[HN Gopher] Mario meets Pareto
___________________________________________________________________
Mario meets Pareto
Author : superMayo
Score : 1461 points
Date : 2024-04-04 21:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mayerowitz.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mayerowitz.io)
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Beautiful presentation. I love when visualizations serve the goal
| and not the other way around. Tufte would be proud.
| Fnoord wrote:
| 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.
| djbusby wrote:
| Gotta teach the kid about using the brake and the "poomp"
| slide (called boost after N64) on the corner. I race Mario
| but when she's on, mine (8), can get me on the 150 tracks
| (switch). I'm still crushing on the 200 tho (for now) ;)
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Bugged out for me around 2/3 on Firefox/iOS (which is really
| Safari) with Lockdown mode.
| denkmoon wrote:
| FYI Mario Kart for the Switch has a handful of accessibility
| options that help less experienced/younger/elderly players
| stay in the game and on the course without taking away from
| the fun.
| vavooom wrote:
| The switch from 2D to 3D was so seemless and beautiful I
| actually gasped.
| pcchristie wrote:
| Yep same, I let out an audible "nooooo....".
| smlacy wrote:
| Maybe it was 3D the entire time. :)
| ndr wrote:
| Same. What a beautiful plot twist.
| superMayo wrote:
| Thanks a lot! That was my goal. It's a trick I learned: if
| you zoom in from a distance, everything appears flat. The
| effect is achieved by zooming out while simultaneously moving
| the camera closer to the subject!
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Could you not just use a parallel projection (which should
| be the default for this kind of 3d scatter plot)?
| superMayo wrote:
| Yes, I could have been using THREE.OrthographicCamera(),
| however, it makes the effect way less cinematic, and most
| importantly, it makes the depth harder to see
| (particularly for a scatter plot).
| danbruc wrote:
| In cinematography that is called a dolly zoom [1] and it is
| best known for being used in Vertigo [2] and Jaws [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_zoom
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7YJkBcRWB8
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eO_5q5dR9M
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I love how that transition is relative to the scroll
| position rather than working off a breakpoint. Did you
| consider doing the same thing with the first bar chart? I
| think it would be nice to slowly reveal the standings :)
| helboi4 wrote:
| Honestly, I was so impressed.
| wgx wrote:
| > would
|
| Tufte is still alive!
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Of course, but I'm not inside his head :)
| martijnarts wrote:
| Excellent article! Super approachable and relatable, making it
| very good at explaining a useful model.
|
| It immediately has me looking for other places to apply this.
| This'll be top of mind for a while!
| michael-online wrote:
| This excites me to consider using it as a design tool. When
| trying to design a game with a more large pareto front of fun and
| viable builds.
| quibono wrote:
| I really like the article and the presentation!
|
| With that in mind, is this style of presentation (i.e. different
| elements jumping out or moving into focus as you scroll down the
| page) easily doable OOTB with any JS libs? Or is this pretty much
| a custom job?
| swyx wrote:
| keyword you want is "scrollytelling". lots of tutorials here
| and on youtube. easy to start hard to master like with most
| things.
| amarshall wrote:
| One thing this should mention is what game version it uses.
| Updates frequently change the stats and thus what builds are
| "best".
| jdmarble wrote:
| 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!
| crtasm wrote:
| Yes, but there have been many versions (updates/patches) of
| the game. I don't know how many changed character stats:
|
| https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Kart_8_Deluxe_update_history
| rafd wrote:
| Mario Kart 8 is now frozen, no more patches to come.
| superMayo wrote:
| It's the latest version, stats are from
| https://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_Kart_8_Deluxe_in-game_statis...
| modeless wrote:
| Wait, Bowser and Wario are the fastest? I thought it was the
| other way around. I guess it's reversed from Mario Kart 64.
| CapnCrunchie wrote:
| They have the highest top speed. It was that way in Mario Kart
| 64 as well. They have the worst acceleration though.
| modeless wrote:
| This is not true. The lighter characters Yoshi and Peach and
| Toad had higher top speed in 64. https://tasvideos.org/GameRe
| sources/N64/MarioKart64#:~:text=...
| xanderlewis wrote:
| 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.
| cout wrote:
| In a real kart a heavier driver would have lower top speed
| and acceleration, in exchange for better handling (more body
| weight means you can more easily shift weight to the wheels
| that need more traction, unlike a car where the driver's
| weight is insignificant).
