[ti]closed[/ti][T][001] Unskippable Cutscenes

Right, this was a MMO, not a single-player experience. There were enough players out there that perhaps Shalin could find others that shared the same passion and interests she did. As Flit and Shalin approached Alicia Westfield , she courteously apologized for what she could only presume was the Yanma startling her. "Sorry if we scared you. I am a bit new, yes. Shalin Nariya, and this is Flit," she introduced herself and her Pokémon.

The girl's eyes shifted toward the seams in the door, the windows, along the house's many vertices... any clue to see if she could get inside the house without opening the door. "This is going to sound a bit weird, but I'm actually a glitch hunter. What brought you--"

As if both of them being near the door triggered it, the front door's knob suddenly turned, their in-game MOM opening it and greeting them. "Why, hello there! Come on in!"

"Great to meet you, Alicia!" Shalin waved, Flit returning to her side and making her flinched as he buzzed a little too close to her ear. "Nope, ran into Flit on the first try. RNG I wish I could have back when it matters." RNG manipulation was a long ways off, if not impossible, in such a game. And even if it was found, she was certain that was something even the most laissez-faire MMO dev would patch. Imagine being able to control the spawner to get the desired Pokémon one wanted, every time!

Shalin sniffed upon hearing that MOM was baking cookies. "Can't say no to one or two," she caved. "What kind did you bake?"

"Double chocolate," she replied before returning to the kitchen.

"She really knows what my favorite kind of cookie is... I wonder how," she mused, going back to looking up and down the polygons composing the house. "Hmm, let me try something. This wall looks suspicious," she said, pointing to not the wall they were standing next to, but the chimney. She undid the latch on Saria's Poké Ball and lobbed it toward the chimney. The moment it touched the space above the chimney, it bounced back toward her, immediately losing all upward momentum and coming hurtling toward her just as fast as it had risen from her pitch.

"Arceus... I can't believe that worked. How are people still coding geometry like it's the late 90s?" a puzzled-looking Shalin asked no one in particular as she caught Saria's Poké Ball.

"How do you think I feel about Vulpix?" Shalin asked, relating her Desire Sensor plight. "And I want two. Would love feel what it's like to saddle a Pokémon as nimble as a Ninetales." With how fast they were, they might be enough for her to clip through thin walls.

it seemed the reason for Alicia coming back to the beginners' area was intimately personal, if not embarrassing or even soul-crushing. Rather than inquire about that, she would give the girl a history lesson on poorly-programmed video games.

"So one memory-saving trick when rendering 3D environments is to program ceiling hitboxes to extend indefinitely upward until a floor hitbox contains it. This works most of the time... until someone forgets to put a floor where a floor should be."

Shalin giggled when Alicia expressed confusion. It made sense to those not familiar with early 3D games' inner workings. "Think about how polygons are rendered. Triangles are the most memory efficient ways to store polygons in memory because they only have three vertices. If a ceiling is supposed to be on the top of a room or cave and the player's not supposed to get above it, why define a maximum height for it? If you want to define a maximum height for a ceiling, put a floor on top of it." Memory was, of course, more of an issue back in those days, when an entire 3D game had to fit on... eight megabytes. Not the tens, if not hundreds, of gigabytes UNOVR may have occupied.

With how confused Alicia looked, Shalin felt the need to explain in "basic" terms. "Let's say you want to make a box. A simple box. It has six faces: four walls on the sides, a floor on top, and a ceiling on the bottom. This makes the interior of the box all ceiling, and makes it impossible for the player to get stuck inside the box because the ceiling forces them out of it through the bottom."

When Alicia shook her head, Shalin stopped. "...Yeah, there's a lot to it. Let's go inside."

Shalin, likewise, shelved the rest of the game-specific discussion, going back to Alicia's mentioned expertise as she stacked her cookies neatly. "So you're more on the hardware side than the software side," she surmised, respecting the need for hardware troubleshooters. Her expertise was at the software level. Both required attention to detail, just in different ways.

As she listened to the recounting of the glitch, Shalin speculated what the most likely cause would be. "Sounds like they both went down on the same frame, yeah," she agreed with Alicia's assessment. "You know how there's this cutscene where everything else slows down when a boss dies? I bet it didn't take him out of that cutscene mode. I'll try to recreate it sometime."

After she set the plates of cookies down, she headed over to a nearby closet and returned with two shoeboxes, stacked on top of one another. "I know you're excited to get out there, but you shouldn't run off without your RUNNING SHOES," her needy mother reminded her.

"Fair," Shalin replied. "Might give me the speed needed to clip through a thin wall." MOM returned the remark with a dumbfounded stare.

"For the market price, of course," Shalin smiled back. Though she was a glitch hunter by night, she did have a day job. They might have to have that discussion outside the game; she suspected that solicitation was against the UNOVR terms of service. She let the scene before her play out for a while, receiving an unexpected DM from Alicia. She would leave a positive reaction on the message but not reply to it directly.

"And this is why I picked a name that stood out," Shalin chuckled as she popped her shoes off, putting on the RUNNING SHOES. "What do you think, Alicia? Wanna head outside and give them a try?" she asked with that look on her face. That look of someone seeking trouble.