Emilio López

I have a new article! It took a long time but I think it was worth it, hopefully you'll enjoy it too. elopezr.com/the-art-of-pac… Many thanks to @vassilis3D, @moguzhan_k and @aortizelguero for the help and encouragement

The ocean rendering is made with screen space grid, it was missing from environment probes, until now:

How Studio Ghibli uses the 60:30:10 rule for visual magic

I built my own graphics library and got a whole map of my city onto a device with only 64kb of free RAM using my own rendering method written entirely in C & assembly, and a converter that take GeoJSON files and compresses them - this one went from 5mb to 34kb in my proprietary binary format, uses linedraw vector rendering to keep the entire memory buffer at only 8kb of RAM whilst tiling larger maps In short Screw google, aint no reason maps needs to be gigabytes of RAM to use

Sin palabras.

We're announcing the formation of Ecma TC57 to standardize HLSL, boosting shader portability across platforms! devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/standa… For everyone attending Vulkanised, we'll be talking about this at the Shading Languages Symposium on 2/12: khronos.org/events/shading…

Japón 🇯🇵 empieza a cambiar de etapa energética. La primera ministra Sanae Takaichi ha situado abiertamente la energía nuclear como una pieza clave para el sistema eléctrico del país. Tras el accidente de Fukushima en 2011, Japón paró todo su parque nuclear y lo sustituyó por gas natural y carbón importados. El resultado fue inmediato: aumento del precio de la electricidad (causando muertes por falta de calefacción), mayor dependencia exterior y un fuerte repunte de las emisiones. Un país industrial, con muy pocos recursos energéticos propios, quedó expuesto a la volatilidad internacional. Ahora el debate ya no es emocional, es estructural. Japón necesita estabilidad eléctrica para su industria y seguridad energética para su economía. Las renovables deben seguir creciendo, pero no pueden cubrir por sí solas una demanda continua en un sistema aislado como el japonés. La nuclear aporta justo lo que falta: producción constante, predecible y sin emisiones directas de CO₂. Además, la seguridad ha sido reevaluada en profundidad. Japón endureció la regulación tras Fukushima con nuevas exigencias frente a terremotos, tsunamis y pérdida total de suministro eléctrico. Bajo ese marco, se ha puesto de nuevo en servicio Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, la central nuclear más potente del mundo, con unos 8 GW eléctricos. Un paso que simboliza el regreso efectivo de la energía nuclear al sistema energético japonés. Pero lo importante no es solo Japón. Cuando la tercera economía del mundo asume que la descarbonización real exige generación firme baja en carbono, el mensaje trasciende su política interna: la transición energética no se debe decidir con eslóganes populistas, sino con el funcionamiento físico de un sistema eléctrico. ¿Lo aprenderemos en España? japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/0…

@nicbarkeragain Reviewing someone else's code is part of the job on a team, not glamorous but necessary to get information flowing, avoid mistakes and talk to people and learn. All of that is lost with AI, and it basically gets to do the fun part and you get to refactor it

"AI will generate all the code, and senior programmers will review it" is basically a mantra at this point. I'm fortunate enough to know a number of top tier programmers personally, and precisely 0% of them want to spend their time reviewing AI generated code (myself included)

For some, this means nothing. For others, a lot. The whirring of the hard drive, the simple "beep" - two sounds forever etched into my brain; 12 seconds of time travel.

@Clint_Davey1 Unfortunately Napoleon also broke Spain

Spain broke Napoleon. "That unfortunate war destroyed me; it divided my forces, multiplied my obligations, undermined my morale. All the circumstances of my disasters are bound up in that fatal knot."

Claude 4.6 Opus just refactored my entire codebase in one call. 25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files. It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti. None of it worked. But boy was it beautiful.

I wrote a UI library in C that can lay out 95000 items at 60fps. The library is 566 lines of C, and the application-specific ui code is 998 lines. Works on mac, windows, and linux.

For Age of Empires, we used a fake language for the units. It was kind of a cross between Latin and faux-English. The villagers would say "Erectus" when they were told to make a house, for instance. For Age of Empires 2 & 3 we sourced out the real language for the civs. Some we could not, and had to use substitutes. No one knows what the Huns spoke back in 450 AD for instance. Someone told me the Huns in Age of Empires 2 speak Hungarian, but I don't know if this is true. The Goths don't speak Gothic, because we couldn't find any Gothic speakers, so they speak German. For most of the languages I called Brigham Young University, which has a fabulous language department (plus I had contacts). Much of the reason for BYU's great languages is all the returned LDS missionaries from around the world. They had guys who spoke Hungarian, for instance. We hired a guy to speak Nahuatl for the Aztecs, but got diddled. It turned out he didn't speak Nahuatl at all. Fooled us. The Mayans do speak a real Mayan language (out of about 20 extant today). A weird fact is that because the original Age of Empires didn't speak English, when we tried to have the Age 2 Britons speak English our team thought it sounded silly, and demanded something we couldn't understand. We chose an old English which sounded foreign. Luckily, English evolved quickly from 1400-1600 (try to read the original Morte d'Arthur from about 1480) so medieval English is incomprehensible to modern speakers. But when my French and German buddies asked why they could understand the Teutons and Franks and I couldn't understand the English all I could do was shrug.

today was my last day as on my last hourly contract. officially full-time building my C engine. with me luck 🤞

Double clicked on the river

Después del reconocimiento de la estupidez del cierre nuclear por parte de Alemania, llega el de Bélgica. ¿Qué más necesita el Gobierno de España para revisar una decisión que encarece la electricidad, aumenta las emisiones, incrementa el riesgo de apagones y debilita la industria?

Baroness Meyer has kickstarted the Clause 191 debate by highlighting the reality that a FULLY TERM BABY could be aborted by the mother with no consequences.

I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming. graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nanite…

One of the greatest tech revolutions of the last few years that boosted my programming productivity beyond imagination has been the hot-reload button in Visual Studio. No other technology has improved my productivity that much.

Crossed off the procrastination list: added support for multiple cameras in the scene. Up to now, I couldn't create cameras from the GUI, couldn't select them for rendering either. It's funny how something like this takes 20 minutes to do but can stay on the list for years.

Esto es grave. Muy grave. Irene Montero admite públicamente que el objetivo de Podemos es REEMPLAZAR a los españoles y conseguir votos para ACABAR con los "fachas". No nací en España, pero me duele ver el inmenso daño que esta gene le está haciendo al gran país que se volvió mi casa. País por el que he trabajado duro como una más, sin exigir absolutamente nada.