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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • My shelf is full of Ubisoft games. I’m playing one right now in fact, Farcry 2.

    Thing is, I’ve bought a lot of them based of my love of the series, and the truth is, all the recent one’s have sucked. Farcry 2,3,5, primal, AC black flag, rocksmith 2014, anything splinter cell, ghost recon wildlands, all amazing games.

    Farcry 6, AC anything after black flag, breakpoint, the new rocksmith, I hated them all. Not because I want to see a company fail, but because the games just don’t have the mechanics I enjoy.

    I’ve spent a lot of money in good faith because ubisoft made some of my favorite titles, but I’m done. The only games I might buy at this point on faith are GTA6, Kingdom come Deliverance 2, and Subnautica 2.

    I won’t buy anything ubisoft again until I’ve seen multiple reviews telling me exactly why I’m going to love this one.




  • Many cars have this with the touch screen, sport mode, eco mode, etc. Some will even learn from your driving behaviour and calibrate to that.

    The change is functionally instant, and when the original post talked about mapping it’s really a bunch of graphs and curves that dictate behaviour over the full range of rpm of the engine. You can switch maps on the fly by loading different basically spread sheets into the computer. Factory cars are calibrated for general use and epa standards, but you could make all kinds of special settings for various conditions.

    My knowledge of this is dated, haven’t been in the industry since 2000, but the basics haven’t changed.

    Older Porsches had a physical button on the floor under the gas pedal that you’d trigger when you floored it, putting it in spaz mode.

    The truth is, how you drive has a bigger impact on fuel efficiency than anything else, don’t accelerate aggressively, and stay below 65 mph. Wind drag above 50 mph is by far the greatest impact on fuel efficiency. Internal combustion engines are generally most efficient between 1800 and 2500 rpm, so if you keep your cruising speed there you’ll get the longest range on road trips, but obviously it’ll take that much longer.


  • It can’t do both at the same time.

    By remapping I assume you mean changing the ECU (engine control unit) programming.

    Depending on what all it controls, usually fuel injectors and ignition, and what it reads, air pressure, rpm, oxygen, throttle input, the mapping adjusts timing of ignition, and how much fuel is injected based on how fast the engine is spinning, and where the throttle is set.

    Most cars from the factory have a very simple mapping based around what most drivers do.

    A fancy prototype CRX I had back in the 90s had very custom mapping that meant when I drove mellow, it got about 45 mpg, but had very slow acceleration. If I pushed the throttle past a certian point, it spun up like a bat out of hell, but the fuel economy would plummet.

    What you can do with custom mapping is change the way the engine behaves under various conditions and based on the inputs. There is no magic get more out of the engine. Want more power? Eat more fuel and lose economy, and likely not burn off all the fuel so more dirty exhaust. Want more range? Limit power and lose acceleration.





  • I have a few times in life, but I’ve always found a new one.

    Each time I’d get deep enough into something, tech advancements always made that thing functionally obsolete.

    Once again I’m watching my skill set being phased out, but am working on my big last hurrah project right now that I’ve dreamed of for years. Having a great time doing it, but have already started the process of replacing it over the next 18 months.

    The one plus side now is that the company I’m with has already invested in my training for the next big thing. I’ve been through it enough times that I don’t feel like I’m losing something or wasted my time.


  • Don’t let yourself get bottlenecked. The debug cycle can spiral out of control when you too fixated on one element.

    When you feel that happen, take a five minute break and figure out some other part of the project you can spend time on that you know will work. Wasting hours on a stuck pig is frustrating, spending those hours instead making other progress let’s you simmer on the issue.

    Come back to it later with fresh eyes, and maybe it will be easier. If you hit the same wall after many attempts, maybe you have to find a different solution, and at least you got a ton of other stuff done.

    The sunk cost fallacy is a lot worse when you’ve spend multiple sessions on the same issue.

    It also helps when you can identify these problems early in the project cycle. Knowing what parts will work because you’ve done it before, versus new modules you haven’t worked with, helps to plan testing of the unknowns early, even if they are used later in the project.

    On large scale projects, I make sure to prototype the unknowns right at the beginning, and when I get stuck, I do easy work till I feel relaxed again. If I don’t solve the first one, move on to the next, and next, unknown till I’ve been through each at least oonce. Then you’ll have a road map of what works, and what’s going to take the hard, head down, jam music on, I’m not stopping to piss till this works or I abandon it, sessions.

    Then I know there are X number of those sessions in the project, and when I’m in that kind of mood, I tackle one. Some days you just want to bang out easy UI and functions, others you’re ready to beat your head on the keyboard till that one thing works.

    Other than that, I write a lot of test code around the problem so I can isolate exactly what where is. Then once it’s fixed, I go back and strip it all out. Don’t be afraid of spending time really understanding the issue before just doing brute force. In your example, if a module doesn’t do what is expected, are you sure your connected to the module? Are the commands formatted correctly? Do you get any response from it or is it just dead or not loading? Can you write around it? Are there other modules available? Can you write your own code instead of using the module?

    At the end of the day, what you said is right, step away and clear your head. I can’t count the number of times I’ve come back to something I strained at for hours or days, only to solve it in 15 minutes a week later.


  • The pace of change is about every five years, and some elements are always in transition.

    All in one turn key solutions are always one to two cycles behind, so may work great with the stuff I’m already replacing.

    I think these are honest attempts to simplify, but by the time they have it sorted its obsolete. If I have to build modules anyway to work with new equipemnt, might as well just write all the code in my native language.

    These also tend to be attempts at all in one devices, requiring you to use devices only compatible with those subsystems. I want to be able to use best tech from what ever manufacturer. New and fancy almost always means a command line interface, which again means coding.