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A sweep will also make it harder for the inevitable attempt of republicans to invalidate the election.

Pay—the reason most humans work—remains a major motivator today. When consulting firm McKinsey earlier this year asked workers why they took a new job, nearly all groups gave the same No. 1 reason: More pay.

Getting a new job is usually the easiest way to get a raise, with pay for job switchers consistently rising faster than for those who keep the same job

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the very slight suspicion that it's not actually the workers to blame for not staying at a company their whole life.

They have a clause in the announcement that if two games are sufficiently similar is content, they are counted as the same game.

How arethey are going to determine that you ask? Probably the same way they are using to determine install count: pulling it out of their ass.

Covid-19 has made me even more cynical than ever. It has shown that people would rather die than accept reality. And compared to climate change, the effort to protect against covid was minuscule on an individual level. But still, too many people couldn't be asked.

Even if this group shuts down completely, all this does is waste twitter's money while it also tells advertisers to stay the fuck away from ever do any business on Twitter.

A lot of the implications for ray tracing are on the dev-side of things. It's a bit hard to explain without going into technical details.

Essentially, getting light to look "right" is very very hard. To do it, devs employ a lot of different techniques. One of those older techniques is baking the light on static objects, essentially pre-rendering where light goes and how it bounces. This has been done for a long time, e.g. even in Half-Life, the lights are baked for static geometry. So in a way, we have been using ray-tracing in games for a long time. however, it isn't real time ray-tracing, as the information gets stored in light map textures, so there is no performance impact other than storing the texture in RAM/VRAM and drawing the texture together with others.

The inherit problem of that technique is that it only really works for static geometry. If you move your light or any objects in the scene, your lightmaps will no longer match. To solve this, there are mixed modes which use real-time lights, dynamic light maps, and other tricks. However, these are often subject to problems and/or the limitations of using real-time lights. Real-time light problems are: You can only do a limited number before getting a serious performance impact, especially if the lights produce shadows. Soft shadows, shadows in big areas, and very detailed shadows are extremely hard to do as well without some advanced tricks. Also, ambient occlusion and global illumination is not something you can just give lights (there is screen-space GI and AO, but they don't look good in all circumstances, and you have limited control. There are also some other techniques some engines did for real time GI.).

Also there is the problem of baked light affecting dynamic objects, such as characters. This has been solved by baking so called "light probes". These are invisible spheres that store the light data and the closest data then gets applied to the characters and other dynamic objects. This again has a some problem, as it's hard to apply multiple light probes to the same object, so lighting might be off. Also, light direction is not accurate, which causes normal maps to look very flat in this light, and local shadows do not work using light probes. The same is done for reflections using reflection probes which are static. These are 360° "screen shots" essentially storing the reflection at that point in space. This however costs DiskSpace/RAM/VRAM, and it will not hold any information for moving objects (that's why sometimes you can't see yourself in the mirror in games). Also, the reflections sometimes look "out of place" or distorted when the reflection probe is too far from the reflecting surface (again, these cost VRAM and RAM so you don't want to place them in front of every single reflective surface). It costs a lot of time to find the right balance. For the rest, usually screen space reflections are used, as any other real-time reflection is extremely costly as you essentially render the whole scene again for each local reflection. Screen space reflection is an advanced technique that works very well for stuff like reflective floors, but you will quickly see its downsides on very mirrored surfaces as it lacks information that is not on the screen. Some games like Hitman for example use the mix of those techniques extremely well.

Coming back to lighting, there are now better techniques used for example by unreal and some other engines (and now unity in experimental). The light gets stored in more predictable data structures, such as 3d textures. This way, you can store the direction of all light in each cell. The light then gets applied to the objects passing through those cells. This looks pretty good, and the runtime cost is fairly low, but the storage cost of such textures is a tradeoff of texture resolution and fidelity. These textures cost a lot of VRAM to store and without using advanced techniques and tricks, have their own limits (e.g. for scene size). It also costs a lot of time to create each time you change the scene, and it also doesn't eliminate all problems mentioned above, like reflections, moving lights, etc.

Specifically, there is the problem of character lighting itself. Using light probes on characters usually looks pretty bad, as it removes a lot of detail of advanced skin shaders. Even with the above mentioned techniques, character lighting is still extremely hard to do. There is also some other problems, like ambient shadow in already shadowed areas, and light balancing for character versus scene lighting.

For that reason, most AAA games use separate light rigs for characters. Essentially floating lights that ONLY affect the character and move with them. When the mixing with the scene lights is done right, the rig adapts to the current situation in terms of light direction, color, and intensity. If you look in most AAA games, you can often see situations where rim-light comes from a direction where there is no actual light source. However, this way, the devs and artists have full control over lighting the characters. Essentially like a real movie production would have, but without the limitation of the real world.

Now, ray-tracing as you know it right now is not quite there yet, but eventually, ray tracing is the solution to a lot of the problems mentioned above. Things like polygon density, light count, global illumination, ambient occlusion, light direction, reflections, and much more are simply "there" for you to use. Now this doesn't mean that it will automatically make everything look great, but with the overwhelming amount of different tricks that have to be used for current gen games to make the look good, it opens a whole new world of possibilities.

