> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense.
Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles.
And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.
Yeah, I remember a friend getting a call during coworking and her face just went white, and after the call she told us that was the tax people calling about irregularities (she had moved countries and was slow in sorting out her tax situation), and we all bought it - there was no sober "oh yeah it's a scam" advice from us - it was really perfectly timed, and took a day or to for her to reason through that it must be a scam. (No money lost though!)
>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).
Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?
Because it conflates distinct characters and therefore fails its original mission to encode all characters needed for written communication.
Han Unification is just the most obvious case but the issues do not stop there. I'll give you a
western example. In the sentence
«Günther a souligné l’ambigüité de son discours.»
there is an umlaut and a dieresis.
They are different things with different function. In traditional book printing they used to look differently.
With Unicode all this cultural nuance is lost. The characters necessary to communicate precisely simply have never been encoded, because Unicode forgot about its core mission.
Fixing things like that is where I want to see efforts go.
The problem I personally have with the Zelda example given is that it looks really bland to me - the landscape looks really washed out - the author says "Somebody would paint this. It’s artistic.", but I don't think anyone would paint with such bleached-out colours.
In the painting there's a delicate interrelation between colours - you have browns/greens/blues in the dark parts, and more whites/yellows/blues/pinks in the light parts. I wouldn't describe it as bland, though it is in a sense washed-out. BotW doesn't, and probably can't have that level of handling of shades colour in the enviroment graphics if nothign else because of the technical constraints of the Switch hardware.
Looking at the screenshot, what can you say - you can say that it's nice that the green/yellow of the sky is mirrored in the green landcape with yellow rivers. And the back-lighting of the sun is helping give definition to some of the mountains/hills, which is nice. But I don't see very much subtle going on with the landscape.
Looking at the art, you can see a lot more dynamic range, clearer silhouetting of mountain ranges at various distances, whereas the actual game is more monotone-green. You can also see the fog doing a lot more work of making the shape of the land clear. There are some bits of fog/mist in the screenshot as well, but they're not doing as much heavy lifting in terms of giving shape to the landscape.
The Switch is really limited on the hardware front, and I can't imagine what kind of trade-offs the art team had to make to get to where they are - it's a very difficult balancing act that I only understand a small part of. Nintendo also tend to be very conservative/restrained in their 3d style (I remember being somewhat unnerved by Ubisoft's "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle" Mario game, because it went super high-production-quality).
It feels a bit cheap to give as an example, but the 3D MMO Love by eskil steenberg tried to emulate the impressionist style, and did a striking job:
https://imgur.com/9U18eRZ
The bloom effect is doing a lot of heavy lifting to make the bright colours pop, but even in the less glowy areas there is quite subtle layering of colours going on and one does have the feeling that the colours are playing with eachother.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc02ijaw-Tg a video of it in action, if you are curious ).
As another comparison, looking at elden ring you can see they've gotten 'using fog to make landscape silhouettes pop' down to a fine-art (maybe they're even over-reliant on it)
https://imgur.com/a/5GEePwL
And looking at the landscape you have really nice looking brown/oranges in the fields in the foreground, black/greys/browns in the mid-ground, rocky cliffs, fog is actually glowing, and you have some green forests in the top-left. That's a lot of nuance for what's essentially a brown landscape. BoTW doesn't have that - would it have it if the team had the hardware capabilities and time and budget? Who knows...
"Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible."
I'm really stuck at the start here - moving a pen so that it pointing in all directions is basically impossible - the space of directions is two-dimensional and you can only trace out a one-dimensional curve (or pair of curves).
Ok, wikipedia makes it clearer:
"In mathematics, a Kakeya set, or Besicovitch set, is a set of points in Euclidean space which contains a unit line segment in every direction."
Quanta writers are generally very good at explaining things, but wikipedia wins hands down in this case...
It’s not pointing in all directions at once, it’s pointing once in each direction. So if you spin the pencil so it does exactly one complete rotation that works, doesn’t it?
I think OP is thinking about covering the sphere of directions in 3D space, not just directions in a 2D plane. No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area, so any finite amount you draw will cover zero percent of the area of the two-dimensional sphere surface.
> No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area
The object doesn’t matter, using pencil as the example was what threw you off - it’s not about what the pencil “draws”. Consider a thin cylinder, or rectangular prism, or just a stick - if you spin it around, its endpoints trace out a circle whose diameter is the length of the stick. You can move and spin such an object in another way where the shape traced out by its endpoints has smaller area than that circle.
Yes, and spinning the pencil on its centre like that shows that the circle (of pencil length diameter) is such a set. (I think you're thinking about it the wrong way around: it's which containing shapes allow this, not how can it be done at all.)
> "In mathematics, a Kakeya set, or Besicovitch set, is a set of points in Euclidean space which contains a unit line segment in every direction."
Is that definition correct/complete? It leaves open the option that such a set isn’t connected. I think there’s an additional requirement that, for any two directions D and E, you can move a line segment oriented in direction D so that it’s oriented in direction E without any point on it ever leaving the set.
Yeah - if there was just a risk of having one I'd probably get mine removed, but yeah - I think I remember looking into it once and coming away thinking it's probably best to leave it as is. (I can't remember the details).
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
reply