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I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.

Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, "immature" for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?

Given how harder it's becoming to tell apart AI slop from something made by a human (videos, photos, text), and how much scammers and other criminals are piling up on the tech, I'm thinking this will be the silver lining, making some people pay more attention to real life and finally accept the maxim "Don't believe everything you see on the internet"

Other points:

• it's not mutually exclusive with any other neurodivergence, in which case they're "twice exceptional";
• In an environment with unprepared people and professionals, they may be wrongly diagnosed as having some other neurodivergence.
• It's not just a high IQ score;
• Gifted kids can be problem students and have low grades;
• Homework feels like torture (this is true to any child, tho);
• They're very likely to question authorities and point out perceived hypocrisy (emphasis here on perceived, because pointing something and being right are different things);
• As kids, they may have weird quirks for executing tasks, such as wanting to hold pencils the "wrong" way, or wanting to press against a wall to do homework;

If you're Brazilian or can understand Brazilian Portuguese, this is the podcast I listened to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apnuIIePeeA

Aos brasileiros que acabarem encontrando esse post, o podcast que assisti é o que linkei acima

I've been interested in checking out some "DIY" boardgames, ones that you could just print the pieces/sheets/cards/tokens/etc and play.

I'm mostly interested in boardgames that can be played with 4+ people and require little setup or rules introduction, as I'm pretty much being the "gateway drug" for the group (everyone I've shown Blokus so far has loved the game).

I'm ok with knowing about heavy games (stuff that takes an afternoon to finish) to keep an eye on for future reference

I've been reading a book on the Paraguay War, Maldita Guerra, and it mentioned how Solano Lopez (then Paraguay's dictator) planned to invade Mato Grosso and possibly take Cuiabá. Trips upstream from Assuncion to Cuiabá at that time would usually take 12+ days on steam ships.

What really surprised me is that this kind of information was supposed to be taught back when I was in school.

Some weeks ago, I've come across Delta Chat, whose main thing is "(near) instant messaging using your email"

That left me thinking, has this been attempted before? If not, why? Also, why (besides servers' limitations as means to fight spam) isn't this solution used more often, given that e-mail has been a decentralized solution for well over 40 years now?

I'm thinking about making a character entirely out of Polygon2D nodes without textures. One thing I haven't figured out how to do is make each polygon cast a "permanent" shadow on top of the ones that are Z levels below it.

Below is an image of what I want to do, but using shaders/lights. I've only managed to do this by making extra polygons to fill in as the shadows.

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How exactly do I have to set up a light source to achieve this effect? Using a DirectionalLight2D or a PointLight2D just brightens the polygons and I can't figure how to use a LightOccluder2D, or even if this is the correct way to get this result

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(The polygons are green due to the DirectionalLight being green) - The occlusion simply applies the shadow on anything that is Z levels below it.

I'm looking for something that "a child would find easy to learn", possibly a virtual keyboard with an obvious "start recording" button that does that, recording your keys on the selected Track, then allowing easy playback so you can listen to it.

Time sure does fly, huh

Tennis uses multiples of 15, but only up to 45, calls other points weird names, then closes a set, which has to be repeated at least 6 times for a separate scoring, with said scoring also needing to be repeated AT LEAST 3 more times, but can be dragged out ad infinitum.

Even table tennis has the decency of using a straight scoring system where 11 points wins a set and 2 sets wins the match.

It's totally original, you guys!

I'd like to create an effect similar to 2 death animations that exist in Crash Bandicoot 3.

In one of them, Crash is disintegrated: all the triangle faces get separated and fly apart. A similar triangle separation is seen when he dies from fire, the triangles fall separately.

The second is a simple separation of the legs and torso. One enemy that exists in the 1st stage can cut Crash in half, which will cause the torso to stay in place while the legs walk away.

Transcription:

Text: My browser when I open the 42nd tab and beyond

A 2 panel image of Michael Jordan: Stop it. Get some help.

I'd like actual examples instead of "I work faster", something like "I can move straight to the middle of the file with 7mv" or "I can keep 4 different text snippets in memory and paste each with a number+pt, like 2pt", things that you actually use somewhat frequently instead of what you can do, but probably only did once.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/16870410

> > However, despite all the attention Godot has been receiving, the switch from Godot 3 to Godot 4 called for the removal of Godot’s visual scripting system. This presented us with an amazing opportunity. We knew we needed to provide more to our users, and now Godot was lacking in a function that we know really well! And that’s how the current plan was kicked off. > > Makes me wonder if they'll do something similar for RPG Maker if AGM does well enough commercially, since the RPG Maker Unite, which was supposed to work with Unity, died thanks to that charge the devs per-install kerfuffle.

> However, despite all the attention Godot has been receiving, the switch from Godot 3 to Godot 4 called for the removal of Godot’s visual scripting system. This presented us with an amazing opportunity. We knew we needed to provide more to our users, and now Godot was lacking in a function that we know really well! And that’s how the current plan was kicked off.

Makes me wonder if they'll do something similar for RPG Maker if AGM does well enough commercially, since the RPG Maker Unite, which was supposed to work with Unity, died thanks to that charge the devs per-install kerfuffle.

Anime is Oddtaxi

Something that I realized way later than I should.

During some of my Godot development, I've finally hit the debugger tab of the editor while the game was running, saw the "Video RAM" and found something very odd. My 2D game was eating up over 500MB of VRAM, which was way too much for what was on screen. Since the debugger lists all the files currently in memory, I could see how much RAM each file consumed.

My characters were made of several separate files (2 arms, 1 leg, 1 torso, 1 head) and all those files had the same total resolution of ~1000x1000, but different "useful" areas, like 200x200 on the head, 40x100 on each arm. Turns out each goddamn pixel of each file had to be kept in RAM, because, unlike disk space, the game "needs" to be aware of the WHOLE image, because it doesn't know whether RGBA(0,0,0,0) at XY 0,0 is any more or less important than whatever is at XY 120,250.

Yeah, after I cropped the images to only have the area they actually have drawn, VRAM usage dropped to ~200MB (the drawn area was still large)

If anyone ever complains that your game is slow, or that you should optimize how you organize your images, it's very likely you should look into that for better performance.