I do this in a more crude fashion (like the article mentions) on the GPU in an old personal project.
I just run a low-res (256x256) pre-pass and store the distances to a floating point texture. I then use that pre-pass texture as the starting point (minus some delta) when drawing full-screen. This makes it really nice and performant, even for complex SDF shapes.
I think a common misconception in GPU programming is that branching is slow. It is only really slow when neighboring fragments diverges on those logic branches.
The quick pre-pass step gets close enough to the SDF surface that more fragments are in lockstep with each other and terminates at the same time, eliminating the expensive re-runs the GPU driver has to do. More experimentation is needed on my end. I do this in the browser with WebGL so accurate profiling is sometimes difficult.
I experimented with different resolutions and number of pre-pass steps but found it was sufficient on most GPU's with a single prepass run (subject to change the more I test).
Whenever plugging a hole like this, the OS should kinda leave it “open” as a kind of honeypot and immediately show a warning to the user that some exploit was attempted. Granted, the malware will quickly adapt but you should at least give some users (like journalists or politicians) the insanely important information about them being targeted by some malicious group.
Wouldn't it make sense if the content of it could be auto-generated as well for the users' locale directly with no need for JS?
Either as a date in the example "4 days ago" or "in 2 days, 2 hours and 28 seconds" for future events. This requires some control for granularity to control for how precise you want it to be and what to omit.
"a few seconds ago", "3 seconds ago", "less than a minute ago".
Should support a shortform that can act as a countdown timer "00:00:56" or "00:56".
I think OpenStreeMap could benefit immensely from investing a bit in making self-hosted versions more approachable and on more platforms, especially now that vector-tiles are becoming increasingly used.
I would love to quickly install a small subset of the planet (say my home city or country) on a cheap webhost with a simple LAMP stack. Then have the map just use that server whenever it fits within the bounds of my subsets and then possibly fallback to other or the public servers if requesting data from outside.
Routing also seems like something that could technically be done (albeit less efficient than dedicated C++ implementations) on cheap servers but I guess it would require more work.
Rolling out map updates for all these self-hosted instances is a bit of another problem but I'm sure it can be done.
The game doesn't really explain that too well. You have to go find the packages first before you can deliver it. For example the old lady asks you to deliver an offering at a temple.
Teaching gameplay without an overt tutorial is a difficult skill, maybe this dev can pull it off? It's hard to get into the "new player" headspace without feedback from actual playtesters.
After clicking through the first popups with the player's inner monologue, I fully expected some help text like "Use W S A D to move" to pop up.
I had no real reason for that expectation, except this is how several games I played in recent years handled it - which made me realize now, that explaining gameplay to new players is something that's actively evolving. There may not be a rulebook, but there are clear trends.
He did not pull it off. You can't click on things, there are no "you can't do this yet" signs if you get to the temple without a package, there is no "following your nose at the start leads to your first quest". Utterly inscrutable.
That's part of the charm, in my opinion. It encourages just trying things out and learning on the fly. With such low stakes, I think it was a great way to go.
In Denmark you can. I was in my mid thirties when I went to my doctor to ask them to prescribe it. Before each shot I would go to the pharmacy and buy one dose and go to the doctor to have them administer it for me (if I wanted to). At that time I think it was free for teenage girls, now it's free for teenage boys as well.
The evolution of who gets HPV vaccines is really interesting. At first it was young women, as vaccinating young men had a very marginal decrease in cervical cancer rates via indirect protection (which itself is a function of how many young women are vaccinated). Then as HPV infection was linked to more cancers, vaccinating young men crossed the cost-effectiveness thresholds many governments use.
Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.
Seriously. My memories of this vaccine are so foggy because I distinctly remember being told "its not effective for men" and that it would be an expensive out of pocket cost. Yet, the whole point would always have been to prevent the spread.
it's not just the cost of the vaccine roll-out though, you need test on your target demo and since these are healthy people the bar is very high. If the demographic (like males over 45) shows very little involvement in the infection vectors then testing might fail the cost-effectiveness, not the delivery of the vaccine.
BGFX (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) uses a different approach. You basically write your shader in a GLSL-like language but it's all just (either very clever or very horrible) macro expansions that handles all the platform differences.
With that you get a very performant backend for OpenGL, WebGL, Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D 11 and 12 and Playstation. It's shader compiler program basically does minimal source level transformations before handing it over to the platforms' own shader compiler if available.
I just run a low-res (256x256) pre-pass and store the distances to a floating point texture. I then use that pre-pass texture as the starting point (minus some delta) when drawing full-screen. This makes it really nice and performant, even for complex SDF shapes.
I think a common misconception in GPU programming is that branching is slow. It is only really slow when neighboring fragments diverges on those logic branches.
The quick pre-pass step gets close enough to the SDF surface that more fragments are in lockstep with each other and terminates at the same time, eliminating the expensive re-runs the GPU driver has to do. More experimentation is needed on my end. I do this in the browser with WebGL so accurate profiling is sometimes difficult.
I experimented with different resolutions and number of pre-pass steps but found it was sufficient on most GPU's with a single prepass run (subject to change the more I test).