Dwarf Fortress for example starts with basic midpoint displacement but then does a lot of custom massaging.
Nothing shown in this article is even vaguely trivial. The author is very obviously a 100x'er by comparison to almost every human on Earth (with GPU shader rendering specifically). The "straightforward approach"? "Straight forward..."?
Out of 8,000,000,000 humans, what percent of them can implement even the "hello world" steps necessary to start this article? Hey y'all, how many even know what a shader is? There's such a huge amount of OpenGL jobs... ("what's OpenGL, we only use Unity")
How about online gamers? What percent of the 1,021,282 players current online for Counter Strike 2 (7/28/2024, 1:22 PM EST) [1] can even implement the first steps of the shaders necessary for the game they're playing?
What percent even know how to compile a simple command line c++ program or write an even more simplistic Javascript script in a browser? Note, this is vaguely a trick question, as most humans can barely operate email.
What is the "problem" you speak of in the first sentence? I don't see it explained in the rest of your post.
Are you just pointing out that this is a very specialized field that requires having studied/learned a lot of complex inter-related topics and that most of us have not done so?
What's even your point?
> How about online gamers? What percent of the 1,021,282 players current online for Counter Strike 2 (7/28/2024, 1:22 PM EST) [1] can even implement the first steps of the shaders necessary for the game they're playing?
It's like asking what percent of the drivers can build a diesel engine. And call it "the entire problem with automobile industry".
Sorry, but this is just nonsense. Of course few users can build the thing they use.
Sounds a little dismissive.
Big companies that can afford it overcome this via specialization. An artist who does concept art and general animation may have zero skills writing shaders, etc, thus the rare one-man-show combination of skills is not required.
I briefly walked through the article and I can confidently say these techniques are well-known among graphics programmers. These days even artists who can't write code know what triplaner mapping and PBR are, even though they can't implement them from scratch.
Doing something "well" is subjective, but there is no chance there are only less than 1000 people who know these.
I'm still thankful to the author for writing these down, of course.
Also, I'm not quite sure how this turned back around to your "thesis". How does this make a problem with the games industry, exactly?