Also, something that will not directly influence the final game, it will eventually simplify things for devs so that more time can be invested into other things.

At this current usage of ray-tracing, it's more like a gimmick, because devs will still focus most resources on the current ways to use light. This is because most people don't have cards with sufficient ray-tracing capabilities. So for the moment, I agree that the performance hit is not worth it. However, eventually it might become the default way to draw games. While we are not quite there, in terms of performance, I think that things might become a lot more consistent and predictable eventually for raytracing.

Maybe the rumors about Putin having cancer are true, and this is what the scientists told him to not accidentally fall out of a window.

Fleecing these nutjobs by pandering to their fantasies is so fucking easy.

In a way, that's maybe not even a bad thing...

Ah yes, the "hitler was good for the economy" bullshit. Even if you'd ignore all the atrocities (which you shouldn't), fact is that the outcome was a country in ruins.

And Hitler's economic plan was always based on stealing resources from other countries through war, because else the country's spending was unsustainable.

The change had been expected, with Musk tweeting in August: “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.”

Yeah... we figured it's his doing, since it's a terrible decision.

But charging it is easy enough?

In its dismissal of the broadband industry's claims that itemizing fees would be too confusing for customers and too burdensome for providers

Sounds like there is a lot of shady shit in there that people will ask about if they had to list it.

Yeah, I'm completely fine with venting, especially while this is an ongoing situation.

It's basic abuser mentality. "Because a black person has dared to become president, you forced us to be more racist and divisive."

Looking forward to the first trial where a girlfriend AI is going to be called as a witness.

It was also visible in the debate. They told him "whatever question comes up, bring up immigrants". If Trump had been forced to actually answer any of the questions, his dementia would have been much more obvious.

90% of my recommendations are videos I have already watched.

Watching too many cop shows maybe (stuff like blue bloods). They usually treat fentanyl as something you will die from if you touch it for even one second.

I haven't heard of that. Which vaccine did he patent?

The only thing I remember was him speaking out for not lifting ongoing patents on the vaccines, and then reversed course as criticism grew bigger.

I mean, Anything this "seal" is on is sure to be a scam, so ironically, it really does work to identify scammers.

Imo the anger is a bit misdirected. Making a toned down version of the game takes equal the amount of resources, if not more compared to other ports. Performance wise the switch always has been a toaster, even compared to the last gen of consoles. There probably are now phones with more graphical power, so ports to hardware that is so far behind is difficult.

I've ported games to switch and there is a lot of extra loops to go through to make it even remotely run at decent frame rates.

The publisher could have made the switch version cheaper, but they probably invested more resources into it than porting it between xbox and playstation, so i can kind of understand why they didn't.

The argument "it looks worse so it should be cheaper" is kind of questionable, when the console they are buying it for just doesn't allow for much better considering the art direction. If the switch was as powerful as the ps5 or current xbox, they would have made the game look as good as it is on all the other platforms.

A valid question is if this needed a switch port at all, and considering the backlash, the publishers are probably asking themselves the same question.

I expect most people to stay where they are (at least at first). All I want is an active alternative for Reddit. 99% of current reddit is just noise anyways.

Yeah, he literally ran on "lock her up" for the 2016 election.

The way the old guy was smirking when he "corrected" the other guy on who declared the war was very telling. Just like nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 40s they know exactly what they are doing.

Shit like this takes a special kind of evil.

Well... about that...

It was sad to see that mods of a lot of subs had no backbone and reverted to normal after a few days of virtue signaling. However, not unexpected. Respect to the ones that didn't give in to preserve their "power".

Musk is a master of finding the most backwards ass way to go about trying to solve a problem.

Agreed. So much less noise.

There actually were social wings in the NSDAP before the 1930s, but they have been eradicated and only the name remained.

I always get annoyed when reading ads like "it's free with xy subscription".

The only thing I really miss is the resize of images holding left click. (the other stuff is nice too, of course)

This manga is unironically hilarious

"We took all the easy to reach resources. Better get used to being primitive, suckers!"

Could be a new gameshow: Boomer or Toddler

The only time I would wish this cunt another 20 years to live is if he was being sentenced to prison for 20 years.

Exactly. It's enough active users to have a stream of good content compared to what it was a few month ago. I'm enjoying my time here right now.

The books have a few very interesting ideas, like the leader vampire society that feasts on whole tourist groups. Or a vampire during the civil war. Unfortunately, it's mostly fluff and never expanded upon.

I wouldn't personally buy it for the switch.

But typically publishers are not making the price on release based on what platform you run it on. It looks worse, but that isn't really the game's fault. It has the same amount of cost attached to it as any other port of the game, if not more. On the other hand, from the consumer perspective, I can 100% understand why someone wouldn't want to spend $70 on this.

In the end, will it be worth the money they put in to port this game to less-than last gen? I have no idea.

Also the scene where Scotty knocks himself out. Also the rest of the movie.

It makes sense. More income, more bonus. It would also prevent companies from handing out bonuses while operating at a loss.