NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

[The Nameless One]

Mongol composite bow's better anyway.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Mongol composite bow's better anyway.

Only if you're on horseback

 

[Fedora Master]

Travelling in style.
MORROWIND Style!

 

[Monk]

"Take props! Motion capture actor takes a few steps and her temperament changes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyff4a9ojkQ

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[NecroLord]

Travelling in style.
MORROWIND Style!

Ah, so you just discovered the Jump spell.
Lightweight stuff for now, you should get a 100 pts Jump spell made or enchant an item with it as soon as you have the means.
It will save you a lot of time travelling (not to mention being generally useful).
You can later also combine it with Fortify Acrobatics.

 

[Fedora Master]

Travelling in style.
MORROWIND Style!

Ah, so you just discovered the Jump spell.
Lightweight stuff for now, you should get a 100 pts Jump spell made or enchant an item with it as soon as you have the means.
It will save you a lot of time travelling (not to mention being generally useful).
You can later also combine it with Fortify Acrobatics.

This isn't my first rodeo. I'm simply not abusing the total shit out of magic and alchemy.
It's cheese, but more of a nice platter of gouda with the grape on top than a full-on stinky-ass wheel.

 

[markec]

 

[Infinitron]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/02/the-diablo-hackers-that-debunked-a-record-speedrun/

How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal​

Investigators decompiled the game to search through 2.2 billion random dungeon seeds.

For years, Maciej "Groobo" Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game's randomly generated dungeon.
But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo's run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo's game couldn't have taken place in any of them.
"We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper," team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. "Betrayal might be another way to describe it," team member AJenbo added. "To find out that this had been done illegitimately... and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement."

If we have unearned luck​

If you have any familiarity with Diablo or speedrunning, watching Groobo's run feels like watching someone win the lottery. First, there's the dungeon itself, which features a sequence of stairways that appear just steps from each other, forming a quick and enemy-free path down to the dungeon's deeper levels. Then there's Groobo's lucky find of Naj's Puzzler on level 9, a unique item that enables the teleporting necessary for many of the run's late-game maneuvers.


Groobo's 3:12 Diablo speedrun, as submitted to Speed Demos Archive in 2009
"It seemed very unusual that we would have so many levels with the upstairs and the downstairs right next to each other," Allan "DwangoAC" Cecil told Ars Technica. "We wanted to find some way of replicating this."

When Cecil and a team of tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) authors started that search process in earnest last February, they said they used Groobo's run as a baseline to try to improve from. While Groobo ostensibly had to rely on his own human luck in prepping his run, the TAS runners could use techniques and tools from outside the game to replicate Groobo's run (or something very similar) every time.

To find an RNG seed that could do just that, the TAS team created a custom-built map generation tool by reverse-engineering a disassembled Diablo executable. That tool can take any of the game's billions of possible random seeds and quickly determine the map layout, item distribution, and quest placement available in the generated save file. A scanner built on top of that tool can then quickly look through those generated dungeons for ones that might be optimal for speedrunning.
"We were working on finding the best seed for our TAS, and we were trying to identify the seed from Groobo's run, both to validate that our scanner works and to potentially straight-up use it for the run," Stephan said of the effort. "We naturally had a lot of trouble finding [that seed] because it doesn't exist."

A thorough search​

In their effort to find Groobo's storied run (or at least one that resembled it), the TAS team conducted a distributed search across the game's roughly 2.2 billion valid RNG seeds. Each of these seeds represents a different specific second on the system clock when a Diablo save file is created, ranging from between January 1, 1970, and December 31, 2038 (the only valid dates accepted by the game).
After comparing each of those billions of those RNG dungeons to a re-creation of the dungeon seen in Groobo's run, the team couldn't find a single example containing the crucial level 9 Naj's Puzzler drop. After that, the team started searching through "impossible" seeds, which could only be created by using save modification tools to force a creation date after the year 2038.
The team eventually found dungeons matching Naj's Puzzler drop in Groobo's video, using seeds associated with the years 2056 and 2074.


After an exhaustive search, the TAS team couldn't find a dungeon with Naj's Puzzler dropped in the place Groobo's run said it should be. Credit: Analysis of Groobo's Diablo WR Speedrun
The early presumption that Groobo's run was legitimate ended up costing the team weeks of work. "It was baffling when we couldn't find [the early Naj's Puzzler] in any of the searches we did," Cecil said. "We were always worried that the scanner might have bugs in it," Staphen added.

