Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

It is possible that years of cd keys tied to multiplayer access & then an early move to digital/DRM on PC has given a false impression of just what an aberration denying any borrowing/resale/rental path is.
Here's Sony, talking about this console generation: https://youtu.be/kWSIFh8ICaA (if I then buy you a pint & you keep the game, this is a zero-friction, zero-fee resale).

Unionised US journalists writing about crunch culture while also saying it's not part of their billable labour when they put 40+ hrs/week into gaming, despite that work being core to their company's tentpole media output (podcast etc), are possibly indicating limitations of unions when not operating in a legal landscape that also believes in worker rights.
It's much easier to see exploitation when you're looking in.

So this is now getting fixed-fixed: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs/pull/1997
(Previously it was patched to explain to users how to manually find the last working build & install it - something the error message didn't make clear back in Feb was the expected process.)

My real concern is that a slight occasional stutter in a couple of games I'm playing is being caused by my preferred settings being ok for not overloading the shader cores but is pushing the engines to slightly over-allocate VRAM, so getting silently swapped out by WDDM (which definitely can cause such unpredictable but rare extended stall issue). Or maybe it's just a driver or game bug?

I did not think "only 8GB of VRAM" was going to be something I thought about already (but maybe I'm stuck in a ~2016 mindset).
Starting to see games using up every inch of VRAM they can get their hands on (7.5GB in Division 2 for 4K high). Wonder how much is "just stream in as many assets as will fit" vs feeling real pressure (games that estimate usage in settings warn of huge VRAM jumps for some temporal AA & other choices @ 4K).

I've been going through a lot of semi-recent Ubisoft games (in uPlay+) - nVidia really "owned" high-end PC gaming for a few years with TWIMTBP.
These games are mainly console-first, optimised for GCN, but on PC the quality dials go up to 11 with nVidia tech. If you want much better SSAO or soft shadows you couldn't get on consoles then you have to run them on an nVidia card (for HBAO+ HFTS etc).

Are some devs implementing colour blind modes by enabling #a11y shaders meant to show "what it looks like" when colour blind (intended for designers to make sure we're not accidentally picking two values some can't distinguish for important UI elements)?
That doesn't seem like it's going to help users. Or am I missing something?

Filling in the SSR gaps. Important note on specular & how they don't line up: "SSR produces the reflection of a photo of the scene while raytracing produces the reflection of the scene". https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/hybrid-screen-space-reflections/

Most small indies if they get a bit of success/funding via PC releases doing well: Ooh, time to pay for that console devkit.
Me, if I ever had the cash: I, ah, "need" a reference spec HDR monitor to master my content for my most discerning audience if you please.
https://hexus.net/tech/news/monitors/134468-vesa-introduces-displayhdr-1400-specification-level/

Extremely happy to read this from nVidia Research (skipped over in my blog post: iterating DLSS as the future of temporal solutions rather than competition):
"One of the core challenges of super resolution is preserving details in the image while also maintaining temporal stability from frame to frame. The sharper an image, the more likely you’ll see noise, shimmering, or temporal artifacts in motion."
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-control-and-beyond/

Maybe this comes from having 20:12 (corrected) vision and so lacking the standard level of organic blur pass but... are we really going to have a sharpening arms race? With our existing real-time aliasing issues? https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/08/the-sharpening-curse.html

"Creating an environment where a random hire would likely succeed is much more firmly in your control than hiring 'better' candidates" https://www.robg3d.com/2019/08/could-a-random-hire-thrive-in-your-organization/

I've been reading through several interviews (catch-up Sunday) that open with photos provided by a publicist but credited to the photographer, interspersed with video game essays that, if any credits are given, are just the name of the game's publisher. I have encountered the name JoJo Whilden (which IMDB can expand) from still photos on sets but am only left with "screenshots courtesy of Sony".

Sunday thought: have you ever considered naming the photographer on (official) screenshots?
I think most of us have talked to people who've created official screenshots for a publisher (or done it ourselves as indies) & understand this is a skill. Seems like something that should get a credit the same way we attach photographer info to an image taken with a camera.

Always consider: your code is a guest on someone else's system. Any other agreements you think everyone is signing up for are built on top of that.
/end rant.

As someone who likes to buy & own games, to run them on my own hardware for my enjoyment (when not agreeing to community rules for competitive online), this Denuvo quote is chilling (conflating eg Cheat Engine with criminal piracy):
"the increase in mobile usage has also attracted criminals to develop a variety of ways to bypass, cheat, modify or pirate mobile games"

My first thought when hearing about Denuvo for Android was "exactly how different will it behave to a power virus?" considering games are already pushing the limits of what mobile SoCs consider an acceptable workload.
DRM punishes customers. Run-time decrypt & obfuscation-first code already seems dodgy on laptops (where many gaming laptops are on mains) but mobile: I know what I'd avoid ever installing (if not hidden from store listings).

If you're doing game dev and have an eye on Rust (the language) then it's probably worth putting a pin in this: https://rust-gamedev.github.io/2019/08/18/introducing-the-rust-game-development-working-group