#outcomes

[philosophybits]

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Thomas Sowell: The big confusion among the redistributionists is between opportunity and outcomes.

One of the examples I used in a recent column was, you know, when I was a kid, I briefly tried to play basketball, and I mean, I was lucky to hit the backboard, never mind the basket. But I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had.

You cannot measure opportunity by outcomes, and that's what the redistributionists insist on doing.

[orangebluewildflower]

"If you are going to overthink then overthink the positives.

Overthink the best outcome.

Overthink how good this life can be."

[arthropooda]

[sacredcodedn]

Conlangs

A conlang is a constructed language, or a language in which that a person (likely an author) creates a language using linguistic analysis and understanding of the human psyche and communication.

There are often 3 parts to a language that need to be considered in conlangs;

Spoken Language

Written Language

Communal language

Spoken language is how the language is used to communicate between speakers vocally, things that often impact this are tonality and emphasis.

Written language is how the language is written down, in english we write uniform letters left to right in straight lines, whereas in other languages you might write up to down, or right to left, or you might even write in spirals. You can even dodge letters all together, but it is reasonably difficult to make a writing system that avoids repetition.

Communal language is how language changes in community, like for example english has evolved due to slang and simplifiers. For example; the word okay comes from the term all correct, and in some twist of the word it became Oal Korrect, then being shortened to OK. This shows evolution in language, and really cements a language in world and makes it feel real.

꒦ˎˊ˗ ︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶ ꒦꒷꒦₊˚

In Humanity I will be making 3 unique languages at least, one for each continent outside of the blank continent, however I may do some more, making some country based dialects or languages with same base sounds.

There are environmental factors you need to take into accout as well however, for example a conlang that i made before was for a desert civilisation where the rock around was too tough to carve, so the only written language they had was small spirals that would convey simple words before they were washed away by the winds. And so they were mostly spoken word.

You can then consider punctuation; will your language's written language even have punctuation? Or will it have punctuation for niche concepts like assertiveness and doubt.

꒦ˎˊ˗ ︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶ ꒦꒷꒦₊˚

As a newbie to conlangs, I first went to the Conlang Creation Society Website which then spurred me on to the Conlangers Library, which taught me some Conlang terms that will be important for this breif;

Artlang - Directly means artistic language, which is a language made mostly for fictional media or aesthetic reasons.

Natlangs - Natural languages, languages that are spoken in real life, or commonly in countries.

Babel text - Genesis 11:1-9, to my understanding, this is a text that is translated by most Conlangers. This allows for artists to understand each others works. Usually used as a test drive for conlangs and understanding.

Glossopoeia - The action of creating a conlang. A Glossopoeist is a Conlanger.

Neography - Meaning New Writing, it is the action of making a writing system for a conlang.

꒦ˎˊ˗ ︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶ ꒦꒷꒦₊˚

How to make a Conlang

In this I will be following the Conlanging 101 guide by tabby!

First, the question of purpose, this is obvious for me, as I will be making these for my animated series. However I will be doing this for fun also, so that will be how I treat this!

Second, Examples; I think before I find examples I will first need to find out what the landscape of the area is, the first continent I will be doing this with is going to be the music continent. So Im thinking of making the music continent mainly inhabited near jungle, and due to this I might make this continent directly inspired by Africa in terms of landscape and geology. Due to the Sahara desert being in close proximity to jungles.

Due to the geography of the area being humid and arid, the sand will be a large part of the belief system of some of the peoples of this continent, likely being one of 2 gods in a bitheist religion.

The way this language is going to have come about is likely through people mimicing the creatures of the jungle's calls, harmonious and unique, and so the language should likely be tonal and maybe melodious in its usage. Possibly using a metronomic bird or creature to keep plosives on beat

＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼

Language Examples (With Colour!)

Basque

Visit Original Link

Basque sounds very rhythmic and nice to the ear, the plosives are like small breaks from a song, I could use this to make a more fast paced variant of the language, the vowels are weighted very "A" heavy, which makes the language feel slightly more regal to me for some reason.

Igbo

Igbo has a nice feeling to it, with its plosives and nasals weighted the same it feels quite polite and welcoming. With emphasis on the glides, it feels far more open ended, which is a quality I enjoy.

Korean

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The Korean language has very nicely weighted vowels, that are very nicely placed, the ends of words are also very vowel heavy, with Os and As, which make it sound very sharp with Ss and SHs

German

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German has a large emphasis on the CHs (like in the word loch) as well as in the alveolar sounds in the language. This makes it sound quite harsh, however also oddly soothing, and with some of the opened letters it feels very comforting to me.

Na'Vi

This is a Conlang made for avatar with a 1000 word dictionary and speakers all around the world. This shows the prowess of the conlangs, something I might take from this is the creation of new word structure being ejectives (small stops before the end letter), creating new structure and word ideas is something I greatly enjoy doing, and so that is likely what I will take the most enjoyment in doing.

／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／＼／

Creating the sounds for my language!

