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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#151

Post by jjmarr »

suby wrote: post #128
tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d…

Here's a gif on how a real pinball bumper works:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/aflmj7/how...

It's not really a rigid body, it's a dynamic component that squeezes the ball.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#154

Post by PhasmaFelis »

investguy1 wrote: post #6
unsui wrote: post #4

This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems. As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky. This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex. And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodat…

In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP. In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP. In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP. Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA? It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government, And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly tox…

> And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.

Destroying the government services that allow disabled people to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my literal, physical body.

You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical disagreement. People are going to die.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#157

Post by amarant »

bostonpete wrote: post #148
tombert wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics. I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right. ETA: I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It…

Ball spin would be trivial to simulate. The only way I could see the physics getting at all expensive is if they went overboard with fluid dynamics

Simulating airdrag and turbulence the compute-intensive way: simulating all of the air inside the pinball machine! You've got a few tens of liters of gaseous molecules to keep track of, should be enough to slow down most computers I would guess!

But I would be very surprised if any pinball software actually does that!

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#158

Post by ninetyninenine »

jjmarr wrote: post #151
suby wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d…

Here's a gif on how a real pinball bumper works: https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/aflmj7/how... It's not really a rigid body, it's a dynamic component that squeezes the ball.

Nah. This is easily emulated with an impulse force. The outcome a nanosecond after the ball leaves the bumper is just an impulse. Users can't tell the difference.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#159

Post by ninetyninenine »

tombert wrote: post #129
suby wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d…

Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics. I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right. ETA: I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It…

I bet it has nothing to do with the graphics or the physics and everything to do with the fact that you can't feel the ball. There's vibrations that can be felt when you play with a real pinball machine.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#160

Post by tbrownaw »

rramadass wrote: post #149
akoboldfrying wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sound argument. The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound. So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)

> The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound. False Equivalence. Efficient Communication is secondary to Different Whats and Whys which is what a diverse collection of people from different cultural backgrounds bring to the table…

> This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be guaranteed to all

Oh silly me, I thought the reason was that it follows naturally from everyone having equal moral worth.

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