Mario meets Pareto

The switch from 2D to 3D was so seemless and beautiful I actually gasped.

Bugs out for me in Firefox at around 2/3. Works fine in Safari.

My kid (6) crashes all the time, and she is naturally attracted to picking Peach. I'd say because of that, a character with high acceleration is going to be better. Though she also just likes to push the gas.

Though we're playing the one from GBA on Analogue Pocket. Which is probably a lot less advanced as the one in question here (a game for Wii U from 2012), it does resemble Wacky Wheels quite a lot.

would

Tufte is still alive!

Gameplay and narrative don't hook into that acquisitive gambler's streak nearly as well as "all the unlockable things".

I do agree with you, generally, that this is a bit of a cheap trick and far too ubiquitous. However, there is something to be said for giving the player "things to do" like unlocking content. It does add to the experience to have a sense of "this is why I'm still playing".

It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty".

The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you play games onto others.

That’s why my go-to Mario kart is the N64 version. No bs just pick a character and go

In the ARPG/Diablo genre, Path of Exile is one of the worst offenders. Each character progresses through a 2D locally-connected graph of over 1300 passive skill nodes, of which you only get to pick about 100, where the "undo" action is expensive or impossible.

That said, the sheer amount of options leads to a class of expert players and build-makers that normal players can rely on. I just wish the game itself provided more tools for navigating it (like an ingame build-guide system).

Worse than that, it makes marks of some players. The serious player doesn’t just have experience and technique working for them, they can now start with a character that can beat the newbie with one hand tied behind their back.

We all know that guy you can’t play games with because he sucks all the fun out of it for anybody else. As a game seller this isn’t just bad, it’s stupid.

I have not played many recent games but Scorched Earth was always one of my favorites. The economy allowed you to discover new weapons as you progressed in skill. I do agree as the number of combinations increases that seems like it would take away from the novelty of getting a new item. After all, novelty seeking is what we want, not mindless optimization.

Storyline is nice but if I want to watch a movie I'll pop in a DVD and get popcorn. Cutscenes get in the way after the first play through. Timeless games have some storyline but let you enjoy the game even if you skip the cutscenes.

This is why I preferred Shadow Warrior 2 to Borderlands. Millions of randomly generated guns sounds nice, except they're mostly trash. I'd rather have the 70 hand-crafted options in SW2.

It’s exactly as in Mario Kart 64! Remember, heavy characters have the higher top speed, but light characters have the higher acceleration!

I'm not sure, but it kind of makes sense as a choice, since acceleration and speed should be negatively correlated and since Bowser and Wario are both massive they should accelerate more slowly than others (given constant force). So they get to have the highest top speeds to compensate.

They have the highest top speed. It was that way in Mario Kart 64 as well. They have the worst acceleration though.

Yes, but with their poor acceleration, and given how chaotic some Mario Kart races are, it is hard to achieve their maximum speed.

Yes, but higher-speed characters have lower acceleration and less mini-turbo, which disadvantages them in many situations.

There are no grounds on which I can disagree with you.

In the original MK8, the Triforce tires and Hylean gliders were pretty good, but the stats in MK8 Deluxe for them are not nearly as good.

Well I always pick Koopa, who is apparently the worst. Although in my group of friends I win the most by far… I’ll keep with him to keep it fair :)

You're just optimizing for a different outcome. You could still apply this thinking, just with "Zelda adjacency" as the primary metric.

I wonder if Koopa does better with different customization?

These are the sorts of articles that a lot of news sites and digital publications dream of when pitching venture capitalists to cultivate this as a new sort of medium. But I've always found that the most compelling stuff, the most compelling digital presentations are often emergent. I think designing around it as a goal is impossible and often comes off as contrived and annoying. However, there are a times like this where it's just stunning as in, "yes, please hijack my scroll, go ahead".

If it was Pareto efficient, Koopa would do better too.

Playing with Koopa is MK on hard mode, and you can feel better about winning. You'll be like Piccolo or Rock Lee keeping their weights on while training ;)

Keep in mind that the pareto front is not a two-dimensional line, but a surface in a some high dimensional vector space. In every game there are many, many aspects to min/max. As others pointed out even Mario Kart doesn't boil down to speed and acceleration.

In a sufficiently complex game every build is on the pareto front as it optimizes some specific cost function.

That doesn’t mean that the other combinations are worthless. Presumably there’s value in the cosmetics, plus the puzzle aspect of creating and optimizing the builds along the different dimensions. Surely there’s a meta-Pareto-front of the balance between usefulness of each combination in competitions and amount of fun it adds to the game!

Agreed! But it also depends on the goals for the game--- min-maxing isn't the only way to play and not everyone is super competitive.

Looks like svelte + three.js

Svelte has some pretty nice built-in scroll animation support: https://svelte.dev/repl/051cd352ce284d15b55c91c8b30fa32f?ver...

Looks like Svelte (https://svelte.dev/)

Nothing beats https://ciechanow.ski/sound/

The breakdown is actually bagging vs. front running tracks. Bagging favors speed and front running favors mini turbo.

Bagging means purposefully being far from first to get good items which allow you to come back hard.

"professionals"? This is Mario Kart we are speaking about, not formula 1 or counter strike.

Tends to just be yoshi on one of two karts for nearly all tracks on 150cc because miniturbo speed is the same as top speed of the fastest build in the game.

