As an amateur computer graphics person, the best way to draw accurate stars is to just pre render it onto a cubemap. But if you really need that subpixel worth of parallax to be completely accurate for every star, there are a couple ways I can think of off of the top of my head. With any you’d want to make sure you only store position, size, and color, since stars are all spheres anyways. With effort, you can be very flexible with how these are stored. (4 bits color temperature, 4 bits size, 3*32 bits coordinates maybe)

• splat each star into the screen texture with atomics
• some sort of tiled software rasterization thing, like in Gaussian Splatting

Worse ideas:

• instanced hardware rasterization
• ray tracing

This is not that well suited to most usual rendering techniques, because most stars are probably going to be much smaller than a pixel. Ray tracing would mean you need to just hit every star by chance (or artificially increase star size and then deal with having tons of transparency), hardware rasterization is basically the same and additionally is inefficient with small triangles. I guess you could just live with only hitting stars by chance and throw TAA at it, there’s enough stars that it doesn’t matter if you miss some. That would react badly to parallax though and defeats the purpose of rendering every star in the first place.

It’s much more efficient to do a manual splatting thing, where for each star you look at what pixel(s) it will be in. You can also group stars together to cull out of view stars more efficiently. Subpixel occlusion will be wrong, but it probably doesn’t matter.

This is all just for the viewport, though. Presumably there are other objects in the game besides stars, which need to have reflections on them of the stars. Then that becomes an entirely different problem.

The real answer though is that you wouldn’t try to render all of the stars, even if you want parallax. Maybe some of the closer and larger ones as actual geometry, simplify a ton of stuff in the background, render things as volumes or 2d billboards, have a cubemap for the far distance, etc

Edit: also ofc this presumes you know the position, scale, temperature of every star

I also like the idea of baking all of the stars into a volume in spherical coordinates, centered around the origin

If it doesn’t come with the 3d printer, a pair of flush cutters is insanely useful. Just be careful with them, especially if you have a cheap pair. Probably wear eye protection.

If you think you would find them useful, there are also filaments at different levels of softness, bounciness, and foaming variants of those. Particularly useful for the soft ones as you can get different levels of softness by changing printing temperature. For any it helps to decrease weight.

For 3D modeling software, Fusion is good but annoying to obtain, Onshape is good but has a non-commercial license for the free version (and makes all of your files public), Freecad is FOSS, decent but not quite as good, Blender is good for detailed or sculpted things that are more art-y (although it’s often very difficult to achieve certain shapes that are easy in actual CAD software)

My modelling advice is to keep in mind where supports will go, what places can be bridged, what details the printer can achieve, what axis the vertical should go on (for strength)

Did a teeny bit of googling and it I’ve seen a few people saying PVP washes a little bit easier but it sounds like pretty much any composition is fine, for PLA at least

blame the Normans

Might make sense to just have the motor at the bottom of the drill, then you just need to supply power and coolant down. Need to anchor into something though so it actually does anything and doesn’t just spin the cables

mostly the part 4, its just very… inspirational? maybe not the right word but idk how to describe

wow that’s a lot more than i would have thought

Isn’t that like half of cars nowadays?

https://xkcd.com/264/

It’s clear that several people in charge of the youtube livestream have no idea about how to do that correctly. I think the difference is just effort. Viewership was tiny compared to Apollo 11, as was the hype leading up to it. It’s clear that NASA could provide a whole lot better footage if even some random youtuber (Everyday Astronaut) can beat them. So that aspect is, as you said, because as a society we don’t really care about the Artemis launch. SpaceX does put a fair amount of effort into their livestreams, and you can easily tell by watching them.

For the recorded footage, film often has a lot higher dynamic range than digital cameras and usually looks a whole lot better when recording a launch up close.

Far shots are limited by atmospheric distortion and physical limits from diffraction for a given aperture size. None of that can change.

IDK anything about the quality of the original live broadcast of Apollo 11, so i don’t have anything to compare in that regard

Originally, the president did have basically no power. The whole federal government wasn’t supposed to do that much, and the executive branch by itself was supposed to do almost nothing compared to today. They didn’t even think there would be a standing army. States not being willing to put in strong reforms by themselves led to more executive agencies and executive branch influence over the country. (Which is all controlled by the President, since that made sense for the things that they thought in the 1790s the executive branch would be doing.)

The whole system was made around an idea of who would do what, which has turned out to be completely different after 250 years. It’s not really surprising that it isn’t working very well.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. To even get a sane and effective Congress, we need voters to be aware of the real world, which seems like the largest hurdle right now. In the past, large and effective reforms have mostly been lead and advertised by the President, although it’s possible that with better voting systems and less presidential power parties would be able to cohere behind consistent and strong visions. Conservative think tanks seem to be able to do that currently, but they’re very quiet about it and I don’t know of a progressive equivalent.

Compared to most other countries at the time, it was very democratic.

Yeah, I rewatched the launch from Everyday Astronaut’s livestream and he actually had better footage, he had a tracking camera showing the booster separation

Outside of the launch part, I think it’s mostly because SpaceX has set the standard so high, with tons of high resolution cameras streaming over Starlink even during reentry

it’s a reference to this xkcd

edit: as an april fools thing probably

Still very fond of WBOR from when I was following the Internet Roadtrip

I learned the other day that something can be dubitable but you can’t dubit something. Very sad

yeah, I watched the original video and it’s definitely not in a finished state at the moment, or else they would have actually shown a clip of it working

Yes, but at a set number of iterations, scaling the object will cause volume to grow faster proportionally than surface area.

It’s probably because of the reflection from the front pane of glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-surface_mirror

I think with the straight/gay labels, you’re not going to be not attracted to someone just because they say that they’re a guy or girl. So really there’s just some appearances that you find attractive, and some not. For most people, those line up pretty well with femininity and masculinity, with maybe a few other restrictions on top. Any label is going to be a simplification, you can’t describe with one word the whole range of people you are attracted to.