Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Finally got my order date for symmetric gigabit internet. Previously the fastest offered here (apartments in middle of a dense North European city) was VDSL2 at 80Mbit down, 20 up (given copper cable distance & quality, it could sometimes get as low as half that).
Feels like this is as significant as the move (over 20 years ago for me personally) from dial-up to a hybrid fibre-coax network. The future is here, provided by a local company, just like that HFC network was.

I keep thinking "it's about time I tried Zig for myself" & then reading stuff like this which make me wonder if maybe I should give it a bit more time in the oven before diving in myself. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/failing-to-learn-zig-via-advent-of-code/

Ok, this is actually worse than it initially seemed.
Not only is eg item #13 (which I do not own, have not placed on an ignore list, or done anything else I can think of to make vanish) not appearing on my wishlist correctly but it is also not appearing in my search results on the main store page. The DLC & bundles that include it _do_ appear in the search results. Using them to reach the store listing, it is definitely still for sale right now (it hasn't been delisted).

There are 16 items on my Steam wishlist. The list of them (with no filtering & no matter how I sort them) is only 13 items long. The numbers by the side of them ranked is showing the holes (there is no 5, 13, or 16). I have browsed to an item I wishlisted but not listed on that list (I believe it is #13) & it correctly shows as wishlisted on the individual store page.
Given how much Valve have pushed the wishlist as a source of purchases, this does not seem great.

The thing about the current GPU street prices is I know where they should be. I know how the constant drip of progress should have reached in terms of value for money. I'm not going to make a serious investment in the next 5 years of my gaming time if I know I'm being ripped off. I might as well look at investing in other hobbies if cutting edge PC gaming cannot offer a suitable value.

If it was my $70bn, I would not let Kotick (or the board that supported him) walk away from this with such a pat on the back.
Also this is a depressing way to tail your description of acquiring IP & developers, much of the IP being born before your average customers: "This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse."

I had occasionally wondered if the now-grown kids who watched The Clone Wars ever got any decent more adult stuff (like video games) based on that expanded (canon) lore.
Turns out (actually finally getting round to watching Clone Wars stuff) Jedi: Fallen Order is basically that video game. Enjoyed the game immensely even without knowing at the time that much of its setting was a continuation of existing filmed storylines (beyond books/comics).

From @reedbeta, on the inner workings of GPU texture units when writing your own filters: "This frac is supposed to wrap around from 1 back to 0 at the exact same place where the gather switches to the next set of texels. The frac has a discontinuity, and it needs to match exactly with the discontinuity in the gather result, for the filter calculation to be consistent." https://www.reedbeta.com/blog/texture-gathers-and-coordinate-precision/

A sharpening slider in the settings menu only when the user slides it all the way up, it automatically books an appointment with an optometrist.

Doing a graphics driver update while your GPU is on the blink? Not at all a risky proposition.
TIL you can still boot after a Desktop Window Manager crash cycle takes out your video output & eventually hard-locks your system in the middle of doing an nVidia update. Although I would definitely not assume this will always be the case.

TIL: "the Xbox 360 was designed to run at a higher clock speed, but then shipped at 3.2 GHz because otherwise it would have melted. The 5.5 mm in four clock cycles was probably an artifact of the design goal of having the clock cycles be much shorter." https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/5-5-mm-in-1-25-nanoseconds/

It's interesting that so many AAA games are dabbling with hardware RT on console (due to limited RT budget, not entirely unlike lower-tier new PC GPUs). Basically paying for the upkeep of the RT accel structures that could be used for a lot of very impressive visuals but only selectively applying one or two because it's too expensive to do so for everything while aiming towards current resolution & framerate targets.

Starting 2022 by playing some Against the Storm. Are we still calling these rogue-lite (hour or two cycle of construction; permanent tech tree unlocks) city-builders?
It's an interesting alternative to the classic fixed-scenarios campaign of more RTS-inspired city-builder titles (eg Anno or Caesar) while retaining a lot of the potential for interesting modifiers and without needing to be sustainable for dozens of hours building a single location up (needed for more traditional city-builders).

110 degree FoV and especially eye-tracking with foveated rendering is going to make showing off PS VR 2 visuals with classic trailers extremely challenging. I'm not sure this (captured on PS5 but cropped for 16:9) actually gives an accurate impression of how this looks on a headset. https://youtu.be/yPNn-jwAC9c

I recently shared a game picture I'd taken & had a friend ask me which game/how to see that vista. I had to explain that despite Destiny 2 still being a game they could play, the original campaign content was no longer there so they could not enjoy what I had seen for themself (& there was no offline mode way to enjoy it either - my PC copy came with a disc-shaped piece of cardboard with a key on it).

"[T]here is the distinct possibility that cooler heads will prevail and won’t throw themselves into a technology mostly known for being a scam, but we shall see. But putting current users on notice that the company might not see value in the play style of a majority of their customers seems like a bad sign all the same." https://tagn.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/quote-of-the-day-why-just-play-to-have-fun/

Upsampling technical paper & blog explainer. Might be of interest to anyone doing noisy sub-native ray tracing.
"Worth noting that this type of kernel is exactly what we used in our Siggraph 2019 work on multi-frame super-resolution, but I spent weeks tuning it by hand… And here an automatic optimization procedure found some very good, locally adaptive parameters in just 10 minutes of training." https://bartwronski.com/2022/01/03/procedural-kernel-neural-networks/

So 2022. The year of enthusiast (maybe not a halo product that can take benchmark crowns but something anyone would be happy gaming with) Intel GPUs.
I'm still intensely interested in how XeSS & related dev outreach (assistance/funding) is going to shake out over the next year. Having some competition for DLSS is long overdue & might push for answers to what effects we can apply before the upscale with the trained AI compensating. (Can VRS be used with no loss of visible quality? What else?)

Writing a big public letter where I use "self-sustaining game growth" to mean hyper-exploitation of our existing customer base to boost short term profits without needing to actually change anything about the long term sustainability of hit-driven AAA game development practices (and the eternal dice roll on getting a hit that prints money like GTA V or other exceptional releases, which have no guarantee of ever happening for your company).
Does no one remember how Second Life actually went???

As is my annual tradition, I wrote up some notes on some of the new notable games I completed in the last year. https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/12/games-of-year-2021.html