gavanwoolery

I wonder how many of these tests (if any) are limited by bad multithreading patterns (see: https://www.arangodb.com/2015/02/comparing-atomic-mutex-rwlo...).

Back in the day, I loved flipcode (https://www.flipcode.com/), for pure, development-oriented content. r/gamedev was pretty good in the early days, but quickly turned into something I no longer read (reasoning here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3zd4nq/my_opinion_...)

I've been following it for a while, and the game turned out really well (even ignoring the fact that it is still in beta). Images and movies don't do it full justice, but the game is quite beautiful.

I used to joke that Voxel Quest was just a fancy 3d graphing calculator. I think the entryway for a lot of students to become interested in math is to make rendering more accessible. Shadertoy is one step towards this, but SDF equations are much more difficult to grok than binary on/off voxel plotting, and they have to be mathematically sound or you get buggy looking results.

From the slides, these bullets struck me as things I have wanted for a while (to the extent that I have my own toy language that addresses some of them):

- compiles faster than C

- Produces faster machine code than C

- Seamless interaction with C libs

- robust/ergonomic error handling

- Compile-time code execution and reflection

- No hidden control flow

- No hidden memory allocations

- Ships with build system

- Out-of-the-box cross compilation

I agree with you on the poor documentation - that stemmed from me almost never working with others professionally and either doing a lot of solo contract work or work where my code was mostly isolated from other systems. I've gotten a little bit better about standard practices after working for a company that uses them and team work is super-critical as small changes can potentially cost $10k+ in damage per hour, so understanding the code and making it testable is more important than producing new code.

Over the past year I have been working on Voxel Quest silently, because progress is so incredibly slow that I still do not have much interesting to show (and I dove to the deepest depths of feature creep and tried to build a compiler/transpiler to address a lot of problems I was having with c++ and slow turnaround times).

To be honest, over the past month or so I got frustrated with my slow progress and took a break to work on a simple 2D game, just to see if I had any ability to control what I consider my greatest weakness: failure to prioritize. So far that experiment is successful but now I'm asking myself if making a 2D game is a waste of my knowledge - maybe that is true or maybe its just shiny object syndrome. >_<

Overall the biggest problem is my past two years have been almost entirely consumed by my work, renovating my house, raising a kid, and other stuff. I typically have less than 10 hours per week to concentrate on projects (more often 5), so I am working about 1/8 to 1/16 as fast as I was when working on VQ full time.

Anyhow, it would be nice to work on it in greater capacity, or at least something similar, I just dont know where that money would come from. I am very hesitant to ask people for money at this point, given my track record, so I feel like my next thing has to be self-funded or funded by someone who can truly afford to lose the money. I could easily find people who would throw more money at VQ but I dont think that it would be a sufficient amount to survive off of, so it would be effectively wasted.

Not sure what to do in the short term, to be honest, other than work at my current pace. :/ I'll share my current progress publicly once there is something interesting to show.

I was lucky enough to play some of their demos in person recently. I was really surprised by the performance (even in VR). I feel like there are at least a few real-world applications that could benefit with regards to visualization. Particularly "organic" stuff - I noticed that voxels were able to capture details like skin wrinkles and anatomy really well (they demoed a beating heart captured from a CT scan).

I think "being nice on the internet" is typically a learned skill, unfortunately. That said, sometimes comments that appear scathing are actually warranted criticism - perpetuating "bad" knowledge can be very harmful to the person using it and to those that use their products or code.

The video in this article shows an animated face and body, unless you mean something else. Jon Olick did some work with deformation/animation of voxels, IIRC. But agreed, it is still a challenging and not very well solved problem.

I have known two of the guys involved for a while now (Dan and Bran). Both of them strike me as honest people who are legitimately passionate about graphics tech, so I don't think they are running a scam (only mentioning this because of other comments). I myself, having delved into the voxel world, have my own doubts about voxels in general, as a silver bullet for everything, but there are many areas worth pursuing (particularly within medical, which they are). From an aesthetics standpoint alone voxels are great for games (voxel art now has a serious following on Twitter). Anyhow, I've been amazed with Siles' work over the years. I am curious to see what they cook up. :)

> But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman

At least here in the US, it is actually illegal to either prefer females or discriminate against males in the hiring process (or vice versa), unless the sex is part of the role in question (i.e. hiring a person to play a female in a movie).

Privateer was my personal favorite because of the exploration / trading / upgrade system. There are similar experiences today, but most of them fail to replicate what was special about this game (maybe I am just wearing nostalgia goggles though)

Aside from all the other stuff, my interactions here have led to some great "real life" friendships.

thanks, good points :)

My only form of contact is Twitter for many people (they do not have my email). I posted my email publicly though when I tried to leave Twitter. Twitter is (to its benefit) an extremely low-friction form of communication that is not quite the same as email or a phone call. For example, I can say something on Twitter without demanding a given person's attention - rather, they can read it if they want to.

