but I'm tired of hearing "it's a good year for games." well over 4,000 people have lost their jobs because of this industry just since January. Good video games are nothing without the people who make them.
This post wouldn’t have been possible without their diligent and thankless work recording this information in the first place.
Years ago, I was making a stealth game in Unreal that I've since had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control. At one point I was trying to make my characters' eyes nice, and the gold standard for that was (and arguably still is) Half-Life 2.
HL2 takes a novel approach: the eyes are not rotating sphere meshes with bones, they’re more-or-less flat planes with a shader on ‘em that makes 'em look like balls and points the iris/pupil where you tell it. The eye "plane" can be stretched as the eyelids open or close without affecting the visual, and you don't get any mesh intersection issues (which is why you've never seen the gman's eyeball push through his eyelid even though Gmod exists) or the uncanny appearance of rotating "with the head".
To get this right, I asked Valve's Ken Birdwell about how they got such a good sense of eye contact with this shader back in 2003. Here's the scoop:
Name's Auspice Lee, but I answer to Husker/Prosperity.
I'm a late 30s Chinese trans woman from Malaysia. I hang out a lot in VRChat and run events there, and when I'm not, I'm usually vibing with folks and binging on a roguelite. I lament the death of the PS2-era arcade/combat racer genre constantly. Simultaneously a sad indie girl and a brass-powered funk machine. Tell me about the music you like.
Art from right to left is by: @necrotext, meganemausu (https://meganemausu.carrd.co/), and myself.
i was out doing things. i'm back now.
photos of me, by a friend (iykyk) i went to visit in New Mexico, who got us Authorization. first two are at the Apache Point Observatory. first is of their 3.5 meter telescope during a lunar laser ranging run, where they shine a laser through the telescope to bounce it off the retroreflectors the Apollo astronauts left up there. second is of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope.
second two are me almost burning a hole in my nikkormat's shutter by forgetting to lower the mirror before placing it into the optical path of the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope
