Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

If you're not already aware of it, KiwiFarms is a very dangerous harassment/dox forum. They have a Masto instance & seem to be doing an effort to follow/interact with other instances to increase their connectivity/federated reach.
Masto has a feature where you can block their entire instance - click on a profile of someone interacting from there and "Hide everything from..."

AMD have finally almost caught up on efficiency thanks to 7nm RDNA (custom coolers should fix the blower noise). The upper-midrange has become far more competitive in a week (inc "Super" repricing), even if it'll probably be next year for feature parity (also when nVidia will be able to show off what they're doing with Samsung 7nm - a new fab for very large processor designs).
[But definitely nothing for me right now.]

Wondering what these deals on gaming subscription services do to F2P. I could buy a Battle Pass & enjoy a month/season of a game but often for significantly less I can rent a bag of premium games (even including DLCs/premium tiers for Ubisoft's offering) where I feel I'm always on the clock to consume until the month expires. Pushes F2P down my priority list in the evening.

Just finished Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (ready for the expansion next month) & what a wonderful tactical RPG.
While the comparison to modern Xcom combat isn't wrong, the RPG nature of the game means you'll never have RNG ruin your day but not be aware of it (no strategic layer to mask a fail state). Really helped illuminate that it's not actually the move from action points that I hate in Xcom: it's how that interacts with the rest of the game design.

Valve have clarified (and tweaked some of the rules of the sale "game"): https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1612767708777544444
The "quests" now appear to be tracking a bit better.

This Steam sale is pretty much passing me by (game "quests" seem buggy at detecting so other than shoving money into it, you can't play the sale "game") but it doesn't seem great that enough people have misread "randomly selected users get gifted their top wishlist item" as "user get gifted a random wishlist item" & so are culling all the cheap/indie games from their wishlists (enough to cause a visible spike in wishlist deletions).

My GTX1070 just hit three years old. Still stable boosting >2GHz & 9Gbps VRAM.
What a weird few years for GPU tech & prices. I normally expect year 4 is the very end of the lifespan of an upper-midrange GPU. Not even sure there is a viable upgrade path that doesn't involve ending up with fewer kidneys than I currently have. Maybe 2020 (& Intel's entry) will really shake things up (as 7nm also matures).

I don't think every browser rendering engine used by more than a fraction of a percent of users being a child of KHTML (& most being derived from Chromium) is good for the web. So I moved to Firefox. Here are a few things I learnt while moving: https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/06/moving-to-firefox.html

The Ubisoft studios continue to be the masters of recreating a compacted version of a bit of a city like no one else does.
Saw some interesting pattens on this fence texture when at a sharp angle to the camera (maybe not "almost perfect" yet). Also a few geom bugs with the best giving a glimpse to how tightly polys are being clipped through portals (here misaligned to the actual doorway): https://youtu.be/x2GDvxrZdms

Grabbing a look at The Division 2 & some stellar work on the visuals. From weather systems & time of day to small things like fading SSR into envmaps & the TAA resolve. Here's a crop from some distant chainlink where the internal renderer is only doing 85% res, almost perfect & just as clean in motion: https://youtu.be/r-ggD1TQR5M

Things I learned after accepting bluetooth audio:
The latency is very bad for interactivity (100-250ms).
This is probably why the PS4 does wired (to controller) audio/custom wireless headsets.
There are now optional standard extensions that fix this but good luck having both ends of the connection support it.
Hopefully Qualcomm's next gen extension (aptX Adaptive, including low latency as a standard feature) will become as ubiquitous as current aptX.

Those custom thin scrollbars in WebKit / Blink? You can inject the equivalent for FF into your CSS, for example on here:

.scrollable {scrollbar-width: thin;}

A recent Tweet I made did huge views, no interactions (someone embedded it on a Reddit or somesuch?) so I'm thinking this is not widely known but highly desirable. https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1135839985289060352

My recent thoughts have been around worker co-ops & how the standard model puts the IP rights with the company (so cashing out your ownership share is paying to lose all rights to anything you worked on there). Seems a point of friction (workers leaving can be expensive for those who remain) that could maybe be done differently? https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/05/co-ops-sharing-spoils.html

Decima is a really nice renderer.
Starting to get pretty excited for the next big step forward while still appreciating what's being done on the outgoing consoles (the half-step certainly helped).

Something on my endless list of things to test: we are allergic to dissolves (even beyond them not being a popular style of film cut right now). For good reason, you have to render two scenes at once.
But with modern reprojection, you can probably stop properly rendering the fade-out scene very quickly. Just repeatedly use a fast reproject pass as your main rendering time is spent on the fade-in scene (if you've got dynamic resolution, start that lower res & no one will notice).

So an interesting point about that last boost: it again shows that Rust expressivity is often enough to build with (the library is a lot of nice linguistic flexes, like how std::mem::drop is just an empty function that consumes the parameter because of Rust scope rules). https://gankro.github.io/blah/initialize-me-maybe/#what-is-maybeuninit