|
| But they seem to have ignored kart physics and made it more
| like a car, where bigger cars might accelerate slower but can
| accommodate a more powerful engine.
| thiagotomei wrote:
| It's exactly as in Mario Kart 64! Remember, heavy characters
| have the higher top speed, but light characters have the higher
| _acceleration_!
| modeless wrote:
| I distinctly remember that the light characters had the
| highest top speed in Mario Kart 64. And according to this
| table, I'm right: https://tasvideos.org/GameResources/N64/Mar
| ioKart64#:~:text=...
| posix86 wrote:
| That'd make the heavy characters completely useless, once
| you're behind, there's no way to catch up anymore!
| coryrc wrote:
| Yes, except for items and doing better in the pack.
| re wrote:
| Heavy characters in Mario 64 have tighter handling than
| lighter characters and can cause them to spin out when
| bumping into them.
| posix86 wrote:
| How, if both your acceleration _and_ your top speed is
| worse?
| re wrote:
| I'm not sure what exactly "how" is referring to, but by
| "tight handling" I mean having a smaller turning radius
| and losing less speed when turning.
| willcipriano wrote:
| It's not a big difference and you can't be at top speed
| for long.
| xtracto wrote:
| It was similar in the original Mario Kart of the SNES. I
| clearly remember always choosing toad or koopa because they
| "felt" the more average to me. Donkey Kong was difficult to
| handle and also had slow acceleration, same with bowser.
| thiagoharry wrote:
| Yes, but with their poor acceleration, and given how chaotic
| some Mario Kart races are, it is hard to achieve their maximum
| speed.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Yes, but higher-speed characters have lower acceleration and
| less mini-turbo, which disadvantages them in many situations.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Well... that was a seriously impressive presentation. I already
| knew about Pareto efficiency/the Pareto frontier, but now I'll
| never be able to forget it. And I'll think of Mario Kart (and
| poor Koopa being dominated) every time.
| throwaway598 wrote:
| If it was Pareto efficient, Koopa would do better too.
| teekert wrote:
| 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 ;)
| laborcontract wrote:
| 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".
| georgesimon wrote:
| From what I understand of Svelte, it was built by a working
| data journalist with the dream of enabling these type of rich
| media articles. So yeah, 'emergent' and 'uncontrived' are in
| the DNA of this article and the tech beneath it.
| redman25 wrote:
| I wonder if Koopa does better with different customization?
| dwringer wrote:
| One thing I noticed is if you set the graph axes to "Speed"
| and "handling" and the weight slider about 3/4 toward
| "handling" then Koopa becomes the only member of that 2D
| slice of pareto front. I suppose this could be a benefit
| depending on the course design. At least, it's an example of
| how looking at only 2 dimensions can be limiting.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I was disappointed by the lack of a radar chart
| bombcar wrote:
| I did not know the drivers and carts made a difference at all.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| My 9 yo is better than me at Mario Kart but not by much. This
| knowledge may make the difference for me. Thank you!
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| 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.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| this one groups the characters/cars by identical stats:
| https://www.bettermk8dxbuilder.com
| sph wrote:
| 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 :)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Do professionals use different builds per map? For example, a map
| has long straightaways (favoring top speed) vs a map with more
| sharp turns (preferring acceleration)?
| Laremere wrote:
| 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.
| Madmallard wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| to add to this, "bagging" tracks are determined by how many
| shortcuts they have (ones that _require_ good items to take,
| such as mushrooms or stars).
| CameronAavik wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the speed stat is actually comprised of 4 different stats
| that have different values depending on the terrain: Ground,
| Air, Water, and Anti-Gravity
|
| Weirdly, this has a huge impact on the game, and it's also
| not mentioned anywhere. To find it out, you have to go to
| mariowiki and look up the part statistics. The kart that
| looks like a boat has great water statistics. That makes
| sense, but without even documenting that water speed _exists_
| , it's mostly just an in-joke by the developers. Why did they
| do this?
| prmoustache wrote:
| "professionals"? This is Mario Kart we are speaking about, not
| formula 1 or counter strike.
| CameronAavik wrote:
| Mario Kart has a large and flourishing competitive
| scene[1][2], including numerous competitions with prize
| money. In 10 days, Nintendo is hosting the Mario Kart World
| Championships where they are flying in the best players
| across the world to Tokyo for it. Obviously, not on the same
| level as F1 or CS, but there absolutely is a competitive
| scene for this with dedicated players.
|
| [1] https://www.mariokartcentral.com/ [2] https://www.mk8dx-
| lounge.com/
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| Something not mentioned in this analysis is that after summing
| the stats from the different components, the value is rounded
| down, giving 7 possible outcomes per stat.
| rvba wrote:
| Why is it rounded down?
