Thew

haha remember the apple vr helmet

the claim itself doesn't seem particularly outlandish, and everything's supposedly cited, so hopefully someone with time/expertise should be able to verify it

but until then we've just got vibes to work with and ehhhhh the vibes do not inspire confidence imo

idk man I'd probably wait for an actual journalist to confirm that "meta is behind all the age-verification laws" infodump post

the whole style of it has an extremely "guy falling into an LLM conspiracy spiral now convinced he's Cracked It Wide Open" kinda vibe. weird in-medias-res style

lol yeah

also awesome: the "map screen" is just a picture of the whole diorama. fuck a minimap we already built an actual miniature lol

if you watch the protag's feet here you can see the shape of the actual mesh underlying the projected image

really cool trick!

if you watch the weird orb sculpture thing a the bottom of the screen, you can see the texture projection pretty clearly

(also rather than strictly *photos* I think they might have done a really high-res 3D scan, and then re-rendered that from whatever perspectives they need. much easier that way)

there's an option in the settings to slow down the camera, and then you can make out what's happening

there IS a photogrammetry'd mesh, but it's super low poly and mostly just used as a rough occluder/navmesh. They then PROJECT a high-res photo onto the geo, and crossfade photos as the camera moves

I was wondering how this works. initially thought it was a 3d scan, but given the level of detail and the size of the environments, both the texture and mesh resolutions would have to be crazy high. and this was originally made to run on phones

Since the environments are physical dioramas, I figured it'd just be static camera angles and scrolling, like a prerendered game, but they've actually got these really neat 3d camera transitions

yeah! it got a pc/console port a little over a year ago, but there was basically no fanfare afaik. typical square just shoving games out the door without telling anyone lol

started playing Fantasian. the little dollhouse interior rooms are incredible

lmao yeah. although given that it's an mmo studio I assume every npc will have about 30 pages of dialogue, and also no story lol

this reminds me I never actually finished dragons dogma 2. I liked the first one, but I think I *respect* its commitment to opaque systems-driven narrative more than I actually enjoyed interacting with those systems lol

granblue relink and stellar blade are sorta fascinating to me, as examples of gacha studios deciding to make a highly-polished non-evil singleplayer game as like a prestige project. kinda curious how this one turns out. railroad barons building libraries but it's goofy 7/10 action games

I've gotten a vague impression that there's some kind of Gamer Discourse surrounding the game but thankfully I have completely lost all contact with Gamers so I genuinely have no idea what's going on over there lol

crimson desert looks kinda wild. korean MMO studio with infinite money may have finally created Skyrim 2? or possibly dragons dogma 2: 2

oh hell yeah

Also Transforms and large brushes are a lot faster, perceptual color blending (if you use mixing brushes), they unfucked brush velocity lol, puppet warp is nice. really minor QoL stuff like "changing the color on the Paper layer actually updates in realtime now"

they've added a lot of useful stuff in the past few years; imo if you're coming from 1.x I'd say it's probably worth it. I haven't tried the 5.0 stuff yet, but the spinny transform handle was fucking life-changing for me lmao

the game industry was a lot healthier during that period, and since correlation and causation are the same thing I'm afraid our only path forward will demand some truly horrendous fashion

remember when unity's ceo was a weird danish pervert who always wore like three popped collars at the same time

in a real Artifacts of The Dead World Will Weaken Us mood today

was kind of awe-inspiring when I found out they deleted the community wiki, told everyone to remake everything on a new wiki, waited a few years and then deleted THAT wiki lmao

I've had this exact argument with myself every single time I've made one of these variables for my entire life

does the middle R in "framerate" participate in camel case

AAAAAAAAAA

this is essentially the premise of Persona