5 ms·
Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background.
by ryandrake 1y ago
Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitude, longitude, time of day and so on, which at the time was Preetham[1] ("A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight"), and built a fully realistic sky model for the software. I even added prominent stars based on a hard-coded ephemeris table. It was quite fast, too.
Well, the higher ups of course hated it, they were confused as to why the horizon would get hazy, yellowish, and so on. "Our competitors' skies are blue!" They didn't like "Use your eyes and look outside" as an answer.
Eventually, I was told to scrap it and just draw a blue rectangle :(
All that to say, nice job on the site!
1: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/cps124/fall01/resources/p91-preetham.pdf https://courses.cs.duke.edu/cps124/fall01/resources/p91-pree...
- j_bum 1y agoFun (but not fun) story :)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 1y agoNot even as an easter egg? You could've sold it with telling them Vincent Van Gogh's paintings had the location of stars accurately, you were inspired by those paintings to reproduce the sky color accurately.
- darknavi 1y agoA past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them. I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game)
- pava0 1y agoCobalt was a really interesting game, too bad it never got any fame
- dylan604 1y agoThe last thing you want is to receive a message from Neil Degrasse Tyson about how wrong your sky was https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives+james+cameron+notes+on+sky+in+titanic&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives+j...
- edoceo 1y agoAnd pointed out Jon Stewart's globe spinned backward
- zarzavat 1y agoYou should have added a duck.
- otikik 1y agoI understood that reference
- jbverschoor 1y agoWhipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management
- ryandrake 1y agoA foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?" They just want people to poop out software as fast as possible so everyone can get bonuses and drive around on their jetskis on Saturday. If you're the kind of developer who likes to "sand and finish the back side of the cabinet," either you need to find a very rare, special company, or do it at home as a hobby.
- jbverschoor 1y agoBut it's exactly the thing that makes software "delightful". It's also a huge boost to the developer's appreciation, motivation, productivity, care for the product. But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to prepare to go out of business.
- philipallstar 1y agoThe point is a real skybox is not great for satnav software. It's probably actually worse than a stylised mode, with a predictable colour background for anything that's going to sit on top of it.
- jbverschoor 1y agoThat's exactly not the point. Where do you think innovation comes from? It comes from tinkering.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoTo be honest I don’t think anyone wants that kind of functionality - maybe in the satellite view but not in the vector map.
- marcosdumay 1y agoYep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. If you have to draw a cloudless day sky, you better draw it blue. That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a distraction.
- dylan604 1y ago> Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. This one always gets me in how dirty the sky must have been "back in the day" in order for people to see a yellow sun. I've never looked into what gas would be needed to make the sun look yellow, but it must have been hell to breathe.
- withinboredom 1y agoThe walls were black for a reason in big cities. All those chimneys and coal everywhere.
- card_zero 1y agoNah, the ancient Egyptians, and other cultures, depicted the sun a lot, and never made it white. Red, quite often, gold, very frequently - warm colors. If you paint a white sun people say it's the moon.
- benrutter 1y agoIronically, I'm in the South of England wih clear blue sky, and the site thinks I have a much darker and beautiful reddish sunset. Im fairness, it's probably only out by an hour if that.
- thebruce87m 1y agoMaybe it is out by an hour due to BST.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI’ve had similar issues at work where people really overdo something and it’s difficult. On one hand you never want to kill that joy and passion someone has. That’s a great characteristic. But projects have scopes and too often instructions like “just draw a blue rectangle” get ignored.
- ryandrake 1y agoTotally. It was a harsh but needed lesson on the realities of getting work done in a commercial environment.
- crazygringo 1y agoThis is why specifications are important, and why design is important. The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity. If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars similarly serve no functional purpose at night. What you built sounds great for an actual planetary view like Google Earth. And it sounds fun to build. But it's an anti-feature for a navigation view. When you're navigating, simplicity and clarity are paramount. Not realism.
- johnfn 1y agoOh come now. You are being no fun.
- dylan604 1y ago> This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.
- resonious 1y agoThough sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience. In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").
- bravesoul2 1y agoThe thing here is programming the job can be much more dull than programming the hobby. Occasionally (twice a decade) there can be a collision where you get to do something really cool like that at work. The higher ups want a realistic sky because their market research said it'll boost an OKR by 10 basis points. And then you are in luck! That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously underpaid and overworked.
- maddmann 1y agoHaha it sounds you applied the opposite of the YAGNI principle building this.
- GuardianCaveman 1y agoI identify so much with your sentiment and this type of overthinking overbuilding .
- nkrisc 1y agoThat sounds really cool but I have to reluctantly agree with the senior: a cartoonish day/night sky is better than a half-implemented realistic one. I say “half-implemented” because it sounds as though yours didn’t account for local weather and cloud cover, which is reasonable but then incomplete. Even if you did, well, it’s turn-by-turn navigation. I expect the sky color to be selected for ideal contrast with the important UI elements to reduce the time spent looking at it while driving.