\usepackage{cmbright}

The ‘mod­ern’ look­ing sans-serif font I use recent­ly in \text{\LaTeX} equa­tions on this blog is called ‘Com­put­er Mod­ern Bright’, and actu­al­ly is not so mod­ern at all: Designed by Wal­ter Schmidt in 1996, it is still to date the only free sans-serif font avail­able for \text{\LaTeX} with full math sup­port. Type‑1 ver­sions of this font are avail­able in the cm-super pack­age, but I did­n’t need to install any­thing, because appar­ent­ly, the Quick­La­TeX Word­Press plu­g­in has them already. The only thing to do was adding just one line to the preamble:

\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{cmbright}   % computer modern bright

I also turned on the SVG images fea­ture that was added with ver­sion 3.8 of Quick­La­tex, so the equa­tions are no longer pixel­lat­ed on reti­na dis­plays or when zoom­ing in! Neat, huh?

Elite Dangerous: Impressions of Deep Space Rendering

I am a backer of the upcom­ing Elite Dan­ger­ous game and have par­tic­i­pat­ed in their pre­mi­um beta pro­gramme from the begin­ning, pos­i­tive­ly enjoy­ing what was there at the ear­ly time. ‘Pre­mi­um beta’ sounds like an oxy­moron, pay­ing a pre­mi­um for an unfin­ished game, but it is noth­ing more than pur­chas­ing the same backer sta­tus as that from the Kick­starter cam­paign.

I came into con­tact with the orig­i­nal Elite dur­ing christ­mas in 1985. Com­pared with the progress I made back then in just two days, my recent per­for­mance in ED is lousy; I think my com­bat rat­ing now would be ‘com­pe­tent’.

But this will not be a game­play review, instead I’m going to share thoughts that were inspired while play­ing ED, most­ly about graph­ics and shad­ing, things like dynam­ic range, sur­face mate­ri­als, phase curves, ‘real’ pho­tom­e­try, and so on; so … after I loaded the game and jumped through hyper­space for the first time (actu­al­ly the sec­ond time), I was greet­ed by this screen fill­ing disk of hot plasma:

ED001

Weit­er­lesen