Future of coding is a cool programming community that discusses graphics C and C++ occasionally. A lot of the focus is on visual programming, end user programming, esoteric languages and no code/low code. Lobster.rs as suggested is pretty good for general technical discussion but graphics on a non-surface level rarely comes up.
For graphics and C++ Twitter is probably the best option, follow some important graphics folks (say Peter Shirley, Angelo Pesce or John Carmack) and you'll get some interesting threads. There are also some good graphics programming Reddits. A lot of the best discussion happens in invite only places for me now, having some contacts in the industry helps there.
There are lots of non rogue-lite platformers coming out all the time (perhaps everyday), but not as many big, get a ton of press, critically acclaimed ones. Indie devs have backed away from the genre a little bit because production values and quality expectations are really high, and it's very crowded. Anyway if you want to try a new platformer from 2020 that's not rogue-lite I suggest looking at
One argument is these spaces exist, have existed for a long time, and are completely accessible to those who would want to join them. If you're a man, men's clubs and men only events still exist. Maybe they don't exist explicitly in tech? Are implicit spaces not enough? Seems easy enough to have a meetup and simply not invite any women, POC or LGBTQ people, especially in tech.
This is really cool, but a lot of the comparison to VR or AR HMDs is parroting VR cliches (it's anti-social, you need a headset, etc). I do believe a display could be interesting for some use cases, but one of the strengths of VR is handtracking and tracked controllers. VR wasn't particularly interesting without an input system and that's regularly disconnected by both VR skeptics and VR lovers. A volumetric display you could reach into (think Black Panther "black sand") would be amazing.
Unfortunately it's still extremely expensive to do so. DXR documentation tells you to keep any hit shaders simple.
It's also possible to fix transparency ordering in rasterization using OIT and there is some hardware support for it (ROV), but it's also expensive and can be hard to do right so many games choose rough sorting
I once pitched a startup idea that would enable this if I was given "infinite money and infinite time". Most folks ignored it, but my elderly parents still tell me to start a business to work on this right now
Strongly agree with you regarding IP. Especially when we live in a world where many of the biggest corporate IPs are shared fiction myths that incorporate public domain material, or where a lot of new IP is inspired by existing IP to the point where it could be part of that property.
I worked on the Horizon team, and there's only so much I'm comfortable saying, but I can say the team burnt me out and I quit.
There isn't a 100% chance that Beat Saber 2 will be exclusive, but you're right that it's likely and if that happens it will be a shame. My hope is that Facebook moving away from PC VR as a focus means they won't see it as competition, and start releasing previously exclusive games on Steam in the same way Microsoft and Sony have started releasing previously console exclusive titles, but I won't hold my breath.
Ah yeah, you're probably right. I read it as total sold units. He's probably right about total units sold in 2020, or maybe a little bit on the high end. Because we don't know Quest and Quest 2 sales and they're harder to estimate it's hard to know
This, greatly improved comfort, and quality 3D scanning\photogrammetry being mainstream (close with Apple LIDAR) at the same or similar cost (~$200-$500 for a standalone HMD) enables a host of interesting stuff. Right now Social VR and VR collaboration software has some potential, but is more awkward and challenging to use than video conferencing.
Microsoft has a good track record with making games, but yes all of FAANG is terrible at this. I have a little more hope for Facebook now that they've started acquiring studios and letting them run independently, instead of the previous combination of publishing\funding and having few internal game teams (which generally doesn't work in big tech anyway). This could lead to a model that looks more like Microsoft Game Studios.
Estimates of total hardware sales vary depending on what is considered VR hardware, but most estimates I've seen have worldwide unit sales at around 5-6M in 2020.
His sales estimates are a little low, unless he's only including PC VR. PSVR alone has sold ~5M units by most estimates. In the most recent Steam hardware survey, about 2% of users that completed the survey have VR devices, which is roughly another 2M users. That doesn't include Quest and Quest 2 sales (many people never use the link cable), or the few Rifts out there that aren't on Steam. So while it's highly unlikely that 6DOF VR devices have sold 10M units, its likely cleared 8M units and could easily surpass 10M in 2021.
The biggest issue right now is lack of software. There isn't much to play at all in VR, and there are very few great VR titles and only a handful of good ones. For HN commenters that want the infinite screen experience, I unfortunately believe that will be relatively niche (you sell to a bunch of programmers) and none of the current players are really focused on enterprise as games have been the stickiest thing so far. Quest 2 is pretty high resolution and eventually a tracked keyboard and infinite office will ship, so it might still be the best option for a while for people looking for VR productivity.
I worked for a game studio that did this. Tokens could be used for a raffle. It was kind of a silly thing though and wouldn't be considered compensation, there were normal bonuses and stock grants. It also (usually) wasn't tied to crunch. The tokens were handed out by peers
Oculus couldn't survive by itself. It's possible that Microsoft, Samsung, Apple or someone else would purchase them, but I believe that with Oculus the best possible outcome is for them to role back anti-consumer (required FB login and especially all the policies that come with that) and anti-developer (actually blocking apps they believe compete with them) practices
The Call of Duty, Destiny (and I believe Overwatch and some other Activision games) backend is written by Demonware, which was acquired by Activision years ago. According to their website (https://demonware.net/)
We have a commitment to open source. Our core technologies are Python, Erlang, C++, and MySQL.
