Cyrus Draegur
Poly-Panro-Ace It/They
friendly neighborhood wholesome degenerate abomination from beyond the stars (mostly harmless™).
Atomic energy enthusiast. Architecture enjoyer. Mecha appreciator. Sci-Fi reader.
Winged caniform cybernetic biped techno-lich in its dreams.
- 0 Posts
- 35 Comments
They don’t need to update well; they’re a compromise to achieve slightly more reactive lighting than ‘baked’ ambient lights. Perhaps one could describe it as ‘parbaked’. Only the ones directly affected by changes of scene conditions need to be updated, and some tentative precalculations for “likely” changes can be tackled in advance while pre-established probes contribute no additional process load because they aren’t being updated unless, as previously stated, something acts on them. IF direct light changes and “sticks” long enough to affect the probes, any perceived ‘lag’ in the light changes will be glossed over by the player’s brain as “oh, my characters’ eyes are adjusting, neat how they accommodated for that.”–even though it’s not actually intentional but rather a drawback of the technology’s limitations.
I’ve seen an awesome “kludge” method where, instead of simulating billions of photons bouncing in billions of directions off every surface in the entire world, they are taking extremely low resolution cube map snapshots from the perspective of surfaces on a “one per square(area)” basis once every couple frames and blending between them over distance to inform the diffuse lighting of a scene as if it were ambient light mapping rather than direct light. Which is cool because not only can it represent the brightness of emissive textures, but it also makes it less necessary to manually fill scenes with manually placed key lights, fill lights, and backlights.
It’s also why a flashlight may be able to run for dozens of hours straight on a single battery but in video games it’ll die in minutes if not seconds. Realism is unfair. Also the same reason why nuclear reactors in video games are always dangerous. Because representing them realistically would be boring to the average adrenaline junkie “gamer”.
trebuchet would leave more evidence
less mobile than drones which can swarm in from, potentially, all directions.
also i don’t think you can buy trebuchets from hundreds of stores ready to operate out of a convenient little box
furthermore once the trebuchet has fired and you have to get away, it will take quite some time to pick it up, pack it, and depart.
WB sure would deserve it if, for instance, a hail of bricks came falling randomly out of the blue at terminal velocity to pummel all of their fancy cars to shit where they were parked at their lot.
Be sure to never ever fly a remote control drone anywhere near a premises owned by WB, kids. Wouldn’t want to be implicated with a completely blameless karmic act of the gods.
Bear in mind I am specifically saying nobody SHOULD do this.
But I would find it very funny if it happened anyway :3
Here’s how I think a GoG subscription might work out:
The money goes into a balance on your account. It just accumulates store credit.
You might raise the question of “why would they want to do that”, to which I say:
it’s guaranteed income for them and they make a profit by selling games ANYWAY.
The fact that they get this income consistently is good for their books.
You might also raise the question of “why would anyone want to participate in that”, to which I put to you this:
I want to give myself a “gaming allowance” of a little bit each month but saving is hard. If I am paying GoG a monthly subscription, though, and I accumulate a balance of credit, I can get games without it impacting my budget outside of what I’ve exactly allotted.
What else do I get? The warm fuzzy feeling of supporting GoG. Which I’d definitely do anyway. Honestly, letting me turn my subscription into store credit is a huge boon. I don’t NEED any perks beyond that.
Oh here’s something GoG could maybe do, actually:
an extremely UNOBTRUSIVE cloud storage drive that they say is for Save Syncing (and automates this if you’re running the galaxy app) but that they’ll let you store any arbitrary files in it as long as what’s in it fits within the space they’ve designated for me… and furthermore if this space got bigger the more store credit I have built up, that’d be the tits too.
OH OH OH I thought of two other perks!
What if the cloud storage suggestion also automatically “stored” “copies” (in your “personal” cloud storage box) offline installers for games you’ve purchased so that you can still download them EVEN IF they get “delisted” for sale?
What if your subscription gave you sliiiightly more than the cash value in store credit? Like only 10% bonus.
If I am paying $5.00 per month, they put $5.50 store credit in my balance each month.