"aside from everything else, it seems like it's really, really late in the game to suddenly realize 'oh we need magical compression technology to make this work don't we'"
Afaik, it was undergoing incredible mismanagement, a series of mechanical faults and poorly maintained systems. It meant that its air defense was down or severely limited, and their communications systems busted, they had to choose between communications with the crew or command. Once the ship was spotted, it couldnt defend against the missles and after the impact the crew could not communicate to address it.
All that from memory, im sure i got some details wrong but what a mess.
This blew up on twitter, but i heard a few industry people note that during play this type of object isnt actually rendered unless visible. Still bad, but not why the game preforms so poorly.
Cant exactly remember the phrasing or terminology but worth nothing
"Camera is far away is it just wouldn't get rendered" is...not quite right.
If the view-frustrum of the camera includes the model, it will typically get rendered.
What typically save performance in these games is a system called "LOD" or "Level of Detail". This typically means that an asset (say the 3D model of the citizen) might have a few different qualities of 3D model. One "high quality" model that should be used when the character is close to the camera, a medium quality one when the character is kinda-far, and a super low quality one when the character is way off in the distance.
What the tweet and screenshot reddit post are claiming is that this LOD system is not present for these citizen characters, so when one is far away, they are still rendering using the high quality model. The GPU still needs to do all of the rendering work required to draw the high-quality model, even if it ends up being far away.
> Aside, anyone else noticing more 'one-shot' posts here? Links to tweets, etc that don't really say much besides 'this is a thing.'
> Not necessarily bad, but I don't find myself spending as much time with HN links as I used to.
A generation raised on retweets and other one-click shares now walks among us professionals and peers. Stuff is going to change as they becomes a larger and larger share of the community. It’s the same reason we see more video posts with the requisite complaints from my fellow greybeards about how they swear reading is a lot faster and easier.
But the curiosity is still there and good, depthful discussion still happens in the comments, so I think the community is staying healthy through these changes.
it's not even a distance thing. that would be LODs which are apparently not done for human models.
Occlusion culling and frustrum culling are what are used to choose what is outside of the camera's view, because of either obstruction (a model is completely behind another and is therefore not visible) or is simply outside of the field of view of the camera. That turns whole models on or off, though, and not parts of a model.
The teeth are rendered, but because of how draw calls work, the performance impact of the teeth is miniscule compared against the overall performance profile of the entire game.
> The teeth are rendered, but because of how draw calls work, the performance impact of the teeth is miniscule compared against the overall performance profile of the entire game.
I agree as to the individual teeth, but in aggregate rendering the "high quality" model (thousands of triangles) for lots of small characters that usually appear off in the distance instead of the "low quality" model (tens of triangles) could drive a pretty non-trivial performance hit. As far as the teeth go, they're a pretty small factor overall, but I would imagine having no LOD on characters that are usually small and distant is a significant performance issue.
geometry instancing makes even complex models transfer to the GPU quickly (when measured per instance) when you send them all in the same draw call, but sending a few LODs in a few draw calls will take less time to rasterize, yes.
problems in this space are very fun to work on and think about, to me. that's why I work on completely different things. I'd hate it if I did it full-time.
Sure, I guess I was mostly responding to "the performance impact of the teeth is miniscule compared against..."
I might have just over-interpreted how small you meant by "minuscule". I'm not sure what other performance problems exist in that game specifically, too, which could impact it.
Presumably you're referring to culling because the triangle is occluded by some other object being in front of it. However, that still involves processing the geometry to determine the triangle is being occluded (and thus, can be discarded partially or entirely). Rather, a low LOD object shouldn't even include the geometry in the first place, reducing the amount of work that needs to be done overall and improving performance.
It's dynamic LOD and every modern game has it. These days you're encouraged to make the models detailed so they look good close up. Dynamic LOD will cut back the detail when zoomed out. There's surprisingly very little performance hit over having low poly models from the start.
I know close to zero about this so bear with me, but isn't there a cost to reading the models off disk and deciding if they need to be rendered? Memory bandwidth isn't free.
Models are Kb in size and insignificant to textures though. It's common practice to load up detailed models and let game engine dynamically adjust LOD. It doesn't hurt performance much at all.
Im a student and have been slowly messing with other note taking strategies for class. I switched first to joplin for md and html which was jeads and shoulders above google docs for speed and organization. This semester im giving obsidian a shot for its links and an automatic flashcard plugin, hoping it helps me review quicker and gets me to think about how these topics connect instead of just copying information from start to end. But admittedly i was convinced by one of those "my second brain changed my life forever and cured cancer" videos
So far its been good and an improvement, thanks to md im taking great notes fast and efficiently and im putting more thought into connections. But all the videos and posts claiming its changed their lives or something is a bit much. I cant imagine it being that much more useful outside of school.
On a side note, any other useful programs/techniques feel free to share.
This trend is indeed weird. It reminds me of my journey with Vim. In the beginning it was life changing. Like I felt like it really gave me an edge. I had all kinds of customizations on top of it. After a while I changed to Vim plugins inside full IDEs. No customization, just my plain comfortable text editor of choice. I feel nice while using it. Feels at home. I can't use mouse based text editors and feel happy anymore. Or at least I don't bother trying. Also I see no point in comparing this with anyone else using their tools. It's their tools and they could have more than a decade of experience in it.
Notion + GoodNotes is where I’m at currently. I do wish I could combine the two, but no app I’ve found does tablet+pen and typed notes seamlessly together, so I just split them out for this setup.
I’m also experimenting with Asana to track class assignments, but I’m currently trying to get them to let me buy “only” one seat of Business level, since the “workload” tool seems immensely valuable to keep my work spread out evenly through the semester.
> But admittedly i was convinced by one of those "my second brain changed my life forever and cured cancer" videos [...] But all the videos and posts claiming its changed their lives or something is a bit much.
Would you have clicked on the video if the title was "My second brain has been kinda useful, I guess"?
Fair but id offer that having more "realistic" recipies and those details would still offer far less than understanding and practicing the engineering process. Finding efficient solutions to your problems and engineering them over and over again for efficiency teaches excellent problem solving and engineering skills that would be hugely beneficial, imo more important than learning the specific materials that make each item irl.
People looking to get rich quick write (or pay sweatshops to write) very low effort, poorly researched books about obscure topics. They put them on amazon, maybe make some money, then repeat. The video explores one of those buyable programs to get you involved in all of that.
Seems like chatGPT is being used as the next tool in this process
A lot of the problems people are having in this thread ive been having while trying to use reddit for anything useful.
Im trying to put together a small project using a raspberry pi and figured the subreddit would be a good place to start. I couldnt find good recent answers so I make a short post, what pi would best handle quality video streaming, best ways to go about it ect. Deleted because I was supposed to ask it in a specific thread. Ok sure whatever. So I ask that question in the proper QnA thread and only response I get plainly and unhelpfully says to look at an faq question which dosent answer my question at all. I feel like if your going to have and run a community because your passionate about something, and offer help about that thing, you could probably do better than leading me down the "your question is to generic/easy for me to bother" like an automated help line.
SO feels like that to me, you need to go in with a "worthy" question to get any kind of help and not just stomped down
https://x.com/JohnSmi48253239/status/1794328213923188949?t=_...