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Reposted by Scott Anderson

videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 6d

ion storm, game studio, break room, dallas, texas (1999) www.mobygames.com/game/1678/jo...

a tekken 3 arcade cabinet, turned off with an a4 white paper typed out note taped to the screen. the note reads:
no more tekken 3 until daikatana ships
the management

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René Otto @aceottorney.bsky.social · 17h

Proud to announce Deviant Legal’s Game Developer’s Guide to Publishing Agreements: a free resource for developers wanting to learn about publishing deals. Publicly accessible, without requiring to provide your data: deviantlegal.com/guide/game-d...

An image about the game developer's guide to publishing agreements feauturing otto the otter

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퓨̸크̸ "Games No One Likes" Puke @puke.bsky.social · 27d

Combat gameplay from Ragnarøkkr, PC-98 (1994)

A forgotten strategy role-playing game with some really great art. Developer Glodia would stop making games soon after, but ex programmer Hiroyuki "Hoee" Kuwata has since created a dedicated fansite with downloads:

quarter-dev.info/top.php

#chosting

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Reposted by Scott Anderson

videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 7d

garden designer 2, magazine screenshot, pc (1995) archive.org/details/cd-r...

a window within a window: 3d view of a simplified 3d house, garage, green backyard, surrounding fence, outside backyard. user interface takes up the rest of the screen, contained in menus up the top of the screen and smaller windows with icons and a further out view of the house and yard.

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Reposted by Scott Anderson

Shannon Appelcline 🌮 @shannonappelcline.bsky.social · 5h

I've done a few interviews about Designers & Dragons Origins over the last few days, and some folks have asked about the origins of Origins.

There's a long-ish story about the DnDClassics site and the return of D&D PDFs to the world.

The product histories emerged organically from that.

Launching Soon - Designers & Dragons: Origins

From Evil Hat - Launching Soon - Designers & Dragons: Origins

www.backerkit.com

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Xalavier Nelson Jr. @writnelson.bsky.social · 4h

You would not believe how many stories like this have been popping up over the last ~5 years

Not just full games cancelled—entire characters and plot lines removed or changed, leaving less time for making the *rest of the game better*, to try avoiding a small and malicious contingent of voices.

Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 5h

SCOOP: Last year, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game set during Reconstruction. Was to feature a Black Assassin who, among other things, fought the rise of the Klan

Sources: Leadership nixed it over concerns re: U.S. political climate, backlash to Yasuke

www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubis...

Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year

Company leadership deemed the project too controversial for the moment, sources tell Game File

www.gamefile.news

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Weasel Hills C.C. (Hole 19) @wildweasel486.bsky.social · 1d

Some inappropriately creepy golf content - Sente Mini Golf (1986) has DIP switches that add photos of missing children to the attract mode (and to enable a "LOCATED" message per kid). These profiles were replaced with new ones in updated ROMs.

Modern operators seem to leave them on, a lot. 😨

A Reddit post from r/creepygaming by user SuperCamouflageShark - I saw these missing child reports on the attract mode of a Sente Mini-Golf arcade machine recently.

The photo is of a Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying black-and-white photographs of missing children: Tahj Allen Merriman, and Steven Phillip Curtis. Their profiles are filled out in red text.

Another photograph of a different Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying the same photos of missing children.

Sente Mini Golf running under MAME, with the DIP Switches menu showing. DIP switches 3, 4, and 5 configure whether the missing children are displayed in the attract mode, with switches 4 and 5 showing or hiding a "LOCATED" stamp over the respective kid's photo.

Screenshot of Sente Mini Golf running under MAME; this screen shows two different missing children: Malinda Marie Smith and April Rose Yates. For the sake of demonstration I have enabled the "LOCATED" flag on the kid on the right. (DISCLAIMER: I do not have any information on whether April was located or not. This is strictly a demonstration and is not intended as documentation of a real event.)

