Looks neat, added it to my wishlist!

I'm curious about some of the tech behind this if you don't mind me asking:

1. Is the top down view just rendering the same isometric assets from a different viewpoint, are they pre-baked sprites, or are they completely different and hand-tuned?

2. How are you doing the changing wall height for seeing inside buildings? Do you just have 4 pre-set wall heights that you're animating between globally, or is it dynamic?

No idea how many people are paying for it, but there is https://www.ge-tracker.com/ for $2/month. I did the free trial a while back, but it was more fun to write a similar app that just uses data from the OSRS Wiki API (https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Real-time_Price...).

Haven't there already been attacks way outside of the separatist territories?

Yes this article notes there was shelling in Kyiv and Russian troops on the Southern border.

You are correct! However (from my POV) this was done with the intent of disabling any possibility of a counterattack or serious resistance.

Russia's ability seize it's desired positions is significantly greater if Ukraine has no functioning airforce or military infrastructure.

While this _does_ make it easier for Russia to invade the rest of Ukraine (again, because of a lack of military infrastructure) I still think it is a stretch that they will go for a full-country occupation.

While this is not exactly a parallel, think back to Operation Desert Storm. The US-supported coalition had no intent of occupying Iraq, but it's push into Kuwait was made _significantly_ easier after they completely annihilated a significant portion of Iraq's military structure (inside and outside of Kuwait).

I hope you're right.

If Putin pushes further then we'll know he's gone completely mad.

It is a mistake to see Putin as mad, paranoid, or motivated by an inflated ego. His posture is that of an old-school Soviet intelligence officer.

AIUI, Ukraine cannot join NATO at the moment; it doesn't control its own borders (Crimea, Donbas).

If Russia annexes Donbas, then they're back to the previous problem: NATO on the border. Note that Russia has not annexed the part of Georgia they invaded; it is now supposedly an independent republic. My guess is that they would settle for independent republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. They don't want Global Nuclear War any more than we do. It's a shame Ukraine didn't agree to give them autonomy earlier; now it looks like Russia is determined to destroy the Ukrainian military infrastructure, and autonomy isn't any longer up for discussion.

The separatist republics have constitutions that proclaim their borders as matching the corresponding regional borders they had in Ukraine, even though their de facto area of control is less than 1/3 of that. Putin claimed that his recognition of them includes that definition of their border. So Russia can push all the way to the regional border while still claiming that it's "protecting DPR and LPR".

Those are on military bases.

So? What else are you gonna shell first when invading a country?

I'd be interested to see the result of iterating on an image using these tools. Like go from high res to pixel art, back to high res etc.

I remember back in like 2010, someone uploaded and ripped a YouTube video 1000 times and then edited the natural degradation of the compression. Went from perfectly watchable video to horrible static-y mess.

Here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0

Here’s another one up the same alley that is interesting to watch: VHS generation loss.

> What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) of a VHS tape? This experiment shows how the quality degrades with every generation.

> The copying was done using two PAL VCRs in SP mode.

> (The video is Fading like a flower by Roxette)

https://youtu.be/mES3CHEnVyI

Thanks for the link!

This may sound crazy, but I wonder if there's a way to "automate" this deconstruction with ffmpeg...

Update: here's a one-liner that will do exactly that

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4

For better results, run the above command ten times:

for ((n=0;n<10;n++)); do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -strict -2 -crf 51 output.mp4 && rm input.mp4 && mv output.mp4 input.mp4; done

Theoretically, it should be possible to recompress the video back into the compressed file with no loss, provided the same codec is used, but it would be far more expensive computationally.

Aren't most image/video compression algorithms lossy? There would surely be more than one possible "decompression".

Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic. I’d like to see it too.

Like this? http://www.translationparty.com/

If you're out of imagination you can copy and paste some comments from here and watch the results.

http://www.translationparty.com/bizarrely-the-pixelated-stuf...

From

> Bizarrely, the pixelated stuff in the images you linked look way better.

To

> But then I remembered I look way better in the morning light.

In one step. Lovely! This sounds like poetry.

I've never heard of this before but just wasted 20 minutes on it. Very interesting concept with hilarious results

Most things I tried were slightly changed from english to japanese just once, then converged. Maybe it's just my lack of imagination!

Most of what I tried gathered somewhat from English to Japanese. Perhaps it is my lack of imagination!

The best examples, those with more divergent results, are those with a lot of subordinate clauses, which get mixed-up and moved from different parts of the sentence. You can select complex sentences from the list below.

> Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic.

This exact game features in the plot of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Galactic Pot-Healer.

For songs there is this: https://www.youtube.com/user/malineka146/videos

Mine too! Small world haha.