For this part, I will be starting with the consonants, as they are the primary starting point for many conlangs, if you want to understand the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) here is a really informative video by TheLingSpace!

And here is the IPA wikipedia so you can listen to some sounds for your leisure!

There is a small question I need to think about in my language, do I want to avoid voiced or voiceless consonants, as I was planning on having all plosives be said on beats of a metronome, so there would be no need for the plosives to be voiced as they would need no note in terms of musicality, which is often why in musicals, they wont have a long pause for an actor to say a line (think the line "say hello~" where the o is held for about 20 seconds) on any voiceless consonants (like s or p) as they simply would never work in the context of music. But also I want there to be some voiced consonants to include in speech, so I think what ill do, is only add voiceless plosives, and every other consonant is voiced. That way when the plosives are said on the beat, all voices in the area will stop, giving the area a kind of "bump" to it. I also don't want to add very many difficult to pronounce letters like many uvular sounds, which can have notes, but in general can lead to throat issues more if you aren't used to it. Now I could add the fact they just are used to it, however; due to it hurting me, I will not be using them so I can speak this language for practice.

Here you can see I went with the plosives "p","t" and "c", as they are some of the only ones I could think that fully stop your vocality in place for air. Also, usually in making beats, humans will gravitate to Ps, Ts and Cs. I didn't note it down, however I will also be including the Glottal stop "ʔ" (which is seen as the stop in the word "UhʔOh" spelt Uh-Oh)

I also used the fricatives "v", "z" and "ʑ" as if you add a vowel after them they can easily sound nice and melodic.

Using the flap "ɾ" allows for a kind of half plosive, as it uses the same movement as a "d" but with less of a stop, kind of like a "d" with a hole in it if that makes any sense.

The usages of the nasal "ng" was so that I could add a bit of nasal to the language, seemingly very straightforward, but needed nonetheless Now, you will see this chart and think that there aren't enough consonants, thinking of english shows 21, but due to the unique way that the language is going to be spoken, these 9 should be all I need.

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

In terms of vowels, I was going to make the language use a bizarre one like "ɤ" but I realised that the base 5 vowels work perfectly for melody. So I will be using the vowels "a", "e", "o", "u", and "i"!

Diphthongs

Diphthongs are 2 vowels placed next to each other, now, I doubt there will be much use of diphthongs in the higher tempo areas of the region, but for the lower tempo out there; ill be adding the diphthongs "ou", "ae" and "ai"

Triphthongs

Triphthongs are 3 vowels placed together to make a single noise; like in the word "beau", in terms of this, I likely wont be using many, however I might use "eau"

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

Making words!

In order to make a lexicon for a language you need some root words that you can mash together to make more complex words. So I will be making 500-600 of these root words, which will overall make up the base lexicon of the language. I will be writing them in Latin characters (ʑ will be written zh, ɾ will be written r, and ʔ will be written ? ) as I will be making them into a writing system later. I should also likely make a name for this language. But I will make it after the lexicon so I can feel more of the understanding of the sounds etc.

For making adjectives, I will be using this list of these Gradable and Non-Gradable adjectives from the british council learn english page

⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢

Here you can see the way that I am formatting the dictionary.

⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢⌢

the reason why the dictionary is so important is so that words can be made through joinery of others, for example; The sound of wind is the combination of sound and air. Being Civ and Porov, so the word becoming Porciv means "woosh" in a sense.

Writing system

currently, Ive only set up the phonetic system for speaking the language so now I have to come up with a way to convey the shift in note and then the shift in letters.

I don't want the system to have basic lettering conventions because it is also going to be a music system (due to the denizens of the nation thinking music is life energy, they would want their writing to have the same backbone as music).

I also want the writing system to move in a way that isn't conventional to the western world; mainly just so I can challenge myself, however in order to give reason to this, when writing, the system will go from the top down in order to convey incoming information. However when writing music it will from the bottom up, this is because it is more for use in sound being played, and it is in their belief that sound is life energy which is pulled down into the ground, so the closer to the bottom of the line the notes are, the sooner they are played.

I am not fully sure how I would make multi note chords in this method, but I might just use 3 lines, or have floating lines like when music goes off the scale in regular music today. The scale of which the note will be played will not be written, as the people believe that music should be free, they imagine it like telling an artist what strokes to make in order to draw a cat, in oppose to just drawing a cat.

Dependant on the insignia on that precedes the music tells people the instrument type it uses (E.g. Woodwind, percussion, etc.).

In the same way, the insignia that sub-cedes the writing will tell the speaker the tone of which the word needs to be said. Tone in this case meaning the note, not like the majority of tonal languages that I've seen that deal with tone in either difference or lack, where you will have words that have an upward or downward tone.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Actually formatting the language

I want the language when spoken to have a melodic sound to it, which is going to be difficult, however it works by making the tones of the language's most common word types (those being nouns, adjectives, and verbs) the notes "C", "E", and "G" which are the most pleasing notes to the ear.

