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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • addietoLinux@lemmy.mlSDL3 is officially released!
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    21 hours ago

    Kind of. It’s the Linux kernel that manages all of the controller drivers and makes them available to userspace, mostly via the evdev interface. SDL is a library for managing graphics, sounds and events in a generic way on multiple platforms and devices. It’s overwhelmingly the most common library used for Linux games - Steam used it for all of their Linux-native ports of Source engine games, for instance. But it also presents all gamepad events in a consistent way regardless of their “true source”, so generic devices tend to work with every game.

    SDL3 mostly clears out all the clutter from the previous versions of SDL. It’s a mature library and gamedev has come a long way in that time. Getting rid of all the weird stuff that the API accumulated makes it easier to use and maintain. Plus there were things like managing audio generally, and pen-and-touch gestures mobile phones and tablets, that were quite the head-scratchers before. That’s all a bit easier now.











  • addietoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlLearn to code
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    6 days ago

    Programming a robust global date-time system and having a transparent conversation between metric and *imperial/traditional" units is just a warm-up to show that you can work with the truly demented currency system. Make sure everything is rounded off to the nearest whole ha’penny.


  • Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.

    Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.


  • addietoCalvin and Hobbes@lemmy.world16 January 1988
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    7 days ago

    Uncle Max looks so much like Bill Waterson does in real life. He got dropped out of the comics because “not being able to address Calvin’s parents by name” was awkward, but really this is a comic about a boy and his tiger and how they interact with the world - adult to adult viewpoints just don’t belong. Although this one works for me.


  • addietoComic Strips@lemmy.worldCollege
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    7 days ago

    Wikipedia’s entry on Z-Lib has its Tor address on it as well, so you can avoid that link too. Massive repository of textbooks and indeed books of any kind, all just available for free download. Makes me sick.


  • DLSS2.0 is “temporal anti-aliasing on steroids”. TAA works by jiggling the camera a tiny amount, less than a pixel, every frame. If nothing on screen is moving and the camera’s not moving, then you could blend the last dozen or so frames together, and it would appear to have high resolution and smooth edges without doing any extra work. If the camera moves, then you can blend from “where the camera used to be pointing” and get most of the same benefits. If objects in the scene are moving, then you can use the information on “where things used to be” (it’s a graphics engine, we know where things used to be) and blend the same way. If everything’s moving quickly then it doesn’t work, but in that case you won’t notice a few rough edges anyway. Good quality and basically “free” (you were rendering the old frames anyway), especially compared to other ways of doing anti-aliasing.

    Nvidia have a honking big supercomputer that renders “perfect very-high resolution frames”, and then tries out untold billions of different possibilities for “the perfect camera jiggle”, “the perfect amount of blending”, “the perfect motion reconstruction” to get the correct result out of lower-quality frames. It’s not just an upscaler, it has a lot of extra information - historic and screen geometry - to work from, and can sometimes generate more accurate renders than rendering at native resolution would do. Getting the information on what the optimal settings are is absolute shitloads of work, but the output is pretty tiny - several thousand matrix operations - which is why it’s cheap enough to apply on every frame. So yeah, not big enough to worry about.

    There’s a big fraction of AAA games that use Unreal engine and aim for photorealism, so if you’ve trained it up on that, boom, you’re done in most cases. Indie games with indie game engines tend not to be so demanding, and so don’t need DLSS, so you don’t need to tune it up for them.


  • addietoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3038: Uncanceled Units
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    8 days ago

    For something that doesn’t run continuously, like eg. a refrigerator, then an average daily usage is more useful, no? “This product draws 1.5 kW with a duty cycle of 0.08” doesn’t really help when comparing efficiencies of potential purchases, you’d need to convert it to electricity consumed in a set period anyway.





  • So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.

    Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)