Something that I've worked on is being shown at GDC, which is just hella cool. Wish our southern neighbours weren't so weird at the moment, I would've loved to be there in person. www.theverge.com/games/892436...

My GPC talk about X-Plane, OpenGL, Vulkan and regrets is now up on YouTube: youtu.be/Ju2TQyy6hGg If you are in the mood for what paid critics have called 'the worlds okayest' talk, look no further. If not, there are also great talks posted on the channel. Either way I had an absolute blast in Breda

Windows Defender is apparently now marking netcat as a naughty program and just deletes it. Unfortunately that breaks shader reloading in X-Plane because that uses the built-in telnet server to execute the commands. Thanks Microsoft, it's the third time I'm downloading netcat again...

Of course Slack also needs to shove AI into everything whether anyone wants it or not. And of course the "Don't ask again" button doesn't work. Not in the sense that it ignores your request, it literally can't be clicked. The state of software these days is absolutely disgusting.

Finally some text books that I can understand

Had an absolute blast at GPC! Met a bunch of awesome people, all of them super nice. Also really nice to finally be able to put a face to an avatar for some. Really wish I could’ve stayed for the final bash instead of immediately running back to the airport.

On my way to the old world and #GPC2025 from the funny number gate

TIL that the Discovery tab is just a feed that can be unsubscribed from. Afterwards it no longer hangs around the tab area of the Home page. Dunno about everyone else but mine was an absolute train wreck of terrible hot takes, NSFW content and AI evangelists. Bsky is a lot more peaceful without it.

From a graphics programmer standpoint, Liquid Glass is so cool. Doing this effect in real time on a consumer phone is so cool. As a phone user though, what the actual fuck? Why are they shipping me a cool tech demo?

Sometimes it's easy to forget how far things have come. I'm putting some screenshots of various X-Plane versions together for no particular reason and the difference between v12 and v11 is wild. The v11 to v10 difference is a lot harder to see in this view but still there.

We have a quarterly user survey about feature requests and issues they would like to see fixed (it's always better AA and more perf), but this time around there apparently was a large enough crowd to get "AMD CrossFire support" on the board. I have extremely bad news for those users...

Looks like I’ll be giving a talk about working on X-Plane at GPC 🥳. Covering how we went from a GL 2.1(!) codebase to a modern Vulkan/Metal one and the challenges and advantages of working on a single product for 30 years, with an eye on the unique challenges of a small studio working on flight sims

I’ve been enjoying doing CAD work on the Surface with a pen, but the keyboard has been incredibly awkward. Figured this was a good opportunity to finally use one of the Pico Pis collecting dust and make a macro pad thingy. Quite pleased with how it turned out.

Made the mistake of looking at the Hacker News comments on the preliminary report of the Air India crash. People who regularly rant about managers demanding features with no understanding of the problem space are now seriously saying “planes should just not allow actions that can crash it” 🙄

Be still, my beating heart <3

Fun quirk of first gen Maxwell GPUs: If you have a f16 render target, output to it won’t be clamped to the highest f16 value but instead overflows into INF. This gets particular fun when you turn on blending and no amount of shader side clamping can save you.

Honestly, forget about AI tools. The trifecta of power tools for game engine development is RenderDoc, Superluminal and Live++. Hands down the most bang for your buck you can ever get and RenderDoc in particular is criminally underpriced.

Tired of debugging optimized code with missing variables and inlined functions? @visualstudio.com preview now has Dynamic Debugging which automatically unoptimizes functions you step into while debugging 👀 Available in UE 5.6, or with a simple cherry pick: devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/cpp-...

Product idea: A CVS grade receipt printer for C++ template errors.