipsters are the dregs of society and culturally neuter everything they involve themselves in. While the Game Industry has many faults, Hipsters are ultimately at the heart of its creative bankruptcy and decline into irrecoverable mediocrity. Terms like "AAA" and "Indie" are byproducts of hipsterism and feed the American's need to destroy intellectual exploration of related mediums. Because Hipsters need to be told what to like, appeasing Hipsters is a cheaper and therefore more rewarding business model than actually putting effort or honesty into a product and seeking gratification from sentient entities. As a direct result, it is easy for us to review any nature of productive medium by gauging its Honesty and what kind of Effort went into it. As one can expect, most products, not just games, have had little actual effort placed into them and are blatantly dishonest products. This is a critical part of Capitalism, of course, but it's always interesting to see why. One can read more about the Hipster and the dangers it brings with it to creative mediums by reading articles such as this and this.

A Quick Time Event, or QTE for short, is a modern adaptation of "Simon Says". Games that utilize QTE's are attempting to superficially cater to an audience with kindergarten level mental development, also known as Hipsters. When a game uses a QTE, we can easily gauge that it is not only a dishonest product, it is also a product of an extremely lazy and incompetent developer. A QTE is about as big of a red flag as you can get outside of something like copying a Blizzard color scheme. Some games attempt to hide what is essentially a QTE, like games that rip off of DDR, but it's quite difficult to pull wool over a Canadian's eyes, as we are quite large and forever hungry.

Auto Exposure

A means to irritate the player by rapidly changing brightness of an environment in a vain effort to "replicate eye adaptation". Like similar hipster post processing filters, it is only an annoyance.

Chromatic Aberration

Gas Chamber-worthy post processing that makes images appear out of focus by introducing camera defects into the picture. Leads to severe eye strain. The photography industry spent countless quid and years getting rid these defects, but shovelware developers think migraines are hip again.

FXAA

Remember when anti-aliasing was a thing we had in games? Nvidia doesn't, and this widely-used and extremely poor quality blur filter is now the most dominant excuse to avoid researching AA solutions in modern gaming. An excellent example of why this industry is trash.

Goff

A bald midget with an appetite for long, hard work in the rear. Capable of feats such as pogosticking down the office corridors, skewing multiple interns at a time, and using his waste disposal chute as a dimensional door. Even the mere mention of a Goff or its handiwork is often enough to send a Peter catatonic. Makes its dwelling in the humid depths of a never-ending closet labyrinth.

Motion Estimation

Motion Estimation is an encoding feature. The encoder looks ahead X frames to find differing information and manages its compression in a way to try to combat the macroblocking behavior that plagues flash-based videos and deprecated codecs. Motion estimation is an extremely CPU-intensive process with many different settings that impact encode speeds dramatically, but can help the end result of a video's quality, even when the general bitrate settings are very modest. Commonly, I try to use ME to fight quality loss in high-motion productions like DMC, Dragon's Dogma, and many emulated titles. Traditionally, the more motion and the less information that can be shared between frames equates to not only slower encode times but a larger file, but have little to no impact on playback performance for all but the most ancient computers.

Color Grading

Most commonly known as hue or contrast filters, Color Grading as it is traditionally applied in modern cinema is an effort to create a homogenization of color palette by applying a shade of color to an entire scene. Extremely common in Bluray releases, firms apply green or blue tints to movies in an effort to make them appear more edgy. These filters are often absent from actual cinemas. Games have begun to rely on color grading to hide inconsistencies in commercial art assets, and such behavior is seen in titles such as Dark Souls and Skyrim. Often times color filters greatly degrade visual quality, reduce contrast and color depth, and otherwise fail to actually make anything edgier, just uglier. Plainly speaking a game nor an animation should ever actually need to use a color grading filter if it was properly designed from the ground up.

"AAA"

Marketing jargon used by Americans to denote that their focus tested software is of a lower than average quality.