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 1d

You could also read the official documentation in this case, but it's been established that it is harder than reading a random tweet or finding out the hard way 😅

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 4d

It would be cool if the strided view could be used for indexing, and it still copied the entire array when not indexing, but there isn't a clean way to do that in C#

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 4d

It's funny because the internal C++ code that copies the vertices does use a strided array view 😂. The reasoning for the full copy is the correct version of this code copies once to a temporary array, and then sets the vertices after all operations are done

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

The documentation and examples also clearly explain the behavior, but I guess people don't read docs :)

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

I know this is demonstrating the worst case, but Mesh.vertexCount would at least avoid the first allocation. The example code for Mesh.vertices also demonstrates a better usage of this property (copy it into a temporary vertices array and do the operation there)

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

In practice, it's a balancing act. Removing the properties and adding a method called CopyAndUpdateVertices might be fine. If you're too explicit,you end up with something like modern graphics APIs, which people also don't love

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

Unity does more heinous opaque transformations with Mesh, although this is bad. The best advice is not to use properties for Mesh ever if you care about performance. The question is, would outright removing these slow APIs make everyone happy or piss more people off?

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

I would like to see Unity Mesh split into at least 3-5 separate classes (roughly GPU, CPU, and editable, with skinned mesh variants) because the Mesh class does way too much in Unity

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

The alternative would be to keep an internal copy of non-interleaved vertices, which is wasting a ton of memory for an edge case situation or some how cache vertices after it is first accessed, which is completely doable but probably not worth the effort. If you need speed, use a different API

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

People are hating on this and calling it dumb, but if you think about how mesh vertex data is often stored as interleaved (which Unity does by default), and that the vertices accessor gives you only vertex position data, it has to make a copy and reapply it to the internal mesh data

Samperson @samperson.bsky.social · 5d

This drives me nuts.
If you're wondering why I've become so annoyingly dogmatic about never using properties, this is it.
It becomes so hard to get a basic understanding of the performance characteristics of any code, just by reading it

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

I think performance minded engineers hate it, but if you're a solo developer or a designer making a small thing and just want code to work, this is more intuitive and less steps than SetVertexBufferData, MeshData.GetVertexData or an even more exotic path, but almost all of them create copies

Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

Friends don't let friends use .vertices (if you care about performance, of course). These accessors are convenient, but they are terrible for performance. Unity has a lot of slow and easy to use paths, and there is an interesting discussion about whether that is a strength or a weakness...

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

This quote...

What people want to replace you with is what they think you already are. If companies, bosses, and boyfriends want to replace you with a robot or an AI model, that’s because they already see you and what you do as simply the workings of a machine with far too many bugs.

Sara McH 🤧 covid mode @saramchenry.bsky.social · 5d

This essay is a banger. houseofmirrors.substack.com/p/you-dont-n... (obligatory "wish it weren't on substack")

You Don't Need to Log off, You Need to Become Sensual

The digital world the wealthy are creating is designed to detach us from our bodies

houseofmirrors.substack.com

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

Moving off of Unity is good for them as a UGC platform with its own tools and scripting. They don't benefit from an off the shelf engine as much, unless they decided to use Unity editor for their desktop editor. More importantly they have more control, but the engine sounds kind of basic now

Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

Meta released some rough technical info on Meta Horizon Engine. It's a good idea for them to move to their own engine, but assuming things stayed similar to what they were like at launch, the technical advantages could be made with more efficient usage of Unity

developers.meta.com/horizon/blog...

Meta Horizon Engine at a Glance

We’re introducing our new Meta Horizon Engine designed to power Meta Horizon Studio, Worlds, and Immersive Home in Meta Horizon OS. Dive in to learn more and apply for beta access.

developers.meta.com

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

I bring this up because the presentation only mentions manually sorted transparencies and shows artifacts (like glass sorting on top of VFX) that happened with manual sorting that can be (partially) reduced with CPU depth sorting at the cost of worse batching

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 5d

This is not only introducing a new approach to OIT, but it's a comprehensive overview of various OIT techniques and a history of transparency in COD.

One thing that seems to be missing is CPU-side depth sorted transparency, which I implemented in SHG's COD branch and IIRC Treyarch had also

ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 8d

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talks slides posted: "Adaptive Voxel-Based Order-Independent Transparency" shipping in the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 by Michal Drobot from Activision Central Tech is now online: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....

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Reposted by Scott Anderson

ceruleite.bsky.social @ceruleite.bsky.social · 8d

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course - my slides from the retrospective: "Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games - a 20th Year Retrospective, and a Look Ahead" are now online: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2025/index....
Enjoy!

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