Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Random advice about premature optimisation: first make it work, then make it fast.
Experience means completing the second part quicker without spending much more on the first part, because you know more about how to design it to be easy to make fast. But it's always a two step process.

While I know nothing about the next consoles, time for some fun speculation: what if the XB1X gets a sidegrade (new internals, same perf target) at the same time as an XB2 arrives and only the XB1S/OG get dropped as current targets. https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/01/a-new-console-generation.html

Valve's unmoderated / machine-only solutions (ie scaling up profits but not labour dedicated to maintaining a quality experience) are certainly highlighting themself today.
The Division 2 announced as a uPlay/Epic Store exclusive. The first game's Steam page is being bombarded with negative "reviews" (commenting only on the news; swearing broken by commas to avoid word bans; no discussion of what's actually on sale). Machine just says "high review volume detected".

VRR is very much becoming more of a mainstream thing (Xbox added it; DP & HDMI both include in latest version; more monitors are tweaking their panel driver - a cheap value-add if they can adapt). It's definitely one more thing we should all consider when thinking about frame pacing (and test for how we actually do during horizontal scene pans etc).
An added detail to account for when constructing timing heuristic. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025407/Advanced-Graphics-Techniques-Tutorial-The

I've been happy with the value of my GTX1070. The G-Sync ASIC/FPGA board costs for a compatible VRR monitor? Extremely beyond my value/price range.
This is the right move for nVidia customers & hopefully we'll see HDMI 2.1 VRR in the future (maybe when they release 2.1 cards) on top of DisplayPort next week. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13797/nvidia-to-support-vesa-adaptive-sync-with-gsync-compatible-branding

Not sure if this makes me an old jaded (C) programmer but I don't really get why you'd ever static link Vulkan (ie getting the compiler to import a trampoline) when dynamic linking is recommended, faster (cache your fn pointers), and easy (1 macro will do the job, others have shared their macros). https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/1.1.70.1/windows/loader_and_layer_interface.html#user-content-best-application-performance-setup

There isn't much I can add to the "Debuggers? In my Modern C++?!" convo (former automated debugging researcher thinks debuggers are core to dev tools) but I'm glad automated debugging tools in game engine dev have become more of a thing in the last decade & so many game devs vocally defend the power of interactive debugging as complementary.
2011, when automated code analysis was less the norm: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/128836/InDepth_Static_Code_Analysis.php

Every year for a while I've been doing a round-up of the notable new games I enjoyed. Lots of (PS)VR making it to my list this year. https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html

At first glance this appears to be two extremely poor reactions to discovery of important software flaws. https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/software/asus-gigabyte-software-hit-by-security-flaws/1/

It might be good if everyone published complete, detailed sales data (at least beyond a certain scale), rather than having them leak via people doing maths on percentages (like the recent PSN Trophies data).
Agree on sharing; promote popular stuff via a unified set of charts (eg total & period; by platform, by region, indie/under $X budget projects).

Yep, if you've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Epic's store, here it is: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-2019-cross-platform-online-services-roadmap
Online friends, matchmaking, cloud saves, trophies, unlocks, PC overlay, and VoIP. All aiming for cross-platform, works with any engine, becoming available throughout 2019.

"It is worth repeating that we paid attention to code that was not being executed, and that has made all the difference." https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/a-not-called-function-can-cause-a-5x-slowdown/ & the follow-up: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/when-your-profiler-lies/

An interview with Elan Ruskin on engines, tools, and 15 years of AAA experience. https://isetta.io/interviews/ElanRuskin-interview/
(HT to @KostasAAA for the link.)

Slightly surprised there hasn't been a She-Ra and the Princesses of Power video game announced. An RPG retreading the show's arc, collecting an ensemble cast while battling the Horde writes itself (with plenty of battle designs working well on both mobile & controllers).

Rust [2015] (stable) is now Rust 2018 (stabilising some features; small number of breaking changes preparing for the coming years of updates). https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/12/06/Rust-1.31-and-rust-2018.html https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/12/rust-2018-is-here/
It's a great time to have a look at #RustLang and maybe try some of those Advent of Code problems (an ideal project for building lib & tooling familiarity). https://adventofcode.com/2018