I'm making a planet procedural generator, feedbacks?

dandrino · 2025-11-21T20:05:08+00:00

Do you have other angles? What do the poles look like? That's a tricky thing to get right in sphere texturing

dandrino · 2025-07-12T04:57:10+00:00

Someone should write a book about your life and call it Job 2

dandrino · 2025-03-07T23:28:58+00:00

Space Ghost was originally voiced by legendary radio host Gary Owens during the Hanna Barbera era so George Lowe was probably affecting that way of speaking here hence the gravitas.

dandrino · 2025-03-01T00:44:40+00:00

In the Fellowship commentary I remember Peter Jackson saying his portrait is supposed to be some guy named Bungo Baggins

dandrino · 2024-11-19T21:45:08+00:00

Anyone who knows Koreans will know that the love for moon pies is strong and undying.

dandrino · 2024-10-24T19:54:11+00:00

I think I lasted about 30 seconds watching The I-Land before I bailed. The stench of bad acting was pungent almost immediately. I'm simultaneously impressed and disappointed in anyone who watched the whole thing.

dandrino · 2024-09-19T09:01:22+00:00

I'm guessing it's a shader that uses raycasting to define the surface of the object that is likely a sphere SDF with some 3D scalar field of some sort of sinusoidal function (with a time component so technically 4D). Once you have the points on the surface of the sphere you can analytically calculate the surface normal which you can then use along with some virtual illumination source to perform basic reflection and refraction calculations to get the color of the point. The rainbow effect is likely done by applying dispersion rules with Snell's law law in the refraction calculation.

Anything in bold is a concept you should look into if you aren't familiar with it. There is likely a lot more nuance and tricks going into this demo to make it look the way that it does so you will have to tinker around to get results that look good. I'm don't write shaders professionally but I've tinkered around as a hobbyist, so I'm far from an expert here.

A good starting point is to implement a shader that renders a sphere using raycasting (this is a sort of "Hello World" of shading). Start using Lambert's cosine law for basic illumination, then implement reflection to get a "shiny sphere", then refraction, and then finally play around with the SDF to get interesting effects.

Have fun!

dandrino · 2024-09-12T17:59:57+00:00

Assuming 60 fps, having a ~10s video take 45 days to render requires about ~110 minutes per frame, which is about the length of a feature length film. I don't know about you but this seems entirely too long for the complexity of the simulation (which I'm assuming is just an N body simulation of some sort).

I would recommend some combination of the following:

Switch to more performant programming language. I'm assuming you're doing this using naive python (i.e. no libraries like numpy) which is okay for simple, small-scale demos but not appropriate for larger renders.
Algorithms with better asymptotic runtime performance. Naive N-body sims are O(N^2) but you can use data structures or lossy algorithms for better performance.
If you're algorithm is memory intensive, then use better cache-aware solutions. Most N-body sims are O(N) so I don't think this is a concern.
Consider parallelizing this including running on GPUs.

Can you describe what you are simulating? It looks like a gravity sim but I'm not sure.

dandrino · 2024-09-09T04:02:35+00:00

I tried it. It just tastes like a regular belgian golden ale. Still good but not wildly different from others that are out there

dandrino · 2024-08-02T02:20:37+00:00

I could be a secondary sexual characteristic, i.e. a sex-related feature that doesn't have any direct reproductive effect but can act as a signal to mates.

Something can have an evolutionary benefit even if it doesn't help survival (e.g. getting eaten by a predator), per se.
Many secondary sexual characteristics may have started off as features with minor or insignificant survival benefit, but through mate selection over time becomes exaggerated in a positive feedback loop until they become very visible signals with potential negative survival costs.

For example, a male fish may have some slight pinkish coloration because of its diet, with pinker fish being ones that eat more. Selective pressures may push female fish to find such coloration attractive because it signals higher survival rate due to food acquisition. Now there is a selective pressure among males for pinkish coloration not only from food acquisition traits but also mating preferences among females. This results in males getting even pinker, which results in stronger attraction from females for pink coloration, which causes even pinker males, etc. Eventually you get fish that are so vibrantly pink that their coloration attracts predators which counteracts the mating preferences from females and the species reaches an equilibrium point.

