Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 104

@rsolva In this case, SPDIF is the wrong signal type. To do 5.1 over SPDIF, you need DTS, and to do DTS on Windows 10, your apps and games must support DTS. Your average motherboard sound codec won't encode it for you. My roomie has tried to get 5.1 over SPDIF working with his apps and games on two different systems, and it doesn't work for him.

In case anyone else is being bothered by a "Please update from the iOS 12 Beta" popup on an iOS phone running the latest beta: It's not just your phone: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/30/ios-12-beta-update-popup/

My roomie has two computers that he needs to connect to his Logitech 5.1 system. Using an optical cable for one computer didn't work properly, and also doesn't permit simultaneous listening.

eBay offered no relevant results for "5.1 mixer", so I'm planning a little electronics project: a board with 12 inputs, 6 outputs and 18 op amps to mix down two analog 5.1 signals into one .

This is such a common need for hard-core gamers that there really should be a shrink-wrapped product for it.

Got my 15" Mid-2015 MacBook Pro back from the repair shop. My hands are feeling happy again. I was using a 2017 model as a loaner. The keyboard was terrible and I never got used to it. It hurt my fingers to type on it because of the lack of key travel. Also, the damned things don't have any ports, so everyone has one of those bars that extend the ports, meaning that it was pointless to remove the ports in the first place. Why, Apple? Why did you do this? I bloody hate you, Johnny Ive.

@popefucker Face capture doesn't fix it either because much of it is about what happens around the eyes, and that data isn't typically captured.

@popefucker Based on how terrible it looks, my theory is that the modelers and animators who tend to work for game companies simply don't pay much attention to face movements, especially not the eyes. Maybe they don't even notice the problem. It's almost as if they are blind to it. It looks awful and I wouldn't accept it if I was making a game.

@popefucker You can do good animation with low-poly models. Character animation is relatively inexpensive in terms of computation; it's mostly a few extra matrix calculations based on joints in a skeleton, specified by keyframes, and it's minor compared to everything else that's going on in a typical high budget game.

@popefucker There's also the whole thing about video gamer self selection among people who make video games. The medium of video games will tend to attract creators who felt inspired by the video games that were on the market, but not the ones who weren't inspired, so game companies will typically have people who don't care much for animation quality. I imagine that the people who do care about that would tend to go into filmmaking instead.

@popefucker Cool character designs and rich environments are routinely prioritised over animation. I think this is forms a feedback loop. People like me, who struggle to feel immersed when the animation is poor, are eliminated from the pool of possible users, causing the demand for vivid animation to remain low. Filmmakers aim for a wider audience, so they must take such concerns into account.

@popefucker It has been done, but apparently, it's *not* such a huge selling point. Gamers *are* willing to pay for games with poor animation. The gamers I know seem more concerned with rendering quality than lively animation, so why prioritise it?

@popefucker Also, animation is more or less free. It's polygons and shaders that cost you resources. Very realistic animation is possible.

@popefucker That Tomb Raider game I talked about had a budget of $100M. By comparison, the movie Frozen had a budget of $150M. Finding Nemo's budget was $94M. You *have* noticed the trend that AAA games have roughly movie-size budgets, right?

@popefucker You know, if they just did some little things, like write a subroutine that performs automatic eye movements and blinks... Also, add some random jitter to hand movement. Pixar figured that out with Toy Story in 1997. Video game characters? Stiff as robots.

Animated CG movies have a lot of that stuff figured out; but it seems that few movie animators want to work for game companies... or perhaps game don't want to hire them...

Can anybody explain why video game human faces, even in top budget games, animate like someone gave botox to a zombie? Also, why do video game characters still have limb movements like robots? Animation quality in video games has hardly improved in 20 years. My roomie was playing the new Tomb Raider on his new gaming PC and the character animation was basically horrible.

@fraying I was just saying in another thread that if the ghosts of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot joined the site, harassment would STILL not be justified. Mob justice is not justice. It's sadism.

@visitorlizard I'm basically saying that you're horrible if you mistreat people, no matter what your opinion of them is. Under no circumstance is it fine to be toxic.

@visitorlizard Or rather, I'm saying that even if it was Hitler and not Wil Wheaton who joined, such behaviour can't be justified.

@visitorlizard I'm talking about the people who mobbed him off the site.