Simon F

I take it from the square ‘halo’ that Mario+cart are not 3D but just a bunch of alpha masked textures?

YouTube video by ACMSIGGRAPH VR@50: Reception Honoring Ivan Sutherland

What in particular are you questioning?

Martin Newell explains in part of this video (youtu.be/VktqJ5I9aKY?... (at about the 1:02:05 mark)) how he borrowed the family teapot and used it to create the original model.
(See also graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/)

IOCCC winner code entry

This IOCCC winner entry (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) made me smile. The code draws the current moon phase to the console.

@andrewwillmott.bsky.social

Winding order error?

I apologise for not putting the correct facetious emoji in 😝

Handle of Newell’s Utah teapot but with an additional support?

Is that a CSG error? 😀

Halfway through cutting some long grass (and hoping there are no Eastern Brown or Red-bellied Black snakes hiding amongst it)

If it hasn’t reached a metre then don’t panic.

It’s been a long time since I saw it and I may be misremembering, but
“Truly Madly Deeply”

Given the loss of Alan Rickman, not sure I’d even dare watch it now.

If you only had a something-or-other for every time you suggested that

You know you are allowed (in fact it is recommended) to keep your coding hat on when outdoors, even when not coding!

I think I have an 80% Go-Gos, 20% Fun Boy 3 mixture in my head.

Now I have to work out which version was in Aus

As in alpha tested textures. Possibly … not really given it much thought.

2/2
Unfortunately, textures usually use non-linear, sRGB, so you have to be more careful and get things in the right order.

(FWIW when developing PVRTC v1 I assumed non-premul, but then sort of changed it to premultiplied for V2)

1/2 The problem is that there's probably a better way.

If your textures are using linear intensities, the correct thing to do is to use premultiplied (AKA associative) alpha for all your filtering/blending. Jim Blinn wrote a great article explaining why. (graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs24...)

I thought support for the pulse dialing had long vanished from telephone exchanges.

Do you remember the (I assume) myth that if you had a "1" (or perhaps a 2 if nimble enough) in a telephone number that if you tapped the cradle/hangup when dialing instead of the "1", the call would be free?

Since the ‘salmon’ is the next most efficient travelling machine, one wonders if the much derided “fish on a bicycle” begins to actually make sense.

Advice from a 70s(?) song in Australia:
“Turn the pillow over, because it’s cooler on the other side”

The ~2BPP mode uses a per texture 256, 2x2 pixel codebook entirely generated by the compressor.

If you request the ~1BPP mode, that used 4x2 pixel codes BUT those pixels were 8 bit indices into a shared 256 colour palette.
Because it was shared, the palette had to be supplied

By coincidence, I recently did an ‘archeological dig’ and uncovered the source code for the Dreamcast/powerVR VQ texture compressor (circa 1999/2000)

Might be interesting changing the colour distance metric from the assumed sRGB to something like this.

Beware! This might be an attempt by Big Brother to make a sound track for room 101

That’s no crime. That’s wisdom.
(Recall time in high school I did work experience at XXXX brewery where I was shown the centrifuge used to do final separation of yeast and beer before the former was sold to (then) Kraft for making Vegemite.
I believe the term was “removing the cr* from the pi* 😳)

I didn’t realise Vis Studio is also doing some Valgrind-like stuff in debug builds to detect it at runtime.

🤷🏻‍♂️
Too long ago to remember ☹️

Not at first, but that’s mainly because I’d forgotten how one does (non command line) targets on windows.

Fair enough, but render time may improve with instancing as more of the model may be resident in cache.

How randomly placed are the spheres? Just wondering if you instead created a small number of “building blocks” randomly filled with spheres, and then used instancing, whether you could get the same effect with much smaller BVH build times.
(Possibly smaller render times too due to mem footprint)

What was scary was that the modern compiler flagged a few uninitialised variables (not in the bits I wrote, phew!) so I guess the we were lucky back in the 90s 😀

The rainbow is still elusive...
But how about subsurface scattering the hard way? By rendering tiny diffuse particles (atoms?) to simulate the many internal bounces of the surface.
Looks a little bit like sugar.

I can’t find it now, but did you ever see the (satirical) picture of the bicycle with about 20 chainrings + chains that was touted to go faster than light? 🤪