The issue for you is not "change", but that society would "capitulate" for "such an insignificant demographic group" of "less than 4% of the population", correct?

You cited this Gallup poll (http://www.gallup.com/poll/182837/estimated-780-000-americans-sex-marriages.aspx?utm_source=SAME_SEX_RELATIONS&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles) of how many Americans were in same sex marriages.

Another Gallup poll shows the historical trend of religious self-identification in America from 1948 to 2014: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

In 1948, the proportion of respondents who self-identify as either Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Jewish, is 95%. ~5% said "None" or didn't answer (less than 0.5% said "Other").

In following years, they tracked more detailed responses and grouped some as "Christian (nonspecific)" and Mormon, and changed the Roman Catholic grouping to just Catholic.

In 2014, those who specified a religion (which is everyone except those who said their religion was "None" or didn't answer) represented 80%.

The full statistics are in that link -- these two years are endpoints in the polls, but not outliers.

Thus, over 66 years Americans who identified as religious (not all of whom follow the Bible, but most do so I'll be generous to you) lost 15 percentage points. That's a rate of 0.227272 percentage points per year.

If Americans keep leaving religion behind at this same rate, in 2348 all religious people will represent less than 4% of the population.

Then we get to trample your rights, right Bob?

At 3:19, that's a brutal combo. That cat should take up boxing.

Bob, whether or not these folks are killing each other day in day (out), police have been killing them too. Both are wrong. The difference is that police are agents of the law, empowered and restricted by that law. These killings show that there is a non-localized problem of police ignoring restrictions and abusing power, for whatever reason (fear? racism? mob-mentality? "just following orders?").

That is worth protesting, because there is literally no other way to fix it.

So when those rounds drop about a mile away...

I think accents go both ways. As an American teenage boy visiting Dublin many years ago, I distinctly remember an Irish girl telling me "Ah loove yur achsint!"

I spent a few months in New Zealand, including some nights in Rotorua and a trip down the Shotover. Rotorua is funky and reeks of sulfur from the vents everywhere, and the Shotover jet boat ride is fantastic. But the highlight was a flying lesson in a Piper Cub over Wanaka, north of Queenstown. It's a bucket list must!

His most powerful point, for me, was this:

For political reasons today's Germany is refusing Greece the same deal Germany got in 1953, namely 50% debt forgiven and the rest on a 30-year plan.

tldr: Actually, games do this all the time, but usually only for water surfaces!

The reason for this is that the way you render a proper reflection is to "flip" the camera to the other side of the reflective surface plane: looking down on a lake, you'd render the water reflection from the point of view of the camera looking up from under the water surface, flipped over. This is called "planar reflection". In order to do this, you render your entire scene again, so it's not cheap. Also, the reflection only works for that one plane: if you had two altitudes of water (or two differently angled mirrors) they'd be on different planes and so you'd have to render a reflection for each one.

You can't render curved surface reflections this way, though. For example it doesn't work on a car (what plane would you flip the camera over?). For that, the trick is called "cubic environment maps". I won't go into the details, but it only really works well for faking reflections on objects since it shows the correct view from a single point. You can create them dynamically for things like racing games, but they require 6 scene renders (one for each face of the cube) for each environment map.

Half Life offered both techniques for water reflections, so one could fire that up and compare them that way.

This demo seemed to use environment maps for the mirrors and I suspect all of the other shiny surfaces.

Note that these techniques are to get detailed reflections: specular lighting (where you don't reflect an image, but instead mathematically simulate simple light bouncing) is easier and cheaper, since it's just math to get a color and strength.

You could do planar reflections for every mirror, but it's a full scene re-render for each one so your frame rate would tank or you'd have to take out other features. Compromises!

Game graphics is all trade-offs and smoke and mirrors: it's our job to fake things and make you think the game is doing sophisticated simulation when actually it's doing as little as it can to get as much as possible.

Upvote for the spunky elderly lady. Take that, old age!

A murmuration of starlings!

They should bear-hug it out.

I'm an American recently expatriated to the UK to travel Scotland with my English girlfriend, so I find it particularly ironic that this is *blocked.

Upvote for Scotty.

... drop bear?

I am a graphics coder at Respawn. I understand where the claim of a "decade-old-engine" comes from, but I assure you we entirely rewrote the renderer backend and heavily modified the rest.

I'm not an authorized spokesman so I can't confirm anything that we haven't already talked about publicly, but pretty basic insight confirms what I've said: for example, all modern PCs and consoles use DX11-class GPUs and the "decade-old-engine" you mention only supported DX8 and DX9.

Anyway, I'm really glad you like the game! We've worked hard on it and hope it does well.