Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)

I'm reminded of a lecture I saw yesterday (on YouTube) by an artist with an optimistic view of AI. (I'm not about to talk about AI, it was the rest of the lecture that was more interesting.) He pointed out that the first movies were just recorded theater plays, but didn't attract big audiences because the experience of seeing the play in person was better - you had sound, depth perception, and maybe audience interaction. Only when cinematographers started exploiting the medium's own advantages did it really become a thing.

There was a first person who realized that you could literally cut and paste film together to put more than one location into the same film, there was a first person who realized that you don't need continuity in the real world to make continuity in a film. He used the example of a film that showed people climbing into a cannon, then cut to a different angle, then the cannon was fired, then cut to a shot of the moon getting bigger and bigger. In reality these were three completely separate filming arrangements, probably two different cannons, but when run together consecutively they tell the impossible story of people shooting themselves to the moon with a cannon. And you can't do that in a play. Nobody realised you could do that with cinema until someone did realise. By today's standards it is obvious you can do this, but it wasn't back then!

There was the same thing with the sound recorder. Initially people just taped bands playing and played it back as a substitute for a band. But then you eventually got bands that would play looping samples (literally tape pasted into loops) and use tape machines to speed up and slow down their sound and make weird effects you couldn't do live. And just what the heck is electronic music anyway?

The guy's point was that's going to happen with AI too, but that's not my point.

I think 3D rendering in games is at or slightly past the midpoint of the same cycle. At first the goal was to recreate reality on the screen. Humanity achieved that goal around the time of Crysis. And it's a fine state to be in - it does work well - but there is more that a computer do. Actual reality is better than perfectly simulated reality on a screen, just like a live play is better than a recording of one, so the point is to go beyond reality.

Games have traditionally not really cared about stylizing the graphics so much as stylizing the gameplay, but I can think of some games, like Antichamber, where the graphics are doing completely unrealistic things.

idk what my point is here but just do darkened corners if you think they look good in your game.

If there's an alien living outside of the superconductor it probably has eyes that can sense all four components of the electroweak force, including the combination that we call electromagnetism, which is the only one that can pass through the weak force superconductor. Such a being would see the superconductor "material" as something like a block of red jello, only allowing one "color" to pass through and would be as surprised to see us there as we would be if we saw sentient beings inside a block of YBCu superconductor alloy.

Although we wouldn't have a way to see sentient beings inside a block of superconductor alloy, because we don't have any more long-range forces to probe it with, besides gravity. Our outside-weak alien could still see us with electromagnetism which is the one remaining long-range force we have, but that's disabled inside an electric superconductor too.

The lens flare isn't telling you the sun literally makes polygonal shapes. It's telling you the sun is fucking bright and it's dazzling you, and it's doing that by reference to something we've seen in films shot with cameras.

You can achieve it other ways. HL2 Lost Coast - Valve's HDR tech demo - conveys the same basic fact by delaying the tonemap change. As you walk from the dark area to the bright area, the tonemap stays set for the dark area so your whole screen is washed out in white, until it gradually shifts to normal over about half a second. This is also how your pupils work, of course.