jckarter

i wrote my own renderer for VGA B800 text! it's a huge lump of text+attributes that gets displayed when a VGA card is in a "text mode", usually 80x25 cells with 16 colors. many games from the DOS era stored a copy of this buffer with special art of text written in it, to be displayed when you exited the game.

so when you exit the sourceport, it displays the same B800 text that the game did when you exited to DOS in the original 1994 version of the game!

check it out here: https://github.com/fabiangreffrath/taradino/

If you've used a ray/path tracer you know that the output always starts out noisy - rays are very discrete things so you need to trace a lot of them if you want things like soft shadows, global illumination, depth of field and motion blur. The noise comes from the fact that scattered rays are sent towards different directions for each pixel.

But there's nothing stopping you from just, not doing that

With the piece above (Danmarksfärjan), it was extremely important to me that the smooth plastic surfaces should appear smooth in the final render, rather than having visible noise. To that end, I used the exact same unscrambling technique above (albeit implemented by hand in my rendering framework rather than in Blender), trading off high-frequency noise for lower-frequency artifacts that are visible in the shadows/reflections if you zoom in close.

as an anarchist ive never understood why some anarchists are so vehemently against voting. like obviously were not going to vote our way into anarchy but most of them seem to think that participating in liberal electoralism somehow gives the incoming government a kind of mystical power over you, but isnt that just believing in the liberal myth of voting as conferring legitimacy on a government? like its just a vote, it doesnt matter beyond what it does. surely you just use it to try to make things less bad (if thats an option) and then go back to doing whatever anarchist stuff you were doing before?

found a way to make this charles dickens classic more relatable