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| That's just something the game does. I don't know why. But it
| shows you the little ticks in the stat bar that it rounds
| down to.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Missed a unique opportunity to title the article: It's-a-me,
| Vilfredo!
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Couple points:
|
| 1. Skill absolutely matters, more than the kart, etc. that you
| pick. Watch some expert players on YouTube playing with weird
| builds and you'll see that they are still able to do well even
| when playing with significant disadvantages.
|
| 2. In practice, you don't really need to know the value of the
| hidden mini-turbo stat because higher acceleration == higher mini
| turbo. For 99% of players, acceleration can just be used as a
| proxy for mini-turbo.
| SignalM wrote:
| Very cool love the design of the site and now I know which cart
| to win with
| rozab wrote:
| This is all very webdesign-y and might be good for a less techy
| audience, but tbh I think the original article with its notebook
| format provides a lot more useful information
|
| https://hinnefe2.github.io/python/tools/2015/09/21/mario-kar...
| brrrrrm wrote:
| that one doesn't have mini-turbo, which has largely superseded
| acceleration as a stat (it correlates but isn't 1:1)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Indeed. MK8 courses are absolutely loaded with mini turbo
| opportunities-- every drift, jump, or bump in the road is a
| chance to get that little boost. I'm not at all surprised it
| can make the difference in competitive play.
| sequoia wrote:
| 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.
| jmholla wrote:
| I always knew those little red tires were the best. Sadly, this
| misses the most important thing to me: style. And my love of
| Zelda. So I'm afraid I'll personally have to disregard all of
| this.
| VelesDude wrote:
| There are no grounds on which I can disagree with you.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| But you can add that as a dimension to the chart!
| sspiff wrote:
| Hard to quantify into numbers, no?
|
| I like Luigi more than Mario. But do I love Mario like a 6
| and Luigi like an 8?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Time for binary sort or an elimination chart; take every
| character, compare them to another, sort them as to which
| one you prefer. Then assign a number to each one of them.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Preferences don't tend to work that way. You know how, if
| you use a sort function that accepts a user-defined
| comparator, the documentation will have dire warnings
| about making sure that the comparator gives consistent
| results?
|
| The procedure you're suggesting here doesn't comply with
| those warnings. Sorting will not terminate, or will yield
| different results from attempt to attempt.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| pushedx wrote:
| Also keep in mind that the 3.0.0 patch for Deluxe changed a
| bunch of stats.
| bovermyer wrote:
| You're just optimizing for a different outcome. You could still
| apply this thinking, just with "Zelda adjacency" as the primary
| metric.
| kzzzznot wrote:
| 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 :)
| dluan wrote:
| Now this is ~~pod racing~~, uh, game theory
| Buttons840 wrote:
| How to calculate a Pareto front world take me some thought.
|
| I wonder, in practice, does defining my preferences and weights
| and then using a genetic algorithm find the optional solution?
| That would take me less thought, because I already know exactly
| how to define a score function and use a random API.
| swaits wrote:
| 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.
| eggdaft wrote:
| If by "optional" you mean "optimal" then no, a GA is not
| guaranteed to find the optimal solution in the general case.
| non-chalad wrote:
| How would this mesh with Halo Kart (2)?
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K0IcawLpCE
| petesergeant wrote:
| This is great, but like many casual players I'm very wedded to my
| character but not their build. Be great to pin the character and
| then get the best build for them.
| superMayo wrote:
| I hope your character is not Koopa
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| God I am so disappointed, I thought he disassembled Mario Kart 64
| into C and refactored the codebase. Fuck my life
| keithalewis wrote:
| No, just go get one. Don't be a PL obsessing over a video game.
| superMayo wrote:
| So sorry I've disappointed you, but don't fuck your life plz
| y1zhou wrote:
| This is so neat! MOO has been a integral part of my work yet it
| has never occurred to be that Pareto optimization could be
| applied in kart picking.
| evilc00kie wrote:
| tl;dr: use peach with teddy buggy, roller tires and the cloud
| glider.
| stefanlindbohm wrote:
| Love the application and visualization!
|
| Having spent the past year building a journey planner algorithm,
| which heavily builds on pareto optimality/sets, from scratch, I
| was waiting for the full set of pareto optimal solutions. I.e.
| all kart combinstions that are best in at least one way.
|
| Should be doable by iterating through all possible stats and
| merging[1] into a set for each one. We might get a lot of
| solutions, but it should be somewhat managable.
|
| Has anyone tried this?
|
| 1: Merging is to take the new entry and 1) removing any existing
| entry that is dominated by it, and 2) adding the entry if it is
| not dominated by any existing entry.
| ndr wrote:
| Isn't this what the last part of TFA covers?
| bandrami wrote:
| I haven't played this series since the SNES 30 years ago. Do the
| different characters still get different power-ups from the
| cubes? Because that was always what I picked based on.
| sspiff wrote:
| 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.
| baku-fr wrote:
| 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.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| This is seriously the most impressive visualization I've ever
| seen. What tool did the author use to do this?
| simple10 wrote:
| Looks like svelte + three.js
|
| Svelte has some pretty nice built-in scroll animation support:
| https://svelte.dev/repl/051cd352ce284d15b55c91c8b30fa32f?ver...
| hantusk wrote:
| more specifically it's using the svelte wrapper of three.js
| called Threlte: https://threlte.xyz/
| superMayo wrote:
| Author here. I'm using Svelte, which is great for interactive
| applications. For the event handling I'm very influenced by
| what https://mlu-explain.github.io/ does. The 3d plot is made
| with Threejs through the Threlte wrapper. One challenge was
| animating the 20k points in the 3d plot, which is handled by
| a custom vertex shader.
| simple10 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the tech stack. It's a really impressive
| site.
| danans wrote:
| Looks like Svelte (https://svelte.dev/)
| _nhh wrote:
| Nothing beats https://ciechanow.ski/sound/
| themoonisachees wrote:
| If the creator happens to come by here:
|
| Very cool and I see the vision
|
| Unfortunately on firefox for Android 13 on my nothing phone (2a)
| almost all on-screen assets flicker non-stop. I thought I was a
| style decision at first but now that I'm further down it's very
| clearly a bug.
|
| Still very cool, learned about pareto efficiency from a video
| about this exact topic a few years ago that only computed the
| pareto front for accel and speed because they couldn't represent
| higher dimensions well. Maybe same author?
| superMayo wrote:
| Thank's for the info, will fix asap !
| neokrish wrote:
| This is absolutely brilliant! Bookmarked and I'm sure I'll be
| revisiting this and sharing this broadly!
| Saba21 wrote:
| Cool, great!
| micheljansen wrote:
| This article was way more interesting than the title suggested.
| Well done!
| andai wrote:
| The submission originally had a much more descriptive title,
| but it was changed to match the article's title as per the
| rules.
| james_a_craig wrote:
| A dissenting opinion on the design - for me, this presentation
| was like watching a video to find information; too slow paced,
| and it made me impatient the whole time. The original notebook
| format was far better in that regard. The layout within each
| section is beautiful, but the animation and the scroll-sensitive
| layout (vs. just having a series of static diagrams) makes it
| unpleasant for me to read.
|
| The content's excellent and it was fascinating to see how the
| differences between characters and karts play out though!
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| > 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.
| wcrossbow wrote:
| Nice article! The resulting Pareto front really highlights how
| hard game design is. You can get millions of possible
| combinations but the reality is that only a handful of them will
| ever happen in a competitive environment.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| 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!
| kibwen wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| As a game designer, you _want_ to add silly and suboptimal
| things to your game. Don 't fall into the trap of thinking
| that every decision must be perfectly balanced and equally
| weighty, because your game will turn out bland and
| textureless. And beyond the considerations of "optimal" play,
| putting suboptimal options into your game can serve as both a
| way of naturally selecting difficulty without having to
| implement ungainly difficulty sliders, and also accommodate
| fun/silly challenges for people who just want to mess around.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| 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.
| wcrossbow wrote:
| I was refering here to playing competitively, that is,
| playing with the only goal of winning. Of course, it is
| perfectly acceptable to play for style or to manage a podium
| with the worst configuration or anything you fancy [ _].
|
| However, if your one and only goal is winning I suspect that
| the high dimensional vector space will end up not looking so
| high dimensional once you account for the correlations
| between the different features you use. This is already clear
| from the very strong correlation between speed and
| accelaration.
