magic_lobster_party

His sister is trans. It’s an issue very close to him.

Most of that cost was unlikely for the hardware itself, but rather Nintendo greed. Most of it was probably for the early access to Nintendo’s next console and possibly support from Nintendo directly.

Interesting paper. I skimmed through it quickly, but it seems like they wanted to avoid relying on ray tracing.

Minimal ray tracing. Many non-local lighting effects can be approximated with texture maps. Few objects in natural scenes would seem to require ray tracing. Accordingly, we consider it more important to optimize the architecture for complex geometries and large models than for the non-local lighting effects accounted for by ray tracing or radiosity.

Most of the paper is way above my understanding, so I’m not qualified.

They used top of the line hardware specialized for 3D rendering. Seems like they used Silicon Graphics workstations, which costed more than $10k back in the day. Not something the typical consumer would buy. The calculations are probably a bit off with this taken into account.

Then they likely relied on rendering techniques optimized for the hardware they had. I suspect modern GPUs aren’t exactly compatible with these old rendering pipelines.

So multiply with 10ish and I think we have a more accurate number.

Did Toy Story use ray tracing back then?

AFAIK, A Bug’s Life is the first Pixar movie that used ray tracing to some extent, and that was for a few reflections. Monster’s University is the first Pixar movie that was fully ray traced.

I remember Crazy Rich Asians was a great offender of this. The main character is a teacher in game theory, which naturally makes her great at any game (which also becomes an important plot point later in the movie).

There’s also a similar trope with the Rubiks Cube.

Bonus points is when there’s a game theory department in a movie. Then they all will be masters in any game.

I think the big problem is when companies apply for patents but never utilize them. In my ideal world, patents should quickly expire and opened to the public if they aren’t being used. Like, what’s the point of protecting your idea if you have no intention to use it anytime soon?

That could deal with the patent troll problem as well.

They targeted gamers…

Original PlayStation for not shipping with dual analog sticks from the start. Almost all games had to be playable with non-analog controllers. As a result, dual shock support was mostly an afterthought. Especially FPS games were awful to play.

Imagine the games that could’ve been possible if all games were designed with two analog sticks in mind. We would certainly have fewer games with tank controls.

I think this is also the main reason why it didn’t take until PlayStation 2 for developers to realize that the second analog stick is awesome for camera movement (instead of awkwardly mapping camera motion to the shoulder buttons).

I’ve done this. Brought a switch with me on a longer vacation only to never touch it. At least I learned a lesson and stopped bringing it.

Don’t forget the Dijion mustard incident. Unforgivable.

I suppose most people here are not alt-right at least.

In 1995 most would probably consider Star Wars an old movie. I think most would consider Jurassic Park to be an old movie now.

Left joycon for movement. Right joycon for mouse.

We got a new release year trailer

It got a bit of the old Rareware vibes with the eyed rocks. Looks like a fun game!

Funny how Fortnite is among the incompatible games, and is the only game with a fix: ”A Switch 2 version is planned”

Great that they’re open about which games are incompatible, and that they seem to have made an effort to try all games on Switch.

how will Nintendo compete?

Mario Kart 9

AI is probably going to transform how code is written, but I don’t think AI will fully replace programmers. At least not in the foreseeable future.

Most of a programmer’s work is maintaining existing code. This is something current AI models still struggle with.