Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

I guess I'm going to download the current DXR samples & have a play next month so goal achieved there?
When MS abandoned their fallback layer/made it clear it was never intended for end users, I had somewhat placed DXR on a "check again in 2021" shelf. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14100/nvidia-april-driver-to-support-ray-tracing-on-pascal-gpus-dxr-support-in-unity-and-unreal

I had been planning to write this blog post for a while but having read Angelo Pesce's post just yesterday, there was bound to be a bit of contextualisation/reaction to that which slipped in. https://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2019/03/rendering-doesnt-matter-anymore.html

I've been replaying a lot of games from about ten years ago recently. You can definitely see the reaching of "good enough" asset fidelity (even demanding they feed 4K not 720p screens).
Ultimately, I'm inspired by what it says about long lives for what we're making today. https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html

It's apparently "hate on DST day" in the US. Here's why it's not about farmers or pointless changes: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/glasgow
At northern urban latitudes, working under 9-5 capitalism, if we didn't have a time shift, we would either have daylight at 3:30am (summer) or it would not be the day until 9:45am (winter).
DST pushes the few hours of actual darkness into the middle of the night in summer & hours of winter light early enough to be there for the start of most people's working day.

Just as with Destiny 2's paper "disc" with printed bnet key on PC, there are no real physical copies of The Division 2. GaaS; those without uncapped fast internet cannot join us. 🙁
"If you purchased a physical copy of the game [] download Title Update 1 while you install it. Expect a 88-92 GB download [] final HDD install size will be between 88-92 GB". https://support.ubi.com/en-US/Faqs/000041895/

And in a "didn't totally pull the rug out from under all the modders" move, nVidia gave some of the devs doing 3D Vision modding a heads up two months ago. Sounds like people are coming up with plans. https://helixmod.blogspot.com/2019/03/future-of-3d-vision-support-official.html

Technology doesn't always progress in a straight line. I remember last time nVidia gave up on stereoscopic (Elsa Revelator 3D owner from the CRT days). https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4781/
Advances linked to this most recent cycle: consumer high refresh rate LCDs & strobed (ULMB) backlights; quite a lot of stuff now used for VR.

Are we in the period of digital game rentals where big companies lose money pushing services to capture the market before boosting prices way up (eg why VCs are happy to lose billions on Uber etc today)?
MS not only adding *their* new stuff but also stuff like Shadow of the Tomb Raider & Just Cause 4 as soon as it fails at retail (so the publisher is willing to do a deal). EA Basic for $4/month (only missing a few recent games & some DLC of Premier tier).

Anyone (not under NDA) know how Origin Access 'Vault' works for indies/non-EA games?
If I'm signing up as a consumer, does it help to download all the indies on there and run them once or is payment tied to meeting some bar like 3+ hours played/reaching a point in the game that sends a message back to Origin?

This is, quite simply, unacceptable; it's inhumane. If a person in a leadership role will not consider their own health & company policies on healthy workplaces, you have to relieve them (enforced vacation) & disable their logins so they can't sneak work in. https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2019/mar/03/masahiro-sakurais-dedication-causes-him-bring-iv-drip-when-he-gets-sick-so-he-can-continue-his-work-normal/

I guess once you ship a game with a typo in where it saves some config files, it's a real pain to justify the fix (which has to cope with moving said files to the right place rather than just fixing the typo).

Almost a decade since Dragon Age was first released so I'm replaying the entire series. Not sure if I'm getting hyped for the next game or concerned by BioWare's recent output vs 10 years ago.

Constantly surprised by nVidia's choices (which clearly work for them, the benchmarks don't lie).
"Turing [GTX] Minor does away with the tensor cores [which nVidia route FP16 ops to with RTX cards] in order to allow for a leaner GPU. So what happens to FP16 operations? As it turns out, NVIDIA has introduced dedicated FP16 cores!" https://www.anandtech.com/show/13973/nvidia-gtx-1660-ti-review-feat-evga-xc-gaming/2

Since 2003 (and the launch of the MX700) there has only been one mouse shape I've used. Had been slightly worried when Logitech retired the mould a few years back (and prices of old stock started creeping up) but it's back (shame it's the Logitech G prices not the M prices). https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/peripherals/logitech-unveils-refreshed-mx518-gaming-mouse/1/

One of those cool social media collaborations that the first author then blogs highlights of to make it easier to digest. Thanks to everyone who gave their time to each step in that process.
Explaining Code using ASCII Art: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653

In a couple of years there are hopefully going to be some really interesting indie aesthetics around partially breaking denoising and temporal reprojection steps. https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news/interactive-light-map-and-irradiance-volume-preview-in-frostbite

Trying to explain to someone how AMD are a die shrink and a half ahead of nVidia, at the same fab company, but that's not the whole picture (even with 13B transistors each - one company with more FP64, the other going for more exotic accelerator units, but neither really impacting most games out today). https://hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/127418-radeon-vii-vs-geforce-rtx-2080-3440x1440-wqhd/?page=9

Robert Yang on the thickness of detailed skin: "Many of our top video games now have us roleplay as a generation of video game action-dads who shun moisturizer. We adopt cyborg faces that morph into chiseled hams, all ruddy and fuzzy, with pores the size of pancakes." https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2019/02/thick-skin-complexion-realism-and-labor.html