The TAS team's thorough search also showed troubling inconsistencies in the other dungeon levels shown in Groobo's run. "Normally you would only need to identify a single level to replicate a run since all the other levels are generated from the same seed," AJenbo told Ars. But the levels seen in Groobo's run came from multiple different seeds, which would require splicing footage from multiple different playthrough of different dungeons. That's a big no-no even in a so-called "segmented" run, which is still supposed to contain segments from a single unmodified save file.
"At that point we also wanted to figure out how manipulated the run was," AJenbo said. "Was it a legit run except for [dungeon level] 9? Was it three good runs combined? In the end we only found two levels that had come from the same run so at least 13 (probably 15) runs were spliced into one video, which is a lot for a game with just 16 levels."

The evidence piles up​

After Groobo's dungeon generation problems came to light, other inconsistencies in his run started to become apparent. Some of these are relatively easy to spot with the naked eye once you know what you're looking for.
For instance, the "1996–2001" copyright date seen on the title screen in Groobo's video is inconsistent with the v1.00 shown on the initial menu screen, suggesting Groobo's run was spliced together from runs on multiple different versions of the game. Items acquired early in the run also disappear from the inventory later on with no apparent explanation.


This copyright date doesn't line up with the "V1.00" seen later on the menu screen in Groobo's run. Credit: Analysis of Groobo's Diablo WR Speedrun
Even months after the investigation first started, new inconsistencies are still coming to light. Groobo's final fight against Diablo, for instance, required just 19 fireballs to take him out. While that's technically possible with perfect luck for the level 12 Sorcerer seen in the footage, the TAS team found that the specific damage dealt and boss behavior only matched when they attempted the same attacks using a level 26 Sorcerer.
After the TAS team compiled their many findings into a lengthy document, Groobo defended his submission in a discussion with Cecil (screenshots of which were viewed by Ars Technica). "My run is a segmented/spliced run," Groobo said. "It always has been and it was never passed off as anything else, nor was it part of any competition or leaderboards. The Speed Demos Archive [SDA] page states that outright." Indeed, an archived version of Groobo's record-setting Speed Demos Archive submission does say directly that it's made up of "27 segments appended to one file."

But simply splitting a run into segments doesn't explain away all of the problems the TAS team found. Getting Naj's Puzzler on dungeon level 9, for instance, still requires outside modification of a save file, which is specifically prohibited by longstanding Speed Demos Archive rules that "manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed." Groobo's apparent splicing of multiple game versions and differently seeded save files also seems to go against SDA rules, which say that "there obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game."
After being presented with the TAS team's evidence, SDA wrote that "it has been determined that Groobo's run very likely does not stem from only legitimate techniques, and as such, has itself been banished barring new developments." But Groobo's record is still listed as the "Fastest completion of an RPG videogame" by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team's findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).


A recent Diablo speedrun on a confirmed legitimate dungeon seed.
This might seem like a pretty petty issue to spend weeks of time and attention debunking. But at a recent presentation attended by Ars, Cecil said he was motivated to pursue it because "it did harm. Groobo's alleged cheating in 2009 completely stopped interest in speedrunning this category [of Diablo]. No one tried, no one could."
Because of Groobo's previously unknown modifications to make an impossible-to-beat run, "this big running community just stopped trying to run this game in that category," Cecil said. "For more than a decade, this had a chilling impact on that community." With Groobo's run out of the way, though, new runners are setting new records on confirmed legitimate RNG seeds, and with the aid of TAS tools.
In the end, Cecil said he hopes the evidence regarding Groobo's run will make people look more carefully at other record submissions. "Groobo had created a number of well-respected ... speedruns," he said. "[People thought] there wasn't any good reason to doubt him. In other words, there was bias in familiarity. This was a familiar character. Why would they cheat?"

 

[NecroLord]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/02/the-diablo-hackers-that-debunked-a-record-speedrun/

How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal​

Investigators decompiled the game to search through 2.2 billion random dungeon seeds.

For years, Maciej "Groobo" Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game's randomly generated dungeon.
But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo's run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo's game couldn't have taken place in any of them.
"We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper," team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. "Betrayal might be another way to describe it," team member AJenbo added. "To find out that this had been done illegitimately... and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement."

