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

Witnessed a gig so intense that I'm still under a spell from it — from beautiful and fierce #LeraLynn herself! ❤️‍🔥 The sound was rather fantastic, and that poetry and hypnotic voice really shined in this, unexpectedly substantial, and guitar-thick arrangement. What a treat!

Fun fact: Unity serializes bool properities in YAML as 0 or 1, so you can change the type to int, float or enum and the old content will just work. Makes it easy to extend the range of a property from e.g. “hidden” and “visible” to also have a “shadows only” option. #unitytips

I just leave my blob of utter adoration of #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes here: although it's focus-hungry, puzzlicious and coffee-propagating, all in all it's a wonderful game to share (if your fam is into existential horror kinks). It's also stylish in so-o satisfying way. 🌹ԅ(^‿^ԅ)

Witnessed a truly stellar performance of Samuel Barnett (yes, he did say ACTUALLY) and Victoria Yeates (acting on goddess-like level) in @theRSC #SwanTheatre #BenAndImo. Couldn't recommend it enough! 💫

Ever played a game where you are switching through menu windows and have to wait for an animated transition to end before you can take another step? I'm pretty sure they StartWindowTransition() instead of expressing their final intent to SwitchToWindow().

I find it necessary to always start from the final destination — what players should see, what they should hear, what they should be able to do? — at every point in time. And then walk back to the data that is required to decide exactly that. And then to the sources of that data.

Then, both system author and users get aware that there might be someone else requesting or releasing it. And a dead simple solution emerges by itself — replace that global isPaused in the system with pauseRequestCount and consider the game paused whenever it's not 0.

The common answer to this is: “People just shouldn't have access to anything global or dangerous.” But this doesn't help to resolve actual tasks at hand. What often helps me to untangle this is a slight shift in wording: we RequestPause() and then we ReleasePauseRequest().

The reason usually boils down to a programmer solving their local problem as if they are alone in the project and their tiny component have authority over anything. Music is too loud during a dialog? SetMusicVolume(0.5) when we StartDialog()! What do you mean by user settings?

Let's say, we pause world simulation to start a cutscene, and we unpause it when it finishes. And we also allow players to open settings menu while in cutscene, to switch subtitles etc. But we usually unpause the simulation when we close menus... You guess what happens next.

Is it just me, or does the majority of bugs in games come from programmers thinking too much about events and actions instead of state and intent? I mean, yeah, we write procedures and compile to instructions, but I would be very careful with things like Pause() and Unpause().

People don't talk about game architecture enough so! 💫 How do I ID things? 💫 Let's retrace how I reinvented the wheel! Latest when adding your first 💾 Save Game 💾 system, you will find you need to ID your object types, cuz you can't store a reference to a Prefab 🧵

The Last Night - Game Architecture (on Unity) by our Lead Programmer @GhatSmith 💫 VIDEO + SLIDES available on our fresh new blog! https://t.co/6u3ebNQYeS Preview in the thread 👇

Amazing! It's interesting that it looks more like a paper printing technique than the 1-bit pixel display. I imagine the same principle would work great for texture-space hatching that keeps the line width constant-ish.

A video about some of the techniques I used to give some life to the movement of this character https://t.co/9ITLXUQHCm

A glimpse of revamped global illumination in my toy #rustlang #vulkan renderer `kajiya` 👀 Lots more ReSTIR, new meshless irradiance cache, much larger worlds 🎉 Around 11ms/frame here on a Radeon 6800 XT at 1080p, pending some optimizations 😛 Lighting: sun + emissive materials.

Visiting Manchester for a day with @lita_llost we couldn't miss the opportunity to check out a familiar place... #lonesurvivor @jasperbyrne

#KnowByHeart... will be released February 10, 2022. Be sure to add the game to your Steam wishlist. https://t.co/Ly5PgKnkAf

Not sure if I want to elevate all rails to allow that diagonal slope in the middle or just forbid it for such cases and keep rails closer to the ground.