tal

I haven't looked into any actual decision process, and personally, I'd like to be able to post vector files myself, but there are some real concerns that I suspect apply (and are probably also why other sites, like Reddit, don't provide SVG support).

• SVG can contain Javascript, which can introduce security concerns

• My guess is that there are resource-exhaustion issues. With a raster format, like, say, PNG, you're probably only going to create issues with very large images, which are easy to filter out -- and the existing system does place limits on that. With a typical, unconstrained vector format like Postscript or SVG, you can probably require an arbitrarily long amount of rendering time from the renderer (and maybe memory usage, dunno, don't know how current renderers work).

• At least some SVG renderers support reference of external files. That could permit, to some degree, deanonymizing people who view them -- like, a commenter could see which IP addresses are viewing a comment. That's actually probably a more general privacy issue with Lemmy today, but it can at least theoretically be addressed by modifying Threadiverse server software to rewrite comments and by propagating and caching images, whereas SVG support would bake external reference support in.

I think that an environment that permits arbitrary vector files to be posted would probably require some kind of more-constrained format, or at minimum, some kind of hardened filter on the instance side to block or process images to convert them into a form acceptable for mass distribution by anonymous users.

Note that Lemmy does have support for other format than SVG, including video files -- just not anything vector ATM.

If the art you want to post is flat-color, my guess is that your closest bet is probably posting a raster version of it as PNG or maybe lossless webp.

Can also store an SVG somewhere else that permits hosting SVG and provide an external link to that SVG file.

No problem. I don't mind trying to help if you get stuck -- ComfyUI is more complicated to get going with than Automatic1111, especially if you're not familiar with how the generation works internally, as ComfyUI kind of exposes you to the inner workings more -- but I just don't want to try rewriting the zillion YouTube and webpages that cover the "here is how to get ComfyUI installed" process out there. I don't even know what OS you're using, and some of that setup is OS-specific.

Huh.

I guess they didn't go in much for curvature on the trigger back then.

Context (which I had to look up, since I haven't played Homefront):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homefront_%28video_game%29

Homefront is a first-person shooter video game developed by Kaos Studios and published by THQ. The game tells the story of a resistance movement fighting in the near-future against the military occupation of the Western United States by a reunified Korea.

So, I'm not going to write up a "this is how to install and start ComfyUI and view it in a Web browser" tutorial -- like, lots of people have done that a number of times over online, and better than I could, and it'd just be duplicating effort, probably badly. You'll want to look at them to get ComfyUI up and running, if you have not yet.

My understanding is that if you install ComfyUI and load a workflow -- which I've provided -- and you're missing any nodes or models used in that workflow, ComfyUI will tell you. That's why I attach the workflow JSON file, so that people can use that to reproduce the environment (and should be able to reproduce this image exactly).

The workflow is compressed with xz and then converted to text for posting here, since the Threadiverse doesn't do file attachments on posts, with Base64. On a Linux system, you can reconstitute the workflow file by pasting the text in the spoiler section into a file (say, "workflow.json.xz.base64") and running:

$ base64 -d <workflow.json.xz.base64 | xz -d > workflow.json

There's an extension that I use that makes it convenient to download nodes in ComfyUI: ComfyUI Manager

https://github.com/ltdrdata/ComfyUI-Manager

It works kind of like Automatic1111's built-in extension downloader, if you've used that.

I think -- from memory, as I'm on my phone at the moment -- that I'm only using one node that doesn't come with the base package, SD Ultimate Upscaler, which is a port from Automatic1111 to ComfyUI of an upscaler that breaks the image up into tiles and upscales it using an upscaling model; it lets me render the image at 1260x720 and then just upscale it to the resolution in which it was posted. If you install ComfyUI Manager, you can use that to download and install SD Ultimate Upscaler and whatever else you might want in terms of nodes. Also provides an option to one-click update them when they get new releases.

I don't think that it can automatically download models, though it'll prompt you if you don't have them. I believe -- again going from memory -- that there are two models used here, the NewReality model derived from Flux, and the SwinIR 4x -- I probably should have used the 2x model as I'm scaling by a factor of 2, changed that in my most recent submitted images -- upscaler model.

You can google for either of them using their name, but NewReality is on civitai.com, which you'll need an account on:

https://civitai.com/models/161068/stoiqo-newreality-flux-sd35-sdxl-sd15

There are several versions of the NewReality model, based on various base models. You want to click on the right version, the one based on Flux 1D.Alpha; the default when you go to the page has the SD3.5Alpha version checked. Then click "Download".

That gets dropped into the models/checkpoint directory in the ComfyUI installation.

..I don't remember exactly where I got my copy of the SwinIR upscaler model, think it was from HuggingFace:

https://huggingface.co/mirroring/civitai_mirror/blob/ee44205453f9a8f125b0acf496e2ed13ad074498/models/SwinIR/SwinIR_4x.pth

This is the homepage of the SwinIR upscaler, should also work, though looks like they use different filenames:

https://github.com/JingyunLiang/SwinIR/releases

The SwinIR_4x upscaler gets dropped into the models/upscaler directory in the ComfyUI installation.

You need to restart ComfyUI after adding new models for it to detect them.

If you haven't used a Flux-based model before, it can be slow, as a warning, compared to SD models that I've used.

If you've never done any local image generation before at all, then you're going to need a GPU with a fair bit of VRAM -- I don't know what the minimum requirements are to run this model, might say on the NewReality model page Civitai site. I use a 24GB card, but I know that it's got some headroom, because I've generated at higher resolution than I am here. Hypothetically, I think one can run ComfyUI on a CPU alone, but it'd be unusably slow.

Bridges ice up before roadways. When driving across a bridge, even if the roads are okay, be really cautious.

Heat pumps are also electric. The term that you guys want is "electric resistance heaters".

I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an "action roguelike" a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don't functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren't roguelikes?

My red lines are:

• Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I'd accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

• At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I'd definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps -- Tales of Mag'eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say -- roguelikes.

• At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

• Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

• Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn't call a first-person grid-based game -- and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure -- a roguelike.

• Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn't rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player's "mind" is controlling.

I don't think that I'd make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I've played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That's a big part of the game.

IIRC, the sprites were pretty large for the time.

Well, on the up side, last year the news was on drought.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/drought-spain-empties-reservoirs-forces-limits-water-use-2023-08-08/

Drought in Spain empties reservoirs, forces limits on water use

August 8, 202312:52 PM PDT

AGULLANA, Spain, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Artur Duran holds his hand out by his waist to show the level of water he remembers two years ago at the Darnius Boadella reservoir in northeastern Spain.

Then, it was still deep enough for sailing. Now a long drought has nearly emptied it.

"We have never seen (it) so low," the 79-year-old local resident told Reuters at the reservoir, which is only 20% full.

A 401k isn't mandatory. If you've got an issue with having a 401k, you don't need to do so. I suspect, however, that you'll be hard-pressed to find a route that will provide long-term returns as solid as regularly dropping funds into an index fund in a 401k.