The picture was indeed taken with an iPhone :-)

We can definitely agree on the crappiness of the picture.

The centre 9th of the photo in question is quite dark, too.

To me it looks like it metered almost exclusively on a black part of the dress, blowing out both the background and the blue bits of the dress.

And yet the dress is definitely over-exposed when we compare with model pictures of the very same dress from Amazon etc.

Based on the adjectives, one is more blue, the other is more white.

The photo shows plenty of color. From looking at the picture, the background in particular, it is very clear that the image is quite over-exposed, which will significantly lighten colors. Obviously, the camera based its light metering on the black parts of the overall rather dark dress, which caused the blue parts to become overexposed and the the background to blow out.

It's completely ridiculously obvious, to the point where I theorize that anyone seeing white instead of blue actually has a mild form of brain damage.

But how can those factors simultaneously cause a warm highlight on black and a cool blue tint on white?

The answer is that they cannot do that.

No, it's distinctly a grayish blue. The photo is perfectly fine showing which colors the dress is, it's just a bit overexposed so the colors doesn't show through as strongly as the official model photo on Amazon.

And shiny black often appears golden or brownish under strong direct light which is actually a really big clue. Since the "gold" parts fade way too much to black in the dark parts, it's obviously now brown/gold, but black with a strong light shining on it. And no light source can simultaneously put warm highlights on black, while at the same time casting a cool blue tint on white, especially not one as strong as in the picture. Not in this universe, at least.

No, the highlights are simply blowout because the picture was taken on a phone camera. Give me a bright enough light, a piece of dark fabric and a phone camera, and I can easily make white or near-white highlights appear on a picture of said dark fabric.

Brown highlights are common on "black" fabrics, since they are often extremely dark brown (or blue), not true black. So the dark parts are definitely black.

If the blue parts of the dress were actually white, that would require a light source with a lot of blue light, as well as a camera with very misconfigured white balance. You would have to deliberately do this to mislead. It's also impossible to do this on an iPhone (which the picture was taken with).

Lastly, we know for a fact that the dress is blue and black, because the manufacturer doesn't even sell a white and gold version.

Both games run on RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine). Same foundation, same animation engine (Euphoria), same physics engine (Bullet) and so on.

The step from IV to V is not comparable to the move from RenderWare to RAGE at all.

Learning stuff from the bottom up is really good advice. Learn the basic of how stuff works and get a good knowledge foundation. From that you can usually extrapolate or at least make educated enough guesses that learning more complex systems becomes easier.

Be yourself. Stay curious. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Never shy away from a challenging task, because even if it fails, it will teach you something new and grant you valuable experience.

GTA IV and GTA V share the same engine, though.

I can beat that.

I own a gold-plated TOSLINK cable.

Keep diggin', you'll hit gold any day now.

Any. Day. Now.

I am happy to see that you continue to get worked up to absolutely no avail. No matter how long and rambling your screeds continue to be, you will change no opinions and sway no votes.

But please, do continue. You're quite amusing :-)