If we have unearned luck​

If you have any familiarity with Diablo or speedrunning, watching Groobo's run feels like watching someone win the lottery. First, there's the dungeon itself, which features a sequence of stairways that appear just steps from each other, forming a quick and enemy-free path down to the dungeon's deeper levels. Then there's Groobo's lucky find of Naj's Puzzler on level 9, a unique item that enables the teleporting necessary for many of the run's late-game maneuvers.


Groobo's 3:12 Diablo speedrun, as submitted to Speed Demos Archive in 2009
"It seemed very unusual that we would have so many levels with the upstairs and the downstairs right next to each other," Allan "DwangoAC" Cecil told Ars Technica. "We wanted to find some way of replicating this."

When Cecil and a team of tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) authors started that search process in earnest last February, they said they used Groobo's run as a baseline to try to improve from. While Groobo ostensibly had to rely on his own human luck in prepping his run, the TAS runners could use techniques and tools from outside the game to replicate Groobo's run (or something very similar) every time.

To find an RNG seed that could do just that, the TAS team created a custom-built map generation tool by reverse-engineering a disassembled Diablo executable. That tool can take any of the game's billions of possible random seeds and quickly determine the map layout, item distribution, and quest placement available in the generated save file. A scanner built on top of that tool can then quickly look through those generated dungeons for ones that might be optimal for speedrunning.
"We were working on finding the best seed for our TAS, and we were trying to identify the seed from Groobo's run, both to validate that our scanner works and to potentially straight-up use it for the run," Stephan said of the effort. "We naturally had a lot of trouble finding [that seed] because it doesn't exist."

A thorough search​

In their effort to find Groobo's storied run (or at least one that resembled it), the TAS team conducted a distributed search across the game's roughly 2.2 billion valid RNG seeds. Each of these seeds represents a different specific second on the system clock when a Diablo save file is created, ranging from between January 1, 1970, and December 31, 2038 (the only valid dates accepted by the game).
After comparing each of those billions of those RNG dungeons to a re-creation of the dungeon seen in Groobo's run, the team couldn't find a single example containing the crucial level 9 Naj's Puzzler drop. After that, the team started searching through "impossible" seeds, which could only be created by using save modification tools to force a creation date after the year 2038.
The team eventually found dungeons matching Naj's Puzzler drop in Groobo's video, using seeds associated with the years 2056 and 2074.


After an exhaustive search, the TAS team couldn't find a dungeon with Naj's Puzzler dropped in the place Groobo's run said it should be. Credit: Analysis of Groobo's Diablo WR Speedrun
The early presumption that Groobo's run was legitimate ended up costing the team weeks of work. "It was baffling when we couldn't find [the early Naj's Puzzler] in any of the searches we did," Cecil said. "We were always worried that the scanner might have bugs in it," Staphen added.

The TAS team's thorough search also showed troubling inconsistencies in the other dungeon levels shown in Groobo's run. "Normally you would only need to identify a single level to replicate a run since all the other levels are generated from the same seed," AJenbo told Ars. But the levels seen in Groobo's run came from multiple different seeds, which would require splicing footage from multiple different playthrough of different dungeons. That's a big no-no even in a so-called "segmented" run, which is still supposed to contain segments from a single unmodified save file.
"At that point we also wanted to figure out how manipulated the run was," AJenbo said. "Was it a legit run except for [dungeon level] 9? Was it three good runs combined? In the end we only found two levels that had come from the same run so at least 13 (probably 15) runs were spliced into one video, which is a lot for a game with just 16 levels."

The evidence piles up​

After Groobo's dungeon generation problems came to light, other inconsistencies in his run started to become apparent. Some of these are relatively easy to spot with the naked eye once you know what you're looking for.
For instance, the "1996–2001" copyright date seen on the title screen in Groobo's video is inconsistent with the v1.00 shown on the initial menu screen, suggesting Groobo's run was spliced together from runs on multiple different versions of the game. Items acquired early in the run also disappear from the inventory later on with no apparent explanation.


