Funny thing about the PS2. It’s often cited that Sony never had an official online service for handling multiplayer games. And certainly if you look at the multiplayer games released for the PS2 you would see that every game implemented their own.

But there was an official one. That’s right, Sony actually has an official online service for the PS2 that was akin to what Xbox had. They had one as soon as the network adapter was given to devs.

But AFAIK no one used it in a shipping title. Why?

I have a theory about why Steam is so much more performant than Epic Games Studio, or other online store apps. And it’s not just that Steam was written from scratch vs being an Electron app or literally an Unreal Engine app. Or because it’s much older and had to run on old PCs. In the early days of Steam, Valve employees could get a special key for their accounts that unlocked access to all games on the platform. And not just all Valve games, _all_ games.

I really hate the framing of frame generation as being "improved performance". It is technically accurate in that "performance" has long been measured by "frame rate". But we were shitting on TVs for doing this kind of thing just a few years ago.

tomshardware.com/pc-components/… And yes, the frame generation done by DLSS 3 and FSR 3 is better than that used by TVs for motion smoothing, mainly because it has real depth and motion data to pull from. But it's also not _that_ much better. 30hz content upscaled to 60hz looks bad. And generated frames look bad

I find all of the relighting of gaussian splats effort out there to be a kind of hilarious step backwards in so many ways.

We spent the last decade moving towards ever more accurate PBR and ways of removing lighting from photos. And now we're back to "just mult Lambert on it." Don't worry that the reflection data is literally baked into the data, we'll just multiply it by the light color and it'll be fine!

It also already has shadows? Just use a 2x mult and pretend that fixes it! Maybe we'll run a decontrast filter on the splats first like it's 2004!

This is utterly false.

Renderman specifically was a REYES focused renderer until 2012, and was the odd one out in an industry that had been using predominantly raytracing and pathtracing since the beginning.

https://twitter.com/AMDGPU_/status/1654229131951763457

2013's Monsters University was Pixar's first fully path traced movie. And afterwards the studio moved to almost exclusively using pathtracing for all new productions afterwards. Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur being the last two REYES productions.

Sometimes it's easy to think "building a PC is so easy", and then you see builds like this one and go "oh, oh no, no no no."
reddit.com/r/PcBuild/comm… The first image is mostly "yeah, I can understand the choices are non obvious". The second hurt if you look close enough.

The Tarkov cheat video is an interesting expose on the problem that exists for all multiplayer games right now, and has been a problem for over a decade now.
With rare exception, you should assume every game you're playing online has someone cheating in it. And I'm not talking just Tarkov matches.

_Every_Game_

The sophistication of cheats is crazy too, and big business. Authors of cheats can be making as much or more than devs do.

Emulating the visual style of the PSX is a fascinating thing to me. For most I feel like what people remember that was unique to the PSX is the texture warping and surface jittering. Though 16 bit color dithering, lack of texture filtering, and no mip mapping are also present. What I find most fascinating about it is the surface jittering is the part that sticks or perhaps the most. And it’s both the easiest, and usually least accurately emulated aspect when it comes to games looking to mimic the style.

From a technology enthusiast viewpoint, I’m super excited by bipedal robots. I think they’re super cool.

From a cynically viewpoint, they worry me about what they’ll be used for, and think those building them greatly under appreciate the human element of those tasks. Big tech companies want to use robots to replace what they see as low skill labor. Bipedal robots theoretically mean they can replace those work forces without having to significantly update the work environments currently populated by humans. Win win! (For the owners.)

Spoiler: Habit ranked #1 in this “study”.

Which is a little crazy to me because the original Habit in Goleta is so much better than the chain ones.

https://twitter.com/bielleogy/status/1630971391272189952

For those who don’t know, The Habit was a little burger place in Goleta, CA. In the late 90s they opened up a few more locations in Santa Barbara County. The other chain locations licensed the name and recipes in 2007, but until 2020 where run by a separate company.

I want to talk about something I feel is confusing to many.

OLED has an order of magnitude faster response times over LCD.