Epic Games has Epic Games services, which is a set of backend services that includes matchmaking, achievements, peer to peer networking, lobbies, etc. Apparently Fortnite runs on Epic Games services. Consoles and Steam have similar backends.
All of these backend services use variations on standard web stacks that, from what I can tell, don't look radically different than the variance you'd see among startups or big tech. Here is a postmortem of a Fortnite outage that talks about some of their tech stack, for example https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-.... They use MongoDB, Java, JAXRS, Redis, AWS, etc. All tech familiar to "mainstream" (web) software engineers.
One thing that is different is game clients (which are obviously real-time 3D engines), and specifically game servers, which are either peers or headless server versions of the game. These run game sessions once matchmaking is resolved and connect to a fixed (usually 4-128) number of players in that given session. Sometimes the backend and game server code is more tightly intertwined, for example in an MMORPG or a Destiny style "shared world" game where matchmaking happens on the fly based on the player's location in the world. There are a variety of services that will help manage hosting game servers (Multiplay, Playfab, etc.) but most of them end up running on "standard" Cloud compute providers (Azure, AWS, GCP). Ultimately the only non "mainstream" thing about running large multiplayer games is the game engine piece.
My spouse does this for the exact same reason (we have a 3 year old). I feel like a bag of shit when I don't sleep so I just don't have personal free time.
This is probably my number one VR application I want. I don't like Lego CAD applications (physical feel of building is important) and don't want to/have the room for "infinite" sets. I've seen some prototypes of VR lego builders. If I had the time I'd absolutely do this as a hobby project, with a focus on VR interaction and feel.
On console and embedded the OS is either non-existent or gives your game guarantees about when it will schedule something and how often. Hardware obviously gives you way more control, but a baremetal raspberry pi project, Arduboy, console homebrew, etc can give you some of that control back in software. Awesome project btw
Quest 2 is $299, that's a barrier but not insane. Also, Rec Room is not VR only, there are clients for iOS, PC and PS4 that run in a mode with no VR (obviously VR isn't even an option for iOS). That's not as much platform coverage as Roblox, but it's not bad. Definitely worth checking out even if you don't have VR.
I gave away technical books at my local library as they had a "free books section". Some of them were older editions of industry standard text books (Real-time rendering and PBRT first edition), but the library refused to take donations because they were "technical books". Granted a lot of them were really outdated 90s technical game programming books like "Windows 95 Game SDK Strategy Guide" and "The Black Art of Windows Game Programming".
You're right, it appears that tech bro is insulting to the HN audience. Too late to delete or edit my comment, but maybe future readers can ignore the offensive parts of the post. I still stand by the focus on product and selling for projects that were largely about learning could lead to negative comments. I attempted to get some balance in my original comment but it seems like using tech bro negated any of that
It's good that he built some side projects and seems like he learned a lot. And the process and write ups are entertaining, but I understand some of the negativity. He comes off as peak tech bro, instead of talking about how he's making the projects for fun or for learning everything is about monetizing or getting views on (admittedly!) poor quality hackathon projects. Dialing down some of the tech bro and the focus on making "products" and I believe the negativity would go away. It doesn't help that his idea process seems to be "what can I make that is like something else, but significantly worse" :). I think it's a great achievement in rapid development, however
Might start to make sense to do "upscaled iOS ports". iOS is lucrative enough that many developers will support it anyway. Adding mouse+keyboard support and gamepad support isn't insane and I believe Apple Arcade games require gamepad support. You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway
It looks like their business model isn't to sell to consumers at all, but sell to big urban property development. This implies they don't do one off installations, but negotiate to get these in many/all units in a new or renovated development. I'm sure they would build one for an individual condo unit or homeowner for the right price (which might look like the same price as a 15 unit installation or something...)
The format is documented and there are open source "emulators", as well as (many) other Fantasy consoles like Tic-80 and Quadplay that are also open source. Even if you don't want to use Pico-8 for moral reasons, if you have an interest in fantasy consoles, there are many FOSS options. It appears like you aren't really trying, and just complaining about Pico-8. I'm sure you had no problem finding an open source text editor, open source OS, open source compiler, etc. Do some research, or alternatively admit you actually don't care about fantasy consoles or game development, and are here to complain about random software being closed source.
I'm aware of Chucklefish's usage of Rust, but they aren't a good AAA example even if they've shipped some of the most successful indie titles of all time. Also, as mentioned in a sibling comment they have abandoned Rust because the lead programmer that was driving it moved on.
There are some AAA game engine and graphics developers actively using Rust in their main codebase like RAD and Embark, and many are Rust curious and using Rust for side projects or tools. It's true that it will be a while before wide Rust adoption happens in the game industry (if ever) and C++ will stay around for a while. As for tech in games moving slowly... there is some truth to that but some things also move much faster than web dev due to new consoles cycles with new hardware capabilities. It will take a LONG time for a SV startup to fully embrace WebGPU even when browser support is decent, on the other hand every AAA game engine has HW raytracing support
This is some high quality HN pendantry. Sure, you're right they're minimal, but also they're literally in a folder called "backends". Also, if you're active here you'll know a lot of people might be interested in using ImGUI, but also not fit in the category of "slightly competent graphics programmer".