I’m not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the “tricks” that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you’d still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!

Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.

Yes there is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

You’re welcome and I hope things work out well for you!

Relationships are hard, both platonic and romantic. Maintaining them in a healthy way is really difficult and no one can give you a map for how to navigate the issues.

Sometimes, you’ll find that despite your best efforts, relationships can wane or end over time. Your best friend might suddenly have to move halfway across the world for a job - while they’d still be your best friend, you won’t be able to get coffee/beer like you used to. Or a close friend could unfortunately lose their life at the drop of a hat, and you’d never see them again.

I’ve learned to focus more on and appreciate the time that you do have with a person, however long or brief it may be, because you never know when it’s the last time that you spend the most time with them.

It’s hard to understand the full context of your situation because there’s a lot of details missing, so I’m going to make some assumptions based on what you’ve said.

I think your mistake was to go straight to running when you haven’t even started crawling.

You’ve described yourself as not having been a very sociable person over the years, so planning a massive party of 30-50 people for people that you haven’t had regular contact with was likely to never have worked out the way you expected, regardless of how much effort you put into planning and setup.

My advice to you is to start small and take it in steps.

Firstly, don’t bog yourself down with thinking about how a) badly the party seemed to have gone, and b) how many relationships you’ve let erode.

Second, instead of focusing on those that didn’t show up, celebrate that you had 5 people who cared enough to come to it. Spend time cultivating relationships with them, because those were the ones who bothered to be there.

Lastly, for those you felt were important and let you down, you have to understand that people tend to treat big parties as optional. If someone is important to you, inviting them to a large party where they’re just one-of-many doesn’t really tell them how important they are to you does it? I know I’d feel a lot more important if someone invited me to their small and intimate party!

Additionally, you should reach out to them and let them know how you felt - no one can read your mind. You have to communicate how you feel and give people a chance to respond. If they respond positively, great - you’ve kept an important friend! If they don’t, then you’ve learned that your relationship with them wasn’t a healthy one.

You don’t have to pretend like it didn’t hurt you, but the onus is on you to communicate that to those you felt slighted by.

Also, don’t plan massive parties for yourself with over-the-moon expectations, especially not for your first birthday party!