|
| [_]I myself have played MK64 a lot and sometimes the goal was
| simply to see the world burn, standing on a corner with a
| shell waiting for the what would've been the winner of the
| race. Fond memories.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> playing with the only goal of winning_
|
| Even if you're only optimizing for race times, in the case
| of Mario Kart, the choice of track will have a huge impact
| on the optimal kart selection. Tool-assisted speedruns pick
| different karts for different tracks.
| TheLegace wrote:
| The min/max cost functions make a lot of sense(easiest to
| visualize). It also can do a lot when you do multi-objective
| optimization. But I have always wondered how you go about
| evaluating other cost functions. I mean mathematically the
| concept is intuitive. i.e. just swap it for a quadratic or
| exponential, but which cost functions are useful in the real
| world?
| littlelady wrote:
| 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.
| anArbitraryOne wrote:
| I once messed with using linear programming to approximate this,
| and I have to say you did an excellent job explaining it!
|
| Worth noting that the tires and gliders are independent, so one
| can first find their pareto frontiers, then combine that with
| those of the drivers for all dimensions
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| Here's the repo: https://github.com/SuperMayo/mayerowitz.io
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| You have a lot of options to choose from. How to pick the truly
| best option? Let me show you a method, in which you arbitrarily
| pick 3 out of 6 attributes and then use an artificial,
| unintuitive interface to choose an optimum trade-off between
| them. And once you do, my super-amazing method will tell you what
| combination to use, easy!
|
| OK I might be an old bitter cynic, but the beginning got my hopes
| up for something clever. The only value I see here is explaining
| the Pareto frontier, but it doesn't take a genius to
| independently figure out, if you have 2 attributes, and someone
| else has one of the attributes at least equal, and another
| higher, that someone else is a better pick...
|
| Of course, what the article doesn't even touch, is that some
| attributes could get worse results as they get higher: imagine
| having an acceleration and speed so high that you effectively
| can't steer your car.
|
| Also a pedantic argument could be made on the cosmetics possibly
| actually affecting performance...
| Scarblac wrote:
| 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.
| lkirkwood wrote:
| 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.
| samwho wrote:
| This is superb. Really great work!
| jeroenvlek wrote:
| This is the kind of content I'm here for. Thank you, superMayo!
| trojanalert wrote:
| This is so darn good!
| blauditore wrote:
| When buying a bike, I kind of used this method by looking at the
| cost-vs-spec-level plot on 99Spokes. Although it should be taken
| with a grain of salt, as spec level is a heuristic and not always
| very accurate. Found a nice MTB for a good price that way, but
| struggled with other types of bicycles.
| Mulderns wrote:
| If I'm optimizing for 'weight' is it supposed to be heavier or
| lighter? At the moment it seems the more weight I put on 'weight'
| the heavier the build is.
| po wrote:
| 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.
| frankvdwaal wrote:
| From the site:
|
| "all elements on the frontier are not equally good."
|
| Peach is just as good as Daisy, for example, so I'd say: "Not all
| elements of the frontier are equally good."
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Mario kart doesn't have weight as a metric for speed in turns?
| dancemethis wrote:
| _The_ Pareto? The thin-voiced lawyer who was the victim of
| Brazil's best prank call in the 80s?
|
| No, A Pareto, the excellent economist.
| HiJon89 wrote:
| Really cool analysis and visualizations! Although there's an
| interesting wrinkle with Mario Kart 8 + 200cc - most players
| don't want speed over a certain level because you're too fast to
| control. So rather than trying to maximize absolute speed stat
| you may want to minimize the delta from your optimal speed stat
| cout wrote:
| 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.
| kzzzznot wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| > A portfolio with low risks and high returns? [...] Of course,
| if you already know the exact weights
|
| Or! In this case, it reduces to a one-dimensional optimisation
| thanks to the structure of the problem.
|
| What we're optimising in portfolio selection is not the return of
| a single investment, but of a lifetime of investments. And thanks
| to compounding, that is a function of both risk and return. So we
| can find the optimal allocation without making any tradeoff:
| https://two-wrongs.com/the-misunderstood-kelly-criterion.htm...
| gizmo wrote:
| 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.
| batterylow wrote:
| Nice analysis and visualisation! I used a Pareto approach for my
| exercise and a project I'm working on - https://limitgym.com
| davemp wrote:
| This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves
| with current game design--options for the sake of options.