But the 240hz LG OLED monitor isn't that much clearer than the best 240hz, or even 360hz LCD monitors. And in some cases looses to them significantly?! The term you'll see related to this is "persistence blur".

In the past, a lot of the "smear" you'd see on LCD displays were from the LCDs themselves taking longer to change the image than the time between frames. This is true today, even for the fastest "1 ms" displays.

I'm in a love / hate relationship with the desktop display world right now.

Competition in OLEDs have finally come to the desktop! But all 3 new options come with massive drawbacks for mixed use. The 34" QD-OLED monitors have triangle subpixels, and absolute trash anti-reflective coating.

The 27" WOLED monitors have RWBG subpixels, and very short warranties.

The 45" WOLED monitors also have RWBG subpixels, and a painfully 3440x1440 resolution for the size.

I was talking to my Dad about flight delays and staffing issues, and my dad pointed out a problem I'd missed entirely.

There are no new pilots. When the pandemic hit, passenger airlines in the US laid off all their pilots. If those pilots were within 5, maybe 10 years of retiring, they mostly decided to retire early.

Fast forward to now and the airlines are trying to hire back all those pilots, who are responding 🖕

Random story:

A couple I know decided late in life they wanted kids, and decided to try to adopt.

They had a few criteria for what they were looking for: They wanted a kid who could already speak, read, and write, because then they’d be able to listen to commands and do what they were told.

They wanted a kid that was neat, and whom they wouldn’t have to clean up after or have dirty laundry.

They wanted a kid who they could mold.

On the topic of some people complaining that a popular new show has been “ruined” for them for having a rich and politically powerful Black character. Those kinds of people believe this shouldn’t be possible. Not just “not possible”, but also that it _shouldn’t_ be possible. Their whole way of thinking is that rich and powerful Blacks are an abomination that should be prevented and eliminated. They’re somehow “unnatural”. They can only exist if they were created by a white person, and is thus subservient to them.

Here's an actually decent chromatic aberration UE4 Material for objects in the scene. With the caveat that other transparencies are not visible through it, like most of these kinds of effects.

Would anyone want a non-crap example chromatic aberration material for UE4 with the giant caveat that it's kind of useless because the SceneColor node is itself basically unusable for a shipping title? There are two examples I found online that everyone points to, and both are ... just ... utterly dreadful.

It's not difficult to write one that matches Unreal's existing material node refraction implementation that lets you use a base IoR value, plus an extra variance factor.

While the initial benchmarks being shown aren't terrible exciting, I'm still personally happy to see another GPU coming to the market place.

I'm of course talking about the new ... Moore Threads MTT S60 Oh, and I guess that Intel Arc thing is cool too. But they've been making GPUs for ages so that's not really a new thing.

Really though, Moore Threads as a name for a company that makes GPUs. It's like making an electric car company and naming it Edison.
tomshardware.com/news/first-who…

One of those very important, but little and under appreciated game tech art / vfx things is pickup highlighting / shine. It’s a something I’ve taken stabs at dozens of times over my career and never really been 100% happy with what I’ve done. For as long as there have been games, there's been a need to communicate to players that some items are things the player can pick up or otherwise interact with. Which usually means making them stand out from the rest of the world, either all of the time or contextually.

The new RTX 3090 TI GPUs are so massive that EVGA has taken to building a cable suspension system for them.

There's a whole cottage industry at this point to handle GPU sag as GPUs get bigger and heavier. GPU Support brackets are a thing some cases are coming with pre-installed. Most aftermarket ones make use of the unused PCI screw mounts. Here's a 3D printed one as an example.

I find the size of Call of Duty: Warzone fascinating. It tells a lot about the underlying tech being used by that generation of the IW engine, specifically it’s heavy reliance on a lot of prebaked data. Likely including megatexture like ground textures, but also lots of probes. Basically, Call of Duty’s engine was designed around maximum performance in limited size play spaces. And while it obviously is capable of wide open areas, it wasn’t what the tech was designed around.