@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

christer

@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place

VP of Central Tech, Activision Publishing. Ex-Sony, ex-Neversoft, ex-academic, ex-book author (RTCD).

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pervognsen, (edited ) to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

This is my 30 years belated realization that PHIGS was a 'graphics' pun pretending to be an acronym. I'm not sure if that makes me hate it more or less. I'm leaning towards more. The focus on PHIGS was less welcome when I read Foley and Van Dam than the chapter on dot-matrix printing which at least had some timeless "how stuff worked" appeal. Teaching specific APIs in a textbook almost never ages well.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen my uni graphics textbook (the name of which I don’t even remember, but it was crap) was based on GKS (Graphical Kernel System). Which existed for like a picosecond and I can’t imagine anything “real” actually used it.

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

This is a fraction (a few of our PS4 devkits) of the infrastructure that builds Call of Duty 24/7.

Add PS5s, XBox gen 8+9, thousands of CI/CD worker VMs (100s of Dell R650-class hosts), GPUs/VGPUs, phones+Mac hosts, and you have our massive “COD scale” build/test infrastructure.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras @christer we sometimes affectionately refer to the entire farm as “The Death Star” (due to its ability of performing unintentional denial of service attacks on our internal network if we screw something up).

We have “destroyed” (read: exceeded) the capacity of internal firewalls a few times, forcing IT to buy increasingly more expensive firewall equipment.

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

Day drinking is ok, when we've rolled back daylight savings time, and it's dark outside. Right?

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@Humus and it is!

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

Overall, I quite like Mastodon, but what drives me absolutely, completely, totally, bonkers is how it handles, or rather doesn't handle, post history.

Example: a few weeks ago I posted a question about optimized binary search implementations. The resulting thread contained a lot of really good info from various people. I saved it, thinking I'd go back through it later when I had space for it in my brain.

Now, when I visit that post, there's almost nothing left: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@rovarma/111246663566919985

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@rovarma the usability of Mastodon ranks at the bottom of designs.

It’s what happens when you let programmers let technical arguments trump design decision.

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

Gaussian Splatting is basically three phases:

  1. Capture with photogrammetry. This is pretty standard "where is the camera" followed by stuff like Bundle Adjustment.

  2. Cull redundant points by growing gaussians to cover the culled ones.

  3. Render them.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras @TomF seems like an accurate statement. But wouldn’t it be nice if some of the NeRF people would, like, use their love of the fuzzy to instead invent some automatic way to BEVEL ALL THE EDGES of everything. (Sharp edges, phtooey!)

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

I've been researching optimized binary search implementations for environments where every cycle matters, particularly w.r.t. cache efficiency/branch prediction.

Stumbled on these excellent articles by @pkhuong from a long time ago:

https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/30/binary-search-is-a-pathological-case-for-caches/

https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/03/binary-search-star-eliminates-star-branch-mispredictions/

Any more resources I should know about? Context is binary search through a large-ish (512K-2M elements) fixed-size array with assumed pow2 no. elements and 16b per element. Other algorithm suggestions also welcome!

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen @molecularmusing @rovarma just to throw one more option out there. Not sure it’s better than what’s already suggested, but food for thought.

Link 1: http://ilan.schnell-web.net/prog/perfect-hash/
Link 2: http://ilan.schnell-web.net/prog/perfect-hash/algo.html

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

Mountain trek.

I've been working more on the height function, colors of trees, grass, fog, fixed some issues in the pathfinding to make the paths more natural, etc. There's better scenic views now!

Video of trekking through a virtual mountainous forest landscape along winding paths.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras @sinbad @runevision reasons to buy company/own product - to ensure:

  1. Exclusive access for you
  2. Exclude others’ access
  3. Product available to you in perpetuity
  4. Shutting it down as it competes w/ your product
  5. Good income stream or growth product
  6. Locking up talent behind product
  7. Get at IP/patents of product
  8. And more.

