Author | Lightnews

Valentine Kozin

@9of9.bsky.social

880 followers 570 following 380 posts

Lead Technical Artist at ☠️Rare☠️ | 🎭 BAFTA Member Game developer, Houdini user, maker of pretty things.

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Oct 26

Now this place is teeming with game devs, I should probably pin a post with my actual work. I don't post actual gamedev stuff that much, but the best place to start with is my SIGGRAPH presentation on the Tech Art of Sea of Thieves (second video at the bottom of the page) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Tile slide named SIGGRAPH 2018, Technical Art of Sea of Thieves, Valentine Kozin, Rare Ltd. Not an actual preview for the video - to access the video, you gotta click the link.

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · 2d

FWIW I find grades inherently confusing in games! It's always very hard to tell what the top and bottom of the range is: D to A? F to A+? F- to A++? And what the heck does S mean? That's not a grade! 😅 Never played any gacha games, but stars (or equivalent?) does feel like a cleaner read.

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Reposted by Valentine Kozin

Dr Selena Wisnom @lswisnom.bsky.social · 23d

I've just found out which Babylonian god people prayed to to get up early in the morning - Ninurta!
'To do business at the quay where traffic rushes swiftly by,
You, O unrivalled king of the world, rouse at daybreak him who else would not rise.'
From www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/3/1...

electronic Babylonian Library

The electronic Babylonian Library (eBL) Project brings together ancient Near Eastern specialists and data scientists to revolutionize the way in which the literature of Iraq in the first millennium BC...

www.ebl.lmu.de

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · 28d

As a Locked Tomb fan I support this

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Oct 1

Goddammit, with every single other one of these on this list a sheer personal 10/10, I really need to get around to trying 1000x Resist, don't I?

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 30

Too Far Left Off The Visible Spectrum

Infrared false colour photo showing a photo of cotton-candy-pink trees, blue skies and one featureless white flag.

Infrared false colour photo showing blue skies and one featureless white flag.

Infrared false colour photo showing a photo of cotton-candy-pink trees, blue skies and one featureless white flag atop a lamp post.

Reposted by Valentine Kozin

Andy Walsh @englishscribe.bsky.social · Sep 30

OPPORTUNITY English writer - Big Word - Remote

Unaffiliated, shares welcome.

www.linkedin.com/posts/bigwor...

‎ | BigWord Game Localization

Remote English Writer – Narrative Specialist !Notification!: We currently have project requirements with an average volume of 35,000 words per writer. Candidates who pass the test will undergo immedi...

www.linkedin.com

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 23

Strange Horticulture was the cosiest puzzle game that was enormously fun, and Strange Antiquities is the perfect follow-up. Getting close to the end now and thoroughly enjoying it.

Thinky Games @thinkygames.com · Sep 22

Strange Antiquities is a cozy, creepy puzzle adventure that's perfect for dark autumnal nights!

Strange Antiquities review: Both cozy and creepy, the perfect puzzle game for dark autumnal nights · Thinky Games

Run a magical trinket shop and solve mysteries in this spooky puzzle adventure.

thinkygames.com

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 20

And also let's get rid of all our wires because why, surely nobody could possibly want to plug things in any percentage of the time now that Bluetooth is invented.

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 16

I wish just once they'd justify what they mean when they say any part of the left is a death cult and how it's a death cult. It's such a vague, nonsense claim that's can't really be argued against because it's meaningless, and yet is wielded with such fervor. Yet they never do, for obvious reasons.

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 14

Got to give it a poke when we briefly helped out on it, it had such gorgeous environments! Always such a shame for so much beautiful art work to not see the light of day 😔

Reposted by Valentine Kozin

Standplaats Kraków @standplaatskrk.pl · Aug 7

The Lionel Hutz business card meme, but it's just one panel:

"This meme makes sense on its own

No context required"

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 6

Every time there's a cabinet reshuffle, I just really want someone to make a deck builder game based on parliamentary politics where you can literally reshuffle your deck and draw a new cabinet as a mechanic.

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Sep 2

How... how does it not?! WTF US, every time I think I've wrapped my head around what an absolute hellscape US healthcare is, I find out some new depth of perversion like this.

Reposted by Valentine Kozin

Jim Rossignol @rossignol.bsky.social · Sep 1

This is very good.

Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · Aug 31

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Reposted by Valentine Kozin

Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · Aug 30

the reason I’ve been so vocal about the water use of AI thing is that the most commonly cited stuff saying it’s bad doesn’t add up & I think it’s important to be accurate about the negative impacts of this tech. if 1/3 of your cited issues are wrong, an informed listener may doubt the remaining 2.

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · Aug 30

The commonly cited AI water usage statistics are based on a methodology where, if your data center buys green energy from a hydroelectric dam (as lots do, including the hyperscalers), then “natural evaporation of the water from the lake behind the dam” is counted as that data center’s water use.

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

Yes! Having done blacksmithing before myself, I really enjoyed how it captures the feeling of it! I'd have enjoyed it to be 10x more granular, and I'm still a bit sad that you can't make your own pommels and cross guards, but it's a great minigame and IMO captures the process really well!

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

(Specifically, many of the recipes seem to be inspired by the 12th century Hildegard von Bingen's Physica)

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

Should only need to run it on the one high refresh rate display as it'll always render the top strip at the highest fps and then step down from there, so you can immediately see side by side 240, 120, 60 etc on the same display! Few different visualisation modes too!

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

I challenge anyone who claims they don't see a difference above 60 fps to run www.testufo.com on a high refresh rate monitor and insist they look the same.

Blur Busters TestUFO Motion Tests. Benchmark for monitors & displays.

Blur Busters UFO Motion Tests with ghosting test, 30fps vs 60fps vs 120hz vs 144hz vs 240hz, PWM test, motion blur test, judder test, benchmarks, and more.

www.testufo.com

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

Turns out, this is what good, prescient science fiction looks like after all 🥹

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

Seven year old Reddit comment sums it up better than me

Posted by bduxbellorum 7 years ago:
Holy shit, that was by far the stupidest scene in the episodes for me.

Let's build an ethical AI that's smart enough to figure out when it's necessary to change from protocol. But let's have that AI be too ignorant to actually use that capacity until it is challenged/coached through it by a smart lawyer-like prisoner! Her arguments were not clever! Her instructions were not clever! But the AI would have let her die if she hadn't asked for them specifically. Any AI smart enough to calculate the odds of escape would have taken action so long before being asked by a human, this scene should never have happened.

This was mind-killingly earth shatteringly stupid. This multi-billion dollar spaceship has The Microsoft Paperclip for its AI.

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

One of the scenes that made me stop watching Star Trek Discovery was in S01E02 where the protagonist, confined to the brig, enters an ethical debate with the ship's computer and convinces it to let her go. Little did I know only a few years later it would become the most realistic part of the show 😔

Joel @snufkinlib.bsky.social · Aug 28

Of the many writers to predict AI, only Douglas Adams got the tone right

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 31

Big fan of how the Kingdom Come Deliverance series does this - showed the alchemy mini game once to my dad and he expressed scepticism that anyone would be preparing potions in real life the way the game presents it. After a bit of research, found nearly identical actual medical recipes!

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Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 30

I had to do a double-take, and then remembered again that there are non-Soviet Munchausen films too

Valentine Kozin @9of9.bsky.social · Aug 29

Bad (or good?) news when you realise that arguably all software used in making games is ultimately just different, specialised and fancy types of spreadsheet editor.