If you look at the first place (after clear cheaters) time trials for different tracks, you'll see different choices but clear patterns. The main mode of the game has you race a set of four different tracks, and the online mode throws in all of the tracks; So in those modes the choices are going to be more constrained towards an average good.

For my part, I got the best rank in single player on all pre-DLC tracks with only toad and the default kart, so it's a part of the game you can entirely ignore if you're not competing against other humans.

For time trials, yes that is true. There are also other concerns such as that the speed stat is actually comprised of 4 different stats that have different values depending on the terrain: Ground, Air, Water, and Anti-Gravity. Some tracks that have a lot of water and so for that you would be better going for a kart that has high water speed. There are other less important statistics at play too that aren't mentioned here such as handling, traction, and also the hitbox of the vehicle is also important since it might change how tightly you can hug a turn against a wall or how wide you have to steer to collect coins.

In practice when playing online however, you won't know what track is about to be played, and so the meta right now prioritises mini-turbo stat much higher than speed. Having a high mini-turbo can also overcome the lack of speed by performing additional mini-turbos even on straight sections. Also when playing online you also will be hit by items a lot and need to try dodge other items being thrown at you, and for that having higher acceleration helps too.

The first paragraph mentions this: "In Mario Kart 8, ..."

If this was more than a tool for teaching multi-objective optimization, I'd like to see how the Pareto front changes over Mario Kart releases!

It's the latest version, stats are from https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Kart_8_Deluxe_in-game_statis...

Mario Kart 8 is now frozen, no more patches to come.

that one doesn't have mini-turbo, which has largely superseded acceleration as a stat (it correlates but isn't 1:1)

I don't think it's fair to disparage this article. The other one is perhaps good for a "deeper dive" but I'd say TFA is better overall at illustrating the concept.

In case you aren't aware, you can select a few builds and quickly compare the stats using: https://mk8dxbuilder.com/

Another thing is the coins. Collecting them gives you a speed boost for each coin you collect.

In summary: the difference between raw talent and experience.

Your kid has likely better reflexes and motor skills than you have, but on your side you have experience and wisdom accumulated over the years :)

So sorry I've disappointed you, but don't fuck your life plz

No, just go get one. Don't be a PL obsessing over a video game.

The items you get are the same, but maybe the frequencies are different? I never heard of that being the case, only that the weapons you get depend on your position in the race (you get better weapons when doing worse in the race).

But I also didn't realize this was the case on SNES. I only ever played the SNES version as a young kid, and it was a Japanese NTSC version on a PAL television through a cartridge adapter and it was pretty janky.

This is the case on Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GameCube), on the Arcade GP series and Mario Kart Tour (smartphone).

In all other games, character choice doesn't affect item distribution.

Exactly. Handling and Acceleration are the most important factors at 200cc.

Acceleration because when (not if) you get hit/crash, you need to be able to catch up quickly.

That sounds not so different from building a race car irl. There's no point in a big engine if you have to brake so early that you get passed in the corners. Plus all that braking will cook the brakes. It's often letter to have a lower top speed and never have to slow down.

Not entirely sure what you're looking for.

If you don't want to use the "artificial, unintuitive interface" (bit rude IMO) you could just google "best mario kart setup".

The selection of attributes is not exactly arbitrary. AFAIK speed has always been by far the dominant stat in mario kart, then acceleration. Choosing e.g. better handling at the expense of speed is an immediate disadvantage. If your problem is that this doesn't help you to choose atteibutes in the general case, take it up with the chaos of the natural world...

This article solves a problem people have (not knowing what setup to pick) in a very stylish way (subjective) and teaches the reader something along the way (what a Pareto frontier is).

Not a particularly constructive comment if you ask me.

I thought it was a clever relatable way to explain the concept of the Pareto frontier. And that of the 703560 builds, you can pick just 14 and choose among those depending on what you prefer was a surprise to me.

Yes, indeed. There are quite a few “nature inspired metaheuristic algorithms” which do exactly this. When I say “quite a few”, I mean countless.

Look up NSGA and NSGA-II for a good starting point. Then Kagi your way deeper into the rabbit hole.

If by “optional” you mean “optimal” then no, a GA is not guaranteed to find the optimal solution in the general case.

Why is it rounded down?

Thank's for the info, will fix asap !

Isn't this what the last part of TFA covers?

keyword you want is “scrollytelling”. lots of tutorials here and on youtube. easy to start hard to master like with most things.

I hope your character is not Koopa

The submission originally had a much more descriptive title, but it was changed to match the article's title as per the rules.

Not quite, because one big input is the ratio of your investments to your annual savings. Large drawdowns are bad late in life, early in life they're not such a big deal. Kelly prohibits very profitable bets when they come with considerable risk of ruin (because you lose out on any future compounding when you zero out your wealth), but that is too conservative when you're young and your portfolio is small relative to your income.

The article even hints at this by observing that the discounted sum of future salaries are part of your current wealth. Which is exactly correct and also -- if you're young -- the most significant variable by several orders of magnitude. Curiously, the author understands this but doesn't care.

the animation and the scroll-sensitive layout (vs. just having a series of static diagrams) makes it unpleasant for me to read.

I totally agree; I don't understand the fascination HN has with these types of sites. It all feels like extraneous design just for the sake of it, rather than actually making anything easier or better to understand.

Pretty sure weight mostly affects how badly you're knocked by other players when they hit you. So heavier is better (although it's often correlated with slow acceleration or poor handling). You want an EV... heavy as hell but with amazing acceleration.