As an amateur computer graphics person, the best way to draw accurate stars is to just pre render it onto a cubemap. But if you really need that subpixel worth of parallax to be completely accurate for every star, there are a couple ways I can think of off of the top of my head. With any you’d want to make sure you only store position, size, and color, since stars are all spheres anyways. With effort, you can be very flexible with how these are stored. (4 bits color temperature, 4 bits size, 3*32 bits coordinates maybe)

• splat each star into the screen texture with atomics
• some sort of tiled software rasterization thing, like in Gaussian Splatting

Worse ideas:

• instanced hardware rasterization
• ray tracing

This is not that well suited to most usual rendering techniques, because most stars are probably going to be much smaller than a pixel. Ray tracing would mean you need to just hit every star by chance (or artificially increase star size and then deal with having tons of transparency), hardware rasterization is basically the same and additionally is inefficient with small triangles. I guess you could just live with only hitting stars by chance and throw TAA at it, there’s enough stars that it doesn’t matter if you miss some. That would react badly to parallax though and defeats the purpose of rendering every star in the first place.

It’s much more efficient to do a manual splatting thing, where for each star you look at what pixel(s) it will be in. You can also group stars together to cull out of view stars more efficiently. Subpixel occlusion will be wrong, but it probably doesn’t matter.

This is all just for the viewport, though. Presumably there are other objects in the game besides stars, which need to have reflections on them of the stars. Then that becomes an entirely different problem.

The real answer though is that you wouldn’t try to render all of the stars, even if you want parallax. Maybe some of the closer and larger ones as actual geometry, simplify a ton of stuff in the background, render things as volumes or 2d billboards, have a cubemap for the far distance, etc

Edit: also ofc this presumes you know the position, scale, temperature of every star

I also like the idea of baking all of the stars into a volume in spherical coordinates, centered around the origin

Decent I think, as long as you don’t want to use XeSS

Are there any alternatives that are decently fast for large files? My computer and my phone both get at least 300 mbps from the router, and I have yet to find a local file transfer application that will be anywhere near that fast for large files (destiny, local send, kde connect, might have tried others, I don’t remember)

As a native English speaker I certainly won’t process the words of a lot of songs without a conscious effort

Lyrics are so often indecipherable as well. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLYJQJh9c8

One that I remember is that I had heard the song “believer” a number of times before learning its name, I always thought they were saying “pick me up and pick me up and leave me, and leave me”. I don’t think I even tried to decypher the rest lol

I think the “proper” way to simplify it is would’ve, which is pronounced the same as ‘would of’

A lot of mistakes have just become incorporated into the language in the past. Maybe ‘would of’ is just too blatantly wrong for that to ever happen though

Maybe not really a ‘mistake’, more of a normal shortening but my personal favorite english-ism is “bye” being descended directly from “god be with you”. People just kept collapsing it more and more over time.

Edit: also “a pease” -> “peas” -> “a pea”

Ok, just read the artlce cited on wikipedia and it sounds like calling him a Trump supporter is a bit of an exaggeration. He seems basically centrist. Which is not great but not nearly as bad.

Their CEO is a Trump supporter

This isn’t new, the features have been in the app for a while now

for 4 Linux would also kind have the same problem as a 3rd party ROM, (almost) no one is making mobile apps for Linux

Sure, there are a lot of desktop apps, but most don’t have a mobile UI in mind

Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus have removed the option of bootloader unlocking on all of their devices.

Got me worried (bc i have a newish oneplus phone) but apparently OnePlus is only doing that in China for now. Still not a good sign for the future…

It’s not just risk, you also can’t really target a narrow audience. Indies can afford to make a game that only 1/100th of people will be interested in. Even if the AAA studio was 100% sure they would succeed and gain a loyal fanbase, they won’t do that if the potential fanbase is pulled from too small of a group.

the other thing is that you don’t actually need to rise the video game hierarchy to get an executive position like you might expect. You just need a business degree and some examples of successful leadership at other companies, even ones totally unrelated to video gaming

Yeah. AAA higher-ups are very rarely gamers or actually interested in playing video games. They’re just business people who I think mostly want to chase the profitable trends and recreate whatever successes they had in the past under projects with actually decent leadership.

Indie devs also generally aren’t concerned with stretching the runtime out over return limits or in a way that will prevent people from reselling the game.

I’ve used some slightly weird hardware but haven’t experienced anything of what you described. Across the whole range from the lab server with 3 3090s and 500gb of ram to my $40 Chromebook I got on ebay

Hmm, yea I’m on a computer the majority of most days probably but I can’t remember ever really dreaming about that

Don’t they have the whole “copilot+ ready pc” branding thing now for computers with npus? is none of it actually local yet?

I have a laptop with 4gb ram that i’ve been using kde plasma on and fairly frequently it just freezes or I have to restart because I had like 6 tabs open in firefox

Although I don’t remember having that problem as much when I was on xfce, but I also might not have been using it as heavily then

I’ve never had a similar problem with chrome on chromeos with the same amount of ram, I think chrome+chromeos might be more aggressive with unloading tabs

Sometimes it does actually kill firefox but sometimes it just becomes very slow (1-2 seconds per frame) or freezes entirely for several minutes when out of memory. Might be just because the swap is really slow, but there’s just 2gb of that, why would it freeze for several minutes? (One time this was happening was when I was trying to compile llvm on two threads, I ended up having to temporarily kill the desktop environment to save ram)

Not going to surprise anyone but Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets aren’t great on Linux, at least with controllers

Although that is improving!

I recently switched to Android. IPhones work great, the hardware is all there, the software is probably more polished, etc… but on Android you can get the phone to do basically anything with a bit of effort. There’s an app that lets you easily install most linux packages, and one that can emulate most Windows apps and games. There’s a ton of open source software, and you can actually find apps that don’t shove in-app purchases in your face (because devs don’t have to pay $100 a year just to stay on the store)

I got PrusaSlicer to work on my phone, through the Windows emulator, and sliced one relatively complex 3D model with it. For some reason it crashed every time I tried to start it after that, but it’s still pretty neat that it worked at all. PrusaSlicer has a linux build for ARM so whenever I find the time to set up one of those linux desktops on my phone I’ll probably try that.

Fedora and Arch both work pretty well on 4gb. Plasma and Gnome were surprisingly decent, and xfce was great but a little uglier. Blender, FreeCad, Minecraft (with performance mods), Celeste, for example all worked perfectly fine, with maybe a few browser tabs in the background as well. You couldn’t do anything too heavy, but it was pretty usable (I was using it as a travel laptop mostly). I’d say 2gb is where it becomes too little to live with.