To be fair, and ironically, it's FAR cheaper than a real Virtual Boy by this point along the timeline. >_>;

The reason it's done this way is optimization, thus why some resources reference additional resources, like Materials referencing Shaders. The Material sets the parameters, while the Shader defines the code sent to the GPU. Having various Materials all using the same Shader is VERY beneficial! ;)

HOWEVER, "Local to Scene" is merely a flag. In code, if you're trying to make unique instances of resources, you have to do it manually with duplicate().

Plus, when a scene loads in the editor, any resources set Local to Scene will be missing their name reference since they'll now be unique.

And I bring up Scenes because Resources have a special option called "Local to Scene". Each time an instance of a scene is created, any resources in that scene with that flag set will create unique instances of themselves so that you can edit their properties without changing ALL instances of it.

"Scenes" in Godot are effectively a culmination of nodes to achieve a certain in-game effect. A scene can be the actual scene, or it can be a player, or an enemy, or a bullet, or a powerup, or even a special effect.

In terms of working with the Godot Engine itself, my biggest tip is to wrap your head around the differences between nodes and resources ASAP. Each node you create is its own unique thing, but each resource can either be the resource itself in memory, or a unique instance of that resource.

In terms of the scripting system itself, if you have experience with Python you'll be right at home; GDScript is VERY similar but has a few additional features specially suited for how things work in the Godot Engine, such as in terms of referencing nodes.

There is ONE thing that kind of irks me with Godot Engine's scripting though... you CANNOT leave scripts in error states when saving. If you save and there's errors you MUST go in and "fix" them even if just commenting things out. Leaving errors in place and closing the project is... "bad"... >_>;;;

The number of likes/reposts on my stuff went UP when I switched from the burning husk of Twitter to here. :B

Always have, always will. :P

I actually still have the original boxed set of the first six Star Trek movies on VHS. :D

Granted, they're in storage just like all my other VHS stuff, including an episode of Captain N recorded from TV where the line "It's those palace pests!" got closed captioned as "This hotel is best!" XD

Fair. Based on some of the stuff said/done at the end of Other M I'm pretty sure the story is intentionally written to get you to hate a lot of the male cast (which is also nearly the entire cast) though it doesn't take the right steps to actually get you to like the few people who respect Samus. :/

I'm one of those strange people who don't mind the story in Other M; I mean yeah, I see all of its flaws but I at least understand what it's trying to do, even if it's failing in a lot of places.

So as I've not played Prime 4 yet: Would you say Prime 4's story is better or worse than Other M?

I remember once seeing a technique of alternating the tempo on every step in a tracker, then later recognizing that people had trouble replicating the feel of the first overworld tune in The Guardian Legend on NES, so I tried my hand at it using that technique and it came out right! :B

Not mirrors... MAGNETS.

A couple times in grade school we were allowed to play with this magnet kits which had all kinds of shapes of magnets and metal pieces and such and it was incredibly fun and I'm guessing were stupid-expensive given how rarely we ever got our hands on them. :(

Ever so slowly getting closer to the day when I can reveal the true nature of this project and what it's really about.

I can at least say that whenever I am testing things in the game I frequently get sidetracked and just start messing around with the mechanics... and that's EXACTLY the point! ;)

I mean, 60 is impressive enough, but yes, it can go way harder with the right hardware. ;)

BTW: If you were following this shader mess at all and understood what was going on, you might've thought a viable solution would be to just use the model's world position as a base to work from.

Problem there: Not all models which could use this shader have mid-points in their middles. :P

Thinking to the shader work I still have to do going forward... I think this is definitely the hardest shader of the entire batch I'm going to need to make, plus I've learned... WAY more about the math involved than I ever expected to need as a result of all of this so that should help too. :P