iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 23/08/2026

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I finally have a complete player model loaded into Garry's Mod directly from Command & Conquer: Renegade's original game files All of the supporting code is a line-by-line port of the original game's C++ into Lua

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 15/08/2026

That answer raises even more questions

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 08/05/2026

The latest addition to my Command & Conquer: Renegade porting convenience toolkit extension for VSCode is the ability to jump directly to files and lines from error stacktraces There's nothing quite like grinding a bit of life's friction down smooth

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 05/03/2026

Thinking through the problem myself, I think my personal preference would be to use the number of nodes within the selection box as the main metric for whether or not a poly line is selected In the negative cases I think it's far more likely that the user is trying to select something near the line

A diagram showing a 3 by 2 grid of 6 test cases. Each test case contains the same series of 4 connected lines that together make a shape like a loose segment of string dropped on the ground.

In each test case a mouse cursor is shown dragging a rectangular selection box around portions of the connected lines. Each line end contained within the selection box is numbered/counted starting from 1.
At the top of each test case is a test number, title, and the text "select the line?" with either a green check mark or red X mark next to it.

The first test is labeled "1. completely surrounded" and shows the selection box containing every node (or ends) of the connected lines. It shows a green check mark.

The second test is labeled "2. half surrounded" and shows the selection box containing the leftmost 2 nodes of the lines. It shows a green check mark.

The third test is labeled "3. half surrounded" and shows the selection box containing the topmost 3 nodes of the lines. It shows a green check mark.

The fourth test is labeled "4. slight overlap" and shows the selection box containing the single topmost nodes of the lines. It shows a red X mark.

The fifth test is labeled "5. slight overlap" and shows a thin selection box passing between the middle nodes of the lines without containing any nodes. It shows a red X mark.

The sixth test is labeled "6. corner overlap" and shows a selection box where one of its corners touches the middle of a line segment but does not contain any nodes. It shows a red X mark.

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 05/03/2026

Would the very corner of a selection box clipping a line segment cause the whole line to be selected? I'm not entirely sure what the best implementation approach is, but I can tell you that, as a user, I surely do not mean to select the line in this situation

A hasty mock-up image of a mouse cursor dragging a box selection over a green rectangle with the tip of the selection box intersecting a nearby line segment

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 20/01/2026

Every individual pose and facial expression in that crowd shot is exquisite

A man in the crowd extends his arm forward in a chopping motion. The side of his face is visible and his mouth is open. The gesture and open mouth suggests he disagrees with the referee and wants the room to know

A woman is facing the camera and has an open-mouthed smile taking up her entire face such that her eyes appear to be entirely closed

A woman’s mouth is as open as it is possible to be, like she’s screaming in excitement. The man standing next to her is smiling at her as politely as is possible when someone is screaming directly next to you.

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 09/01/2026

Found this lovely function in the C&C Renegade source code There are 7 total steps in the level loading process and they've hardcoded the percent complete the loading bar should be at each step As a kid I always thought the loading bar moved the same every time but I could never prove it until now

$A C++ function called "Get_Predicted_Percentage" that takes an integer called "state" as its input. The body of the function is a single switch-case based on the value of the "state" input. For each value of "state" from 0 to 6 there are pre-defined output fractions starting with (0.1/18) and progressing all the way to to (17.6/18) Every output fraction has a denominator of 18 and that decision is entirely unexplained.$

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 04/12/2025

If I ever get a time machine, I'm going back to the Westwood offices circa 2000 to slap some sense into their development team There's just no excuse for this kind of code

The code of a C++ function called List_Available_Definitions that is formatted in a way that simply must have been intentionally written to cause physical discomfort and pain to the reader.

There are spaces and tabs where there shouldn't be and a lack of spaces where they should be. It uses a for loop in a way that should be internationally outlawed as a war crime.

It does all of this in only a handful of lines, which is a legitimately impressive rate of horror-per-line

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 18/11/2025

Unrelated to this specific clip, I wonder if you might be able to get a bit more visual "motion" out of the helicopter's blades by gradienting the dithering from their leading edge (opaque) to their trailing edge (transparent) Like this, but dithered and better

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 05/10/2025

If I had more time I would've written a shorter letter. Instead, I wasted way more time drawing a picture Not shown (because I didn't want to take more time) is adding a physics joint between either end of the chain and whatever intersects it and reducing the slack on both "new" halves of the chain

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 09/07/2025

When I think of old cloud rendering, I think of big, chunky dithering. I think that might be nice here, even if it was only used on clouds (and smoke?)

A screenshot of Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat showing a gorgeous pixel art airplane cockpit in midair with a dithered cloud on the horizon

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 01/07/2025

Unfortunately your take is in direct opposition to my childhood game Command & Conquer: Renegade so you’re gonna find you’re on your own on this one

The purchase icon for a “transport helicopter” (chinook) from Command & Conquer: Renegade

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 24/05/2025

After 4 days of refactoring hell, my work-in-progress Renegade HUD finally renders again This feels like a great excuse to share a little progress video

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 01/05/2025

Converting C++ to Lua for this C&C Renegade HUD has driven me to create a little tool to help with some of the more repetitive parts of the process The code is super brittle and there's lots of room for improvement, but it's going to save me a lot of time in the long run

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 25/04/2025

A thousand curses on whoever decided to add these fun little weapon icons to the Command & Conquer Renegade HUD Because now I have to figure out a way to generate icons in that style at runtime for arbitrary user-created weapon meshes from the wild west of Garry's Mod

A screenshot of the lower-right-hand corner of the user interface for the 2003 game Command & Conquer: Renegade. The interface shows the name of the currently equipped weapon, the amount of ammunition remaining in the weapon, and the amount of ammunition the player has in their reserves. Positioned vertically between the ammunition display and the name of the weapon is a green-tinted image/icon of the equipped weapon facing to the left with a slight tilt both towards the camera and downwards.

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 08/04/2025

VSCode's inability to monospace emoji is going to give me a stroke

A screenshot of Visual Studio Code showing a Markdown table with a cell containing an emoji that causes the right side of the cell to not align with the rest of the table

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 05/04/2025

Look at this. I'm not a professional game dev, but I've dabbled in modding and Unity for now multiple decades. I know for a fact it's really, truly not that hard to get an arm to animate towards an interaction point better than this

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 04/04/2025

Entering the Marketplace of Ideas like

The painting "The Expulsion of the Money-changers from the Temple" by Giandomenico Tiepolo which depicts Jesus Christ brandishing a short whip at money changers who are falling over themselves and their overturned tables to escape.

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 28/03/2025

@jenmsft.bsky.social The fact that any non-standard title bar requires you to disable all window decorations and remake them from scratch causes even Microsoft's first-party apps have inconsistent UI/UX on even the operating system's core interface elements like the close button

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 29/01/2025

I just had a rendering issue with the Windows 11 file save dialog that exposed *exactly* how big the bottom-right corner's resize handle is No real point here, it's just topical

A close-up screenshot of a Windows 11 file save dialog window's lower-right corner. The top and left sides of the box defining the window corner's resizing handle are visible due to a rendering issue causing them to appear to have a thick white border against the dialog's dark gray background.

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 17/08/2024

Ooh, nice! Maybe some splits in the metal like this?

A black and white photo of a WWI-era artillery gun barrel that has ruptured outward and split into several vaguely flower pedal shaped sections

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Great ideas, smart brain @bad-takes.online · 30/07/2023

In one of the test cases here a trailing italic space is simply missing from the final rendered message

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