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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I only know this because I recently started doing some game development (as opposed to just being a gamer for 30 years); Shaders are little programs that run directly on your graphics card. They’re all over the place in games, doing stuff like making objects glow, morphing/transforming objects, and in 3D games, they’re also doing a lot of the work of lighting effects and details that you would want to see in order to actually see the game’s final product. When you start a game it will (either in the foreground or background) compile (build for your computer) all of the shaders designed in the game, but I guess this needs to happen on each computer. If they re-coded some of the shaders in the game to be more efficient/use fewer resources and ultimately make the game run faster, the ones in the previous release would need to be completely recompiled.

    (I’m sure someone will be along to correct any inaccuracies in that.)

    What I think is odd though is that game companies are throwing that around like anyone has any idea what they’re talking about though.


  • This doesn’t super solve your immediate problem, but it might help you keep progress on your game:

    Remember — it’s a game. Maybe yes, you could calculate the area of the polygon you drew, and then you’d have it working like that for good. But then what happens if you want to fudge a number, like the area calculates that 2 troops can fit in France but for balance you really want 3? At that point you’re going to need to fudge the calculation, add another factor or redraw your polygon (the latter which might not be possible).

    An alternative way to solve this is you can look up on wikipedia the different areas of these countries. You can assign a factor for each one (like Risk does) based on various factors - area, population, etc, but ultimately balance, that allows you to set whatever you want on each country. Not that the math isn’t exciting, but you’re probably going to end up doing this anyway after you figure the math out.