I was at a coffee shop once that was playing metal while my writing group was meeting there and I just thought they had excellent taste (it was not near closing time)
His SDF probably puts out a depth buffer, so with some effort (shadows might be hard?) you can just mix it with traditional polygons. The same way raytracing and polygons mix in AAA games.
He's using the SDFs to fill a space sort of like Unreal's Nanite virtual geometry. Nanite also doesn't support general animation. They only recently added support for foliage. So you'd use SDF / Nanite for your "infinite detail" / kit-bashing individual pebbles all the way to the horizon, and then draw polygon characters and props on top of that.
In fact I was surprised to see that Nanite flipped from triangle supremacy to using voxels in their new foliage tech. So maybe the two technologies will converge. The guy who did the initial research for Nanite (his talk also cites Dreams ofc) said that voxels weren't practical. But I guess they hit the limits of what they can do with pixel-sized triangles.
Right, you don't just "good person" yourself into billions of dollars. There will always be a trail of people screwed over, or taken advantage of along the way. Or you can go the more modern way and externalize all the negative impacts of your business (e.g. scooter rental companies).
Diehard C programmers have Stockholm Syndrome for the language because they like to show off how they can be productive in a bad language. If they took a few months to learn C++ / Rust / C# / any language that has solved this, they'd have to admit that they staked a lot of their ego on a language that constantly makes them jump through hoops. Because they love showing that they're good hoop-jumpers.
But any noobie who's a year into programming will say "Oh cool, in those languages I don't have null pointer exceptions" and never learn C. Good!
If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “you just need a different mindset” and “you just to be better at C” as an excuse as to why “we don’t need rust”, it’s always been from the same people who have CVEs against their own C code failing to do exactly what at they say they could never do in real C code
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