That mushroom was load-bearing!

If you also named a project, you solved both hard problems.

Lucille: “I don’t care for Tetris.bas.”

Software path-tracing has been on my bucket list, mostly to test a concept: physically based instant radiosity. If an eye-ray goes camera, A, B, C, then the light C->B forms an anisotropic point source. The material at B scatters light from C directly into onscreen geometry. This allows cheating akin to photon mapping, where you assume nearby pixels are also visible to B. Low-frequency lighting should look decent at much less than one sample per pixel.

I made an FPS on NES.

It doesn’t use any mappers or added chips. There’s quicksaves, a level editor. jump-in two-player co-op, and SNES mouse support.

I have not been arsed to add music.

All both of them?

Or like a hundred million?

Sony pulls this shit with every new Playstation, through the ingenious and difficult process of not making enough. “PS3 sold out at launch! New shipment sold out again! And again!” Meanwhile they’d moved fewer total units than the 360 in the same timeframe, but Microsoft made one big shipment instead of three small ones.

I guarantee you’ve been unironically smug about “only a sith deals in absolutes.”

Fuck software patents.

Copyright made sense when it was a decade or two. Industrial patents seem basically functional. Trademark’s mostly truth-in-advertising for consumer choice.

But software patents aren’t about how you do something - they’re claiming the entire concept, in the broadest possible terms, and killing it. Straight-up murdering that potential. It is denied the necessary iterative competition that turns dogshit first implementations into must-have features. Nobody’s gonna care in twenty years.

Entire hardware form-factors have come and gone in a single decade. Can you imagine if swipe keyboards were still single-vendor, and still worked like in 2009? Or maybe Apple bought them, and endlessly bragged about how Android can’t do [blank], because fifty thousand dollars changed hands in the 3G era.

How many games would not exist, if Nintendo had decided they own sidescrollers? A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says those mechanics are theft.

Holding out hope for that GBA port.

Mask on, mask off.

And in fairness, common things can still be a tell of some kind. The first time I saw a normal webpage rendered in Computer Modern was friggin’ surreal.

Again – two dashes will do it. Click the document icon below this comment.

Y’all need to relax about a punctuation mark that Markdown does when you hit dash twice.

LLMs didn’t invent the em dash. It appears in the chatbot because it appeared in normal text.

If you don’t think code is art, we are about to have a screaming row.

Ban the entire business model.

Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money.

This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.

Elsewhere in these comments, someone did suggest generative AI, and frankly, yeah. Using a program to apply a particular art style to a zillion glyphs would be down right commendable, prior to ChatGPT.

I have officially lost the plot on what’s happening here.

Kanji has over two thousand typical characters. Feel free to contribute several to open-source fonts.

Ah, so you’re just saying words recreationally. There’s glory for you. What does art have to do with effort, or talent?

Fonts are protected works and you seem to understand why - but dismissively pretend an artsy font would be exceptional and distinct, instead of being as protected as any other illustration of the alphabet. None of them somehow own… the alphabet. Just the illustrations. Like any illustration. Even little Billy’s shitty Sonic OC has some copyright protections. He can’t slap his drawing of Blonic into a video game, but neither can Sega.

Consider Futura.

You have seen this font a million times and probably thought about it precisely never. It’s aggressively plain. But its development is a microcosm of early 20th-century art history, philosophy, and politics, to the point it was treated as degenerate by the actual goddamn Nazis, and then later adopted by them anyway. These boring-ass letters were innovative. This one sans-serif font has a five thousand word Wikipedia article. That’s not a complicated joke, and it’s only partially ingroup fart-sniffing. This is an element of culture you interact with every goddamn day. You’re doing it right now. Immense work has gone into designing and rendering whichever generic sans-serif you’re reading this in.

Yet even if it was still mono-spaced Codepage 437 in green on black, somebody had to draw all those pixels. Somebody decided it needed not one but two smiley faces. And it’s protected to the same extent as the BIOS code, one ROM chip over, for all the same reasons. It is an artifact of human labor, under practical constraints, for specific expressive purposes. It can’t not be.

I’ve done some Game Boy games. One has a custom font. I just winged it. It’s not important. But why would you expect those graphics to be any less protected than all the other sprites I drew?