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John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

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Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#81

Post by zdkl »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #74
erikpukinskis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing wrong with it is that you generally have to have a Facebook account to read Facebook content, which means you have to give them your real name. It appears that this month Facebook is allowing people to read this particular post, but they aggressively put the sign up wall wherever they thing it will generate the most conversions. You certainly can not see John Carmack's past posts without a Facebook acc…

Whether or not a post is available to "the public" (signed in or not) is completely the choice of the author, not some mysterious committee at Facebook.

And what happens when facebook decides otherwise? Because it seems they already have with their strategy of curating content and information to maximise engagement.

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#82

Post by intoverflow2 »

tomphoolery wrote: post #57
taneq wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a natural place for him to post. He was bought. From what I've seen of the guy, the natural place for him to post would be in a .plan file somewhere.

There's nothing wrong with posting a technical article on Facebook, especially if you're too busy being a graphical programming genius to set up your own blog somewhere. I don't see it as any different than posting on Medium...besides making a choice as to which company you're going to support? But seriously, who cares?

>There's nothing wrong with posting a technical article on Facebook

Not what I think of when I think "technical article" http://i.imgur.com/nmoFIQL.png

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#83

Post by intoverflow2 »

xxs wrote: post #78
rmtew wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried to read a page on facebook without an account? It's intended to be an almost unusable experience. On loading a page, I get a modal popup obscuring all content insisting I "register" or "login", with a "not now" option. Then when you click "not now", the bottom third of the screen is obscured by a fixed overlay. It is loosely describable as readable, but in practice, it's a fight to read it. The element…

indeed: inspect element -> style='display: none' should not be mandatory to read a page. Grease monkey is an option, but still.

It's coded in react or whatever so it just gets recreated a second or so later.

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#84

Post by tmsbrg »

rmtew wrote: post #77
mcpherrinm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not a post is available to "the public" (signed in or not) is completely the choice of the author, not some mysterious committee at Facebook.

Have you tried to read a page on facebook without an account? It's intended to be an almost unusable experience. On loading a page, I get a modal popup obscuring all content insisting I "register" or "login", with a "not now" option. Then when you click "not now", the bottom third of the screen is obscured by a fixed overlay. It is loosely describable as readable, but in practice, it's a fight to read it. The element…

I agree Facebook is a bad place for placing public content. Note though that it's currently a lot more bearable if you disable JavaScript for Facebook. As someone who doesn't use Facebook at all it's easy for me to keep it disabled with NoScript. Then I just see content, no popups.

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#86

Post by intoverflow2 »

bertil wrote: post #17
sintaxi wrote: post #8

In an ideal world this article would not be posted on Facebook.

That article is shared to 'Public': it should be visible to non-logged-in users. Not sure what changed — could be an issue with excessive crawlers… I’ve very convinced that Facebook is very comfortable to let the minority who are not comfortable having an account read a public post -- especially when it’s about engineering. Those are usually on the company blog (without log-in block); Carmack probably was just using…

>Not sure what changed

Metrics driven design and development. 1) team gets told it has to increase sign ups 2) Product already too popular to go anywhere meaningful with it's content/features 3) Only hope left is to make the experience worse for non-users in the hope to irritate them into being users.

> It’s probably less high on the priority list than “give affordable internet access to 1 billion people”,

Both this awful login form and the cynical project to get the 3rd world online via Facebook are part of the same goal.

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#87

Post by jacobolus »

Alupis wrote: post #63
pyronite wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The character count of a random sentence ("Don't try to do accurate dynamic shadows on GearVR. Dynamic shadows") puts it at 68 characters. The Rules of Typographical Style suggests 66 characters is considered ideal: http://webtypography.net/2.1.2 . This is possibly why their textual content is narrow. It's designed to make it more readable.

The source you sited as stating 66 characters being "ideal", has an approximate average of 134 characters per line.

Here’s roughly what it’s supposed to look like, http://i.imgur.com/yOndq70.png

Your browser window is just too wide. With such an oversized browser window, a substantial proportion of content on the web, perhaps the majority, is going to have an absurdly wide measure to the point of extreme illegibility. I highly recommend narrowing your window; as a general rule it will dramatically improve web typography.

HTML/CSS technology are really bad at giving page authors easy control over precise text layout. If they make the CSS code short and use percentages, then everything will end up too wide in large browser windows, and too narrow in small browser windows. But if they use fixed widths or maximum widths, it’s easy to screw up and break the layout in some browsers.

P.S. the author directly addresses your point in the linked page, did you read it?

“From a typographical perspective, the most appropriate method is to set box width in ems (elastic layout) as it ensures the measure is always set to the typographer’s specification. Setting box width as a percentage (liquid layout) gives the typographer approximate control over measure but also allows the reader to adjust the layout to suit his or her comfort. This website has been designed with liquid layout to afford readers this control.”

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#88

Post by cowsandmilk »

swang wrote: post #22
bertil wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is shared to 'Public': it should be visible to non-logged-in users. Not sure what changed — could be an issue with excessive crawlers… I’ve very convinced that Facebook is very comfortable to let the minority who are not comfortable having an account read a public post -- especially when it’s about engineering. Those are usually on the company blog (without log-in block); Carmack probably was just using…

i can read it logged out of facebook unfortunately there is an annoying box covering up 1/3 of the page asking you to login or signup. it does not "block" any content in that you can still read all of it. but it is highly annoying (and i assume purposely so).

The main question is why Carmack doesn't use the Facebook Engineering Blog. There are no popups or other annoyances there. For example:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/265413023819735/surround-360...

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#89

Post by Ono-Sendai »

tgb wrote: post #80

What's the problem with specular lighting on bump maps? I think I see what the issue can be, specifically, that when the bump map texture is smaller than 1-1 texels-to-pixels, then the normal chosen will 'shimmer' between the possible texel values. But can't one use mipmaps for bump maps as well to reduce this?

I think the problem with mimmapping bump maps is that it effectively smooths the surface, so you loose the bump effect.

Re: John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR

#90

Post by tgb »

Ono-Sendai wrote: post #89
tgb wrote: post #80

What's the problem with specular lighting on bump maps? I think I see what the issue can be, specifically, that when the bump map texture is smaller than 1-1 texels-to-pixels, then the normal chosen will 'shimmer' between the possible texel values. But can't one use mipmaps for bump maps as well to reduce this?

I think the problem with mimmapping bump maps is that it effectively smooths the surface, so you loose the bump effect.

Can't the same be said for mipmapping textures? Losing detail at low LOD is expected, though I can't picture if bump maps lose 'more' perceptually.
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