Join us on a journey through 50 years of computer graphics and help realize the path it never got to take by inventing the missing hardware, math, and algorithms! Lead our build/test/release culture and help make our next-generation devices: www.indeed.com/job/seeking-...

Before the days of SSR, the water of Fable 1 on Xbox used the screen buffer as a texture source, flipping it and warping texture co-ords. Other PS2 games would have done this as well since using the frame buffer as a texture source was trivial on the GS.

Bah! Not enough Ulster players being called up for the 6N; they are white hot right now. Don't care about 6N results and fear Farrell is fast becoming a World Cup liability. I mean, Lions tour was awesome, but we were the only country to sacrifice long-term progress for it.

I snapshot many things but one I regret not doing is DEV7 for the Adibou games. It was light years ahead of its time: a non-programmer-friendly, high-level custom language with IDE, debugger & integrated asset pipeline. Again; it was French, and I love that I got to witness their technical prowess.

Playing through Just Cause 3 right now and it's totally brilliant. On the one hand it's gorgeous and fun to zip around everywhere. On the other, despite its impressive open world, it also highlights the astonishing attention to detail GTA 5 had.

There are a couple of live demos too: Basic testbed: andrewwillmott.github.io/app/DemoApp.... Constrained paths, using quaternion splines for orientation: andrewwillmott.github.io/app/DemoApp....

I've pushed a few changes to my splines library, github.com/andrewwillmo..., recently, including:

Hurrah! The Nintendo Switch port I’ve been working on is finally done - Moonring is out today! #gamdev #moonring www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/...

Ah, nice, yet another "wrote a huge chunk of the bloody engine" credit gets marked up as "additional programming." As a contractor/consultant you have much better financial control over your future but don't ever expect to be part of the team. If you want legitimate credit: put it in your contract.

It's coming up on 10 years since I added Global Illumination to UE4 for a client and I still feel immensely sad when colourful games don't attempt the same. They lose out on so much warmth and grounding, and also making lighting artist' life much easier. (this particular one was voxel cone tracing)

This is Sektori! A twin-stick shooter I've been making (and documenting the journey) since April 2021. And it finally launched TODAY on Steam, PS5 and Xbox! Here's a fresh launch trailer, all shares highly appreciated. More game info in replies. #indiegame #ps5 #xbox #steam #indiedev #gamedev

New blog post about the development of Radical Pie: terathon.com/blog/radical...

Took me AGES to dig this up, I knew I preserved it but I have so many backups. This my first reviewed Shareware game from early 1997 (aged 16). I'd love to frame it but it does look a bit gaudy 😂

Looking at my C# code from 15 years ago: it was more verbose but A LOT less noisy. Trying to get to the bottom of it but there's a lot more scoping and brackets these days, with increased use of properties.

I am excited to announce the release of Radical Pie, version 1.0! This is the professional equation typesetting application that I've been working on for the last year. See the website for details. radicalpie.com

I never got on with the later levels of Doom 1/2. The earlier levels were a master class in level design, while the later ones were a bit boring for me. Just played Doom 2 Master Levels, though, and OH MY GOD they are a revelation. Incredibly well made and super fun! doomwiki.org/wiki/Master_...

I'm frankly astonished that we still can't tell our x64 CPUs to not add entries to the BTB. We have millions of bounds checks, sanitiser guards, type checks, overflow checks, etc. polluting the BTB. When all we need is a "BTB says no" and a forward branch. Xbox 360 PPC tw instruction be sad :(

It must be every few months I become horrified at C# authors significantly ballooning the surface area of the language. Today I found Primary Constructors and I had to WTF. Each new generation of C# programmer must have fundamentally incompatible styles.

LAPACK/BLAS have a neat vector normalisation trick: find the max axis and divide each component by that before rsqrt and scale. Avoids overflow and gradual underflow due to squaring in the rsqrt. If the max axis is tiny then all axes are tiny so the components can be considered roughly proportional.

There are days when I look at colourful, cartoony models up close and get annoyed at the polygonal silhouettes. Mainly because a small team in Santa Monica solved this 25 years ago on a Playstation 2 and I love that technology so much (tfrags!) . Using Lisp.

King Of Meat is currently ✨ VERY POSITIVE ✨ On Steam 👍❤️👍❤️👍 store.steampowered.com/app/1926980/...

This game is all Glowmade, a crazy-talented team making a game they love. I played a small part on their custom engine, building lots since the WonderWorlds days (e.g. lighting model pretty much the same). This one has my own RHI across PC, Xbox and Playstaion too. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRr0...

It's days like this I remember why I wrote Remotery. I'm building a 32-bit app and I recall Total War: Rome 2 being very tight on memory where no existing profiler would run without crashing. I had to write a custom one that ended up being the inspiration for Remotery.

Today I remember Lua uses 1-based indexing and it threw me into mild depression. Remembering vividly when our industry decided Lua was better and custom languages needed to extinct themselves. Sigh, we could have had so much better.