This copyright date doesn't line up with the "V1.00" seen later on the menu screen in Groobo's run. Credit: Analysis of Groobo's Diablo WR Speedrun
Even months after the investigation first started, new inconsistencies are still coming to light. Groobo's final fight against Diablo, for instance, required just 19 fireballs to take him out. While that's technically possible with perfect luck for the level 12 Sorcerer seen in the footage, the TAS team found that the specific damage dealt and boss behavior only matched when they attempted the same attacks using a level 26 Sorcerer.
After the TAS team compiled their many findings into a lengthy document, Groobo defended his submission in a discussion with Cecil (screenshots of which were viewed by Ars Technica). "My run is a segmented/spliced run," Groobo said. "It always has been and it was never passed off as anything else, nor was it part of any competition or leaderboards. The Speed Demos Archive [SDA] page states that outright." Indeed, an archived version of Groobo's record-setting Speed Demos Archive submission does say directly that it's made up of "27 segments appended to one file."

But simply splitting a run into segments doesn't explain away all of the problems the TAS team found. Getting Naj's Puzzler on dungeon level 9, for instance, still requires outside modification of a save file, which is specifically prohibited by longstanding Speed Demos Archive rules that "manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed." Groobo's apparent splicing of multiple game versions and differently seeded save files also seems to go against SDA rules, which say that "there obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game."
After being presented with the TAS team's evidence, SDA wrote that "it has been determined that Groobo's run very likely does not stem from only legitimate techniques, and as such, has itself been banished barring new developments." But Groobo's record is still listed as the "Fastest completion of an RPG videogame" by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team's findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).


A recent Diablo speedrun on a confirmed legitimate dungeon seed.
This might seem like a pretty petty issue to spend weeks of time and attention debunking. But at a recent presentation attended by Ars, Cecil said he was motivated to pursue it because "it did harm. Groobo's alleged cheating in 2009 completely stopped interest in speedrunning this category [of Diablo]. No one tried, no one could."
Because of Groobo's previously unknown modifications to make an impossible-to-beat run, "this big running community just stopped trying to run this game in that category," Cecil said. "For more than a decade, this had a chilling impact on that community." With Groobo's run out of the way, though, new runners are setting new records on confirmed legitimate RNG seeds, and with the aid of TAS tools.
In the end, Cecil said he hopes the evidence regarding Groobo's run will make people look more carefully at other record submissions. "Groobo had created a number of well-respected ... speedruns," he said. "[People thought] there wasn't any good reason to doubt him. In other words, there was bias in familiarity. This was a familiar character. Why would they cheat?"

Those speedrunning autists do not fuck around when it comes to their business...

 

[Viata]

Took then years to notice something as obvious as the guy picking up a ring and then the ring disappears from his inventory and shows up again the next time he opens his inventory.

 

[Darth Roxor]

the story of the sneaky potato who managed to troll autists for 15 years before being caught

i salute my fellow potato

 

[Infinitron]

What if Astartes but about NCR's capture of HELIOS One?

(okay, it's nowhere near Astartes but still cool)

The action begins:

Is it over for the NCR bros?

Second wave:

When all else fails:

Getting tactical

I'm not sure those jetpacks are canon.

NCR BERSERKERS. Yeah that's definitely not canon.

Entire series is just nonsense.

The nonsense continues:

The Brotherhood reaches its breaking point:

A breather episode of sorts as the Brotherhood retreats to HELIOS One for their last stand:

As the NCR seem to be moving in for the kill, the Brotherhood get a second wind with their DEATHBOTS:

The Brotherhood counterattack pushes forward and demolishes all resistance:

Colonel Moore and the Rangers take command in a dialogue-heavy interlude episode:

Time to BUST OPEN some cans:

NCR Rangers kick major ass:

 

[ferratilis]

For fans of F.E.A.R., a few days ago someone released a patch that fixes all the common issues with a single .dll file. Some of these required a lot of tweaking previously, now it's just a matter of dropping a file in the installation folder. The only thing you might want to tweak is the HUD scaling factor, I like 0.8 personally.

https://github.com/Wemino/EchoPatch

Features​

• HUD Scaling - This feature dynamically scales HUD elements (such as texts, the crosshair, and icons) relative to the screen resolution. The base resolution is 960x720, ensuring the HUD retains its original proportions and appearance on all higher resolutions.

The HUDCustomScalingFactor setting in EchoPatch.ini can be adjusted to customize the overall scaling of HUD elements.

