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[MrBogosity]

I find it fantastic that they aren't using IK in games since it's been in 3D modelling software for something like 20 years now.

Before that, you had to use a hierarchical model. So, you move your shoulder, and your arm moves with it, and your hand moves with the arm, and your fingers move with the hand. You could do that. What you COULDN'T do is something like, put a heavy bowling ball on the figure's hand and have it weigh the hand down--the hand would move down but not move the arm with it, because the hierarchy didn't work that way. The arm would move the hand, but the hand wouldn't move the arm.

IK itself doesn't really add much more in terms of computation. It must be something about the physics engines.

[evensgrey]

I have a suspicion that IK isn't in game engines mostly because of inertia.  If you look at the taxonomy of game engines, most of them have at least 20 years of history to them and haven't had it ever, while the game developers have attained great skill in producing the pre-rendered animations you need to do to use without it.

Now, SMALL shops could really benefit from not having to produce those pre-rendered animations since they take a lot of time and skill.  It would also make it easier to have more playable characters in games with elaborate character animations like in the Assassin's Creed games (where they've run out of time and money without all the playable characters they would have liked).

[AdeptusHereticus]

Even if computation was this big of a problem, it wouldn't be that relevant I think because we are at a time where we can afford to over use the same graphics engine for as long as we need, because they are good enough to serve as interface for realistic physics, and have been for a long time. The complexity of the models and the fidelity of the texture work is at that stage. In my ideal world, we would already be going toward more expensive CPUs and less expensive GPUs because of the use of "old" graphics engine, favoring multi CPU over multi GPU (Yeah you can buy a lot of cores, but what about a lot of CPUs with a lot of cores ?^^) for huge and very detailed drawing distance and for complex interactions between huge numbers of seemingly free agents in addition to advanced physics.

If there is too much inertia in the video game development industry to allow for that evolution at the moment, it might be overshadowed by the inertia in consumers habits, because I don't hear a lot of them asking for that kind of depth in games ...

[Travis Retriever]

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."--The signature of in10city, from the bodybuilding.com forums.

[Travis Retriever]

[Ibrahim90]

[R.E.H.W.R.]

[Dallas Wildman]

Even the Department of Defense the Military recognizes the value of strong encryption:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150703/14441931535/dept-defense-defends-strong-encryption-while-impetuous-child-nsa-continues-to-lament-coming-darkness.shtml

[AnCap Dave]

[evensgrey]

Even the Department of Defense the Military recognizes the value of strong encryption:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150703/14441931535/dept-defense-defends-strong-encryption-while-impetuous-child-nsa-continues-to-lament-coming-darkness.shtml

It's so irritating that the NSA is no longer willing to look at the consequences of preventing security.  They've done some pretty good work in the past (the SE part of SELinux originally came out of the NSA, for example), but now they just don't want to know.  They're busily setting themselves up for exactly the same fiasco the Stazi had of gathering too much intel to analyze, leading to anything they do find that they actually care about being blind chance.  No doubt they think that the kind of data mining that private industry routinely does with Big Data will solve the problem, but there's no real chance of that.  Data mining is pretty dependent on knowing what the info you want looks like to begin with.  You can pull out any sort of data association you want, but it can't tell you anything useful unless you picked it for a meaningful reason.

[AnCap Dave]

[MrBogosity]

Smackdown!!!

[AdeptusHereticus]

Smackdown!!!

Ah ah, that was good.

Did the decision really describe the right to marry as a fundamental right though ? What does that mean ? In my understanding, any fundamental right is a right that authorities cannot infringe, but that's not what the decision on gay marriage entails. The implication here are that the civil union validated by the governement is now opened to gays. Saying that marriage is a fundamental right would mean that anyone can make a ceremony out of the union of two people, which was already possible for gays in reality. What they gained is the possibility to benefit from special advantages from the governement that were refused to them before.

[Travis Retriever]

Smackdown!!!

*Standing ovation!*

[Dallas Wildman]

*Standing ovation!*

Holy crap it's Bill Whittle's liberal counterpart!