Brad Roepstorff

New post: "Multi-Core By Default" On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.

@TerriblePosture Ok that trailer kinda rules. Also: my 1.5 year old watching over my shoulder just demanded to watch “bata choo choo” a bunch of times in a row

GUESS WHAT YOU GUYS?!?!?!

Local lights are now live in HypeHype! 🎉 I developed a new stochastic lighting algorithm — from concept to prototype to production — in just 6 months. Super proud of this one! [Details in thread 🧵] Here's a walkthrough of a game I relit with local lights

The directx docs should include these comments :-)

For the love of our eyeballs, do not align your ember particles to velocity! Don’t give them that comet texture either, ugh. Let’s make ✨physically based flying embers✨ A Unity vfx graph implementation and explanation below. 🧵

@GabrielSassone 💪

#NewProfilePic from a recent concert!

@s4schoener Perhaps the best programming productivity video ever made

One Simple Trick for dealing with CI failures youtu.be/6edtnA4cHrA?si…

[0] What a horrible term 'printf-debugging' If you are debugger-free might as well at least be libc-free Here is how I work CPU C code without any debugger in my engines, and how it works better than a debugger for me ...

yep, definitely giving this a try.

Preview of "Scavengers Reign" Season 2. Unfortunately, this new season has not yet been greenlighted. So the creators of the show & Green Street studio produced this concept trailer in-house. Full video >> catsuka.com/news/2024-11-0… cc @josephbennett00 @charleshuettner

@yiningkarlli yeah, I was scratching my head at that one too. I guess maybe it counts because Feynman did some AI research back in the day? hah

The Nobel Prize for Physics this year goes to.... not physics???

The reason Japanaese studios are making consistently great games as an industry hub is quite simple. Many of their teams have been making games together for a long time, sometimes decades. They build upon their pipelines, they know the strengths and weaknesses of their teams. Theres a healthy mix of new staff with new ideas and seasoned devs with retained knowledge. Even when new companies form, they often emerge from teams who had worked together prior. The average employee stays in a job for 12 years in Japan. Up to 3x longer than western hubs. The west needs to do more to retain staff, stop treating them as disposable. You cant simply throw money at building a team for every game, there's a cadence that comes with familiarity and group knowledge. Not saying Japan's perfect but there's definitely positive development outcomes from this culture. I find the number one reason for job hopping is lack of clear role progression and lack of support in improving. Not money. Growth. Afterall money comes with growth. The problem is too many studios use money as a way to bribe staff into staying in poor situations rather than solving root issues. I've fallen for this myself. Such a simple thing, and yet when I think back throughout my career it was never clear on how to attain my next promotion, and was I getting any training? nope. We need to stop seeing "investing" in staff as throwing money at poaching staff, and instead see it as putting money into growing and retaining the staff we have.

@rfleury Yeah, agreed...except for artists type users, who mostly seem to be allergic to typing code into open text files. I think it's because the possibility space of text is too large and compilers are necessarily pedantic, so only certain engineer types can put up with it daily

@broepstorff You can get this more or less with a good graphical debugger. I think current paradigms would improve a lot, even holding the source code format constant, with just a better build model, and much faster builds, to allow for real time feedback, hot reloading, and looped editing.

As one who suspects there’s a high ceiling beyond text as the visual representation for code, I think text has a design advantage in its ability to implicitly/invisibly denote references (via identifiers) between two locations. I’d say that future work should/could include that.

@rfleury I mostly still just want text but with the two main advantages of a noodle graph: improved look up of functions/variables and zero syntax errors Inline display of variables during execution is also a nice advantage of noodle graphs, but is pretty domain specific

@rfleury Yup. Blows me away that most noodle graph languages don't have named variables Text also has a (vertical) timeline of statement execution which is a big plus (but which falls apart in async/parallel code)

I made a VSCode extension that uses PDBs to provide GotoDefinition intellisense support. Verified to work with Jai, C++, Rust, Zig, Odin, and Nim. Should work with *any* compiled language that makes PDBs. Here's a little video. Links to blog post / marketplace in reply.

Signed distance functions (SDFs) are an important surface representation, which can be directly visualized via the “sphere tracing” algorithm. At #SIGGRAPH2024 we showed how to sphere trace a whole new class of surfaces, based on *harmonic functions* rather than SDFs. [1/n]

A very interesting technique for mesh simplification and skinning weight optimization. While it may seem trivial, extracting a single layer from a multi-layered object while avoiding collisions is far from easy. kuiwuchn.github.io/proxycloth.html

@Donzanoid Heh, the game was targeting xbox 360 and wii (but not PS3 for some reason), and that was the only viable choice at the time.

@Donzanoid You haven't lived unless you programmed tev stages in Gambryo using xml lol