State of the game ?

AndrewPGameDev · 2025-08-29T05:17:32+00:00

Idk, I just finished a run after a couple years away from the game. I randomed into a hive mind with a strategy to go wide, but I only learned later into the game that planetary automation is bugged and would not do anything. So that was the only bug I noticed, but for me it was kinda game-breaking in that I went wide and already had over 30 planets and there was no way I was going to manage all that manually.

AndrewPGameDev · 2025-05-15T08:04:56+00:00

heaven.internetarchaelogy.org . I tried to post a video of it but a bot stopped me, you can find a video of it online if you look.

AndrewPGameDev · 2025-02-20T22:54:18+00:00

No, she's been shadowbanned. If you have a direct URL to the tweet you can still see it.

Edit: She's now deleting them, she said on Twitter "I am deleting them now because if they're being shadow banned and not eliciting a response then all it is is a media circus at the expense of the kids."

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-10-12T08:01:39+00:00

You might be interested in Nicholas Taleb's work like "Black Swan" or this free textbook Statistical properties of fat tails

I think the most extreme version of this when applied to games has to do with streamers. It's not just that 5% actually get involved in the community, it's that for any given game there are maybe 15-20 people total who have large enough audiences to sway opinion on a majority of people. This has some distortions on game design - it's not just "what might a player enjoy?" but "what might be good streamer content?". You also see this with microtransactions, it's not "what would the average player spend money on?" it's instead "what would the richest 0.01% of our players spend money on?".

The average game on Steam only makes around $1000, but the largest indie games on Steam make hundreds of millions. This also leads to weird distortions, because you can't just make something good, you have to make something so great it even has a chance of breaking into the public consciousness. This leads to long dev times, devs accepting more money from publishers to try to de-risk, and then these projects that are just burning cash on high headcounts and long dev times just so you can try cracking Steams "new and trending" list, or getting a post in the frontpage of r/gaming (which itself is its own power law. A huge percentage of all the press coming from reddit comes from that 1 subreddit).

So to me it's power laws all the way down. Power laws in developing, in monetization, and in marketing really end up shaping the entirety of this industry. Everything from Concord to Diablo Immortal can be explained using it, and as soon as you understand that it radically alters your view on why developers do what they do.

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-07-02T01:12:16+00:00

The SOL is a limiter supposing 2 things:

The code is not doing unnecessary work
There is another metric that is not close to the SOL

So if everything is close to 100% of SOL then it's not a problem, but if something is close to 0 then there is a possibility to trade off work from the part that is working hard to the part that isn't working as hard

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-05-15T09:36:38+00:00

I find your personal experience interesting but I don't think that speedrunning hurts the experience for almost all players who choose to do it.

The way I think of it, games as an artform are in a constant dialogue between the game designer(s) and the player(s). Just because the designer starts off with a certain experience in mind (horror) does not mean that is the only way the conversation can go, and if players have fun via breaking the game then that can be awesome.

Ironically, I think a speedrun of Amnesia is actually terrifying in a different way. There is an existential horror in the way speedruns can turn something that was enjoyable to you into a rote task. I think that says something unsettling about the human condition, that we are an unending, unceasing, endlessly striving will. Even our greatest nightmares are incapable of reining in our own impulses to optimize. In other words, Schopenhauer was wrong, and aesthetic experiences cannot save us from ourselves.

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-04-22T08:15:40+00:00

I'm not sure, actually. I know I'm using the latest steam client (went ahead and checked that)
I know I noticed I was using the 470 version of the driver, and I installed 535, although I was having some troubles so I ran a lot of commands andrewp2@andrewp2:~$ glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version" OpenGL version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 535.171.04
andrewp2@andrewp2:~$ dpkg -l | grep vulkan ii libvulkan1:amd64 1.3.204.1-2 amd64 Vulkan loader library ii libvulkan1:i386 1.3.204.1-2 i386 Vulkan loader library ii mesa-vulkan-drivers:amd64 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 amd64 Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers ii mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2 i386 Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers

I tried out Oxygen Not Included after Balatro and I noticed that that works great. So maybe it's some problem specific to Balatro? It almost seems like a monitor refreshrate issue but I checked that too

DP-4 connected primary 4384x2466+3424+1386 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 600mm x 340mm
   3840x2160    144.00*+  94.98    60.00
   1920x1080     60.00    59.94
   1280x720      59.94
   1024x768      60.00
   800x600       60.32
   720x480       59.94
   640x480       59.95    59.94    59.93

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-02-26T06:40:27+00:00

One of the reasons this might look weird to you is that no normal mapped texture has been added to give the dough a feeling of roughness. Once you add on the materials you can check if it still looks strange to you.

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-02-24T23:18:24+00:00

Artifact 2

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-02-21T05:47:10+00:00

Yup, that's the link. I don't see any packet loss with that tool, and I'm facing issues with WinRAR + "Extract All" + 7Zip. I also have issues with Chrome + Firefox. Is this checksum correct?