Compressor

The term "Compressor" or "Compression" when used in regards to Audio may not be a reference to the actual compression. It may be in reference to a volume/frequency filter called a Compressor, which modulates volume levels according to highly varied settings, usually in an effort to flatten out volumes, e.g. make whispers/ambient sounds more loud and yells more quiet. Older films are very easy to identify in this regard, as bouts of silence between actor dialogue may yield a mysterious rise in ambient white noise until they speak again - this is the compressor at work. As the Loudness War wages on, Compressors are often used alongside frequency shifts to crunch and inflate the perceived volume of sound samples as much as possible, resulting in unnatural, shrill, and "bouncy" samples. This can observed with nearly every vocal sample Blizzard has used in their games since Starcraft 2 and Mists of Pandaria, especially in with the Pandaren and Kerrigan herself. While compressors have been used for positive gains in media for decades, their more modern application is almost always malicious, resulting in the destruction of quality in old music and vocals when "remastered" and re-released so they sound louder and grab more attention. The Loudness War heavily circulates around the abilities Compressors enable one to very easily take advantage of. Televised advertisements, for example, maximize their volume levels through heavy compression so they are louder than feature programs and require you to take action to adjust your unit's volume.

I utilize Compression in almost all of my videos because of the varied volumes my speech tends to produce, especially my outbursts. My initial filters, those used in Darksiders 1 and early SC2 recordings, were extremely heavy. Because fraps merges the mic and game audio into a single stream, any changes I make to effect my voice will also effect the game. This means I must dance a very careful ballet between trying to soften the volume changes of my voice but also change the game audio as little as possible. It is a continually evolving process of experimenting and learning.

The number 3 is popular in both Eastern and Western game culture, but especially the West, because 3 represents an academic approach to interaction in the form of "start, trial, climax". The "3" design mandates that interaction can never diverge from a three-stage movement, rendering all elements that use this philosophy extremely predictable and monotonous because the user knows they can never expect creative exploration of any presentations associated with it. 3 is used in a countless quantity of representations to trivialize the thinking process required in designs. Examples include the three-point pose used in movie postures, the three-point plot masterplan that all Western films adhere to, three-stage progression and fetch quests that dominate Western games. As a result, 3 is synonymous with laziness and creative bankruptcy, because it is a design used out of convenience and excuse rather than genuine value, as demonstrated time and time again by the media that employs it. 3 is a psychological component of marketing akin to the Loudness War and Distract-Before-Substance game theory.

3-point psychological academia is lethal to critical thinking game design because it absolves the designer of responsibility to develop their own storyboard for plot, progression, and player feedback designs. Resulting content relying on delivering everything in stages of 3 amounts to grind by extent of having no tangible, original shape.

"Rotation"

Terminology that typically refers to a sequence of actions, such as a series of abilites conducted in a certain order, or a series of locations a player or NPC visits. Rotations can also refer to certain interactions and reactions. Examples include the combo attacks that bosses perform within Dark Souls 3, or the patterned attacks of units within a shmup. While the modern use for the term is usually related to MMORPG class abilities, the concept can be used to describe to a wide swath of interactions.

Action Economy

A term used when reflecting on the value of a unit's turn, be it in a turn-based game with a global cooldown such as World of Warcraft or an actual TBS such as Heroes of Might and Magic or Dungeons & Dragons. Action Economy is usually used in the context of wagering the value of decision making and the potency of actions that may be conducted on those turns, such as crowd control, or may refer to the value of unit counts in terms of turns (e.g. 1 unit versus 4 units, 1 turn versus 4 turns).

Achievements

Intravenous lard infusion for when eating just makes you hungrier.

"Ceremony"

The term "ceremony" has been used as marketing jargon by firms such as Riot and Blizzard to describe screen shaking and flashing indicators, especially concerning the announcement of mundane events such as achievements for inserting consecutively larger objects into one's anus. Ceremonies play into what an associate described as "adrenaline addiction", the same psychological hook designed to net youth into gambling. Terminology like this is commonly utilized to skirt regulations on rigged gambling architecture. Yes, there are "people" out there who buy RNG loot boxes literally just to open them. The idiot button makes its glorious debute in titles such as Overweight and League of Legends.

