Lichtso (u/Lichtso) - Readit News

Lichtso commented on Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language elbowgreasegames.substack... · Posted by u/spacemarine1

voidUpdate · 9 days ago

It always mildly annoys me when a game says that it is all voxels, but clearly isn't, since the little cubes easily move off the voxel grid. Its just geometry moving around, like normal games, but modelled in little cubes, instead of being fully restricted to voxels. I would really like to see a fully voxel game, where all geometry is "rendered" to voxel space before being rendered to the screen, so that everything is just cubes that don't move, just change colour

Lichtso · 9 days ago

John Lin used to work on such an engine where all voxels stay axis and grid aligned, even in animations:

https://x.com/ProgrammerLin/status/1342786223811698688 https://voxely.net/blog/

But I think the project was abandoned in 2021.

Lichtso commented on Turn Dependabot off words.filippo.io/dependab... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

staticassertion · 21 days ago

TBH I Think that DoS needs to stop being considered a vulnerability. It's an availability concern, and availability, despite being a part of CIA, is really more of a principle for security rather than the domain of security. In practice, availability is far better categorized as an operational or engineering concern than a security concern and it does far, far more harm to categorize DoS as a security conern than it does to help.

It's just a silly historical artifact that we treat DoS as special, imo.

Lichtso · 20 days ago

> I Think that DoS needs to stop being considered a vulnerability

Strongly disagree. While it might not matter much in some / even many domains, it absolutely can be mission critical. Examples are: Guidance and control systems in vehicles and airplanes, industrial processes which need to run uninterrupted, critical infrastructure and medicine / health care.

Lichtso commented on Art of Roads in Games sandboxspirit.com/blog/ar... · Posted by u/linolevan

Ef996 · a month ago

Thanks for references! I initially considered bevy for this but I was a bit scared it was not mature enough. How do you find it now?

Lichtso · a month ago

Really depends: In some areas it is quite advanced (rendering) and in others it is lacking / underdeveloped (editors / tooling). But there is an incredible amount of progress and also churn in keeping up with that.

https://thisweekinbevy.com/https://bevy.org/news/

Lichtso commented on Art of Roads in Games sandboxspirit.com/blog/ar... · Posted by u/linolevan

Ef996 · a month ago

Hello, I am the creator of this road system. The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it. lol. Maybe an asset or a game (a bit scared to jump in a full fledge game to be honest).

I am a fun of Junxions my self which follow closely. But the approach in my system if very different. Junxions creator uses the same kind of node base/bezier shapes paradigm where intersections happen as node graphs and not automatically as collisions between road segments. It's hard to explain but I am planning to dive into more details on why those two approaches are different in my next blog deep dive.

Lichtso · a month ago

> The thing is that I myself don't even know what I want to do with it.

Embrace the next challenge: Instead of roads on parabolic (Euclidean) geometry, have roads on elliptic (non-Euclidean) geometry, like the surface of a sphere. Plus, on a sphere every line is already a circular arc anyway (no matter if straight or bent, the difference is just the center, radius and normals). Thus, this system of circular arc segments really lends itself to such a space.

Little prince style micro planets with their own miniature infrastructure will always have a special place in my heart. Half a year ago I started with laying out the basics https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_ellipsoid_billboard https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid but got distracted by fixing some engine bugs in Bevy along the way. That reminds me I have to update to the newest engine version ...

anyway you can find some of the roads on spheres stuff here: https://github.com/Lichtso/bevy_geodesic_grid/blob/main/src/... it can not only generate the extrusion mesh but also calculate how the mesh overlaps with a geodesic grid of triangular tiles on the surface.

Lichtso commented on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013) quantamagazine.org/in-mys... · Posted by u/kerim-ca

Lichtso · a month ago

Another point in case: Life only exists in liquids, not in solids (too much structure) and not in gases (too much chaos).

In fact one could argue that this is a definition of an interesting system: It has to strike a balance between being completely ordered (which is boring) and being completely random (which is also boring).

Lichtso commented on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3tts-... · Posted by u/Palmik

rahimnathwani · 2 months ago

Has anyone successfully run this on a Mac? The installation instructions appear to assume an NVIDIA GPU (CUDA, FlashAttention), and I’m not sure whether it works with PyTorch’s Metal/MPS backend.

Lichtso · 2 months ago

Yes, using mlx-audio. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726440

Lichtso commented on Vector graphics on GPU gasiulis.name/vector-grap... · Posted by u/gsf_emergency_6

Lichtso · 2 months ago

> but [analytic anti-aliasing (aaa)] also has much better quality than what can be practically achieved with supersampling

What this statement is missing is that aaa coverage is immediately resolved, while msaa coverage is resolved later in a separate step with extra data being buffered in between. This is important because msaa is unbiased while aaa is biased towards too much coverage once two paths partially cover the same pixel. In other words aaa becomes incorrect once you draw overlapping or self-intersecting paths.

Think about drawing the same path over and over at the same place: aaa will become darker with every iteration, msaa is idempotent and will not change further after the first iteration.

Unfortunately, this is a little known fact even in the exquisite circles of 2D vector graphics people, often presenting aaa as the silver bullet, which it is not.

Lichtso commented on Genergo: Propellantless space-propulsion system satcom.digital/news/gener... · Posted by u/maremmano

Lichtso · 4 months ago

For everybody claiming that locomotion without the impulse of a reaction mass is impossible: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09740v2

and before anybody only reads "spacetime curvature" and thinks the paper is talking about a warp drive, it is not.

Anyway, this Genergo thingy seems to be nonsense IMO, or they would have actually explained how it works.

Lichtso commented on Game design is simple raphkoster.com/2025/11/03... · Posted by u/vrnvu

EdwardDiego · 4 months ago

> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.

Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.

Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.

I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.

I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"

Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."

It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"

Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.

Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.

But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.

That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.

Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.

Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.

Lichtso · 4 months ago

> I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.

Rimworld and The Sims. Both are procedural story writers.

> I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices

I agree: All these AAA titles essentially are movies where you get tons of "agency" in choices which are irrelevant to the story, but the main plot is hard scripted into a few predetermined paths.

Until we have full generative AI as game engine the only alternative remains the procedural approach mentioned in the beginning.

Lichtso commented on Replacement.ai replacement.ai... · Posted by u/wh313

sumeno · 5 months ago

Computers are not alive

Lichtso · 5 months ago

Not yet, I agree, but who is to say they couldn't?

Limiting life to cell based biology is a somewhat lousy definition by the only example we know. I prefer the generalized definition in "What is Life?" by Erwin Schrödinger which currently draws the same line (at cellular biology) but could accommodate other forms of life too.