Agentlien

How does an age recommendation take away liberties?

I have kids and as a parent I use these ratings as a very loose guide combined with my own experience and understanding of the game in question. Other parents ignore them completely.

I agree more could be done to directly affect the companies, and there have been a lot of legal cases surrounding loot boxes aimed at children.

But this is a good complement to that. It makes it easier for parents to get aware of the issue.

I remember this period of my own life. I had taken over my father's old 486 and spent my days and evenings trying to learn the basics of programming in C. I was making silly text based games, dreaming I'd one day be creating the game of my dreams. I also modded games by opening every content file and trying to figure out what they did and how I could modify them. I was still years from realizing game development was a career and not just a hobby.

I had replaced all the Windows sounds and cursors to customize the system so it looked and sounded like a Sci Fi system. I even patched the boot screen to be a humorous screen of "MS Broken Windows". It also was quite broken from messing with system files I didn't understand.

It was a magical period and I learned so much.

It seemed to be the monitoring side of it which caused a lot of crashes. It was apparently a very common issue in many games around that time.

That's a really cool anecdote. The overclock makes sense. When we released Need For Speed (2015) I spent some time in our "war room", monitoring incoming crash reports and doing emergency patches for the worst issues.

The vast majority of crashes came from two buckets:

1. PCs running below our minimum specs

2. Bugs in MSI Afterburner.

Six Math Essentials as a title reminds me of Six Easy Pieces. I wonder if that's intentional.

I use this a lot when trying different ways of solving things or debugging.

Just today I was looking into a bug when I started worrying that it might be caused by a fairly recent improvement I made to the feature. I went to the file in question, went back two weeks with ":earlier 14d" then recompiled and confirmed the bug was already present without my change.

I just checked these out and Limelight feels wonderful when editing and reading prose in Vim! I will definitely be using this in the future - especially when writing things for my blog.

I've used a few facetious comments in ChatGPT conversations. It invariably misses it and takes my words at face value. Even when prompted that there's sarcasm here which you missed, it apologizes and is unable to figure out what it's missing.

I don't know if it's a lack of intellect or the post-training crippling it with its helpful persona. I suspect a bit of both.

I remember my father had installed Windows 3.10 (not 3.11) on our home pc (I must have been 6-7 at the time). I complained that it was just awkward to use compared to DOS and all games required you to reboot in DOS anyway. I didn't see the point with a graphical OS.

Then came Windows 95 and my mind was blown.

As someone with a similar background (graphics programmer) it sure seems like a fun problem.

I honestly found the lack of multiplication instruction quite surprising. I did not know that!

This was so much fun to read! Very neat solutions using spherical coordinates and logarithms.

How did you get the actual idea to do this in the first place?

I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL.

These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.

There's a lot of truth to that. I actually bought Disgaea 5 confident I would love it based on a review which did a really good job describing what the game is like, even though the reviewer didn't like it at all.

I also used to love Zero Punctuation even though I didn't agree with half of what he said. But I got a bit fed up with how smug Yahtzee is. He can be really funny, but also way too sure of his own brilliance.

This was a really weird ramble and I find myself disagreeing completely. As a lifelong gamer, it rings false because I've read many pieces of game critique and reviews which perfectly capture a game's soul. As a game developer, I just find the perspective confused.

I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.

Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.

Thank you, that's very nice to hear. :)

Every time I hear someone likes a game I contributed to I feel quite happy. After all, giving joy and escapism to people who need it is why I always wanted to make games.

Right, which is why I wrote "It wouldn't work well in our specific games."

There's an obvious appeal to sim racing for those who want realism and My Summer Car for those who... Well, it's an interesting project which I respect, at least.

The thing to think about is always how well something fits in the specific game you are making. If it completely warps the focus and disrupts the intended moment to moment gameplay loop, then it probably isn't a good inclusion. But it might still be a great idea for another game. In some cases, and this happens often in early development, it can even mean that other game is what you should be making instead. But that rarely happens when working on a big established franchise.

I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?

I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.

Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"

I don't think the idea of realistic scale for video game locations is very attractive.

You can have vast worlds with huge procedurally generated towns. Daggerfall did this and to me it just felt like boring filler. As did its enormous landscapes.

You can have large towns dense with interesting hand crafted places and characters. Baldur's Gate itself from BG3 is a great example. I loved it, but it consumed 50 of the 100 hours I spent on my first playthrough. Almost two months of my daily playtime.

If you want a game where the great outdoors and dungeons are afforded a huge chunk of your time, towns need to be idealized. I love how Breath of the Wild did this. You get the sense of the place from the layout and architecture. But you can still visit the whole place and talk to everyone, without it being the main thing you do in the game. My imagination will scale the place as feels appropriate, without the need for a thousand houses I have no reason to enter.

I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.

I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.

Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.

My parents reacted in just the same way and the lackluster response really took me by surprise.

I just finished reading this article and I'm really impressed. The author has learned a lot in a very short while. And is able to explain parts of it quite well.

This is the kind of stuff I always feel I should be able to do, yet it never happened. Seeing others just do it and share their learnings is such a joy.

As a graphics programmer this doesn't ring true to me.

Using more readable names definitely helps during development. I think the cause of this is twofold.

First, there's a lot of equations used in graphics programming where the canonical names of variables are single letters. If you know the formula a single letter is a good name and it is expected that others reading it also understand it - if you didn't you'd have to read up on the formula anyway.

But beyond that I also think it's a bit of misguided pride. Thinking it's cool to have as minimal inscrutable shader code as possible because that's trendy. It's very common for shaders to be developed with reasonable names and good layout then rewritten before publishing like it was an IOCCC entry.

Interesting that Half-Life: Alyx exclusively in VR wasn't enough, then. I love VR and that game is the best VR experience I've had.

The more I hear about other developers' work, the more varied it seems. I've had a few different roles, from one programmer in a huge org to lead programmer in a small team, with a few stints of technical expert in-between. For each the kind of work I do most has varied a lot, but it's never been mostly about "clarifying requirements". As a grunt worker I mostly just wrote and tested code. As a lead I spent most time mentoring, reviewing code, or in meetings. These days I spend most of my time debugging issues and staring at graphics debugger captures.

At least to start. Microsoft strongly encourages all Xbox games to also come out on PC, though they sometimes release later. I cannot find any game developed originally for Xbox Series X|S where this hasn't happened eventually (and the developers definitively aren't still working on the PC version).

There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.

I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.

I really hope they release something as well, because I loved their research papers on analyzing how Claude thinks[0] and how they analyzed it[1] and I'm eager for more.

[0] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...

I'm someone living far off in remote Sweden, could you explain with some examples?

This game is to Sim City what My Summer Car is to Need For Speed. That's delightful!