David Colson

@_johncrewe Christ John are you trying to get back to hospital?

Yesterdays trackday at Oulton didn't quite go to plan.

Join fred editor code review with its creator @starfreakclone! We’re gonna explore how it’s made (arenas included!) Last Thursday stream before Easter!

It is finally out in pre-order early access today and I'm so happy with how people are enjoying it!

Been a while since my last post haha, though I am very excited today cause I can finally talk about what I've been working on the past two years! I've been one of the lead programmers working on porting @MSFSofficial to PS5! Absolute dream project to work on for me!

@EliasDaler I have absolutely loved watching your tweets about this! So cool, and inspiring for my own side projects haha

I started making stuff for PS1 exactly one year ago. It's been a wild journey since then. I'm thinking of writing a big article about it (and later a video, maybe). And this is just the beginning of my PS1 journey! Now that I have a pretty good engine, I can make a real game.

@damsonwastaken You got any tips on how to get Total Air War to run on windows 10/11? I've tried a lot of random configs with total air war 2.0, but the game usually crashes whenever you start an actual flight, running out of ideas how how to debug it.

The idea being that scenes, textures and meshes are all relatively simple and visible to lua code, which means you can make procedural meshes and textures to your hearts content, and the console will render them happily. Here is how you might access the above data to draw a mesh

A normal file, like a gltf file gets imported and converted to a lua table which you can easily load into lua. Meshes also get converted to userdata buffers (shown in second image), which can be manipulated however you want in lua.

This weekend's work has been back on my PS1 fantasy console project. I've been working on making custom file formats for things like meshes/scenes/textures that are more easily compatible with lua. Heavily inspired by what @lexaloffle has done with picotron.

@SebAaltonen Do you specify if a bind group is temp or persistent in its description when you create it? I guess the persistent pool is global and you do individual descriptor set delete?

@dave_colson We have persistent pool for persistent bind groups and for each frame in flight we have temp descriptor pool for temp descriptors. Temp pools have flag to not support individual descriptor set delete. This allows the driver to bump allocate them quickly (no fragmentation).

Hey @SebAaltonen you expose bind groups in your renderer, but in the vulkan backend I assume you don’t expose descriptor pools? How do you deal with them?

My best idea is that there is a growable set of pools on the bind group layout object and all bind groups for that layout allocate from that pool. But this means destroying a bind group layout frees all the associated bind groups? Maybe this is okay?

An update on my text editor, have finally implemented a big idea for lots of speed, so here I am loading a 130mb log file instantly, navigating and editing all with no lag. Reminder I'm posting more regular updates at dcolson.bsky.social so follow me there

@starfreakclone Your DMs are not open 😊

@dave_colson Please feel free!

I think it's about time to show off a _little_ bit of what I've been working on in my spare time. Here's a little view into 'fred', my text editor: youtube.com/watch?v=LmINbn…

@damsonwastaken YEES

Any retro flight sim fans here? #retrogaming #dosgaming #flightsim

@_johncrewe How are they still sending you bills, it’s been months?!?

New day, new bill 💀

Lastly, I recently started making a vulkan renderer using Jai purely for the learning benefit of learning about modern renderers, and have been following vkguide.dev enough that I have a basic compute shader and imgui!

The next side project is a modal text editor. This is a relatively recently started project and is partially dissatisfaction with current text editors, and also just for the fun of learning about text editing. I'm currently focusing on this one, so expect more updates.

I've been very quiet here for ages, not really been in the mood for social media, but I thought I'd give an update on some of the side projects I've been working on. I'll be trying to share more regular updates over at @dcolson.bsky.social so follow me there to see more 🧵👇