You reminded me the anecdote about every SID chip sounding different. If you hear a recording of a C64 made song, it’s unique to that chip (and somewhat to the machine as well, timing, crystal, etc.).
Different generations of chips, or various cheap clone chips, sure.
Within one generation, evidence of significant differences seems weaker. Sure, manufacturing had loose tolerances, you could end up with a "faulty" chip, but most SIDs sounded the same. You could also end up with a 6510 that crashed after 30 minutes.
I joined Asobo Studio[1] for an internship back in 2010, and some code there was already nearly 15 years old as they grabbed the remains of Kalisto[2] including the engine/editor. That editor (Pawap) is still used to this day, although the engine (Zouna) has been rewritten (but uses the same data backend as the old code, albeit heavily updated too). This was probably the oldest codebase I worked on at the time.
Might just be because we still communicate with them, having the source might allow bad actors to control them. Hopefully one day, it could be released once obsolete.
They’ve been dabbling in this space within Unreal Engine for a few years. Perforce is the de facto standard in AAA studios from my experience, curious to see what’s going to happen to them.
Yes but in a weird way (at least on vanilla 3DGS) - it duplicates the splats on the mirror side.
Vanilla 3DGS cannot do any specular lighting or reflections - the color is basically baked in the splats. There's some active research going on to create richer Gaussian splats so we can do shading (or even ray tracing on it) - but haven't seen anyone using in production yet.
