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Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

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61–70 of 104 posts

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#61
post #34

Can I have it in WebGL now too? I wonder if the slow speed can be partially redeemed by having many emulated cores.

No, because in all their wisdom, WebGL never supported compute shaders, Intel has tried multiple times to add it to the standard and now it has been officially dropped for WebGPU. So when the browsers bother to finally replace their 2011 GPU model by WebGPU (stable), which is still MVP 1.0 compared to Vulkan/Metal/DX 12 Ultimate, then you might have it.

It wasn't an oversight/mistake rather an intentional choice for WebGL to support mobile devices with OpenGL ES 2.0 (and later 3.0) which doesn't support compute shaders amongst many other things. Since it was the baseline exposure of GPU capability they wanted it to work universally not just on desktops which were on the way to being the minority of web users. We GPU is getting it because WebGL is already there as a baseline plus it has been nearly a decade and mobile GPUs are more capable.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#62

...Every pixel is an Operating System? This is the kind of madness/genius that'll take us places.

Every 2048x2048 state texture is the state of an operating system, including CPU and memory. The pixel shaders operate on this state to advance different parts of the state of the operating system as a whole.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is atrocious. Bunch of visual distractions made by avatars, horrible and disrespectful background noise/chatter, graphics like it's 1998..

I'm kinda torn between the current top comment pointing out how immersive everything is, the current top reply remarking about the eyebrow-raising amount of furry representation, and this perspective. The graphics are indeed really bad. The background noise also seems to be poorly managed. And the avatars are visually striking just to the point of being very distracting. But I have not the first clue how to fix any o…

Idk why people would complain about furry representation in VR chat, if at all furries are driving things like VR chat and in 20-30 years or so everyone will be using it and it will "be cool".

Not really much difference between an avatar of any other character and a furry avatar, just people are fans of their own character/universe than say a character from Star Trek or something.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#64
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe because those are both things that are significantly different than reality.

There are lots of things that are different from reality, the questions is why so many of them chose that particular way to be unrealistic.

Pretty easily answerable question...

As mentioned in another comment there's no difference between someone choosing say a furry avatar vs someone choosing say a star trek character as their avatar. Same reason: they enjoy that world/universe.

Why do people make pop culture jokes? Because it's something they familiar with and enjoy and that gives 'em the seratonin.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should it be surprising that in a world where you can look however you want, lots of people would not choose to look how the real world forces them to?

Yup. Maybe it’s that the IRL self is nothing more than one ended up that everyone can’t care less about. There has to be something to be argued with respect to human model of consciousness, cognition, and self identity about almost complete lack of male avatars in actual VR scene. It can’t be like “they’re all young _men_ so they want cute anime”. Maybe it’s not just about VR, or anime, but the concept of masculine d…

Selection bias: the majority of the male population using VR are in no way representative of the general male population outside of VR.

I say this as a gay furry, who knows that there are like, a million gay furries on VR, but constitute only a small portion of the general population.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#66
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the majority of avatars small children or furry-things? I'm really not one of those people who bashes nerdy or alternative culture but I can't deny that it weirds me out a bit. It's a clear barrier of entry for me.

Why does it weird you out?

A few reasons I guess.

For as long as I can remember, we have had adult predators going online posing as young girls/boys with different levels of malicious sexual intent. I understand that that isn't the objective here, but I can't help making that connection. Like "Oh! You weren't actually a 15 year old girl, you are a 30 year old guy pretending to be". That makes me uncomfortable.

The anime stuff always seem to be overly sexualized. Skimpy outfits. Traditionally sexy bodies (Legs, boobs, ass, etc. Yes, that is highly subjective but I think you can see my point).

Same goes for the furry stuff. Always the more or less "sexy", more or less "naked" looks. As an outsider it seems to be a sexual fetish more than anything else.

I have absolutely nothing against people wanting to be more fluid with genders. Or wanting to be sexy. Or roleplaying as whatever. I welcome that. It's just a bit weird that it's such a common choice to be [sexy child] or [sexy animal]. And in a setting that, to me, is not where sexy things happen, or where sexy things are even really wanted?

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#67
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of things that are different from reality, the questions is why so many of them chose that particular way to be unrealistic.

Pretty easily answerable question... As mentioned in another comment there's no difference between someone choosing say a furry avatar vs someone choosing say a star trek character as their avatar. Same reason: they enjoy that world/universe. Why do people make pop culture jokes? Because it's something they familiar with and enjoy and that gives 'em the seratonin.

The question is not "how can anyone choose to be an anime fox", it's "why do so many of them do that".

If say 40% of all quarterbacks were named James, you are not explaining that by saying "James is a perfectly normal name, just like Richard or John".

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#68
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it weird you out?

A few reasons I guess. For as long as I can remember, we have had adult predators going online posing as young girls/boys with different levels of malicious sexual intent. I understand that that isn't the objective here, but I can't help making that connection. Like "Oh! You weren't actually a 15 year old girl, you are a 30 year old guy pretending to be". That makes me uncomfortable. The anime stuff always seem to be…

You should try being in one of the rooms, it's extremely creepy haha. Apparently my poor Quest 2 experience was due to me being a n00b, but when you roll into a room with 5-10 avatars bopping around and you can hear conversations between 4th graders and suddenly realize you're 'alone' with them, it gets extremely uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's a rational response, but I never said a word while I was on there, boxed the thing up after a few hours and shipped it back to Facebook.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty easily answerable question... As mentioned in another comment there's no difference between someone choosing say a furry avatar vs someone choosing say a star trek character as their avatar. Same reason: they enjoy that world/universe. Why do people make pop culture jokes? Because it's something they familiar with and enjoy and that gives 'em the seratonin.

The question is not "how can anyone choose to be an anime fox", it's "why do so many of them do that". If say 40% of all quarterbacks were named James, you are not explaining that by saying "James is a perfectly normal name, just like Richard or John".

This is one of those situations where having the conversation in person would be way easier. I have no idea why this point is not landing lol.

Re: Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat

#70
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreasonable how? That sounds kinda interesting/fun. FWIW, given that you're running a game, and most people run games fullscreen, without anything else going, you can probably get away with not using virtualization, aka eating 100% CPU (or at least 100% of one core)... and even then, with most systems having >4 cores nowadays, you probably needn't worry at all. But just to clarify the corollary, this implementation…

> you can probably get away with not using virtualization, aka eating 100% CPU (or at least 100% of one core)... That's not how virtualization works, it's time sliced which is why you can have more vCPUs than physical CPUs. You can also limit the slice utilization to an arbitrary percentage or give it a priority level for scheduling.

> That's not how virtualization works, it's time sliced which is why you can have more vCPUs than physical CPUs. You can also limit the slice utilization to an arbitrary percentage or give it a priority level for scheduling.

At that point though, why bother virtualizing? If you're going for the beige PC look, why not go all the way and emulate an 80486 (or 80386 even) on an IBM PC clone in software running linux 0.01? Performance isn't going to matter too much, so you could limit it to as much or little CPU utilization as you want.

Plus, virtualizing is going to potentially require additional permissions that users may not want to grant your game (or may not be available on the platform).

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