Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Disney’s Moana island scene vs pbrt-v3. http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/07/16/moana-island-pbrt-all.html

Epic moving to a (backdated) 12% cut for asset store transactions is a great use of their newfound economies of scale. Also good for them to make it clear that this is still profitable for them - not a subsidised move just to capture market share.
Reminds me that Itch.io have been doing a default 10% + card fees cut for ages. We don't have to give 30% to whoever builds a shop & distributes our files. Time for other stores to react?
https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/12/fortnite-creator-epic-gives-unreal-asset-creators-a-raise-and-backpay/

Best practices advice for anyone building an engine with the new rendering APIs. https://youtu.be/6NWfznwFnMs

Disappointed by ArenaNet management's decision to fire multiple staff members rather than support their use of social media.
We can't collaborate or engage with a community if we're constantly in fear that the next rando in our mentions will come with a Reddit army who think they ultimately call the shots within our own HR departments.

One of those interesting perf dives that shows the additional steps required sometimes when using high level abstractions / languages in perf-critical sections of code. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/slow-and-fast-methods-for-generating-random-integers-in-python/

Extremely impressed with Slay the Spire, even before they get out of Early Access (although it's probably pretty close to release right now). https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/06/mini-review-slay-spire.html

I had a couple of thoughts (but suspect I'll not find time to actually implement/test anything) based on the "Spectral Remapping for Image Downscaling" paper doing the rounds again today. https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1011719785145667585

Does anyone have strong feelings about video game performance rights? Should the industry work towards a licensing body or some boilerplate legalese to freely hand over these rights (as consumers assume we already do)?

Old link but ever-more relevant in an era of LPers/streamers (and consoles that advertise their ability to stream performances to the public): http://www.videogamelibrarian.com/public-performance-rights-for-game-programs/

Does anyone have a link to any papers on advanced streaming installs for video games?
I'm remembering a paper or talk about automatically cutting an install into blocks and calculating the best download priority order based on monitoring a local install being played but my Google skills aren't finding it.

Good luck to everyone who has been working towards something that'll be displayed at E3 next week.
Hope any public presentations run smoothly and show off your amazing contributions.

It's been a few months since I wrote about using Rust. Here's a small update about how quickly the stable branch is evolving and how I'm still pretty happy with it. https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/05/evolving-rust.html

Matt Pharr is moving to nVidia (with a blog post talking real-time ray-tracing & machine learning) with some optimism that we're entering another era of rapid progress: http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/05/27/nvidia-bound.html

Would love if this is just a coder using some OSS contribution time to work on something related to their normal project (but also totally unsurprising if the PS5 ends up being a CCX, Navi, and possibly some HBM + maybe a second CCX and large DDR pool). https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-LLVM-Ryzen-Improvements