The Artifice Girl is really good.
We watched The Artifice Girl recently, trailer here, which I'd never heard of before, seeing it recommended in a must-see sci-fi list on YouTube somewhere. It's great, in that way that a few low budget indie sci-fi films are, where they take a great premise and don't wreck it.
Come to think of it, it's probably just that it is well written. So many indie films have great ideas, great cinematography, great production on a low budget, but just fall flat with the writing, leaving you a bit underwhelmed. And AAA video games suffer from this almost universally, IMO. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed the writing in a video game. Probably Portal.
The movie did leave me wondering whether (very) deep fakes and realistic virtual NPCs might end up being a semi-endorsed way to prevent further production child sexual abuse material. There will always be paedophiles, since people don't choose who or what they're sexually attracted to, but if virtual material can replace real CSAM and therefore real child sexual abuse, it may end up being acceptable in the wider community.
Unlikely though, considering in many places even homosexuality is still illegal, or suppressed in the media. Oh well. Maybe an underground, implicitly State endorsed but never truly acknowledged version of the above would happen. Not really an industry anyone would want to get into though. A bit like how the creator in the film was super-intent on keeping his anonymity.
In the meantime I'll keep improving my plotter vectoriser and optimiser, the former of which has already seen gains since the last post. I've dropped the z-buffer and sobel edge detector in favour of running a kernel directly over the geometry and getting better results. By that I mean the pipeline originally was ray-trace / z-buffer / sobel filter / post-processor / poor geometry detection, and now it's ray-trace / custom filter / better geometry detection.
Maybe I'll post the results soon. OTOH, it's the summer break and I'm away and I've been playing with Pico-8 again, after buying it years and years ago but never really making anything with it. Maybe I'll finish something this time.