Blender seems like a decent fit for this project, as the geometry is fairly simple and there shouldn’t need to be a ton of precision anywhere. Anything where geometry doesn’t need to match any already existing hardware particularly well, it is usually much faster to prototype in Blender in my experience. For certain things though, especially when you get curved surfaces involved, blender becomes the much harder option. Parametric obviously has many other advantages, but the stuff you can do with curved surfaces, booleans, and bevels in CAD tools is often extremely difficult to recreate in Blender.

It’s good to encourage reuse, which is eBay’s main thing. I wouldn’t have a reason to buy anything new from them however.

I got my home server (Lenovo thinkcentre, i7 6700) for $30 minus ram or storage at my local university surplus store a few years ago, and I have no regrets. Added a 256gb sata SSD, 16 gb RAM, 8tb HDD all refurbished for like +$150 when that was still cheap.

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

it’s a reference to this xkcd

edit: as an april fools thing probably

I have a 2 core, 2 thread, 4gb RAM 3855u Chromebook that I installed Plasma on, and it’s usually pretty responsive.

sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet

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)

Freecad is pretty good, but unfortunately there’s no foss cad software that’s better. If you don’t care about foss, I would recommend onshape if you’re fine with the “public by default” thing, else fusion360.

For art, blender is great. Plasticity seems neat too, it’s a more traditional software licensing model (pay per version I think, not cheap not insanely expensive)

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

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.

Any should. Any unicode is converted to alphabetical anyways, through “xn–” + a punycode conversion. Which is actually fairly important for places that don’t use the Latin alphabet.

See http://xn-bdk.gay/, which is the same as http://ツ.gay/

(Someone set this up on 196 a while ago, they said they were using Namecheap)

A lot of that is shadows and lighting data, sometimes in unusual data structures without readily available compression methods. Compressing textures also impacts load times, obviously decompressing 10gb of jpgs could take a while. Still probably there are good compression methods and good tradeoffs to make, if any AAA studios actually cared about storage space (They do care a lot about GPU memory, just not storage space).

Gotta make that configurable now

It had an email for uverse at the bottom which I am pretty sure is residential? Idk

That doesn’t seem that difficult?

https://www.falconitservices.com/att-comcast-and-reverse-dns-ptr-request/

I don’t really stay on top of my gmail that often, but my spam folder has basically exactly the same stuff in it that my inbox has. Just a bunch of random emails from services that I signed up for an account on or bought something from and none of which I particularly care about. There’s not really much that I can tell differentiating what gets marked as spam or not either.