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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • maybe the universe

    Imagine how self-important or ignorant you have to be to think this. No matter what, all life on Earth is going to die in 4.5 billion years when the Sun burns out. Once every second, a star somewhere goes supernova. Galaxies collide with each other and violently fling stars out into deep space. Black holes are constantly swallowing solar systems and deleting them from existence forever. All life that has ever existed will die and be forgotten. The entire universe was shrouded in hot and complete darkness for its first 350,000 years. Even these things (which are still miniscule on the scale of the observable universe) are on levels that are about as comparable to human activity as stubbing your toe is to the Holocaust.

    Fuck it: “will ever happen to the universe” is heat death, and it’s infinitely worse than anything humans could possibly do. We’re just some hairless monkeys fighting over an infinitesimal rock harboring life and sending out some stray photons in a radius that’s almost nothing compared to the size of the observable universe.









  • Technology has slowed down, but there’s also diminishing returns for what you can do with a game’s graphics etc.

    • The original Halo ran at 480p on the Xbox. 4K UHD has 27 times the number of pixels as that. The resolution increase from the NES to Halo was about 5.35 times.
    • Games nowadays on PCs are often capable of running smoothly into the hundreds of frames per second, but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is more noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS. (Looking at you, OoT)
    • Render distances are much larger with less obvious compromise on LoD.
    • Stuff like ray-tracing is of some graphical benefit but is hugely computationally taxing, and there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s just more diminishing returns.
    • Physics engines are much more complex.
    • At some point, a limiting factor just becomes art direction and budget. You can have all the fancy techniques you want, but you still need to make detailed textures, animations, etc.
    • The amount of polygons starts to hit a ceiling too where the model is basically continuous to the human eye, so adding more polys might only help very subtly.
    • Color depth is basically a solved problem now too compared to going from the NES to the Xbox.

    You can think of sampling audio. If I have a bit depth of 1, and I upgrade that to 16, it’s going to sound a hell of a lot more like an improvement than if I were to upgrade from 48 to 64.