#i don't know why their 3d renders are so aggressive

[twewytransswag]

Semi-Finals Round, Match 2

[powdermelonkeg]

Video games tend to do this thing called "culling," where they don't render things that aren't in use. In Breath of the Wild, there's no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he's all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.

This is good.

Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.

The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.

You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.

We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.

So what gives?

This is the ocean.

It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.

THIS IS THE OCEAN.

IT IS NOT CULLED.

Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.

Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.

No.

Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:

This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.

Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.

More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.

They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.

In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.

They did not get this memo.

You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"

AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!

Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.

Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."

That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.

Look at Earth. Look at the Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal), which Paldea is supposed to mimic.

I overlaid the peninsula over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.

If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:

HI. WHY IS THIS A THING.

The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:

I will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company stops being a coward and gives us a canon planet size.

IMPORTANT EDITS This is here to answer questions and clarify things.

I am not saying that Paldea as the game makes it is geographically the size of the Iberian Peninsula. This was originally a worldbuilding theory I thought was maybe going to get 30 notes (hence "we now know the size of the Pokémon world"). I'm saying that since the game is representing the Iberian Peninsula and expects us to take it as such (just like Sinnoh = Hokkaido, Kalos = France, etc, backed up by the anime making cities actually look like cities instead of ten houses and a shop) that this is the logical conclusion of it. Switch is rendering Spain and Portugal, Switch is therefore rendering gigantic sun, and I am being petty towards the end and saying "if we're playing it this way, fine, here you go." There's a few ways you can measure a game's dimensions for worldbuilding purposes ft @el-smacko

That being said, these are the measurements if we take it as 1:1 with the peninsula ft @evilscientist3

These are the measurements if we take it to be its actual size as-is-shown in game, making the skysphere still 4x larger than the EARTH ft @valeriaasteria

This includes an error I made in explanation—the sphere ISN'T the skydome, the skydome is STILL above this

And this is a video where someone breaks out of bounds to view this whole thing

Edit 2

A lot of people have been quoting that the sphere and water wouldn’t have any effect. A lot of people have also been saying they definitely would. Both sides have programmers supporting it in the notes, including people who have worked on skyboxes (still assuming this counts at least similarly to one).

I am not a programmer. However, I do fall out of bounds in places on purpose often, and if you do that and leave it running, your character gets very wobbly until it eventually looks like a barcode because the switch can’t do math that high. The main reasons I personally think gigantic sphere = low performance is 1: constant lighting updates to something so large (screenshot DOES display a shadow), and 2: being forced to keep those coordinates stable in all directions, on all coordinate points, at all times without the sky turning into a stripey mess.

Edit 3

A possible explanation ft @sunspotpony!

And a video on how to launch yourself into Pokéspace (which I intend to attempt, and will update this with results when I do)

Fun fact: We know the size of the Pokémon world because Scarlet and Violet has framerate issues

[saguusa]

Let's not forget that there's been a massive push for Accessibility recently, and when democrats retake the government, that push will be renewed (probably by Congressperson Ro Khanna).

Open source code does not have the bandwidge to reformat everything to meet accessibility standards unless it's something like a library or framework used for commercial applications.

The only open source software that works, and works well, is software that is built for corporations and not for you. You know why? WinRAR is why! Who purchased that license? Sure it's nagware, but people need to make a living. It's unreliable to rely on that income. There are also modders, do you know how little modders make from their donate button? Next to nothing for hundreds of hours they may put into a mod.

They don't have the bandwidth to make updates like that if they want to eat. The best and most common open source code are things that have commercial applications because everyone that works on it, is actually already paid by another source, and if they work on that open source library they can use these systems to benefit their job.

The only software that has bandwidth on being better are very often things like TensorFlow(AI), React(Web applications), Bootstrap(Web Layout), and OpenGL(3D stuff).

These are all forms of software that make it easy to make software that you can sell to people. You'd be surprised how free things are for development where the main things you pay for are for cloud stuff.

Most good open source software is built for developers, and if you don't know what your doing, it's literally not built for you, because you're not planning on giving back. I agree that there are some bad licenses out there. Particularly with fonts. Seriously, fuck font licenses. If you want an alternative to that software, you'll need to settle alternate software with a license you do like, or you'll have to learn an entirely new way of interacting with your computer (ha ha, talking about emacs and Vim here).

Maybe you'll get lucky and find some freeware or adware online that does the exact task you want it to. You'll be stuck to those confines though because all the software that does the cool stuff want you to buy it so people can keep updating the software.

It's funny though, because these are the cheap pieces of software that are being complained about. Like commercial grade software is super expensive. Want a good 3d renderer, yeah that'll be about a $500 license. Pretty much the cost of all these licenses combined.

Alternatives to Photoshop include:

Affinity

Procreate - iOS only (because iOS is easier to develop for)

Rebelle

Alternatives to Office 365 include

Google Docs - it's browser based so it always works

Actually Google docs will fulfill most of your need, but it's Google!

Alternatives to Steam is the Epic Store, but if you don't like the launcher. There are third party launchers.

Epic has been making an aggressive bid for publishers to move to their platform by offering them better payment models and larger cuts because it can.

I don't know these other logos.

Anyway, don't expect the good Opensource stuff to be built for you, and if you want to get open source software, be prepared to give back.

This goes doubly now that pirating? Is starting to find its steam again. Always give back.