A truly fun episode, it is not often a video game documentary focuses on artists instead of designers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eUtrUW2QVU

Web design in the early 2000s: Every 100ms of latency on page load costs visitors.

Web design in the late 2020s: Let's add a 10-second delay while Cloudflare checks that you are capable of ticking a checkbox in front of every page load.

@aras we once had an elegant off-screen half-res particle system optimization at some point in our game, but in the end it introduced more bugs on low-end devices than performance gain.

@aras “I already did all the thinking and benchmarking and now you don’t want it, nah ah!”

@andrewwillmott Thx that’s enough to get me started on the idea, before this I wasn’t able to connect the dots between LPV and Radiosity

One thing the Epstein files reveal is that the capitalist billionaires absolutely have class solidarity. The rest of us should too.

With the correct search term (radiosity gi or progressive radiosity) I did find some good decade-old tutorials on how to do this with reasonable performance:

https://rasmusbarr.github.io/blog/realtimegi-pt1.html

@andrewwillmott anecdotally, I don’t see this approach used a lot in modern games, despite many city builders and life sim beyond The Sims.

I wonder why, this seems to scale quite well, does it require a lot of code to determine room connectivity? are there public literature on this topic?

@andrewwillmott my thought exactly, the lighting style seems very distinctive to the sims experience.

@bitinn So the room lighting was a 2 1/2 D radiosity-style algorithm. Which was used to generate light maps for the walls and floors relatively quickly. Because the connectivity graph of the house parts was available, this was a decent way to generate lighting that respected boundaries in a very heavily hardware constrained environment.

Actually has there been any other games using similar lighting approach to The Sims?

Has there ever been a technical breakdown of how The Sims 4 compute its room lighting?

My particular interests: how The Sims 2 & 4 are able to compute lighting per room without real-time shadow casting and they almost never bleed :)

I knew @andrewwillmott mentioned lighting for The Sims 2 in a few of his talks, but it was never discussed in details.

The Sims 2 detects fully enclosed rooms and add light rigs + compute SH for each, it is also able to transport *some lights* partially through windows.

I wonder if The Sims 4 use a more advanced version of this approach.

Has there ever been a technical breakdown of how The Sims 4 compute its room lighting?

I wonder if there will be a flashpoint in 2026, which eventually make the anti-immigrant stand leapfrog from a pure immigration policy to foreigner visa policies.

Speaking from experience, I would be very worried if anyone is an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, I don’t think Japan as a welfare country is ready for what Thatcherism can do.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/06/sana-mania-grips-japan-as-ultra-conservative-takaichi-expected-to-secure-election-landslide

“We would be doing great if not for other people coming here” tends to be an echo chamber that reverberates and amplifies forever.

I wonder if we give it a few years, Japan’s anti-immigration stand will eventually become an anti-foreigner stand, much like how hostile US border inspection policies had become.

Object study of another oldie. First machine I made pixel art on. I was four or something and scribbled stick figures in MS Paint… 🫠

#pixelart #ドット絵 #isometric

At this point, if you are fortunate enough to not have to deal with AI in your daily work within a large tech company, it is because your middle manager has delicately fought the push for “all hands on AI deck” directive, not because your employer have a heart.

I say this because the default assumption hasn’t changed, CEOs still think it is an investment driver, just not as stupidly easy as it used to be.