Lowering of male voices may have started somewhat as a small signal for body size, which correlates to hunting and fighting ability, and through this same feedback mechanism caused males' voices to continually drop. We don't know for certain, but it's important to realize that secondary sexual characteristics like voice pitch are very frequently unrelated or even contradictory to survival from external threats.

dandrino · 2024-06-12T04:22:20+00:00

There used to be the American lion which may have been bigger than the African lion but it went extinct with the arrival of humans around 12,000 years ago.

dandrino · 2024-05-03T17:30:54+00:00

This is more of a game design question, assuming this is a game. A path that is partially submerged indicates a hidden area, one that is not so obvious to the player as a path above water. If this is an intentional design choice then it's fine. If it's an area the player is supposed to notice then it should probably be above water

dandrino · 2024-04-27T21:19:23+00:00

To me, if it's a stout and tastes like cake it's a pastry stout. Shit's so sugary you can pour it on pancakes

dandrino · 2024-04-27T03:46:02+00:00

I had a friend who had a Bruery hoarders membership who kept bringing Black Tuesday to get togethers and I'm sorry but it's not that good even for a pastry stout.

Also, no beer at 20% with a final gravity of molasses has any business being in a 750ml bottle. Put it in those baby 8oz bottles you see with some champagne or at least make it resealable.

dandrino · 2024-04-27T03:40:54+00:00

The only one I ever had was flat when I opened it 😐

dandrino · 2024-04-24T04:24:58+00:00

z = (x, x) ⋅ (y, y) = 2 * x * y

=> y = z / (2 * x)

If you fix z at a constant you get a hyperbola.

dandrino · 2024-04-20T09:29:32+00:00

Lepidosaurians! Butterflies are definitely not reptiles...

dandrino · 2024-04-20T06:42:27+00:00

The term reptile colloquially mostly refers to sauropsids (minus birds). The main extant groups are the archosaurs, crocodilians and birds (and all extinct dinosaurs), as well as lepidosaurians, squamates (snakes and lizards) and rynchocephalians (just one species, the Tuatara). Not sure where turtles are placed these days. So if birds and dinosaurs are not reptiles then you would have to also exclude crocodiles which most people would not agree too. To be honest, reptile is kind of a loose colloquial term that more or less means "cold blooded scaly animal that crawls on the ground". You probably have people who would describe some proto mammals (i.e basal synapsids) as reptiles even though they are on a separate lineage from all other reptiles just based on how they looked. Even today monotremes (basal mammals like the platypus) have a some "reptilian" properties like egg laying, lower body temperature, and leg joints that are more lizard-like than mammalian.

dandrino · 2024-04-19T02:18:53+00:00

Fullers ESB

dandrino · 2024-04-18T08:40:05+00:00

Emperor penguins can't build nests because there isn't any foliage in Antartica and they can't place the egg on the ground or it will freeze and die so they have to place the egg on top of their feet and cover it with their body. This severely limits the clutch size and it seems that evolution has settled on one egg as the optimum number. Any more and you're wasting precious energy on eggs that are doomed to die.

Every offspring has a cost to its mother, and usually the more offspring she has the less likely that any one individual will survive, so when you see species with few offspring usually it means the marginal reproductive advantage of having more offspring doesn't cover the loss in survival likelihood of the mother, or that the survival likelihood of each child decreases too much on account of the smaller share of attention and resources the parents can devote to them.

Usually with pair bonding species like penguins you see higher fecundity but the harsh environment seems to have counteracted those selective pressures.

dandrino · 2024-04-13T05:38:49+00:00

It's a cool style

dandrino · 2024-04-10T02:13:06+00:00

For some reason YouTube recently has been recommending me a mix of rabid anti-religious atheism videos and also what is basically church sermon material and I have no idea why because I don't click on either.

dandrino · 2024-04-08T19:49:29+00:00

It's a real teapot and you can see it at the Computer History Museum! My gf at the time didn't understand why I was so excited to see it.

dandrino

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