bjfar

joined 1 year ago
[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 5 points 1 year ago

I mean yeah you're not wrong, but physical media doesn't last forever either. Vinyl is pretty good, but pretty much every form of digital storage will slowly waste away without some dedicated upkeep effort. Unless you're really willing to put in some serious effort maintaining a personal digital archive it kind of is just better to treat everything as a lease.

The only thing that really worries me are stuff like family photos and videos, and other important digital documents. Yeah I can print some of them, and I should do that more, but on the other hand they're probably safer from destruction with Google than they are in my house. Both would be best though.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago

On the other hand I kind of feel like if a house can be female and a car can be male then there can't really be much argument against using whatever gender any human prefers for themselves.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I used to enjoy manual but now I just kind of hate driving in general so I am happier with auto where I can eat chips or something while driving to make the traffic feel less hellish. Looking forward to self driving cars so I can just take a nap while getting from A to B.

 

I'm just looking for a good review of modern large-scale terrain rendering techniques. I've been reading about a few individually, various quadtree stuff, GPU clipmaps, continuous methods, but I don't have a good grasp of the state of the art, performance comparisons between methods, what I should invest my time learning better etc. A well-written review article would help a lot. But I can't find much, at least not from the last few years. If there isn't a good academic article maybe someone wrote a great blog post or something? I get a lot of hits searching around but they are mostly zillions of different people implementing this or that algorithm for demo projects, it's harder to find systematically put together information giving an overview of the field and techniques.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe you have more hotels in your country. Last AirBnB I stayed in was a little house in a small surf town and I don't think there were any hotels with decent facilities for miles. Was a 5 minute walk down to the beach for a morning surf. Hard to beat.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well then we get down to it, Airbnb is just much cheaper than that for a family. I don't like what AirBnB are doing to cities and tourist towns etc, but hotels just aren't as good.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago

I lived and travelled in Europe for 6 years and never saw a hotel room with anything more than a kettle. Actually no I saw a couple of more hostel type places that had a common kitchen. Still not great for families though.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I can't cook food in a hotel though. Also they kinda suck with kids.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Is it though? I'm not sure the various Mongol empires are exactly your typical tribal people. I'm not sure you can even call them tribal people at all in the modern sense. They were an empire spanning a vast region of the world at one point.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago

If the government was trying to funnel money to vaccine companies they'd just make the vaccines free and pay for them with government funds, forever. That makes a lot more money than having the companies try to get people to fork out 100 pounds for them.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

While I don't know your specific model, Godot generally works with external GPUs on Laptops.

Ok good to know! Yeah there is no specific model in my mind yet, I am so far out of touch with them that none of the model numbers mean anything to me and I don't even know what performance metrics or characteristics to look for in the things.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

A pretty weak one but it should be fine if you're just trying things out.

Yeah? I tried unreal engine 4 on this laptop a few years ago and even just doing very basic stuff with the demo templates in the 3D UI thing was pretty garbage. But maybe Godot is more efficient? Or maybe it's just because I was on Linux using Vulkan drivers which were pretty new and Unreal wasn't using them well or something?

That being said eGPU enclosures are pretty expensive and not worth imo if you just want to play around with graphics. You might be better off buying a newer laptop with a GPU or a desktop PC.

Yes, they did seem pricy. But still, I can't be bothered with a whole new machine. I'll have to do some more mental cost benefit analysis I guess. I guess now is a bad time to be trying to get a GPU in general...

 

So I'm looking for advice on external GPUs. I want to try out Godot, but I don't have a GPU. I don't think I've ever had a GPU in fact. I'm a software developer actually, python mostly, but I've never done GPU stuff in my work, and my PC gaming days were mostly prior to the existence of GPUs. So I'm way out of touch with them.

I do have a reasonable laptop that I've been using for dev stuff, a Dell XPS 9370 (build number from Dell is CNX37014), but it has no GPU, so I guess it won't be great for trying out 3D stuff in Godot. It does have thunderbolt ports though, so I think I can plug an external GPU into those? Anyone tried that kind of thing out? I'd rather fork out for an external GPU if that will work decently rather than try to build a whole new PC or something. I actually have no idea if there is a performance hit for the GPU being external, just heard they were a thing and trying to figure out if they are a viable option.

[–] bjfar@reddthat.com 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Thanks! That's comforting to hear. I hadn't heard of godot but it does sound pretty cool, I'll check it out! Are any of these more suited to Linux development than others? I haven't used Windows in like a decade* and kind of can't be assed with it unless I really have to :). I tried installing Unreal 4 on my underpowered laptop running Ubuntu a few years back, and I did get it working but it was kind of a drag, maybe they've tightened up the Linux version since then though...

*Ok l lie, my work machine is Windows but I kind of forget that it is because i immediately log in to Linux machines to do all my actual work aside from writing emails and video chatting ;).

 

So I dunno where to ask advice about this nowadays, but I'm getting into Lemmy and here seemed as good as anywhere :).

Anyone here have advice for a total noob game dev, but pretty experienced programmer, on what engine they should learn first? I'm not looking to do anything too serious, just want to try my hands at making some stuff for fun in my spare time. These days I mainly write Python code but I wrote C++ for ten years.

So I guess I'm looking at Unity and Unreal, seems like Unreal is C++ and Unity is C#, so I guess that biases me to Unreal, but then it seems that Unity is quite a bit more popular among smaller devs? People praise iteration times and simpler usage etc? Does that shift the scales even though I never wrote a line of C# in my life? I'm sure I can learn it just fine but just trying to minimise effort.

I did however see people saying that Unreal scales better, handles larger worlds better etc. Which might be a factor because the first thing I want to experiment with is some kind of blend of lowish-res whole Earth map data with some procedural generation of the fine details (not exactly trying to recreate Earth accurately, I just think real terrain data would be a good starting point for interesting terrain). So maybe Unreal might handle that sort of thing better? I have no idea though really :).

Any thoughts or advice much appreciated :).

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