@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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eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Hey does anyone wanna hire a freelance coder? Asking for me. It's me you would be hiring

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko @jakesimpson You forgot the word "yet" :-)

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

Neat thing I discovered. If you have a sprite with 5 directions of animation - from going right to going down (make the rest by flips), you can figure out which sprite to use by testing against lines of slope 1:5, 2:3, 3:2 and 5:1, which is really elegant on an 8/16bit machine.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

How elegant!

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@nivrig Oh, so just scale by 15/16. Neat trick!

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Incidentally, another trick to finding the length of a vector (x,y) to within 12% is just:

if ( x > y )
return x+(y>>1);
else
return y+(x>>1);

(do you really need more than 12% precision in a 16-bit game?)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

For the last year I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening To Today" links in this thread:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/108199886340178151

The thread is now so long it is increasingly breaking Mastodon, so I am making a new thread, starting here.

To recap, here's the entirety of the year-one thread in the most impractical possible format: A YouTube playlist containing 246 songs and running for just over 47 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DP_GwDs3XuTbiFmHYTwJWa7

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@MouseByTheSea @mcc @jason Oof - welcome to the game industry! I worked at Sega UK at the time on the Mars/32X, and yeah we got this metal box of parts and a manual and... my gods... what a crazy machine. EIGHT different processors, and something like 4 different types of memory. Byzantine!

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mcc @jason It's really interesting seeing with hindsight how some of the console features were absurdly over-engineered to the extent that they were basically useless for most games. The SNES sound HW is an excellent example. The other obvious one is the Saturn.

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

When I first heard of the Metropolis Light Transport I assumed it was named that to be poetic, but, no, it's just named after Dr. Nicholas Metropolis and his assistant Steve Light-Transport.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

i played openttd all day and i regret nothing except that i didn't make the main station in my main city a roll on roll off station

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Neither of us ever learn...

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Is greybeard a gender neutral term? If not what's the female equivalent?

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Greybraid.

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

the beautiful thing about programming late at night on the side is that if you really apply yourself you can take some mediocre code and make it much, much worse

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@scottmichaud @aeva Parallel killers like 16x as many.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Now you get to refactor for days. And keep a list of all the terrible choices you made that you'll need to fix later.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @scottmichaud But each probably has AVX.

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

The Pixel Fold looks nice but damn nearly $2k for a phone https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/pixel-fold-first-look-googles-1799-foldable-takes-on-samsung/ar-AA1b0Mx5

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @djlink Haha absolutely not. I use a nice potato-grade Galaxy A23 - ideal for home defense.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @djlink
Me: zzzzz
Brain: hey.
Me: wh... what?
Brain: you up?
Me: <checks phone> jesus it's 3am. What do you want?
Brain: your $2k phone can only open and close so many times.
Me: yeah, so?
Brain: it's one opening closer to breaking now.
Me: ...fucker.

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

Today I had to use Git for a project. It took exactly 30 minutes before I hit a repo breaking Gitastrophe.

Git is garbage. Kill it with fire.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@forrestthewoods Usually takes me at least an hour.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Is there any difference in how Russian and Ukranian use Cyrillic? That is if I do the Duolingo Russian unit until I can read Cyrillic, with the goal of being able to read Russian place names, will I be able to accurately read Ukranian place names as well?

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@PavelASamsonov @mcc ...which is probably much better than you'll do in England just because you think you know the Roman alphabet and speak English fluently and have lived there all your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

ding 😔​

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Well done on another trip round the sun!

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

next/past or next/last makes a much better pairing than next/prev in code

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @lritter It's short for "pervious", which means it can get wet. English is logical like that.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@lritter Not sure it's any better than "prev"

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@lritter "last" is very ambiguous in a list.

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

so I'm trying to work out what the exact flags cmake is setting for gcc for a debug build, and the docs just say "the usual ones", and my searches are saturated with stackoverflow posts that are topically adjacent but unfortunately irrelevant to my problem at hand because I'm trying to work out why my debug builds have horrible numeric issues or something but my release builds don't

and so I get the clever idea of looking at what cmake generated, and oh my god that is a lot of cmake

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva I mean obviously it's not actually "zero" cost, but the harder you work, the closer to zero it becomes.

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva The usual culprit here is initiialisation. Debug builds often init to magic numbers like 0xCDCDCDCD and release builds default to "what is your security clearance, citizen?"

TomF,
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @mcc
<loads pistol>
Compiler's haunted.

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

And a very good 5:30am to you, Mr. Inaccessible Smoke Detector!

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

Too much dakka?

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