c0de517e

I kinda doubt it. Ive doesn't have that much pull, most people don't know him, definitely not as much pull as Ferrari, one of the most recognizable brands in the world. And I bet Ferrari was into this, they make a ton of new models anyways, and they probably know that sport car enthusiasts would not have jumped to an EV no matter what. Much better to try to make something very different than their lineup than just an engine swap.

I'd wager that razor blades and scalpels and many other things sharper than kitchen knives are made by machines. Sometimes we don't automate fully expensive things because handmade is also a premium, not necessarily because if we were to dedicate engineering resources to the problem it would be impossible to automate. That said there are things that machines currently can't do despite good efforts to solve the problem. That's true

I imagined that there would be better ones made by real c64 democoders, but I can include a .prg. Also, if you make a C project in the web-based IDE I linked, and copy-paste the last .c file, it will compile it, run it in an emulator, and give an option to download the compiled .prg from there too

thanks

It's just how I decided to generate the previews for my blog in general. Not my best idea, but I don't hate it enough yet to change it.

There are both mechanical keyboards for the c64 (mechboard 64) and c64 inspired mechanical keyboards for the PC (8bitdo sells one, probably others)

Eh, if only I had one. I have some relatives living next to me through and I think I remember an old TV in their basement, I might check it out, that's a good idea.

Fwiw, the c64 is pretty robust, if you don't use the original power supplies.

I'm surprised that people find this to be an example of clickbait. If I cared about views, I'd imagine an honest title like - "I turned my c64 into a digital fireplace" - would have probably been more appealing, no?

Author, fwiw, I don't do/care about click-bait, as I never cared about clicks. Since I moved to my bespoke blog system (previously I was on blogspot) I don't even track page views. But I thought it was somewhat funny.

Author - yes, it's "aesthetic", albeit not my best work and I might revert that decision at some point. Was inspired by lowtechmagazine but they did a much much better job.

I do care about the blog being snappy and working also on very low-end, vintage hardware though, so that also somewhat achieves that goal.

I wrote that it doesn't need VR, not that it wouldn't benefit from it. My 2 cents is that currently and for the foreseeable future VR is not a big asset, I think it's clunky and ridden with fundamental problems we don't know how to solve even in the realms of academic research, much less in products we can actually make and sell for reasonable prices and so on. That said, it's orthogonal to the point I really wanted to talk about, that's why I didn't elaborate further :)

Respectably, I don't care about "your eyes" - all people are different and that's ok. Nor I care -specifically- about DLSS, obviously technologies are always evolving, it's not that DLSS is the best ever that the concept can be. Also its implementation varies among games.

What I meant to say is that we live at a time where rendering every single pixel all the times is simply a waste of resources - that can be better spent somewhere else.

And you're still saying it's "blurry" - that's not the point. Certainly temporal reprojection will -always- be blurrier than not using it. But you're not considering what you're -gaining- by that blur. The real question is - would it be better to say, have a world with 1 million objects at 4k, a bit blurry, or a perfectly sharp image, at 2k, with 100k objects...

Temporal reprojection saves time that then can be invested in other things.

Lastly. CP2077 ALWAYS uses temporal reprojection. ALWAYS. If you disable DLSS it uses its own TAA instead. If you disable TAA (which cannot be done in the settings menu, but there are hacks to force it) is STILL USES temporal for most of its rendering before the final image.

Author here.

DLSS is not the end-solution to rendering, well, nothing is, but it's an AMAZING piece of technology. All these temporal and dynamic resolution techniques are here to stay as they -improve- the look of games no matter the HW.

What do I mean? Obviously dynamic resolution and temporal reprojection are worse than say, a fixed 8k rendering at 240hz! Yes, true! But, that's not the correct math.

The more correct math would be, on a given hardware, say a 3080, would you rather spend the power to render each single pixel exactly, or would you rather "skip" some pixels and have smart ways to recover them for a fraction of the price, almost equal to the real deal, so now you have extra power to spend somewhere else?

Of course if you just do less work with DLSS or similar technologies, you're losing something, it's bad. But that's never the equation. The real equation is that no matter how powerful the HW, the HW is a fixed resource. So if you spend power to do X, you cannot do Y, and you have to chose whether or not X is more valuable than Y.

Makes sense?

Now, all that said, it's also true that sometimes you max out everything in a game, you cannot have more of anything because that's literally all the game has to render, and at that point sure, it's reasonable to spend power even in things that are not that great bang-for-the-buck because literally you cannot do anything else anyways! So for the very top PC HW, you end up doing silly things, like rendering in native 4k because you cannot use that power in any other way.

