khalladay

> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects

Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?

you expect digital cameras to provide cellular internet access for free?

I really enjoyed reading this. It's not often you stumble upon long form somewhat stream of conscious writing thats this personal without it also feeling overly navel gazey. This had a nice balance between travel log and personal reflections.

mastodon.gamedev.place is a thing

There are still a few of us out here fighting the custom engine fight :)

Though I found they like having control over whether the music is playing more... to my chagrin. I tried to keep my parrot from being too noisy through the day by setting up a microphone in his room, and having it turn off the radio for 30 seconds every time he was louder than a threshold amount.

Day one -> he triggered the shut down ~10 times. Day two -> easily 50. Day three -> you can see where this is going

Dude freaking LOVED being able to turn on and off the radio. It almost beat out being able to flap his wings and make the curtains move as one of his favourite hobbies.

I was this way too, until I bought it again on my phone. Now its my commute game and I have clocked in a huge number of hours. But in small, 1-2 run sessions

multiplying estimates by PI has proven to be a scarily accurate rule of thumb over the course of my career.

This is about banning phones during class or school hours. Even though the war on drugs may have failed the general populace, the prohibition of drugs at schools has been largely successful in preventing drug use from taking place in classrooms and on school property. (the same with smoking bans at schools)

This is the same.

Sadly not in Vancouver :( All my memories of it bring good were from when I lived in Ontario though, it could be a regional thing too.

I'm not sure its 100% "blue collar connections." That may be part of it, but the quality of food/drinks at starbucks has gone down dramatically in the past 5-10 years.

I worked full time there for awhile and happily ate hundreds of meals there. Now I won'tbeven touch my favourite donuts (#sourcreamglazedgang)

I dont know if its a corporate level thing or a franchise level thing, but man, Tim's sucks now

[edit: i meant to say the quality of tim's food has gone down, not starbucks]

got a source for that?

Im loving the idea that one of your kids is literally named "koolbear"

Got a source for that?

Yep. And also because we work with a lot of binary data which can't be merged in any sand way. Being able to lock a binary file youre working with is a necessity.

For some weird reason, when im travelling with wifi calling, receiving sms messages is a crap shoot. I basically dont get them if theyre sent by a gov agency, bank, etc.

I do still get them from android phones. Its weird, i have no idea why.

This is cool but... is anyone really excited about injecting microplastics directly into their bloodstream for it?

I dont go out of my way to avoud plastics in daily life but this sounds like a bridge too far for me.

Fwiw, I don't have a degree (just a diploma from a college in toronto) and it has been a non issue. It mattered slightly when I had less than 3 years of work experience, but after that no one has cared.

We have very different views of the US though. I felt the same as you when my only US experience was in the Bay Area, but after living in Chicago for 5+ years and having visited a bunch of places around the country, I miss a lot about American culture now that I'm not there.

Canadian techie here :) I moved to the US for work super early in my career, and recently moved back to Canada after nearly a decade (mostly just for a change in scenery). I work in games, so I never made the super high FAANG wages I see talked about everywhere on here, but it's true even in games that you'll make significantly more in the US than in Canada. I make more than I need for the lifestyle that makes me happy though, so the pay disparity is honestly a non issue for me.

US immigration laws are a complete non issue for tech workers (at least in my experience, you still have to fill out a boat load of paperwork, but if a US company wants you, things move pretty quick). Mostly, people I work with seem to not want to move the the US for the same reasons people don't want to move to another state: they're happy enough where they are, they'd be leaving friends/family, they're worried if the move that their life will be worse, they already make enough money to be comfortable (if not inordinately wealthy). If they're parents, they usually are also wary about uprooting their kids' lives.

What languages are you using day to day?

I've been in games for a decade, and spend about 90% of my day writing c++ (the rest writing hlsl), and I can say with certainty that Visual Studio is both not deprecated, and pretty good actually.

But maybe its the case that outside of my niche VS falls down or the other options are so good that they make VS seem old fashioned.

Takes their shoes off in the "entrance" (or mud room maybe, though I've never known anyone who calls it that) of the house, which is generally a small tiled area immediately inside any doors that lead to the outside. Shoes are left on the tile (or a mat / plastic shoe thing) and then folks walk without shoes from the entrance area into the rest of the house.

We might also wind up kinda like the book "Rainbow's End", where the internet just has too much crap to parse, so people subscribe to a "reality sphere" that filters the internet into a single view that is shared by anyone else who wants to see that sphere.

Does subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference, or am I wrong?

My whole career has been C++ and shader languages, so this really hasn't come up for me. I imagine it being a real word would improve readability greatly.

It's been awhile since I absorbed the weird programming norm that "real programmers use the !x form!" but even after 10+ years of !x , I still find ==false more readable.

At a basic level, this is how modern tools like CheatEngine work today. Find all the memory addresses containing your current health level. Do something to manipulate that value, find all the addresses that reflect the new value, rinse and repeat until you know where your health is stored, then write whatever you want to that address.

It can do more than that of course, but it's cool to see that the gameshark I had as a little kid worked in a similar fashion.

Another use case for assembly is reverse engineering, even if you aren't better than the compiler, being able to understand what the compiler spit out is really handy.

It would be an awful thing and it's creepy that you seem to think otherwise.

Where I work got rid of Jira and switched to some other, ostensibly better(?) competing product. I never had strong opinions about Jira before the switch, but now, after nearly 2 years of a Jira free existence... I miss Jira dearly. The grass is always greener.

Does Jira suck? sure maybe, but my personal experience suggests that everything else sucks equally as bad if not worse, and I know where all the buttons are in Jira.

Ah yes game engine development, where we herd all the lazy folks who hate efficient solutions to problems.