bitinn

bitinn, 1 month ago to gamedev

Hi folks, a while back on here we had a discussion on how games budget their frame time (ie. how much ms each feature should cost), I would like to revive that discussion, specifically a few questions, in AAA game space:

• how do you compromise between different features?

• besides past experience, what data do you use to justify the compromise?

• who are usually in charge of this balancing on a team?

#gamedev #techart

bitinn, 5 months ago to random

Heads-up: you will be seeing gaming stock crash a lot in the coming days, because China, errr, is proposing some radical changes to game regulations and unfortunately it has a pretty big market.

So we are going to bring some of you down with us, sorry about that.

bitinn, 10 hours ago to gamedev

Can older gamedev share some wisdom on how crunch manifest in the early 90-00s era?

These days crunch feels like a “feature” of game industry:

• yes, by market cap we are definitely one of the biggest video game companies.

• but even within it, your choice is to either crunch to meet increasingly difficult deadline;

• or see your project cancelled in 2-4 years, then either continue on with other big projects or get layoff.

Are the 90s’ crunch different?

#gamedev

bitinn, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Question about #shader performance:

On mobile GPU, Is it sufficient to use an if branch to skip unnecessary discard? Or should I be extra safe and use a shader variant? If I use a branch, is passing a uniform at runtime ok?

bitinn, 7 days ago to random

“Tone Mapping Considerations for Physically-Based Rendering”

Cool interactive comparison.

https://modelviewer.dev/examples/tone-mapping

bitinn, 7 months ago to random

• I know notarization sucks;
• I know the need for dedicated dev hardware sucks;
• I know having to support a platform with at best 5% market share sucks;
• I know trying to optimize games to run on underpowered devices sucks;

But I still think indie dev should give macOS a better look.

1. There is no Apple tax like iOS;
2. Players are more than willing to pay for games (they bought a Mac after all);

That’s my feeling from the recent Steam Next Fes event.

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

What if all these are also propaganda, to blame AI models eventually, for targeting aid worker trucks and innocents?

Not the commanders, not the soldiers, not the IDF, not the Israeli leaders, but the “algorithmic kill chain” is to blame?

No more, he who invented the system or approved its usage or actively engaged in the kill chain, must be prosecuted.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

bitinn, 4 months ago to random

A human vision / camera / rendering question:

You know that glare & bloom reflection your eyes see on a bright day from a glass window building or metallic wall?

I have never seen any camera capturing them correctly. Why?

Photos of bright buildings end up like white surfaces, even if you have multi-exposure capture + HDR screens, they still look like bright boring surface.

Camera have visual artifact like lens flare, but why not the same bloom artifact as human eye?

bitinn, 5 months ago to random

A bit of local game industry news:

• ByteDance, better known as the TikTok app maker, are going to stop ALL in-development game projects and layoff/transfer almost ALL of its game dev teams (keeping only teams for currently operating titles), next Monday.

• ByteDance had been one of the top employers competing with local gaming giant like Tencent and NetEase, this is going to create some aftershocks.

• 2023 continue its streak to be a bad year for gamedev.

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

Do you know the hardest part about Tonemapping in games?

It is going from “most things are fine” to “but fix the overexposed pixels”.

You start with 1 simple problem, then slowly unravel a dozen of interconnected problems.

I think there is truly a market for tools that can determine a tonemap profile given the original picture. (And I can tell you histogram/color models aren’t enough.)

The hardest part is about preserving the perceived image, and they are very difficult to tune by hand.

bitinn, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Fun poll for gamedev:

On your dev team, which roles are responsible for building and maintaining animation state machine graphs?

(Please boost if you are interested to know about this.)

bitinn, 6 months ago to random

When we say we are worried that AGI might destroy humanity we actually mean companies.

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

Hot take whispers:

“I think Generative AI will kill console manufacturers by massively raising hardware costs, way before it could deliver any actual AAA games.”

bitinn, 1 month ago (edited 29 days ago) to gamedev

Dear #gamedev, what’s the default monitor(s) resolution in your office?

For larger studio, take the average among your colleagues and round to the nearest.

bitinn, 9 months ago to random

So you have made a platform where:

• People who subscribes to you are ranked above others when replying.

• The original poster had to mute these replies manually each time instead of blocking them.

• And you call this “town square for free speech”?

While I am not “if you keep using X, you are a Nazi collaborator”[1] kind of guy.

I am definitely judging your stand now.

[1] “X” can be any platforms, I am not referring to “Twitter”, which AFAIK doesn’t exist anymore, it is dead to me.

bitinn, 6 months ago to random

I do admire game dev studios that can put out well-loved titles without crunch while staying afloat.

In China, despite all regulations, 12-hour work days (with no overtime pay) are still the norm, and in many places, they are mandatory, yes, even the biggest ones, especially the biggest ones.

bitinn, 3 months ago to unity

#Unity question again:

Say I have a Unity shader, where in vertex stage, it offsets mesh in world space, to be further away from camera in the view direction, then convert the final position into clip space and pass onto fragment stage.

It works perfectly on D3D, Vulkan and Metal platform, but OpenGL want the offset to be much smaller, almost 1/20~1/100 of the value, in order to produce the same look.

RenderDoc shows used inputs are the same across platforms.

What could be the problem?

bitinn, 3 months ago to random

People keep saying ChatGPT is good for manual labor, but every time I try using this service, it lies straight to my face.

This is ChatGPT v4 API, now tell me what dark sacrifice I need to make to convince GPT it has already done the page fetching?

(I see the economic reason behind it: tokens are expensive, so translating a whole webpage is costly, but then GPT lie about the reason, is this what trust in computing looks like?)

bitinn, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Despite its progress, I don't think Unreal will ever beat Unity on mobile performance (not without a huge team to modify it).

Conversely, despite Unity's attempt to expand its portfolio, it is never going to compete with Unreal in terms of feature sets and high end rendering.

What I am trying to say is: all successful engine fit a niche (despite their ambition to grow), I hope Godot, Bevy etc. find theirs.

EDIT: Personally I look for one with focus on "ease of use" + "hardware scalability".

bitinn, 3 months ago to random

Curious search of the day:

Why are MBTI test results way more popular in Asia?

To the extent that they have become key tools in business and relationships.

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

Look, I don’t blame real ML scientists on the shit show that is AI hype and scam, just as I don’t blame real cryptographers on the shit show that is crypto coins.

bitinn, 21 days ago to random

Tankies, don’t ever change, love you too😇

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bitinn, 18 days ago to random

There is one very important takeaway in this John Oliver clip, that was cut from the TikTok screen grab version that’s recently shared on Fediverse:

• Protests are messy, and you cannot expect everyone to behave uniformly;

• When a protest is organized, opponents will say they are “orchestrated”;

• When not, opponents will call them “rioters”;

• So judge the larger cause, and don’t let incidents undermine the cause.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Eo7ioe5Xfo

bitinn, 16 days ago to random

I don’t want to bad mouth industry people on here, but if you watch the recent double fine documentary and how they treated Mr. Booty’s visit or conference call, I think they knew very well how this guy operates:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24152137/xbox-hi-fi-rush-tango-gameworks-matt-booty

bitinn, 4 months ago to random

Hi graphic folks, if I want decode a RGBM lightmap into RGB, then store its value as RGB onto a texture so that I can pack the shadowmask into Alpha, what RGB value should I store, Gamma or Linear?

(Why don’t we pack shadowmask into lightmap by the way? Bad compression? Losing the M in RGBM is too much?)