Anyhow, it was more a philosophical problem that brought me back. I said, in so many words, that I wanted to be more "zen" (whatever that means) and eliminate distractions. They argued that I was not in a "zen" place if I let distractions bother me in the first place. So I took it as a challenge (which I failed). I think it easier to turn things off permanently than to master one's own willpower.

I tried this, but then my friends convinced me to keep it on. :/ May at some point turn it off regardless...

I feel like there is a legitimate market for "the old ways" (TM).

Social media is "great", in the same way that the invention of alcohol was "great" - the bad part of it is that it is literally designed to drive clicks and addict us, and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on (yes, I have seen all your handy scripts and tricks).

You know what was awesome about walking into a brick and mortar building and buying a piece of software? It almost certainly would not contain a virus due to the prohibitive cost of getting it on a shelf, and it was not flogged to a state of near-death by app store restrictions. Yeah we killed some trees, and we liked it that way! (shakes fist at sky).

Writing impressive code used to be a highly valued skill, limited to the few who put in the time to piecing together arcane knowledge. Now we are just surfing on the backs of giants and locked into their ecosystems. So long as you can write a laggy javascript app and google how to do something you are safe in this world. (shakes fist at sky again, why not)

...continues muttering/ranting...

Also worth checking out, not sure if its a recent algorithm or just now in vogue, but wave function collapse. See https://twitter.com/ExUtumno?lang=en for some good examples.

At my company we use simple analysis on previous estimates and adjust future estimates based on past errors. We are usually about 70 to 100 percent accurate using this method. However, projects are usually not more than 7 days of work in my case.

I've been using a 55 inch 4k TV [1] for the past year. Its a matter of preference, but I prefer more usable space over DPI. I have found at this resolution pixels are small enough that they do not bother me. It takes some tweaking, but if setup right, text quality is indistinguishable from a "real" monitor. Its the rough equivalent of 4 27-inch 1080p monitors arranged in a square.

To get an idea of the size, here is a picture of me sitting next to it. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV2094Y

[2] https://imgur.com/a/9uBCG

I could easily be wrong, but suspect the solve for AGI will not involve much in the way of complex math (I have been of the opinion for a long time that NNs are not the solution, see my recent Twitter thread here for elaboration: https://twitter.com/gavanw/status/929085831104512001).

Analogously, my advanced calculus is pretty weak these days, but I have found a strong understanding of basic algebra and vector math is all you need to be a good graphics programmer. There are many fields like this where you do not need to read or understand a single whitepaper in order to be functional within it.

I agree there is probably a better term, but the differentiation would be that you are abstracted one level up from a native shell, and thus could probably more easily write a cross-platform "virtual OS" that could run on top of Windows, OSX, etc - and install it with the ease of running an application, as opposed to fiddling with more sensitive things.

It could technically fit any of those cases depending on the implementation, but the simplest path is probably building an application that disguises itself as an operating system. It could even be sandboxed to some degree and still probably suit most needs.

One can debate whether or not this is a "true" operating system, but I'd like to coin a (new?) term: "virtual operating system"...not to be confused with emulation or virtual machines, but rather an OS that runs on top of a host OS. One obvious use for such a thing is reskinning an underlying operating system in a non-trivial way, i.e. completely changing the UI paradigms. Another use is allowing programmatic access to virtually everything.

That's true, although I guess there is some sort of value for people using "authentic" stuff instead of emulators, etc (even though the SNES classic likely runs on an emulator, it still feels more like the old device).

Primarily, I am interested in seeing another effective 2D Mario with the same charm and style as the SNES games - I do not care so much if it is running on a modern system. :)

I once tried to create a legitimate ROM for the Gameboy Advance but it was obviously pretty involved. For those interested, plenty of resources such as: http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbatutor.php

The (S)NES classic editions have demonstrated the clear appeal of these older platforms.

I think Nintendo/Sega/etc could rake in a lot of cash if they designed new games for these old systems. I would love to see a new Super Mario World-esque game that operated within the confines of the classic SNES.

very late reply, but you are welcome! :)

Yeah, the laser sound as well I think? :) The instruments for the two songs I made for Voxel Quest were ripped from Star Control and other tracker files. https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest-song-1 https://soundcloud.com/gavan-woolery/voxel-quest-song-2

Garriott, and more specifically, the Ultimas, are the sole reasons I became a programmer. I first played Ultima 5 on a monochrome C64 monitor. Seeing the technological leaps up until the 8th sequel was mind-blowing to a younger me. There was something there that sadly will never be replicated. The lack of an internet connection meant there was nothing available other than a box, a manual, and a map to feed the imagination. I was even further disconnected from the world given I grew up in the countryside where neighbors were scarce.

I remember me and my brothers all huddling around the screen on rainy days, the four of us trying to assume the identities of the default party members - it literally felt like looking into a portal to another world.