Clearwater
@Clearwater@lemmy.world
- Comment on Microwave Intensifies 2 weeks ago:
I have tried that. I have a dish taken from a directional WiFi antenna. When placed behind the gateway, it sometimes increases speeds, sometimes hurts speeds, and sometimes does nothing. I found it a bit too inconsistent, and a bit too ugly, to be used permanently. If I had a proper mounting solution, I might have gotten it tuned just right, however at that point I would rather just buy and mount external antennas to hook into the gateway.
However my exact deployment today doesn’t actually have anything behind the gateway. That is just because for my specific case, all the towers it can reach are within a roughly 90 degree field of view. To block the bad ones, I really only need to block off a few sections of the window it’s sitting near.
- Comment on Microwave Intensifies 2 weeks ago:
I unironically do something similar to this. In my area, the only options are a dogshit local WISP, Starlink/other satellite, or (where possible) cellular.
I am one of the “lucky” people who are able to use cell for my internet, however whether it’s the cell company having a craptastic network, software/hardware bugs on the my customer equipment, or a combination of both, there is only ONE cell tower I can connect to which yields a useful connection.
All other towers result in the equipment failing to connect to the tower, connecting but failing to get an internet connection, or only yielding download speeds 5Mbit of less.
I have found that by shoving sheet metal around my ISP’s equipment, I can quite easily block off the non-functional towers and ensure they’re never connected to. I don’t think speeds are any better, but it does help with reliability.
- Comment on I require nothing more 4 weeks ago:
It even seems to have a floor that isn’t worthless! Fuck yeah!
- Comment on Stellar Blade PC launch Hits 99K+ Concurrent players, surpassing every other PlayStation-published single-player game on Steam 1 month ago:
Why not both, then?
- Comment on Anon investigates a random goth girl 5 months ago:
I don’t know you but I fucking love you.
- Comment on Valve pinch a little code from Godot for Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Team Fortress 2 5 months ago:
Reference: developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lightmap
Skipping over some details and simplifying this to (hopefully) make it something anyone can reasonably understand: For Source in particular (as other engines may do things differently), maps start out as being fully bright without shadows. Here is an image I stole off a google search showing what that looks like:
When the map is being compiled (or exported or whatever term resonates with you the best), the lights placed within the map as well (and probably sky information too) are used to determine what parts should be covered in shadow and what should be brightly lit. The result is called the lightmap. (The lightmap itself doesn’t have any texture of, say concrete. It only stores data along the lines of “this light brightness here is 50%”). By taking the texture of the surface (concrete, asphalt, stucco) and darkening / lightening it according to the lightmap, you then end up with a lit version of the map which does have shadows.
Now on to the bicubic part: To keep the size of map files down, and reduce the resources required to load it, lightmaps by default render at a resolution of one pixel per (approximately) 40 cm or roughly one pixel per 1.5 ft. This low resolution is perfectly fine since the shadow of a building or highway overpass doesn’t need to be especially detailed beyond just “it’s dark over there”. Where required, the map author can increase the resolution in the spots that require additional detail. However, there is still one problem: When rendering a frame for you to view, the low texture lightmap is “scaled up” to cover the entire surface and you don’t want pixelated shadows. The fast way of handling this is linear scaling, where to find the value of a “scaled up” pixel, you just take the values of the nearest “original pixels” and simply average them (with more weight given toward nearer “original pixels” than farther). While extremely fast, this leads to stair-stepping as shown in the top-left panel:
Bicubic is just a fancier method of finding the value of that “scaled up” value. It’s a slower method than linear, but it resolves the stair-stepping problem.
- Comment on See something you like? 5 months ago:
I have one hen who is a cross of buff orpington, barred rock, and various random breeds. She is a pretty bird but that is a gorgeous one.
- Comment on I'm so sorry 11 months ago:
This is literally the first post I saw when opening the app. Guess I’ll do something else.
- Comment on what then? 11 months ago:
Commander-in-cheeks
- Comment on Checkmate, Atheists 1 year ago:
Quick search to verify…
So this is how I learn. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
