A tale of many hours spent trying to find a bug that was hidden by an API with a silent fallback.
I have been on and off toying with my own 3d renderer since last year. I started on Windows but recently I have tried to validate the cross-platform capabilities by porting it to Mac. I had to fight off the limitation of MoltenVK for a while, but the real issue came from a different source.
Do you use instrumented profilers? You should! Let’s quickly see how!
I have made an entire talk about profiling. Still, I keep running across projects that don’t use profilers much or at all. Or even more commonly, they do use profilers but do not know they can enrich their projects with profiler markers that would make captures more valuable and much easier to parse. Let’s fix that!
They gave me a Claude subscription and told me to get tokenmaxxing, so I tried to give it a fair shot.
It’s getting hard to avoid LLMs these days. Even if you avoid social media (or at least curate a follow list that avoids the bulk of the slop factory) and shrug off grandiose marketing statements that end up taken at face value in the news, it will likely come and find you at your place of work. Unlike the silver bullets of the past (like microservices or NoSQL), AI adoption seems to have been mandated in many places from the top layer of management, regardless of how many of them ever worked (or studied for) an engineering job.
Two conferences in one. You can see France in the distance but then they pour wine from a can into plastic glass to remind you where you are.
I’m aware that I’ve have been writing less lately, partly for work reasons and partly for conference reasons. Speaking of, let’s talk about ACCU on Sea 2026.
Let’s talk about game simulations. In this special issue we talk about how to handle buffs, modifiers and other stat bonuses.
Whether one is making a RPG or a strategy game, there usually comes a time where designers want to attach a bunch of stats buffs and debuffs to each and every object in the game. The game actors start small but eventually we want our characters, units, countries and monsters stats to be able to be affected by a mix of equipment, perks, area effects, difficulty settings and whatnot. And if we don’t take care, it might turn our game into buff recalculation simulator 2000.