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fluoridationtoday at 6:15 PM1 replyview on HN

...What?

>But a CRT isn’t a camera filming the world. Its a physical device that generates an image as an output of physical process. [...] That’s not a post-process overlay or filter effect, its an entirely different mental model of what it means to draw or render an image. I think this is why I struggled when trying to bolt this onto a modern engine. The foundations between the two models is just so fundamentally different. At this point, I was already beginning to consider my options. I was half inclined to give up.

An LCD or an OLED are also not cameras. I honestly don't understand what insight this person believes they've stumbled upon.

This is also very mystifying:

>The frame is never a single instant, its a culmination of integrations over time.

Strictly speaking, a CRT doesn't understand frames. It just fires whatever intensity of electrons is indicated by an analog signal at any given time as the magnets steer the beam across the screen in whatever pattern has been designed into them. If the tube is controlled by a digital source, there will likely be some kind of framebuffer of some size somewhere on the pipeline that stores at least a full scanline, and nowadays invariably a complete frame, so a DAC can convert the values in it to the analog signal expected by the gun.

The entire article supposedly addresses the "why", but after getting to the end, I still don't understand the why. What's wrong with Unity or Unreal architecturally that this guy's engine addresses?


Replies

nazgulsenpaitoday at 6:52 PM

From my understand after reading, he's suggesting that Unreal and Unity's post processing are just applying effects to a camera/rendered frame, when what he wanted to do is simulate the CRT itself across the renderer to the frame that hits the swapchain.

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