bitinn

clive, 1 day ago to random

If you haven't seen it yet, go check out @ernie's new search engine ...

... which automatically appends "&udm=14" to the end of your search query ...

... thereby triggering Google to give you your results with no AI answer at the top, and (for me, anyway) no ads

It's like google from 2004 or something

https://udm14.com

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

It’s 2024 and I haven’t seen a Sun Eclipse visualization as clear as this 2000 NASA gif.

(Yes it is just a shadow casting spot light super far away, occluded by a relative small and near sphere, now in a real-time ray trace environment.)

A visualization gif of 2024 sun eclipse over northern sphere.

bitinn, 8 months ago to unity

Honestly I think switching away from #Unity might be easier than most might think:

• Unless you are deep* in development, consider porting to these.

• #GodotEngine #UnrealEngine if you need 3D graphics with great editor.

• #GameMaker #Construct if you need a 2D engine with many features.

• #RenPy #RPGMaker if you need genre specific tools.

-#MonoGame #SDL #Bevy #Love2D if you prefer a framework around your familiar languages.

• Know that distinctive gameplay comes from you, not the engine!

bitinn, 5 months ago to random

“Assuming a large, polished and centralized web service adding an open protocol will somehow bring new users to many indie, rough-around-the-edge, underfunded websites, then somehow become less dependent on the large web service.” is the most optimistic thinking I have read this year.

bitinn, 10 months ago to random

BREAKING WEB NEWS:

Twitter has disabled open access of public tweets globally.

Meaning you are no longer able to see any tweets when not logged in.

We have tried private mode in various browsers via various ISP, all tweets/profile links are redirecting to login page.

I guess Twitter is indeed trying to be a walled garden (just like many of Meta's services).

Also service like nitter (basically a twitter web client) are rendered unusable, just like how Reddit cuts off its clients.

bitinn, 10 months ago to random

Tell this to anyone running competitive online video games and see how much trust they put in client side.

(Google is still trying to transform the whole web into an ad marketplace isn’t it?)

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md

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, 3 days ago to random

AI industry:

just sit back and enjoy the prosperity we bring to society!

Actual people:

we need to rebuild the search and internet that you broke;

we need to restart operating systems and social media that you had invaded;

we need to retrain writers and painters that you put out of jobs;

Where is the prosperity?

AI industry:

just look at how fast it can response to your request for a joke or a 4-line bash scripts!

bitinn, 8 months ago to gamedev

It is so easy to fallback into doing what you are comfortable with than what your project really need. #GameDev

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, 5 months ago to random

Merry Xmas everyone, may your find warmth and pleasure from your family reunion and running GPU.

bitinn, 3 months ago to random

Question: once you block an instance from replying to your account (at the user level), how do you unblock it again?

I think it's important that we do this to prevent attackers from breaking up existing instances (most of the attacks are from very small instances though).

bitinn, 10 months ago to random

Thoughts:

I really wish the big 2 game engines spend more time making #glTF viable than #USD.

Look I know how flexible USD can be, but it will never be the defacto pipeline for a majority of game companies.

You have to dedicate so much engineering efforts to get USD pipeline running, that you might as well build your in house format (many AAA did, they had this need before USD came along).

Meanwhile glTF is happy to serve 95% of your asset / scene needs. Folks please give glTF a better look.

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

What US considers to be Chinese threats: hopeful graduates spending millions to go to Ivy League schools, spend years to get admitted into top labs, then throw out everything to serve their motherland.

Actual Chinese threats: obscure underfunded open source project finally getting a stable committer, no one had seen him in person, nor could anyone find his email anywhere on the internet, but his PRs read rather well.

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, 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, 5 months ago to gamedev

A pedantic question for shader guru:

If we use clip / discard during a shadow caster pass (main light depth map), does it somehow also slow down shadow casters on a TBDR gpu?

(But shadow caster only return 0 anyway, what are TBDR gpu actually saving in this case? If they do at all?)

#gamedev #shader

bitinn, 8 months ago to random

Anyway, I am bowing out, but I look forward to see how these numbers change in the years to come.

https://steamdb.info/tech/

bitinn, 1 month ago to random

I don’t know how western companies see these super apps of Asia (WeChat, Line, TikTok etc.), but I can tell you some of us really hate those here.

They replace the web and essentially everything is in a walled garden.

bitinn, 1 month ago to gamedev

#gamedev question: has anyone developed a custom vertices sorting plugin for #Unity, using asset post processor hook for example?

I could really use one right now, as I find a case where the Optimize Mesh polygon ordering isn’t what we want.

(Yes we want certain polygons to come first in a single drawcall for some depth test reasons and we cannot afford to split the drawcall.)

bitinn, 17 days ago to random

#techart question: we all know blend mode might disable early z on TBDR, but which combinations does that? does something like “blend one zero, one one” disable early z?

bitinn, 15 days ago to random

Gonna say it out loud here:

• As western video game publishers struggle with their stock prices and lack of investments, firing people became their go to strategy to make quarterly reports look good.

• While in the East, companies take advantage of lax labour protection laws and terrible job market to crunch existing workers more.

• I have lost many colleagues due to crunch, because they were right, this industry are full of men who had internalized crunch culture and sold it as hard work.

bitinn, 7 days ago to random

“Tone Mapping Considerations for Physically-Based Rendering”

Cool interactive comparison.

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

bitinn, 6 days ago to procreate

Hi #Procreate users, how do you manage your brush set?

• I find myself wanting to fit them into a quick menu (which means 6 items max for fast switching).

• Going for the brush library are too slow sometimes (because when I have more than 10 brushes in a custom set, I end up scrolling to reach a brush anyway, and it breaks my flow).

• My sketch is pretty basic so often 6B + Monoline + Dry Ink are all I needed; but I would like to get into more texturing, 1 or 2 textured brush should do?