Screenspace ("Temporal")

In the context of a game, screenspace effects are typically post-processing filters. The most common screenspace effects are FXAA (screenspace anti-aliasing), SSAO (screenspace ambient occlusion), and SSR (screenspace reflections). In nearly all applications, screenspace effects are inferior to proper implementations of the same features but are used out of convenience because they are bundled with nvidia middleware or easily-acquired third party libraries. Screenspace effects tend to be associated with a multitude of visual bugs and oddities that come as a result of being a post-process filter, such as intense blurring (FXAA), bizarre outlines and unrealistic two-dimensional shadowing (SSAO) and total fuck (SSR). While screenspace has many positive applications, those most commonly used outside of a game environment, it is most well-known for its highly destructive impact on real-time graphics through disgusting post-process filters.

"Ghosting"

Not to be confused with the act of icing a brother, the term Ghosting refers to any number of issues which will result in "ghostly" clones of an image appearing after them, much like a dramatic Anime climax but without the waifus and traps. Common causes for ghosting including Temporal (Screenspace) effects, which are usually several frames behind, certain color ranges on LCD monitors, Sony Vegas' moronic "Resample" setting, and tony. Ghosting is extraordinarily destructive to an image, and is one of the leading reasons why Screenspace is terrible. Incidentally, ghosting is more and more prominent on new console games, as despite the increasing power of hardware the industry's rush to lower graphical fidelity only continues to gain momentum. Ghosting is also often prominently featured in video media due to obscure and poorly documented features of unprofessional software.

"Bypassing Content"

Some time ago, a shovelware developer known as Blizzard Entertainment released software titled "World of Warcraft". World of Warcraft featured monsters idling throughout the world between quest points. Players would ignore the monsters and focus on their objectives. Blizzard added in mechanisms that punished players for ignoring the useless monsters, including a "Daze" effect that dismounted and greatly slowed them down (Vanilla) and scripted effects that would yank them back to the monster and daze them if they were too far to be hit normally (Burning Crusade). The reasoning why they added these punishments were because they believed people ignoring pointless battles were "bypassing content". Since then, the concept of players ignoring intentional grind in games has been universally regarded as "bypassing content" to commemorate the sheer audacity of the American Developer's commentary.

Cargo Cult

Typically used in the context of a developer attempting to replicate or call back to something they clearly don't actually understand. The terminology has roots in real-world applications.

Canadian

An inbred mongoloid typically more concerned with the pursuit of facetious gender politics and political correctness, nursing a deviant and voracious lust for sexual masochism, rather than actually pursuing the betterment of living conditions and/or advancement as a society. Regarded to facilitate some of the most insane and wacky fantasies about digital technology of all the third-world demicultures.

Canadians have a national sport that is widely celebrated internationally, though they've remained the world champions for quite some time. Indeed, the sport of Window Licking is a Canadian specialty, and you'll be hard pressed to defeat one of our many esteemed professionals.

Drunk Swede

In fact, most Swedes are of a foreign origin and have yet to adapt the time-proven culture enrichment of Swedish society that is imbibing copious amounts of alcoholic beverages. However, they have donated many exciting features to the country's social landscape, including gang warfare with grenades, failing to break down doors and windows with pipes during psychotic rampages, and destroying historic artifacts because muh feelies.

Doubling

Jay Wilson, a janitor in the American sitcom Blizzard Entertainment, achieved patriotic Wide Renown when attacking former sitcom members responsible for his paycheque over the American data mining service known as "Fecebook", immortalized the term "Doubling" by "doubling" everything he could lay his hands on in the comedy masterpiece "Diablo 3". Everything from chins to prototype Bubsy 3d assets were doubled in a feverish effort to claim Big status. Henceforth, instances of excessively large entities, including but not limited to numbers, chromosomes, meshes, etc. are simply specified as being "Doubled" to commemorate his legacy.

Limb Darkening / Vignette

While I'm certain some overseas intern was awash in plastic statues hastily coated in shiny golden latex for his claim to fame that was "WE MAEK GAEM REALISTIC BY MAEK EDGES OF SCREEN DARKER", in fact this implementation of post processing - if not a low-resolution alpha mask - that serves to do nothing but render scenes difficult to read, corrupt colors and disrupt field of view has become all too common a semen stain. Suffice to say, benefactors of such ludicrousness are still at large and should be approached only with hedgeclippers at the ready.