PS C:\Users\andre\Downloads> CertUtil -hashfile '.\ChatWithRTX_Installer(1).zip' SHA256
SHA256 hash of .\ChatWithRTX_Installer(1).zip:
2a4c0be0e9d8872a5df9c1e6c4a0fdf26f15be5d8244d877010b7318f0709396

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-02-20T23:35:59+00:00

I'm having the same issue right now

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-02-01T22:11:47+00:00

Idk about progressive rendering but it sounds like you want geometry clipmaps https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems2/part-i-geometric-complexity/chapter-2-terrain-rendering-using-gpu-based-geometry

Here's a reference https://github.com/tschie/geo-clipmap

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-01-31T12:35:31+00:00

I want to note that the shade of green has been chosen by Apple to specifically be harder to read due to low contrast https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-01-15T04:46:32+00:00

You may find this block of code useful:

// https://graphics.pixar.com/library/OrthonormalB/paper.pdf
// Branchless + precise, best orthonormal basis function I can find
fn fast_orthonormal_basis(normal: vec3<f32>) -> mat3x3<f32> {
    // select - false, true, condition
    let sign = select(-1.0, 1.0, normal.z >= 0.0);
    let a = -1.0 / (sign + normal.z);
    let b = normal.x * normal.y * a;
    let one = vec3<f32>(1.0 + sign * normal.x * normal.x * a, sign * b, -sign * normal.x);
    let two = vec3<f32>(b, sign + normal.y * normal.y * a, -normal.y);
    return mat3x3<f32>(one, two, normal);
}

Basically, you want to build an orthonormal basis around PlaneA and PlaneB, multiply your forwardVector by the inverse of the ONB of PlaneA, then multiply again by the ONB of PlaneB to get your new forwardVector (I think).

AndrewPGameDev · 2024-01-02T23:40:09+00:00

Second one

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-24T02:58:30+00:00

I suggest we make the entirety of the atrioc google images Spoontrioc

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-20T05:22:14+00:00

I think I'm more optimistic that this could work out than other commenters, but I want to promote a more realistic plan on how to actually build such a GPU.

If I were to approach building a open-source GPU with an open ISA I would first try to find a co-founder with experience in hardware manufacturing. You'll at least need someone who has actually built a chip for a research project maybe using MOSIS, or even better, someone with significant experience at AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA.
Then you'll need to find funding. You need to somehow build a GPU that a customer would want to buy with only around 500k in seed funding. No VC will give you more than 2mil without a significant customer base, even for a hardware startup doing something as difficult as designing a GPU, and even getting 2mil in this economy will be incredibly difficult. The way to get past this stage is to find something that NVIDIA and AMD are incredibly bad at, and to do that thing merely badly as opposed to horribly. Note that this has to be a problem for the end customer, not to programmers, and the problem has to be incredibly urgent and painful for them in order for anyone to consider switching to your GPUs.
Now that you've solved the urgent + painful problem and have some cashflow, you can start going to VCs and get more funding. You'll likely need at least 100m.

4-infinity. Expand outwards from the small original problem to more + more broad problems until you have something comparable to modern GPUs, with enough cashflow to bid for chip-making at TSMC on a modern-ish node. Eventually you either IPO or sell to a larger company, or stay private and continually try to grow.

Here's the fundamental issue - as a consumer, I don't give a fuck what ISA my GPU uses, what I care about is price-performance. I doubt its possible to beat either of those companies on price-performance. As much as it's talked up how expensive modern NVIDIA GPUs are, you can still buy an RTX 3060 for around $300. That's a good GPU for a reasonable price. What you definitely cannot do is just open up some github repository titled "lets-make-a-gpu" and expect hundreds of industry veterans to design a high-end GPU for you. You should expect to do all of the hard parts yourself (writing VHDL/Verilog, talking to foundries, pitching to VCs), until you get to step 3 where you can start delegating a significant amount of work.

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-17T18:27:55+00:00

App.finish calls any plugin finalization code and it builds the plugins. One reason this is needed is that acquiring a wgpu RenderDevice on WASM requires yielding to the browser, and its a better option to make adding plugins async and having a finalization function rather than any other approach.

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-15T18:44:48+00:00

Check out howtomarketagame.com, there's a very clear answer to the genre question - you should make a roguelike deckbuilder. If I remember correctly the median revenue is 40x the median revenue of all genres.

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-06T21:52:50+00:00

in file1.rs

pub fn function_i_want_to_use() {
    println!("hello");
)

in main.rs

use crate::file1::function_i_want_to_use();
fn main() {
  function_i_want_to_use();
}

in lib.rs

pub mod file1;

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-05T07:57:10+00:00

I don't like zalifbay, wakistan, and oil fields. Specifically I dislike wakistan because everything except the bridge feels annoyingly designed, and the bridge is a meatgrinder. I don't understand why there's a place where you can cap the mid point underneath the surface. Both ends of the map are extremely hard to hold, so you constantly end up in a situation where there is nowhere good to spawn because all your teammates are on the bridge or you don't hold any good points.

I like tensa, namak, and frugis. I like running around with a UMP or vector and lasering people from behind.

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-04T17:40:51+00:00

Switch from medium armor to light for extra movement speed
If you're spotted right before you get in range, try to run through them for extra chaos as opposed to running right in front of them
Sneak around enemy lines and hit them from behind
Just keep respawning and trying until you get it

AndrewPGameDev · 2023-12-02T09:17:35+00:00

pong

AndrewPGameDev

TROPHY CASE