After building a basic CPU and GPU a couple years ago on FPGA, I still wake up thinking how all modern software development is taking an "everything runs all the time everywhere" model and forcing it to serialise. Then slowly increasing parallelism but never quite returning to that original power.

TIL of VD-Dev, despite sharing past franchise titles with Guillaume Dubail and the late Fernando Velez. These guys were proper savants of their time, unlike those that tend to hit popular culture. I'm in complete awe of their work, Asterix & Obelix was mind-blowing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfOR...

Success! Standard CRT finally bolted in and my custom CRT is no longer necessary. I can now delete 1000s of LOC that have caused years of pain. There's a new startup race-condition in there but I'll find that easily enough.

Another target on my list is clReflect. Carrying Clang/LLVM as a dependency has been lunatic-fringe levels of dedication to the cause - a 100GB build folder! The worst part was maintaining a release copy and my own local enhancements. I have to decide whether to retire it or build a custom parser.

I'm switching over from my homegrown CRT to the MSVC one so that I can shed some maintenance weight. Long overdue. Getting some funky errors now because of some shortcuts I took, but it's nearly working! Can't wait to delete all that code.

For some reason getting excited for picking up my planetary sandbox again, in spare time. It's been years and the vision appears to be quite unique. Primarily motivated by a whole bunch of UGC ideas, but heck, I'd love to replace the user C# scripting with Luau. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I can not express how crazy it feels that my colleagues and I are genuinely inventing something new and redefining the path through graphics history from the late 70s onward. We get to do go through all the problems our idols of generations past had to and admire their general awesomeness.

There's something so incredibly satisfying about spending a while rearranging a whole bunch of algorithms and getting your high-throughput type size down to 32 bytes.

OH MY GOD Strudel is so insanely good strudel.cc/workshop/get...

One reason I left Lionhead was that the industry wasn't interested in multiplying the productivity of artists/designers. No investment in new tech ideas that might fail. No focus on empowering talent in untested ways. Just outsource/contract more, buy average tech that perpetuates methods of old.

Asked chatgpt to write some HLSL: void Compute(uint3 tid : SV_DispatchThreadID) { groupshared float2 buffer[64 * 2]; } Looks like I'll keep writing the code then. Y'all are praising some emperor's new clothes, here. Jaysus.

Seriously. YOUR ALL FIRED. This is why academic geeks get stick for obfuscation. Using the SAME VARIABLE for DIFFERENT things, only changing their meaning based on the FONT WEIGHT. I'd love to throw this in the bin but it's a good paper.

I love Eric Schmidt's latest talk on AI: "all the research we're seeing from people like Open AI, Anthrophic and so-in, is saying..." lol You mean: "All those with a vested interested in this being wildly profitable are saying..."

Remembering that time I had a client in Vancouver (I'm based in Brighton) and regularly visited them at their office Burnaby. Bumped into an old colleague from the Lionhead days working for a company in the same building, on the same floor. So crazy.

Long time ago I built a Chunked-LOD QEF Surface Nets engine on the GPU that could handle arbitrary neighbour LOD differences and used Dual Number SDFs for cheap/accurate QEF edge normals. It could scale to planetary sizes like my modified Transvoxels. Maybe one day I'll share the nicer shots :)

Fills my heart with joy hearing The Stig speak like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wV...

Gave up on trying to sell my Unreal Engine plugin, it's free now if you happen to want to 3D-paint textures in the Editor, or make things out of little grids-of-shapes: www.fab.com/listings/058...

y'all looking for rules and laws and enemies in code like it's some kind of religion. Relax. Focus on the goal. Ignore the proselytizing noise.

Current-gen engines and their future versions are necessarily entrenched in decades of dated technology, holding game development back. I wonder if there's any appetite for something more revolutionary. Would be interesting to explore what feature set would now be possible from the ground up.

In 2004 we pitched for Ms. Pacman on PSP. We got the PS1 game and I reverse-engineered mesh/texture/level formats, no source access. In 3 days we recreated the first level, all AI and game logic in our engine. We lost the contract to somebody else because Namco said what we did was "impossible."

I started my career on V-Rally in Leamington Spa and this doesn't do the rally scene in Warwickshire enough justice: it all started way before 1998 with many other teams in the area built by some North West talent with impecable pedigree. This is definitely not over! www.pcgamer.com/games/racing...

In 2003 we walked into the nVidia booth at ECTS and completely surprised their devs with this demo. It was my first time seeing it on a GF4, running 40-50fps! We all had GF3 and were targeting OG Xbox. Lots of sacrifice, but memories and learning I'd never trade. www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqn...

Gonna start pulling old posts from that other account for posterity: Prototype splatting tech for stable painterly rendering, running @ 30fps on an Xbox 360 in 2010. For Fable Heroes (internally named Fable 4-Play); a game me and some Fable buddies started and promoted through Lionhead.