|
| I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much
| stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!"
|
| You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto
| players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the
| core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people's time.
| Doubly so if most of the choice space can be safely eliminated by
| savvy players. The internet exists after all and someone is going
| to do the math. Why would you gate the competitive portion of
| your game behind convex optimization problems? Certainly not to
| make things more fun.
|
| Some examples of these trends are load-outs in FPS games. Every
| gun now has tradeoffs for sights, barrel, under-barrel, magazine,
| ammo, etc. and these choices only come after you've chosen a
| class/weapon. When the core of an FPS is tactical positioning and
| aim, these options feel like a cheap gimmick in order to milk
| slightly more time out of players. Franchises like Halo and
| Battlefield fell for this trap and have completely ruined their
| reputations.
|
| You can still give players choices that _add_ to the core
| gameplay like counterstrike does with the round economy. If the
| entirety of a choice you're giving a player happens in a menu,
| that should be a red flag. The game design industry needs to less
| emphasis on statistics/combinatorics and more on
| gameplay/narrative.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah, especially for a game like Mario Kart, I'm not too
| obsessed with making sure I'm picking the most efficient
| combination of things. I'm picking what I think looks cool or
| has the most fun personality (in the case of characters) for
| me in the moment. For that, having more choices is (mostly)
| better.
|
| Even something like Counter-strike, where a lot of the
| differences are pretty subtle, I liked having a good amount
| of choices just to play a couple rounds with a gun that feels
| slightly different and see how well I do. I had my
| preferences but I played with them all.
|
| That being said I do think there's something to be said for
| not just dumping a bunch of options on a player and be like
| "you figure out how you want to play", even though I've been
| guilty of that in a couple past games I've designed, thinking
| more options is better.
|
| Like I remember on of my sequels to a game I tried all sorts
| of ideas for how to change up options, and instead of pinning
| down that "okay the hand size is going to be 5 tiles, and if
| you place next to an ally tile you'll bump them up by X
| amount, and you can choose what set of numbers the tiles can
| be (like 1-5, or 1-10, or 1-20)... with my new sequel I've
| mostly pared it down and I'm taking away game options,
| because I bet almost no one did anything but use the defaults
| anyway. At least before I hid them in an options menu you had
| to choose to open.
| davemp wrote:
| I don't think we're on the same page.
|
| > 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".
|
| Exactly. These choices don't affect players in the same way.
|
| > 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.
|
| I definitely agree with you here.
|
| As a designer, you're defacto telling people how to play by
| designing choices like this. You're punishing casual,
| competitively natured players with >700,000 options because
| they care about performance.
|
| If you don't derive fun from winning the trade-offs are
| mostly irrelevant and you can simply ignore most of the
| problem, choose a configuration based on fewer/simpler
| dimensions (I'm going to pick yoshi and the egg kart because
| that's awesome), and avoid most of the decision space. This
| type of player probably wouldn't care if all the
| configurations performed the same or more likely could be
| annoyed that their desired configuration performs strictly
| worse. (If the choices meaningfully affected gameplay, like
| having an ability to lay eggs or something, that's
| different).
|
| On the other hand if the dedicated, competitive players are
| going to solve the optimization problem and coalesce
| configurations down ~10 choices. The problem space is also
| irrelevant to this type of player.
|
| But posing this problem negatively affects competitive people
| who aren't dedicated to the game. Now they have to consider
| an intractable problem while their friends are waiting on
| them so they can actually play the game. I know this because
| I've sat there plenty of times while friends scroll through
| all the different options wheels/karts/gliders/characters for
| minutes until they gave up and said something like "Whatever,
| I just want to race".
|
| So why not just give 10 performance profiles and the same
| combination of cosmetic choices as before?
