Patrick McKenna

Tune in Monday at 9:40 PDT for my first ever GDC presentation! 🤩 Branching Out: Watch Dogs Legion‘s Architecture for Group AI Behaviours We'll be online for a live Q&A after the talk #GDC21 #UbiGDC

What are y’all playing this weekend? jk we don’t care we’re a company. Buy our games.

The junior dev asked the senior dev “why are you pushing this code with no abstraction? What if you want to change it in the future?” The senior dev responded “then I will change it in the future” In that moment the junior dev was enlightened

@FreyaHolmer Impostor! 😉

behold: cone

@soychotic BehaviourTree arborist 🌳

Devs what title from other professions should we steal next? We already destroyed “engineer” and “architect” …I’m thinking I like “software doctor” or ooooh maybe “software surgeon”

@boris_brave This blog post details Planetary Anihilation’s engine design that really leans into it. forrestthewoods.com/blog/tech_of_p… Spoiler: everything is a curve 🤯

E.g. suppose your model of chess has 32 pieces, and each has an xy integer location. You can "move" a piece by updating the location, capture by deleting. But how does the view code handle animating those things?

Thinking about model-view separation again for game engine design. I.e. you have a set of objects that represent the game world, and then separately you have code that handles displaying it. It seems good fit for turn-based games, but I've never seen a good implementation.

Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, with a fantastic response to someone saying “Manor Lords is a pretty interesting case-study in the pitfalls of Early Access”. I didn’t think Hooded Horse could get any cooler but here we are 👑

The only perspective on AI that matters

@cmuratori I was eying keychron, but worried about the missing pause/break button they swapped for backlight control.

I have officially taken the plunge and bought a Keychron Q3 QMK. I would like to replace the switches, since Gateron Red/Blue/Brown don't really do it for me. Does anyone have switch recommendations? I currently type on Razer Orange switches and I think they feel pretty good. My favorite keyboard of all time were the Amiga hybrid switch keyboards, but nobody makes anything like that any more (Topres don't feel like it to me, although some people think they do I guess).

To celebrate the launch of our PlayStation Programming course at pikuma.com, we are *GIVING AWAY* a PlayStation miniature from @Retroldtech. To put a number in the bag, simply retweet this post! 🙂

@stevesaylor Example of option 2. How do you type like this?

@stevesaylor Ergonomics. I love a numpad, but I love my body more. With a full size keyboard either my keyboard is centred and my right arm is hyper-extended to mouse, or the mouse is in a neutral position and I have to shift my whole body to the left to type. TKL moves both towards centre.

The erasure of the number pad keys on keyboards is confusing to me. Why is every single keyboard nowadays removing the Number pad keys? I use them almost every damn day. I know it was designed for data entry/calculators, but I find it more useful than the top number row.

@falconerd For asset importing I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the amusingly named assimp library: github.com/assimp/assimp

What did I miss? Let me know down below 👇 Cheers, I hope this was informative!

Want to get away from clunky game engines but don't want to build from scratch? Like many things in life there's a middle path. A careful selection of libraries can drastically reduce development time. Here are some I think are the best🧵

@MIT_CSAIL Can’t decide between ‘compilers’ w @_rsuvorov or ‘semantics of programming languages’ w @johyphenel. It’s been a hot second, but fond memories

What was the hardest computer science course you’ve taken?

@lisyarus @manalokos You could do a similar simplification for the resolution part: just repel overlapping points away from the cell’s centroid. The expensive version would be closest-point-on-line-segment to the nearest outside edge.

@lisyarus @manalokos Yeah, in my case I know which constrains form the hull by construction, but I suppose if you’re evolving morphologies that might not always be true. But if you’ve got meta-data about “cells” anyway perhaps you could lean on that? It sounds like you already are with the spheres

Anybody got any suggestions on collision detection & resolution for a soft-body simulation? :)

@RobertDaleSmith Totally did that at my HS! Boot screen too 😆 Thanks for the happy memories!

Am I the only 90s kid that vandalized every PC's Windows startup/shutdown screens when visiting retail stores?

@manalokos @lisyarus Might be too expensive tho? Sounds like n-squared now that I write it down, but if n is small it might still work. More AABBs!

@manalokos @lisyarus I’d try an AABB coarse pass collision detection then the winding number algorithm for point-polygon intersection tests. Add a constraint to push any points that overlap another object.

Just look at it and tell me, isn't it really worth giving Dreams another chance? #playdreams