But that's in a way "bad", it's a silly thing that we have to do as there is no other option! If we had the option though, it would be much better even on a 3080 to render say a 2k or 1080p upscaled to 4k via DLSS, and use the remaining power to say, have 2/3 times the detail in textures or geometry or number or shadow-casting lights etc etc...

Depending on the engine, yes, it might need to be made relatively early. But in practice it's, as everything, design. Some games want to have that element in their gameplay, some do not, it changes things a lot as lighting is used to make things visible (obviously) and to steer attention, it's a fundamental part of level-design, so things change considerably in terms of the game you're playing based on if you want to allow lighting to change or not.

SSAO doesn't help much in this case, I've added an image of the final frame at the beginning of the post.

It's not about post-processing, it's that most lights do not cast shadows. So yes, there can be a bit of "floating" in certain scenes.

Added to the post, thanks for the comment.

A waste of a comment :)

It's a lifelong journey of passion and learning :) I put together a list of resources here, just start somewhere and keep going, there are so many options nowadays the really the best thing is to chose a project/path and go from there http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2020/11/baking-realistic-render...

Author here - no, that link was to show something bizzarre, how (some) people lose their minds in weird elucubrations on the politics of software - instead of actual hacking. I am definitely not endorsing in any way ever that cesspool that is D.E., I'm sorry if it wasn't clear from the text.

Author here - indeed this is the correct interpretation. Sorry if the post isn't clear. I do love Unity (and all the other things listed).

That was my worst talk! Thanks for the kind words.

Author here - we are specialists who know their field. More or less, of course you can't know all, we also collaborate with each other, but keeping up with published research is not that tough. Also, not that useful, it is useful, yes, but in practice even a problem that is "solved" in the literature means only that you have some ideas of where to start. Dropping things to the specifics of production always implies a lot more R&D, even if the solution in the literature is actually, realistic, stable, fast etc...

Author here - you are most definitely right, there is little correlation between game tech and end results anyways. It's mostly internal stuff, there are millions of other variables. But that doesn't mean that as far as internal policies go, that "engine without name" one doesn't make a lot of sense

No. One cannot refuse a whiteboard test.

One is entitled to think it's stupid, and get a bad impression of the company, and refuse an offer if one gets made, but you don't go and tell that is "unfair" and just refuse to answer, that is totally and utterly inappropriate.

I would have understood if he/she said to prefer a test on a computer, if there was the possibility of doing that. But not just refusing to answer.

And the WORST traits that a candidate can show don't lie in technical expertise, but in attitude and character. So this was totally deserving of getting booted out of the door without a second of hesitation.

Yes, it's cool, but this like most sites doesn't have many examples of scientific vis (large dimensional continuous functions). I think scientific visualization is more important for programmers in their job, for debugging/profiling.

Well that wasn't really to present to a board, but really a quite straightforward application of the rift. VR is used today for scientific visualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environm...) but it's veeery expensive. The rift and companies that will make rift-based products for scientific, medical etc... visualization are going to make money

Good suggestion, I'll maybe write a follow up with a specific example. Thanks!

I've included a few pictures of stuff I recently used, maybe it can help to give more context.

- http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YA10ftXFFQ0/U6-iAdAUtGI/AAAAAAAAAn...

This one was done for debugging, as I do often. The code that I was debugging took some geometry and generated some texturemaps from it, it's really hard to debug why the maps are wrong when they are, what happened to the geometrical calculations. So I just added a std::vector<float> debugStuff and pushed values from various locations, then wrote it as a CSV. In processing I load this bunch of floats I know the meaning of and plot them in 3d as a point cloud. Each point in the cloud is clickable to show more of what happened at that position.

- http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EFgdBffKEU0/U6-h9QweujI/AAAAAAAAAn...

This was for performance. A particular system computes tens of thousands of generated code snippets according to some rules, that will then used in runtime in various ways. Testing in runtime is hard because it's hard to cover all of them and it would take a long time. So I rigged the system to extract statistics about the generated code and save them to a CSV. Then in Mathematica I categorize and plot these datapoints and I can compare what changed between two different runs of the system. When I see in the data that a given change seems promising enough, I do the expensive test in runtime

What I've found is that nowadays most of the resources on datavis are not about scientific/continuous functions but about categorical/statistical visualization.

I've added a few (well many) links at the bottom of the article but if you have any suggestions on resources/software/etc please let me know

gnuplot is fine but one of the best features of visualization is interactivity imho, without interactivity you lose a lot of the power that comes from visualization...

That's why unfortunately I still recommend something like processing, then you can write your own small IPC to send data to your visualization code from any host