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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that’s what probably matters. It’s not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It’s just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.

    Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named “.png” that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn’t a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn’t matter.






  • 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


  • I think with the straight/gay labels, you’re not going to be not attracted to someone just because they say that they’re a guy or girl. So really there’s just some appearances that you find attractive, and some not. For most people, those line up pretty well with femininity and masculinity, with maybe a few other restrictions on top. Any label is going to be a simplification, you can’t describe with one word the whole range of people you are attracted to.





  • 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)