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Other approaches would be similarly clamped-down. We’d quickly run out of ways to make things happen on a screen in response to pushing buttons.
The very concept of a video game console might still be owned by Fairchild.
Other approaches would be similarly clamped-down. We’d quickly run out of ways to make things happen on a screen in response to pushing buttons.
The very concept of a video game console might still be owned by Fairchild.
Length alone makes them obscene. The classic example in games is minigames during a load screen - which happened in exactly one game, and then belonged to Namco until after we stopped caring about load screens. They strangled an entire subgenre. The feature was not allowed to exist, in an industry built from collective incremental experimentation.
Twenty years is an eternity in computing.
Twenty years ago, shaders weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, video cards weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, home computers weren’t a thing.
The entire RPG genre emerged from dork-ass teenagers wasting time on mainframes between 1973 and 1976. If the concepts involved had been patented and locked away, there would not be games with first-person perspective, overhead maps, generated dungeons, turn-based combat, or inventory, until the Nintendo 64.
Fuck software patents.
You won’t unfuck that chicken.
The most anticipated feature of 2015.
Probably not Ankh-Morpork, because Vetenari is nothing if not competent.
I don’t care if the robot that speaks English read the entire library.
How else was it going to happen?
Linking to another instance is kind of silly.
This is… advanced stick-fighting.
“Did Obi-Wan ever tell you what happened to your father?”
“He told me enough! He told me you killed him!”
“And when I did, I talked just… LIKE… THIS!”
Man, if only home computers were capable of hosting their own servers. Oh well! Guess it’s gone forever.
Eh. The primary obstacles to VR right now are intercompatibility and cost. Facebook’s bullshit is near the right price range, but it’s from Facebook, so it’s bullshit. Everything else is wildly overpriced for what remains a niche secondary gizmo atop already-expensive gaming setups, and it only works on one brand of gaming setup. All these motherfuckers took a scalpel to the nascent industry to slice up their tiny fragment of an itty-bitty pie.
I will tell companies this for free: use a point light source and focus becomes trivial. You don’t need three inches of fancy folded optics. The proper Gumpei Yokoi approach is a textbook drawing of one lens, a liquid crystal panel, and a dot that emits light.
I’ve been telling companies this for free: use intermediate voxels and performance becomes irrelevant. Toy hardware can throw sprites at a zillion frames a second, with up-to-the-nanosecond head-tracking. Make games emit that cheap 3D data instead of giving them direct framebuffer access.
Of course if these people were serious, they’d use lightfield displays. Stick a grid of tiny lenses onto a high-res screen and you don’t need focus because you’re emitting a hologram. Nvidia had tech demos for this, an entire decade ago. The hardware is dirrrt cheap. But for some fucking reason we’re still acting like Palmer’s cheap hack remains state-of-the-art. Just stick fancier pancake polarizing birdbath Zeiss optics on this Google Cardboard thingamajig. More pixels! More pixels!
What a fuck.
Advertising shits in your brain.
Exploiting trust is worse. That parasocial z-list celebrity isn’t recommending something - they were paid to read corporate propaganda.
The most painful version of this is Lindsey Ellis’s video on “Manufacturing Authenticity.” It ends with a deep sigh and an ad read. The brand knew she was doing a video about how brands pay the popular kids to shill their whatever, and they did not care, because all that matters is getting a known face to say the words.
Any amount is the same abuse, just gentler or rougher. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
And she’s the kind of woman Spike Spiegel loves: she’ll fucking kill you.
‘It’s Remedy’s own fault Alan Wake II isn’t selling well - they’re not on Steam! Not being on Steam means you might as well not exist for the majority of customers.’
Right, they’re a de facto monopoly.
‘How dare you.’
… basic institutional competence?
What’s happening here is not normal or sane.