The Official Cool Stuff Thread
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@mott555 So the guy's speaking in English, but they also have subtitles in English that you can't turn off? Because he has an accent?
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@jinpa He's speaking English?
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@TimeBandit said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@jinpa He's speaking English?
Frenchlike-English, to be slightly more precise.
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@loopback0 When you understand what you're looking at, that's not nearly as impressive as they're making it sound. As a gamer and a game developer, there were a few points that really stood out to me, none of them particularly good.
She squeezes through a tight opening at one point. This is a well-worn cliche that developers use to hide loading times. And after opening up the exit to the outside, it's blocked by an opaque white light for several seconds. This is an even more transparent attempt to hide loading times.
Why am I harping on load times? Because the PS5's architecture is deliberately designed to make the concept of loading times obsolete. They've specifically said things like "your character can be facing forward, have the level data behind you unloaded, and then turn around, and our data transfer is so fast that it'll be loaded in before you notice it's not there." What this suggests to me is that there are some particularly heavy up-front costs to their "no need to bake LODs or lighting data" gimmick, and it ends up having to process all that at load-time instead, completely negating the hardware advantages. It's "Andy giveth and Bill taketh away" all over again.
Also, massive missed opportunity there. I can't be the only one who was expecting that creepy room full of statues to come to life and attack her, but it never happened.
And last but not least, if they're showing off their high-fidelity graphics, they could at least give us a character with enough detail to look like a real person and not a cartoon avatar that they deliberately degraded to keep her out of the Uncanny Valley. Representing humans (particularly faces) faithfully has always been one of Unreal Engine's weak points, from the lumpy Deus Ex characters to the hideous "genetically engineered perfect beauty" of Miranda from the Mass Effect series. Anyone who's seen The Heretic will take one look at this and realize just how pathetically far behind the curve UE5 is. (And if you haven't, I'll embed it below.) Unity has even released the technology for building perfect photorealistic human characters in the Unity engine, available for free on Github.
I'll admit the lighting stuff is cool, but honestly, realtime global illumination is pretty darned good already. Is it really worth the massive level of diminishing returns implied by those load times to get a few extra percentage points of verisimilitude that most gamers won't even notice anyway?
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It's a cool demo and I don't want another similarly tedious conversation as the one recently in so...
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@loopback0 Not sure what happened there. I've had that thread on ignore for years.
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@loopback0 said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
It's a cool demo and I don't want another similarly tedious conversation as the one recently in so...
You rang?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Not sure what happened there
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@loopback0 Not sure what happened there. I've had that thread on ignore for years.
Instead of guacamole everyone started talking about video games for some reason
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@loopback0 Not sure what happened there. I've had that thread on ignore for years.
Instead of guacamole everyone started talking about video games for some reason
And it was glorious.
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@MrL said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@loopback0 Not sure what happened there. I've had that thread on ignore for years.
Instead of guacamole everyone started talking about video games for some reason
And it was glorious.
you can't fool me!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
"What's a chicken doing on the edge of a Moebius strip?"
"It's trying to get to the other side."
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@Gąska said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Complex Fibonacci Numbers!
(The cool part starts at 4:08.)
I don't suppose the Numberphile people have done a video on this topic?
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@da-Doctah said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Gąska said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Complex Fibonacci Numbers!
(The cool part starts at 4:08.)
I don't suppose the Numberphile people have done a video on this topic?
Not that I recall. Matt's been on numberphile plenty of times though.
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@da-Doctah dunno. I can't stand Numberphile so I don't know what videos he made.
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@Gąska said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
I can't stand Numberphile
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@hungrier Numberphilephobia?
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@Zecc said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Numberphilephobia
Numberphileophobia would be the fear of those who adore numbers. Not quite accurate, I think.
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Gąska said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
I can't stand Numberphile
His long winded explanations of basic subjects make me feel like I'm watching educational TV for first graders. I really don't need a 3 minute explanation of what a prime number is and such.
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@Gąska He doesn't explain anything himself, he interviews professors. Some of them go on a lot about extremely basic stuff, and a couple of them talk for an entire video without saying anything meaningful, but overall the videos are still good.
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Gąska He doesn't explain anything himself, he interviews professors.
But then he says "so what you mean is..." and repeats the explanation in even more infantile way the already infantile explanation given by the professors. But that's details. The main problem is that the professors explain everything in such infantile ways. Which is doubly weird because I never heard professors talk like that IRL.
Edit: maybe I'm just unlucky, but out of 20 or so random Numberphile videos I watched through recommendations, all of them were like that.
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@Gąska said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
But then he says "so what you mean is..." and repeats the explanation in even more infantile way the already infantile explanation given by the professors. But that's details. The main problem is that the professors explain everything in such infantile ways. Which is doubly weird because I never heard professors talk like that IRL.
They do it that way to make it more accessible to Youtube audiences, to bring anyone up to speed who doesn't know the basics already. They're university profs, but unlike their classes, kids watching on Youtube may not have any educational background. Once they finish with the basics, what follows is usually interesting even if you already know what is a prime number
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@hungrier I understand why they do it. I just can't stand listening to it. It feels like watching Teletubbies.
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@Gąska Do you mean Sesame Street?
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@HardwareGeek Having spent countless hours babysitting my sister, and noting her insistence on having TV play her favorite shows all day long from the moment she wakes up to the moment
she falls asleepher favorite TV channel is done for the day and "the fish went to sleep", I can tell you with full confidence that Sesame Street is one of the least mind-raping children TV shows out there.
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@Gąska I used to like Mister Rodgers' Neighborhood, myself. Although some of it was painfully juvenile, their occasional tours of factories to see how stuff is made was actually really interesting for the parents watching.
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@HardwareGeek my wife and I still sing some of the songs from shows our kids used to watch. Partly to embarrass them (not sure why it has this effect, but we love it) and partly because it's amusing. Probably something similar to Stockholm Syndrome.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Yes, even that beach. Pointless.
Hard disagree
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Yes, even that beach. Pointless.
Hard disagree
Didn't they close that beach?
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@PleegWat Maybe recently for Covid or something, but from what I can tell it sounds like it's still open. Looking at the wiki, it sounds like they had closed it in 2008 after a hurricane but reopened it the next year
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Hard disagree
Slightly exciting, somewhat. Still pointless.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEqXNfs_HhY
I didn't read the blog post with much attention, to be honest. My eyes just glazed over.
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https://youtu.be/FCJawbntQVw?t=194
Cool demonstration of why a virus being symmetrical helps it get replicated.
From this website:
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@Zecc is the site more or less Agent Smith's speech?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Schwifty.
Edit: The weird mesh breaks while transitioning is off-putting, WTF...
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Spotted in my YouTube recommendations: looks like home-made animatronics.
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@JBert
I was expecting it to open the bottle by itself.
Still better than any automaton I've ever built.
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@Zecc Opening a bottle on its own would be impressive, but for that it would need to be way more sturdy so as to properly grip the bottle and then have enough strength to remove the bottle cap...
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@JBert I said "expecting" but I meant "hoping". (same word in my native language)
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@Tsaukpaetra The... uh, rend--ing pipeline could be optimized by not cutting spots for the part discarded in the next step, possibly allowing for higher poly detail for the stem
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra The... uh, rend--ing pipeline could be optimized by not cutting spots for the part discarded in the next step, possibly allowing for higher poly detail for the stem
You could also cut it with a small knife, instead of battle axe, and make the stem round.