Ok, first up the players: Labor is the major centre-left party, Liberals are the centre-right (think economically liberal), Nationals are right wing, Greens are left win, and there are a handful of “teal” independents who are mostly politcially centre women but fairly environmentally focused. The Liberals and Nationals make up the Coalition and essentially act as one insane party with the Libs at the helm, so you can essentially understand them interchangably.

Labor won the last federal election in 2022 by a slim majority (2 seats), but the Coalition lost in one of the worst defeats in recent history. The Liberals were hit the hardest, losing 19 seats, putting them at their lowest representation since formation. They were in power since 2013 and lost for a lot of reasons, but one of the major ones was that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was rightfully loathed.

Since the last election, the Coalition has been steadily growing in popularity due to the same reasons other non-incumbents have globally. Inflation, high energy prices, etc all contributed. Plus a (mostly true) perception that the government was doing too little to fix problems like our crumbling healthcare system weren’t helping.

Finally the election is announced in late March (our elections aren’t fixed) and the parties start campaigning. Dutton, the Liberal leader, looks like he is going to win a majority at this early point. The following things happen:

• Labor announces and immediately implements a universal tax cut, Dutton announces he will repeal it and replace it with a cut on fuel prices.
• Labors announces a major initiative to improve bulk billed healthcare (bulk billed = free to the patient), which Dutton immediately matches. Labor runs a major attack campaign claiming that he cannot be trusted, since last time his party was in power they tried to destroy bulk billing among other things.
• Dutton announces a cut of 41,000 jobs to the public service, a substantial portion. He faces significant backlash as people worry it will result in degraded frontline services, remembering the issues with veterans affairs and Medicare last time they were in. The 41,000 he wants to cut is how much the public service had grown since 2022, so this seems like a reasonable worry. He “clarifies” that no frontline workers will be cut. He also adds that the cuts will be through attrition, not firing. Following continued backlash, he “clarifies” that he always meant the cuts were to come from Canberra, the capital. This is a mathematical impossibility, as he would have to gut the upper ranks of every department and probably defense to achieve that number.
• He announced an end to work from home for all public servants. This is bad for the Liberals, because they’ve had massive problems with women in the past (including a woman allegedly raped in a ministers office and subsequently an alleged cover up), and people quickly pointed out that the policy would disproportionately affects women, who are unfortunately still expected to bear most of the burden of childcare. Banning working from home prevents them from holding down many jobs. Dutton responds, typically out of touch, that women can job share. He then “clarifies” he only meant it to apply to Canberra, then changes his mind about the policy completely.
• He rejected Labor’s renewable energy transition and instead proposes a transition to Nuclear. No industry group except the one they hired thinks this is realistic, a good option, or feasible. Unrealistically short time-frames, bad assumptions, etc are used to make it look good on paper. Finally someone points out that the places they plan to put the plants don’t have enough water.
• Just yesterday, on the eve of the election, they announced their budget they intend to introduce if they win shows a budget deficit worse than Labor’s during the next term, but magically improving after that. This exact tactic worked in 2013 but isn’t now.
• Other minor things. They keep crashing campaign trucks into polling locations. Dutton has zero charisma and looks creepy, and was a Queensland cop (that’s really bad, they’re as corrupt as the worst American cop).
• Also a Liberal Senate candidate for this election personally tried to induct me into a culty MLM a few years back so fuck them specifically.

This has resulted in polls gradually sliding for the Coalition to the point that it now looks like they will lose even more seats this election and Labor might even gain one. Dutton may lose his own seat. It looks like the teals may pick up another member, with the Greens and fringe right wing parties staying about the same.

You’re right, it looks like they didn’t (at least for most things?). They do mention raytracing briefly, and that the sampling stage can “combine point samples from this algorithm with point samples from other algorithms that have capabilities such as ray tracing”, but it seems like they describe something like shadow mapping for shadows and regular raster shading techniques (“textures have also been used for refractions and shadows”)?

Maybe, what I said is admittedly mostly based on the experience I have with Blender’s Cycles renderer, which is definitely not real time.

I’m not a computer graphics expert (though have at least a little experience with video game dev), but considering Toy Story uses ray-traced lighting I would say it at least depends on whether you have a ray-tracing capable GPU. If you don’t, probably not. I would guess you could get something at least pretty close out of a modern day game engine otherwise.