​	​
4K Vanilla​	4K EchoPatch​

• Framerate Limiter - The game engine struggles with very low delta times at high framerates. Since it lacks a framerate cap, this can cause the game to run too fast. This feature lets you set a maximum framerate to prevent that. To adjust the limit, edit MaxFPS in EchoPatch.ini. A maximum value of 120 is recommended.
• FPS Drop Fix - Stop the game from initializing all HID devices, which leads to framerate drops over time. The difference with Methanhydrat's dinput8.dll fix is that, rather than intercepting and canceling the problematic call, the call will simply never be executed. This method is specifically effective for F.E.A.R. and does not apply to the other games affected by this issue.
• No Model LOD Bias - Forces the highest quality models to be rendered at all distances.
• No Mipmap Bias - Forces the highest quality textures to be rendered at all distances.

​
MipMapBias settings: On vs. Off at 1920x1080​

• Disable Letterboxing - Disable the letterbox during cutscenes when DisableLetterbox is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini.

​	​
Vanilla​	EchoPatch (Letterbox Disabled)​

• Widescreen Resolution Support for Extraction Point – In the Extraction Point expansion, only 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions are shown in the resolution list. This restriction has been removed.
• Skip Splashscreen - Bypasses developer splash screen immediately on launch when SkipSplashScreen is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini.
• Skip Movies - Skips all corporate intro videos while keeping the sound for the menu when SkipAllIntro is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini. Additionally, individual videos can be skipped instead of all; refer to the SkipIntro section in EchoPatch.ini.

 

[ghardy]

Looks nice. Thanks.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

edit

 

[NecroLord]

For fans of F.E.A.R., a few days ago someone released a patch that fixes all the common issues with a single .dll file. Some of these required a lot of tweaking previously, now it's just a matter of dropping a file in the installation folder. The only thing you might want to tweak is the HUD scaling factor, I like 0.8 personally.

https://github.com/Wemino/EchoPatch

Features​

• HUD Scaling - This feature dynamically scales HUD elements (such as texts, the crosshair, and icons) relative to the screen resolution. The base resolution is 960x720, ensuring the HUD retains its original proportions and appearance on all higher resolutions.

The HUDCustomScalingFactor setting in EchoPatch.ini can be adjusted to customize the overall scaling of HUD elements.

​

​	​
4K Vanilla​	4K EchoPatch​

• Framerate Limiter - The game engine struggles with very low delta times at high framerates. Since it lacks a framerate cap, this can cause the game to run too fast. This feature lets you set a maximum framerate to prevent that. To adjust the limit, edit MaxFPS in EchoPatch.ini. A maximum value of 120 is recommended.
• FPS Drop Fix - Stop the game from initializing all HID devices, which leads to framerate drops over time. The difference with Methanhydrat's dinput8.dll fix is that, rather than intercepting and canceling the problematic call, the call will simply never be executed. This method is specifically effective for F.E.A.R. and does not apply to the other games affected by this issue.
• No Model LOD Bias - Forces the highest quality models to be rendered at all distances.
• No Mipmap Bias - Forces the highest quality textures to be rendered at all distances.

​

​
MipMapBias settings: On vs. Off at 1920x1080​

• Disable Letterboxing - Disable the letterbox during cutscenes when DisableLetterbox is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini.

​

​	​
Vanilla​	EchoPatch (Letterbox Disabled)​

• Widescreen Resolution Support for Extraction Point – In the Extraction Point expansion, only 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions are shown in the resolution list. This restriction has been removed.
• Skip Splashscreen - Bypasses developer splash screen immediately on launch when SkipSplashScreen is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini.
• Skip Movies - Skips all corporate intro videos while keeping the sound for the menu when SkipAllIntro is set to 1 in EchoPatch.ini. Additionally, individual videos can be skipped instead of all; refer to the SkipIntro section in EchoPatch.ini.

If I remember right the Extraction Point expansion has some issues with memory overflow, I think, which can lead to hard crashes. Had it happen once or twice. Never happened while playing the main game or Perseus Mandate.
I don't think it was fixed.

 

[ferratilis]

If I remember right the Extraction Point expansion has some issues with memory overflow, I think, which can lead to hard crashes. Had it happen once or twice. Never happened while playing the main game or Perseus Mandate.
I don't think it was fixed.

I've never experienced that, but the PCGW does provide a potential solution:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F.E.A.R.#4_GB_patch

 

[JarlFrank]

 

[JarlFrank]

 

[NecroLord]

Cutscenes...

 

[Dark Souls II]

Me rn fr

 

[Infinitron]

 

[JarlFrank]

 

[Mikeal]