Reclaimer

As a graphics programmer for a major studio who's worked on some AAA titles (Yes! This is my moment to be a grognard about something on here!), I think particle collisions like this are actually one of a handful of graphical effects that has actually gotten a lot more difficult to do over time. To my mind, the best implementation of this was the original Halo, which came out over twenty years ago. Spark particles from bullet impacts on world geometry would actually correctly deflect off of other world geometry in their path. It was subtle, but really cool. I've obviously never seen their rendering code (I don't work for Bungie), but I think the combination of very simple geometry (by today's standards) and the fact that they still processed their world geometry into BSP trees for culling let them do accurate particle collisions for relatively low cost. Interestingly, the remastered Anniversary Edition, which came out a decade ago and has much more detailed world geometry and a modern (at the time) game engine, doesn't do particle collisions. Sparks and stuff just pass right through geometry like they do in pretty much every other modern game.

People trip. I'm less than half Biden's age and I rolled my ankle pretty good just this last weekend when I somehow managed to stumble while walking across completely flat, hard pavement. Gerald Ford pretty famously took a header down the stairs of Air Force One and he was in his early 60s at the time.

Perun recently made another really good video on this topic that expands on a bunch of this stuff and is also definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9w17Ne1S0M

I'm aware that there is a lot of well documented history of people being quite docile in the face of execution. I don't want to go off topic, but I don't personally find it all that strange. In the examples you cited, I'd argue that based on the photos, videos (in the rare cases that they exist), and descriptions we have of these events, those being executed generally have basically no chance of actually escaping execution. The choice they're faced with is certain death by execution or certain death in a act of resistance. I can't imagine being forced to make that choice - but it also doesn't surprise me that the majority of people would not choose to "go out in a blaze of glory". I have my own theory as to why that is, but I'm not a psychologist, so I'll keep it to myself. But, in the video in question, I'd argue the situation is quite different. There are three prisoners and four guards, so the prisoners are barely outnumbered. Additionally, until the very end, the guards also remain within an arms length of the prisoners at all times. I'm not arguing that overpowering the guards would be a high likelihood proposition, but it seems like there would be a real possibility of success in this instance. There's a reason, after all, that in civilian prisons, the guards who are armed are kept physically separated from the prisoners. The behavior of the prisoners alone isn't what has me convinced (barring new evidence to the contrary) that this video is staged. Instead, the behavior of the prisoners, taken together with the other stuff I mentioned in my original post, as well as that which @Bulletpoint and @Anon052 pointed out makes me feel pretty confident that this video is staged.

I'm trying to be cautious of my very pro-Ukrainian bias, but that looks super staged to me. The "executed" guys seem remarkably chill about the whole thing. Three of them and four guards and they walk that obediently to their deaths? They even hurry into position at the end. They're not being moved at gunpoint. As far as I can see, the guards are holding their weapons at the low ready right up until they fire. They're clearly not blind folded, because they line up pretty neatly without anyone guiding them into position (and you can clearly see that there are a bunch of branches on the ground). Then, immediately after the "execution" there's a cut so the drone can get close enough to see the armbands (note the poster explicitly points these armbands out as evidence that they're Ukrainians and the armbands are only really visible in that last bit). Pretty helpful of the guards to stay lined up like that while the drone got into position for the final shot. And then the guards see the drone and open fire - that's pretty convenient timing so you can cut the drone footage and the "executed" guys can get back up. Unless new information comes out about this via some other channel, I'm going to say that this is staged. And not even staged very convincingly.

Haha, fair enough! I guess I fit right in, then.

Yeah, that was our trainer, then. I started there about 15 years ago, so the Javelin trainer was already "finished" when I was there, though we were constantly updating it. It was using Unreal Engine 2 for the rendering. I saw that! Absolutely wild.

I have had some weird and some not so weird connections to this war: Right out of college I worked at a studio that developed a Javelin trainer for the U.S. Army. I don't know if it's the one you used, but ours was based on a popular commercial game engine. Later, I consulted on a suicide drone program. They never told me what the program was called, but it was designed to target vehicles (I wasn't involved in actually developing the drone or anything - the team behind that was looking into whether they could use some software I had developed to help them iterate faster in testing). Those are the not so weird connections. The weird connection is the Russians and their "Ukrainian Nazis' copies of the Sims 3" from earlier in the war, as, until somewhat recently, I worked on The Sims.

It was super jarring to watch that comparatively sober assessment against their constant backdrop of “look how powerful we are” military footage (with the video even projected onto the floor!).

Actually, that's something I've been wondering about for awhile. Does anybody here know the deal with that? Were those blocks supposed to be filled with explosives but fell victim to incompetence/graft? Or, were those egg carton filled blocks some kind of non-explosive reactive armor?

I'm pretty sure this is due to ongoing supply chain disruptions from the pandemic, not the war. The U.S. is a major wheat exporter. The loss or reduction of Ukrainian wheat exports is mostly going to be felt in places like China (among others), which doesn't produce anywhere near enough food domestically to feed its population. This is very much in line with what I got from the Atlantic article that I posted. The Russian soldiers in that article did not strike me as having "not one step back" type attitudes at all. By the end of their occupation, it seemed that whatever enthusiasm they had at the beginning had long since evaporated.

Longtime lurker, first time poster here. I've been playing the games for a few years now and I have to say that I have been stunned at just how closely the footage we've seen from the war tracks with what we see in game. Really impressive. Also, the quality of discourse on this thread has been amazing. It has become one of my primary sources for information and insights into the conflict. Anyways, I hadn't seen this article posted yet, and I wanted to share it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/putin-war-propaganda-russian-support/629714/ I don't really agree with the author's conclusion (I don't think that any attempt to convince the Russian population at large to stop this war has any real chance of success), but I thought that the story about the Ukrainian family that was forced to shelter in their basement with a group of Russian soldiers was really interesting.