The tempo of speech would also depend on the area, which would be the main aspect of music also, making songs that break the tempo hyper emotional or simply not taught yet.

The sentence structure will be:

Verb - Object - Subject

The reason I am using this structure is because it will feel more out of the ordinary. Plus I think "action - actor - acted" is a very understandable format.

I am going to call the language Tingtizh (Tiŋtiʑ) as it means music or energy in the language and I think that is a good summary of the language.

}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{}-{

How to actually write in Tingtizh

The plosive key (A) shows the way you can impact the baseline in the word (D) either at the start, or in the middle, if a plosive is at the end, you simply write it as if it were in the middle.

In the Vowel key (B) you can see that they intersect the baseline in the word (E).

Consonant Key (C) shows the way you can impact the area around the baseline in the word (F) in the order in the consonant spacing chart (G)

•၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။•

How to write music in Tingtizh

To Start, the notes that are used in music and go on the end of words for tone (A) include all commonly used notes (A-G) the way you write a melody is by writing the Instrumental insignia (B) at the bottom, and then moving the baseline up and beginning by writing the notes on or with the baseline. for this, there is usually a draft and neat variant of a melody (C) Which in some areas, are just how they write music due to them being alot more experimental with their music. In order to make a multi-note chord, you pull a branch out of the baseline (D), and then make it enter again when the letter is complete

•၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။••၊၊|၊|။||။၊|။•

Conclusion

In conclusion, at the end of this immense project, this is probably the most fun I've had in a project in college, which is saying alot when it comes from someone who enjoys the process of learning more than the knowledge.

I likely will be continuing with this language at a later date, however; for now this is all I need for this project!

[ethics-and-ink]

Read More Here: Substack

[nitrosodiumfmpsequel]

Stress Testing Part 1: Fixing Lag

On the last day before the Easter holidays, I have decided to do some more playtesting, and get people to search for as many glitches and problems as they could in the game.

I could only get three playtesters (everyone else seemed to be busy with their own projects), but the advice was still very constructive. I will go through the different problems one by one.

Lag problems: These are definitely an issue. As previously stated, the computers give texture streaming error messages and when resource-intensive actions take place like opening doors, I get a message that the video memory has been exhausted.

Softlock room: I never even considered this could happen until the playtesting. This could be solved with a way out of the room, a switch to open or close it from the other side, or a 'restart level' button for situations like this.

Robot dialogue glitch: This is not a glitch, I've intentionally done this. There is a clear way to stop the conversation, and if the player doesn't want to do that and keep the subtitles on their screen then I've given them the option. There's not really a situation, at least in the first level, where the player couldn't just finish the conversation manually and get the widget off their screen.

"Wedgy got me stuck": This refers to jutting sections of the starting hole killing the player's momentum. This can be solved by putting collision boxes on the shaft sides to smooth out the descent. This is difficult to explain, so I will go into more detail in its own post.

"Rocks made me loose my cool": This refers to the rubble piles severely affecting the framerate.

The lag is the prime issue here, since it does make the game near-unplayable. I spoke with a friend on his issue and he said that the problem likely lies with the textures. I may have accidentally imported 8k textures, which would therefore be causing the "Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget" error messages, and the quality is a moot point anyway because these monitors only go up to 4k. However, the rubble model is obviously causing a problem that goes beyond texturing.

I opened the level in Wireframe Mode and was pretty stunned - the rubble has so many polygons that it looks like a neural network! This is obviously causing the issue, so I deleted them and played through the level to test. The lag issues were completely fixed. Obviously, I still want a rubble model of some kind, so I went back to Fab.

As it happens, I had been using the "raw" variant of the model, which was 400 megabytes, six times larger than the high variant. I had obviously imported some ultra-high resolution model by accident, and so I decided to reimport, using the low quality version.

This looks just as good in my opinion, since I wasn't aiming for hyperrealism anyway. I am still getting warnings about the texture streaming pool though, and I suspect this is caused by the vines. I checked the Unreal forums and found this post which suggests to me that foliage is notoriously hard to optimize in UE5. Given that I am getting errors about texture streaming, it is possible that the vine texture is too high-definition.

I imported the low-res version of the Broom Creeper texture, and it seemed to cut the texture streaming over-budget by about 50 MiB (possibly megabytes, but I don't know) - of course, it is still overbudget. I'm really not sure what's causing it, but it could be the wall textures themselves, so that's worth taking a look at too.

As it happens, the Sandstone Blocks texture (used for the floor) is an 8k texture, and the rest are 4k, which is still fairly high. I can probably reimport the two I use (Sandstone Blocks and Clay Plaster) as 2k textures, and that'd save me a lot of headache.

Here's the game with 8K and 4k textures.

This is the game with 2K textures. The difference is impossibly minimal, but somehow the texture streaming overbudget went up. I don't know how to fix this, but it isn't creating any more lag, so we can consider this a success for now. To conclude, I will be more careful when downloading models and textures in outrageously high resolutions.