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| In Mario Kart in particular, you might explicitly not want
| the fastest/highest acceleration cart (kart?) as a new
| player, especially if you're a younger or older player. Going
| fast is a handicap if you can't stay on the track at those
| speeds.
| gwd wrote:
| > 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".
|
| Then why don't you make sure all the pretty wings are on the
| Pareto frontier?
|
| Back when I was playing D&D 4th edition (fairly casually), I
| started by assuming that all the fighter "feats" were
| basically equivalent from a damage perspective, and only
| differed in application or aesthetics. Then I did the math,
| and determined that there was a 2-3x difference between the
| weakest and the most powerful feats; so naturally I chose the
| most powerful ones. But I didn't really _enjoy_ that process
| -- I felt _obligated_ to do it because... I mean, I 'm trying
| to increase in power? That's the whole point of the game?
|
| Why should choosing an aesthetically pleasing power mean my
| character is weaker?I would have had much more fun if they'd
| balanced the feats such that they were all about the same (or
| at least, all on the Pareto frontier). Then I could really
| have chosen based on personal taste or roleplaying reasons,
| rather than trying to avoid having a nerfed character.
|
| ETA: I feel like StarCraft does this very well overall. If
| nobody's using a unit, they buff in the next balance update;
| if everyone's using a unit, they nerf it in the next balance
| update. The result is that there are millions of potentially
| successful strategies, even at the grandmaster level, as long
| as you play _efficiently_. That 's a lot more fun to me than
| 700,000 strategies, of which only 20 are realistically going
| to win at high levels.
| pksebben wrote:
| 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".
| kibwen wrote:
| Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart
| (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around
| the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a
| values statement of the following form: "good games are
| _only_ concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution
| and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box
| frippery ". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot
| of people the frippery is crucial to the enjoyment of the
| game. (And these are hardly the only two reasons people play
| games, e.g. there's socialization, mastery, etc.)
|
| And even in the case of the OP, concluding that most items
| are useless is not a substantiated conclusion. As the OP
| notes, a Pareto frontier is N-dimensional, and the number of
| points lying on the frontier grows exponentially as we expand
| to consider all the other variables. Just because a meta
| exists among "top players" doesn't mean that's the only valid
| choice; different people can optimize for different things
| (and even top players are frequently irrational, lazy, and/or
| cargo-culting).
| davemp wrote:
| > Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario
| Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive
| around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes
| across as a values statement of the following form: "good
| games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical
| execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other
| Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or
| not), for a lot of people the frippery is crucial to the
| enjoyment of the game. (And these are hardly the only two
| reasons people play games, e.g. there's socialization,
| mastery, etc.)
|
| I don't think my comment was implying any of this.
|
| I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of
| "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay" rather than
| discuss micro-transactions, progression systems, or
| variance/competitive purity.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I was mostly trying to say something along the lines
| of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay"_
|
| Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :) Giving the player
| optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars
| of game design. For many, it's more fun to make a deck of
| cards in Magic or Hearthstone than to actually play the
| deck against an opponent.
| davemp wrote:
| I'm not here to argue about semantics. The first line of
| my OP said "options for the sake of options" and then
| "choices don't significantly enhance the core game
| experience". The comment you're replying to said
| "something along the lines of" to encourage readers not
| to get hung up on the exact wording.
|
| I'd appreciate a bit of a more charitable interpretation
| of my responses.
|
| Given the context, a more charitable interpretation would
| have been something like:
|
| "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay...*in and
| of itself*"
|
| > Giving the player optimization problems is one of the
| fundamental pillars of game design.
|
| Yes, but this is not what I'm talking about at all. I
| don't know how you're interpreting my position as being
| against optimization problems in games.
|
| > Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :)
|
| Would you consider that the choices that make Tetris NP-
| hard significantly enhance the core game experience?
|
| How about MtG or Hearthstone?
|
| ---
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cout wrote:
| 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.
| sizzle wrote:
| That's why my go-to Mario kart is the N64 version. No bs just
| pick a character and go
| goostavos wrote:
| Nah, Mario Kart 8 is great. You don't _need_ to min/max every
| stat. Actually, you specifically have to press a specific
| button to even _see_ the stats at all. Otherwise, everything
| just appears to be cosmetic.
|
| For the most part, once you've got your kart dialed it. It is
| still "pick your character and go". It's one of my goto games
| for "I want to do something for a few minutes to unwind"
| (which usually ends up with me more frustrated and on edge
| than unwound haha).
| OOPMan wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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).
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Right, it's like Photoshop shilling itself as "over 1bn
| builds!"
|
| Well obviously, it's probably actually infinite number of
| things you can do with it. That... should not really be a
| selling point.
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| What I wish this article had was a simulation that generated the
| best kart for each variety of stats. The article doesn't really
| address that different karts suit different driving styles, so as
| a Mario Kart lover I was hoping there would be a list of the best
| karts for each of a variety of different driving styles.
|
| But this isn't _really_ about Mario Kart I suppose...
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