A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'
A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'
Ken Birdwell was all about "getting the lighting right."
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/34328210
For those who just wanna know: cards at the time performed math on brightness values assuming a linear brightness scale when it should be logarithmic.
....ish
The maths was right, except it was all being done on colour values than already had the CRTs response curve baked into them. You may have heard of "gamma correction". Well, this is when you correct an images colour values for the display you'll view it on.
Blending before gamma correction and after gamma correction produce very different results. The cards were doing it after. This story is about doing it before.
Paul Debevec had similar observations around the same time. His work at the time was all about HDRI and that was put into Source a few years later.
When the HL2 documentary came out, someone said "all these gaming news sites will have contant for months" and they were absolutely right
I do this to my silicon vendor. I apparently made some people's lives very uncomfortable for a good while this past year after I decompiled some of their binary blobs.
That moment when there's one company with which you'd almost be OK if they turned into a monopoly (still no, though).
Valve is that perfect example of being just shitty enough to be annoying without stepping over the line into complete enshittification. But this too will happen. I reckon there'd be good odds of it happening not long after Gabe retires.
That's my main worry, and why I'd never want a monopoly of any sort with contemporary hierarchical structures.
If they ever go public then yes, enshittification is guaranteed. As long as they remain a privately held company, there's a chance they can hold the enshittification at bay.
Everyone's saying RGB is the problem, but what's the alternative? CMYK?
The way I read about it they were merely talking about out gamma correction. Or HDR—>SDR mapping - I wouldn’t say the article is super clear.
Allow me to introduce you to the perceptually uniform color spaces, CIELAB, CIELUV and HSLuv, something I needed for a project I was working on a few years ago:
https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/perceptually-uniform-color-spaces/
That explains why Doom 3's shading looked so bad
Mhm yes, is this going to fuck up older games?
Wasn't their shading the whole selling point?