Does that pass muster? Are we now free to appreciate how the clever use of normal maps allowed Nintendo’s artists to counterintuitively decrease poly count across generations of Mario titles?
This is evidenced in the way people seem to consider fragment shaders to be a kind of "illusion" or falsehood.
But of course, a spoiler: it's "illusions" all the way down. This is not a pipe. A value in a normal map is just as "real" as a face in a mesh (that is, not at all, or entirely so, depending on your perspective).
This is interesting to consider, as it never occurred to me that anyone would think otherwise.
I wonder if it's generational. Those who grew up with games whose triangle (or quad, in the case of a certain Sega system) budgets were constrained to the point of clearly distinct mesh faces probably have a different mental model from those for whom baked normals and LOD meshes have always been a continuum.
Not to imply people don’t read the articles here. I would never imply that…
The only reason this made the top of the front page is because this was written in a way that seems intentionally deceptive in order to make you click. I'd argue the author is being a pedant even more, and did it first. Had they used a more honest title, people wouldn't be upset. But then it wouldn't have made the front page.
I hate this trend in journalism that can be summed up as: "I'm going to frame something in a confusing, counterintuitive way, then explain it in a straightforward way, in order to make you think I'm smart and make you think you've learned something really complex." I see everywhere else on the Internet. HN is supposed to filter this out.
Maybe take the rest of the day off? Work through the anger?
This is nice by Twitter standards but it's still an ad hominem, I hope this doesn't become common on HN. It never leads to anything interesting and overall makes conversations worse.
When I spent a bit too long on reddit, I started to realize that all threads there degenerate into this, given enough attention. Without moderation, it just feels like a series of dead-end discussions where trying to participate isn’t worth the effort because any nuanced arguments will fly out the window when people get tired of arguments and want to start fighting. I hope this place doesn’t become that.
This is an insulting and inappropriate response. I'm not going to engage with the rest of your comment if this is how you're going to act.
It’s fun anecdata though, that’s for sure.
The whole point of saying that it's "simpler" is for the wow factor of "obviously this is a more complicated, more detailed, game. Isn't it weird that the model for the coin is simpler despite all of that?" It's the sort of thing that would be clickbait if it were in a news article. The point of being "pedantic" is to point out that the clickbaity implication is inaccurate. Of course it's simpler, if the complexity is moved to the other parts of the model.