Lens Dirt

In the real world, eyes become super dirty at all times of the day and cloud your ability to see even mundane details without squinting. For everyone else not in the office this unnecessary post processing is implemented exclusively to distract players from low-quality assets.

Live2D

Live2d is a form of two-dimensional animation that makes use of static sprite sheets. These sprite sheets, unlike those that form the frames of whole or partial body animations (such as Starcraft units or animated smoke in Warcraft 3), are instead composed of many different body parts drawn as components and composited ingame to form the whole body. This technique is used very often in Asian mobile games, such as Arknights (Unit Sprites), Puzzle & Dragons (Specific card art), FGO (Unit sprites) and Epic Seven (Profile + Unit sprites). The composites can be a rather dense collection of billboards and so they can be rather expensive on low-quality engines like Unity. Furthermore, animating the collection of billboards in a manner that produces believable and fluidic movements is not easy, and most small live2d graphics like those employed in Azur Lane are of an extremely basic and low quality that do not warrant the increased rendering load of transparency overdraw. In such cases the developers likely stick to Live2d versus traditional sheets to conserve filespace, especially in mobile titles. For some games, like Epic Seven, the quality is exceptional and performance respectable because they use custom engines tailored for the presentation. Increasingly, Live2d is being adopted as a preferred method of displaying 2d graphics as the technical workload is ultimately significantly cheaper than traditional sprite sheets but can make use of the same art styles.

Early, primitive animation menus and characters, such as those seen in League of Legends launcher splash screens, are not Live2d, but still images run over with After Effects filters to give them a (very unconvincing) animation.

Incidentally, the prospect of ripping Live2d graphics can be difficult for many titles since the end-user has to reconstruct the composite graphic from the sprite sheets.

Subsampling

A process of sampling something, such as an image, in a lower resolution than normal. For example, Chroma Subsampling is the process of generating/displaying color information at a lower than native resolution. Chroma Subsampling is seen in most default encoding settings for both images and videos, and results in massive quality loss for insignificant filespace returns. However, subsampling exists as a concept in many rendering techniques and is sometimes necessary for performance concerns, especially when displaying real-time planar reflections, which may display a sampled scene at a lower resolution than the actual display size, but distort the image through effects such as water distortion so the quality loss isn't as apparent but you aren't taking the hit of rendering two entire full-resolution copies of the same scene at once.

Frame-Accurate

Frame accurate is terminology that may encompass a variety of subjects. In the case of emulating consoles or virtual machines, such as those used in various Castovers (or runs like FF6), the process of "Frame-Accurate" emulation means emulating the performance of the genuine hardware as close as possible. This means that slowdowns and other issues present in the actual hardware can be replicated software-side. Accuracy also typically means less, if not entirely absent, distortions of graphics and audio, and more accurate handling of interactions in the software/hardware, such as certain bugs that may or may not appear depending on the authenticity of the platform. This kind of emulation is extremely expensive performance-wise, with cost escalating the more accurately you try to replicate the target hardware. Replicating the results of cycles from the hardware is even more difficult, and the more complex the hardware the more demanding the process becomes.

To extend this example, speedruns using emulators require the emulators to accurately replicate their target platform down to the cycles, as many speedruns make use of interactions in the software that become unreliable at best when emulation accuracy is not good enough. The visuals may be close, but the actual low-level interactions may not be.

Frame accuracy as a term may also refer to events occuring within specific frames. For example, in video recordings with OBS, the software has a tendency to drop frames, especially if GPU competition occurs, which is often times invisible to the recorder while it's happening. The resulting video won't be accurate to what the recorder saw while recording, and certain events may even be missed entirely if the frames seen while playing are not actually processed in the video. Differences in FPS as explained in the Tartarus article can complicate this even more when programs like Vegas are involved, as many of my compilations are actually frame-inaccurate because of "slowdowns" from Vegas inaccurately handling weird FPS data from recordings that had unusual metadata.

Frame accuracy can also refer to user inputs being performed at such a precisely timed moment that they were performed on or near an individual frame required of them. This is often due to experience or premonition of the events occurring, and sometimes can lead to viewers believing a production was Tool-Assisted (TAS'd), which is one of the review topics when Castovers are proposed to the site.