There is a Switch game on the list, which isn't a trivial thing.
Also, I did not expect to see Object Pascal as the scripting language!
1,845 karma · joined February 27, 2007
Also, I did not expect to see Object Pascal as the scripting language!
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/11/19/2156246/efficient-s...
In the early days of the app store getting high download counts was one of the only ways to get visibility. Which pushed the race to the bottom on pricing.
Once the big F2P players established themselves, they sucked all the air out of the ecosystem.
Arcade is, among other things, Apple's attempt to fix this. We will see how it turns out.
Dithering is something that you need the most when you are working with either a very limited or a fixed color palette. On the NES backgrounds were dithered because you had so few colors to work with per tile. EGA era PC games used dithering because the standard 16 color choices weren't very useful. Modern pixel artist don't have these technical limitations to work with. And I think that for most, dithering just doesn't look very appealing vs adding an intermediate color.
Anti-aliasing is on the other side of technology window, from an era where there was enough resolution and color choices to support those techniques, but before 3d really took over. By the time you have that level of rendering capability, your are starting to push into the realm of photo-realistic or cartoon techniques. Late in the Super NES and VGA era the trend was away from hand drawn pixel art, and towards high resolution renders scaled down. And when you're working in that space today, you're starting to lose the appeal that the limitations of pixel art offer.
This is all conjecture though. And I'm sure there are pixel artists out there doing amazing things with dithering and anti-aliasing.
But they also say this: "The median viral loads after coughs without a mask, with a surgical mask, and with a cotton mask were 2.56 log copies/mL, 2.42 log copies/mL, and 1.85 log copies/mL, respectively."
That seems like a significant reduction in transmitted viral load? I would think that masks can have a positive impact even if they aren't perfect filters. If you look at their table of data, the reduction trend is consistent across their tests. But between the small number of patients(4) and samples, and the number of Petri dishes that came back as 'Not Detected', it seems like a pretty low powered study. :-/
They are also explicitly testing coughs. I wonder about the effects on filtering droplets generated from normal breathing and talking.
Surgical masks do make sense for the general public. They are much easier to wear, and they still offer a good amount of filtration for the wearer. Plus they have the benefit you mentioned of preventing the wearer from infecting others.
Where surgical masks aren't available, cloth masks still appear to offer some benefit. And there are designs that include a pocket for paper filters.
Do you have a reference for this? I've only ever heard of aerosolization primarily being a concern around people on breathing assistance equipment.
How did the original 8-bit computers do it? Did they have access to chips that are no longer produced?
Early iterations of the RPi boards apparently had some bad design choices in the power circuitry, which makes the problem worse.
"So let's talk about the elephant in the room - graphics. Yes, at that we did fail. And we failed mainly for reasons of time and politics. And even then we didn't fail by nearly as much as people think. Because we were never allowed to ship it, people just saw a giant crater, but in fact Larrabee did run graphics, and it ran it surprisingly well. Larrabee emulated a fully DirectX11 and OpenGL4.x compliant graphics card - by which I mean it was a PCIe card, you plugged it into your machine, you plugged the monitor into the back, you installed the standard Windows driver, and... it was a graphics card. There was no other graphics cards in the system. It had the full DX11 feature set, and there were over 300 titles running perfectly - you download the game from Steam and they Just Work - they totally think it's a graphics card! But it's still actually running FreeBSD on that card, and under FreeBSD it's just running an x86 program called DirectXGfx (248 threads of it). And it shares a file system with the host and you can telnet into it and give it other work to do and steal cores from your own graphics system - it was mind-bending! And because it was software, it could evolve - Larrabee was the first fully DirectX11-compatible card Intel had, because unlike Gen we didn't have to make a new chip when Microsoft released a new spec. It was also the fastest graphics card Intel had - possibly still is. Of course that's a totally unfair comparison because Gen (the integrated Intel gfx processor) has far less power and area budget. But that should still tell you that Larrabee ran graphics at perfectly respectable speeds. I got very good at ~Dirt3 on Larrabee.
Of course, this was just the very first properly working chip (KNF had all sorts of problems, so KNC was the first shippable one) and the software was very young. No, it wasn't competitive with the fastest GPUs on the market at the time, unless you chose the workload very carefully (it was excellent at running Compute Shaders). If we'd had more time to tune the software, it would have got a lot closer. And the next rev of the chip would have closed the gap further. It would have been a very strong chip in the high-end visualization world, where tiny triangles, super-short lines and massive data sets are the main workloads - all things Larrabee was great at. But we never got the time or the political will to get there, and so the graphics side was very publicly cancelled."
http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...
There are downsides to the FPGA approach though. Even the cheapest FPGA can easily end up being more expensive (and more powerful) than the system CPU, putting you in a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. And if you want your project to have a reasonable lifespan, continued FPGA availability can be a problem.
Many projects just drive video directly from the CPU, but that works better when you have something more powerful than the ESP8266 used here. It would be really nice if there was a simple display chip that this sort of project could take advantage of, but I don't know if FPGAs are the answer.
Have you considered alternative rev share models? Whenever I see this sort of service, I'm concerned that it is going to make shorter games and genres with low replayability even less viable than they currently are. Games that people play for hundreds of hours, like Terraria, Rimworld, or Factorio are going to get the dominant share of the revenue.
You can argue this is fair, but I hate to see the industry moving in a direction that makes games like Inside less viable.
https://www.gamedev.net/articles/programming/graphics/gpu-pe...