@donw
Head of Rendering @ Pacific Light & Hologram ~30 games/engines/platforms including Fable, Splinter Cell, Total War, Dauntless, No Mans Sky, DeepMind Lab. Lionhead/Microsft, Ubisoft, Google/DeepMind, SEGA, etc. https://donw.io https://github.com/Celtoys/
not to mention all the step-in/step-out/step-in nonsense everywhere in debug builds (or you could hide it, but wow what a slippery slope).
We use macros for move/forward over here and are slowly phasing STL out to optimise build times and runtime: www.foonathan.net/2020/09/move...
Hexen gameplay does not age well, unfortunately: infinite spawns with limited resources and endless tracing back between hubs, switches that open unknown doors several hubs away, inaccurate main projectile weapon, it goes on. Heretic is still amazing and Faith Renewed level design is so much fun.
Here's part of the generated code without the #line annotations for debugging
side note: I love the Enhanced Barrier API, this would have made my old engines so much easier.
Look at this; beautiful... Rust, eat your heart out! (comments removed, lines compressed, to demonstrate)
For my C# test game I've built a Result type with Roslyn syntax rewriter to get Rust-style error propagation, without simulating via exceptions.
I use + or .Value as de-ref/propagate points (unary + is rarely, if ever, used).
Builds with a Bazel macro. This honestly feels so incredibly liberating!
Didn't somebody do a test recently to see if the bike renting apps encourage red-light running? Something about selling time, rather than distance, means people can't accurately schedule their journies and rush by default.
There is? I've not seen it. I'm based in Brighton where we have lots of Beryl bikes and I see them being more careful. My only concern is lack of helmets; after my wife (wearing a helmet) lost her memory for a week when a pedestrian hit her, I have no desire to engage with counter-idiots.
Not even the electric ones. I'm now seeing, more than ever, cyclists treat red lights as "optional if you can see your way through." So many people completely underestimate the cost of getting this flawed calculation wrong and I'm getting very angry about it.
...but I will be looking at some Roslyn source generator solutions to that if my dependence increases.
I can compile multi-megabytes of source in seconds without having to excessively limit language use and heavily police team behaviour. Pattern-matching makes code more concise, along with a bunch more language features. My only complaint is exceptions and no result-based error handling is pain.
I get memory safety without agonising over it or nerding out on esoteric new language rules. As somebody who's written GC engines before I also understand how to get performance AND memory safety at the same time. Nullability is a game changer, genuine actual bonafide runtime reflection is great.
lol, I've been enjoying C# recently and evaluating ditching C++ completely for my personal research/game work. In discussion this came up; nice to know the training has picked up some good reviews 😂
If I had the time I'd totally reach out to Microsoft to do PC Fable 2. We had it running so we could run the editor tools. It would take some months and it'd be worth adding a content enhancement pass as well, but everybody seems to be screaming for a PC version, even today! It *was* my favourite...
you did help, you showed me another way of doing this!
wow!
haha, I have this coming in the next year I think, so I'm preparing ;)
Yah, if Mojo was created because nobody wanted to move away from Python my one little voice has no hope of changing anything, but I'm free to vent. For me it's all very indicative of how wasteful our discipline has become.
Oooh, and you could introduce gear ratios with varying numbers of teeth for high voltage/low current swaps and model mechanical impedence. It even explains high voltage transmission over long distances.
Ehhh, I see, that's not what I was hoping for. The fact that I have to use something like Conda to manage these "instances" and switch between them is a failure for me. I'm talking about more discipline in library creation, like we did in the COM and CORBA days. But less shit.
A capacitor could be a torsion spring between two shafts, an inductor could be a flywheel, resistance could be friction!
I shall hope for progress!
"The flow of charge, like water" was the most misleading visual aid presented to me in school. I hated it because I couldn't put my finger on inconsistencies I felt, so flunked all the EMF stuff. I already "got" kinetic/potential energy so wires as frictionless cogs in sequence would be amazing.
Research engineers are wild. This python, conda, torch, cuda, driver, gpu version hell is pretty much as if the last 30 years of contract-engineering never existed.
"One you get your env nailed, don't for the love of god upgrade or change it! Be happy it Just Works!"
It's 2026 and people still be using the default Unreal lighting model. Come on, people, your games are starting to look proper bland cookie-cutter; where's the imagination?
Meanwhile, in Dreams... fuppin' gorgeous: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WZ...
My code is so fraught with inconsistency and sometimes I just give up because genuinely the mental tax is too much.
Having to use Color in my day-to-day is almost as bad as a long British winter.
After playing so many DOOM 1/2 and extended levels I'm now onto Heretic. This is still such an amazingly playable game. There are so many gameplay and level design lessons tucked away in here, although I really hate the "have to traverse the lava and take damage" levels. Lots to learn, lots to not.
Given the generation I grew up in, a Rugby match isn't a Rugby match without commentary in a strong Borders accent.