@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

TomF

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place

Graphics coder and HW architect, currently at Rec Room, previously at Muckyfoot, RAD Game Tools, Valve, Oculus and Intel.

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TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Well it's too hot for my celtic brain, I'm knackered from having fun in cars all day, and I've just failed to see the aurora from either of my houses, and now I'm whingeing about it on the internet. I'm having a real day. Time for bed.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Holy crap tomorrow's aurora looks insane! If you're anywhere even close to Canada, try to get somewhere without too much light pollution.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva This was interleaved with the Zardoz thread and I thought you meant you saw the giant floating head vomiting guns at first.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I'm going to go see a movie about ants

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc Welcome. We've been expecting you.

For some absolutely bonkers reason my school thought this was an appropriate film to show to their 12-year-olds. I have been spreading the disease ever since. (I hope you have also watched Zardoz)

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc You need to take a run up at it. I recommend a good Scotch. It gets... "better" is the wrong word. It gets more. A lot more.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc That's just cheating. You have to drink for a reason! No True Scotsman, etc. I'm sure Mr. Connery would agree.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I'm glad Biden has found a place to draw a line against Netanyahu. It feels like he's been wanting to for a while. Behind the scenes the politicos have been trying to dangle the carrot for ages, and it's not worked, so now it's time for the stick.

Unfortunately, I don't think even copious applications of the stick months ago would have made a single bit of difference. Bibi just wants to kill people. What a mess.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

"I don't think I have the energy to work on any projects, I think I'm just gonna write some ideas down"

(several hours later)

"I worked out a nice way to join vertex strips of arbitrary sizes without floating point math. It turns out you can just force them to correlate via a common denominator."

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva What if the common denominator is a power of two? :-)

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Oh, you're joining LOD meshes with no T-junctions. Got it.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Yeah it's a general problem when joining meshes at different levels of detail. Lots of different solutions, all of them messy and annoying in excitingly different ways :-)

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva This one works fine, but it can be processor-intensive because something needs to look at both sides and figure out what the LCM is, and that's a parallelism-breaker.

Another approach is to have both sides do this, but to a common standard multiple, e.g. if one side is 4 and the other is 8, doesn't matter - they (and every other edge) tessellate up to 64 so they meet. Burns more tris, but it's easy to parallelise.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Heh - same problem, different words :-)

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

i have just now found out that what i really should have been doing with my life is be a freelance tech documentation writer

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko I have a couple of friends who do this. It IS a fun job, but it's very inconsistent - companies either want three more of you, or they have nothing for you to do.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Finally finished The Good Place. What a masterwork! The density of jokes, the forwards and backwards references, the stuff you have to pause to spot - all so delicious.

Almost none of it is quotable without gigantic spoilers. Amazing.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Discovered today that the Windows Snipping Tool does video (and audio) recording now. Works great - does a screen subrect, captures the mouse, can pause and resume. When did this happen? Super useful.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

in the games industry you can make a hit like kerbal space program and still have your entire shit shut down and everyone go out of work

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko KSP2 was a troubled project. I forget if it was handed between 4 different companies, or if it was the same company with 4 different names, or a combo. Not happy, either way.

None of this excuses the corporate shenanigans.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I find it frustratingly ironic that C# doesn't have the C # operator.

forrestthewoods, to random
@forrestthewoods@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Proving that Immediate Mode GUIs aren’t significant battery hogs. Computers are really fast!

MacBook M1 Idle: 3.5 watts

Dear ImGui: 7.5
ImPlot: 8.9
EGUI: 8.2
Rerun: 11.1

Spotify: 5.8
VSCode: 7.0
YouTube: 11.5
Facebook: 8.7

Compiling: 50.0

Full blog post: https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/proving-immediate-mode-guis-are-performant/

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@Doomed_Daniel @forrestthewoods Makes me think you could write an interposer library that exposes a retained-mode GUI, but then internally displays it using an immediate mode.

Rather pointless, except to enable direct apples-to-apples comparisons like this. I assume it would be slightly more power-hungry because you fundamentally added code in the middle, but maybe by only a few %

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Huh. I discuss electric vehicles with people quite a bit, and a lot of them would like to avoid Tesla for many reasons (build quality, El*n) but it's so hard to get away from the goodness of the amazing charging network.

And now that's gone. Seems like a poor decision. Oh well.

neilhenning, to random
@neilhenning@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I really think my employers should be able to get compensation from Microsoft for the NUMBER OF TIMES THEY UPDATE WINDOWS LOSING ALL MY CURRENT DEBUGGING STATE AND FUCKING MY DAY UP.

Ranty shout over but Jeez Louise it'll take me a good hour to just get all the tools setup in the right way this morning SIGH.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@neilhenning Unfortunately their incentive is to do it MORE often, so they train you not to rely on retained state. I am certainly at that stage. It's like the 1990s all over again - gotta hit "save" on everything before you go to bed.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I don't agree with punishing companies who happen to be in Israel. But I see no other way to stop this bullshit than to use every lever that exists. And the government of Israel won't listen to screaming people. But they will listen to screaming companies.

Are boycotts a form of economic terrorism? Abso-fucking-lutely. But companies aren't people. So this is how it is.

TomF,
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@atomicpoet But the capitalists do. And they pay the army.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Just opened my ThinkPad and for the second time in three days the act of closing the laptop to sleep it, then opening it again had caused Ubuntu to hardlock. This time I got a very brief small printout about "amd ring 0 error", then it went back to a black screen and I had to hold down the power button again.

I thought getting a ThinkPad, getting AMD cpu/gpu and picking the Linux distro Lenovo lists as supported would mean I got a minimally functioning computer but I guess not.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc I just fucking hate laptops. They ride the edge of HW all the time, and all their power saving gizmos work the instant they ship, and then not at all, because oh my gods the bullshit they pull to make it work...

c0de517e, to random
@c0de517e@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Going through the required "training" yet again thinking - you can't make this non-cringe or fun, the only way to make it better is to make it shorter. But, assuming people aren't morons, I went to check... and yes, by law there is a minimum duration (1h) these have to be.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@c0de517e Is that the one where they show an almost exact recreation of Bush groping Merkel and then say "yeah never ever do this".

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc Haha! Welcome to my brain circa 1990:

Multiplies and shifts are EXPENSIVE. Lookup tables are your friend.

Divides - staaahp. No literally, they make the machine stop. Do absolutely everything in your power to avoid them. Lookup tables are your SAVIOUR.

Branches? 4 clocks just like everything else. Why do you ask?

Wait what's a "cache"?

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