No one item seems to explain Unity’s action? 3 maybe?

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

It’s that time of year when the overblown artist Vikane does these pop up art installations around Los Angeles

image/png

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

I still find it weird when people complain that immediate-mode UI is a toy model that doesn't scale to advanced use cases. This is also true for a lot of game editors (immediate mode or not) but I'm looking at the Rerun demos and the polish and sophistication are about 100x higher along any dimension I care about than the most advanced UIs I've seen people build in the modern crop of reactive UI libraries.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen fully agree. But I don’t even care about how the UI is rendered (immediate or retained) as long as it’s (in no particular order):

good UX, good aesthetics, modularized from the app/game, good editor/editing, snappy, data driven, performant.

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

I miss file resource forks. They were a superior (classic MacOS) solution, involving a "database" key-value store that was invisibly stored alongside the file data fork.

It neatly solve localization, configuration, not embedding crap in filenames, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras yes, that too.

Basically, it was Data-Oriented Design ahead of its time. (But not the performance-oriented variant people think of when you say it today.)

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen @rovarma yes and the interchange issues is (probably) why the idea died out. But it’s still a superior idea and I wish it existed everywhere. As the philosopher B Joel said: “Only the good die young.”

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

What is a good, fun, possibly graphics-related small problem to teach optimization? Most rendering seems so/has been formulated to be so intrinsically data-parallel that it is relatively "mundane", optimization-wise, but perhaps it's also my bias of knowing how to do things "right"?

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@c0de517e I think you’re asking the question backwards. Ask instead what optimization concepts you want to impart, and the answer to what problem to illustrate with will become apparent.

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

Balls!

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras spheres, but solid. Computational geometers are funny.

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

It's amazing to see how strongly devs defend Steam when someone brings up that it charges a ton more than any engine. I mean, I know Steam ofc provides good services and by now it's very hard to get away from, but holy moly batman the Stockholm's

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@c0de517e sign of the times isn’t it: emotions and outrage over logic and rationality.

pervognsen, (edited ) to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

Was randomly reminded of the most baffling prescription in Uncle Bob's Clean Code book, as summarized here: "He says that an ideal function has zero arguments (but still no side effects?), and that a function with just three arguments is confusing and difficult to test." His actual before-and-after code examples involve regressing to a pre-structured form of programming where even local dataflow is implicit through member variables (i.e. shared state) rather than arguments and return values.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen the whole cadre of TDD/XP/patterns/etc snake oil salesmen have done untold damage to software engineering.

Not only from shitty engineers selling selling shitty practices (as the sodoku incident and eg Casey vs Uncle Bob illustrates) but - much worse - making people at large soft in the head, unable of critical thinking/analysis on their own and gullibly drinking the poison kool-aid.

Sigh.

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

I'd love to see a survey of non-gamedevs about the wider perception of ECS in the industry. The only AAA game I know of which is structured anything like the popular conception of ECS is Overwatch.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@mjp @pervognsen on Twitter I likened the dogma for ECS with the (once) craze for scene graphs. Which struck a chord.

Because in reality, in both cases, you’re better off by what amounts to a few arrays (or linear buffers).

The “system” in ECS is, I think, where suddenly people think you need a whole framework around these few arrays.

It’s design-patternitis all over again: assigning a “fancy” name (to something that absolutely doesn’t need it) elevates it on a pedestal.

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aras @mjp @pervognsen “System-Oriented Design” - it’s irresistible.

stevesilberman, to random
@stevesilberman@newsie.social avatar

Wait till Marge Greene hears that the Jewish Space Laser people have teamed up with the Pride groomers to create a ray in San Francisco that instantly turns you trans. Will no one think of the children? [photo via Donna GianGiordano-Merlino]

christer,
@christer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@stevesilberman maybe if someone told Marjorie Greene about the Trans-Siberian railway and what happens if you ride it, she’s be less enamored with Russia.

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