With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.

Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.

You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.

However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.

Isn’t this how the gaming boom and bust cycle always worked?

Indie(ish) games boom, AAA studios buy them and make them bust.

Playing devil’s advocate here a bit, but

This is a good way to test the water. If they give a nonsense response, then what use would it be to do the same thing for somethijg there’s an even greater problem?

The US is sinking into fascism at an alarming rate, and many other “leaders” are taking inspiration - all over the world, including Europe.

Signing an online petition with your name and ID is a great way of saying “I’m ripe for the disappearing”. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk “critics”.

It costs nothing to dial 911

Cries in US Healthcare

Sure. It’s just that the user doesn’t install Unity (or any other engine) themselves when installing a game. They install the game and “it just works”.

For a mod, you have to either have the game, or go get it before you can play a mod.

I know what a game engine is. A court clerk or judge most likely - doesn’t.

And it’s in Nintendo’s interests to paint mods as something lesser - that’s why they take this strawman angle to mods. They couldn’t care less about “games” or “mods”. They care about protecting their IP with any groin punches and baby mario noises they can get their divorced-from-reality hands on.

It’s basically a non-sequitur.

A mod isn’t a standalone game, sure. It requires the base game to have meaning. Unitl it gets spinned off and becomes a “real” (standalone) game.

However, that has no connection with the original problem: Did anyone who isn’t Nintendo ever animate a cartoony person throwing a ball that does something, before Nintendo filed for a patent?

Of course they have. That’s prior art, and the patent itself is under serious question - whether the animation was in a “real” game, a “fake” one or in a Blender animation has very little influence on that fact.

Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn’t matter.

We know the stores aren’t responsible, so we shouldn’t attack them.

The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it’s pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.

As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It’s a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn’t a mistake. It’d be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.

Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say “sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A”.

And look at it this way: There’s less payment processors and they’re smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won’t accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren’t their customers doesn’t cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.

It never was about the laws. If it were, Mastercard wouldn’t have been doing it for quite some time now.

It’s truly idiotic. They backed down to 200 phone calls from CS. They probably cited that rule, saying doing what they do (processing payments) will damage their brand.

Lo and behold, once they stopped processing transactions their brand got damaged. And due to the ego damage already associated, they won’t back down and backtrack not that they actually have a problem on their hands. What with their brand being seen as discriminatory, weak to undue influence and excersizing undue power against their own clients. Very “good brand” of you, Mastercard.

If Mastercard wants to display Christo-fascist family friendlyness they can slap a cross onto their logo and change the font to Comic sans.

In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.

I don’t think AI is inherently bad. What’s bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.

About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren’t enforced at all.

What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of ‘AI’ with ‘photography’. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.

Nor did you read between the lines.

Short answer: the bank won’t give your shiny new tree-planting business a loan as easily as it will to a “liquid tank tree replacement” one.

Long answer:

• Trees take time to grow
• Trees need to be planted
• Trees make shade
• Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
• Trees don’t need electricity
• Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
• Trees don’t look cool

While algae are more efficient at turning CO2 into oxygen in theory, in practice algae don’t have a good climate in such a tank (no oxygen without ventilation, i.e. constant electricity and they get cooked through the glass).

All in all, more of a gimmick than anything.