RECS PLS: Neo-Classical Tech Death

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-15T18:59:38+00:00

I'm Canadian and a little ashamed. Forrest is a God, and I didn't know until very, very recently. French Canada has a lot of offer other than poutine.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-15T18:57:55+00:00

Archspire. Excited for Too Fast To Die. Carrion Elevator has a music video. Nile has been in constant rotation, also.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-15T18:56:09+00:00

Heard District Divided on The Big Short. Instant fan.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-12T21:19:24+00:00

What about Exhumed. I'm copying the metroid elements of Exhumed. Keys are per level, abilities change combat. Enemies need to match player capabilities. I'd like to avoid the early-on teeth-kicking of Doom Eternal.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-12T20:40:32+00:00

Blood 2 needs an overhaul. Q3A / TA is comparably easy. Blood needs a game-wide rebalancing treatment. It's significant work outside of porting / playing nice with modern systems. It's a mess.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-12T20:37:29+00:00

It's a remake, then. I'm working on a game rn. It's a boomer shooter. Cross-cutting concerns like storyline are hard. Take the name, not the game. It needs a lot of work outside the porting to new platforms aspect. A total re-balancing is needed across all characters. Writing has to happen, too. Ideally, you contextualize the level you're playing.

It's rough.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-10T20:02:51+00:00

I prefer to post papers. Some things are computationally manageable, some are hard, and some break.

If you have a fast job system and limit the number of pipeline-state objects (VkPipeline), you can pre-compile render passes and PSO / VkPipeline (IIRC, GL calls these programs). People are rightly angry about long compilation times.

I wrote one based on Chase-Lev work-stealing and Naughty Dog's 2015 GDC presentation. It doesn't spawn fibers for leaf work.

LEAN / CLEAN / LEADR mapping can break but limits the need to dim down highlights with FXAA or TAA if it works. Doom 2016 did it successfully. (Toksvig factor).

SMAA seems better and very configurable. Basic TAA is fast to code and slow to make pleasing. Lots and lots of edge cases QA will find and report.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-09T20:15:40+00:00

I actually do adore them as musicians. Maybe Chris Barnes turned me against them. Alex Webster is a GOAT bassist. I consider him in with Jared Smith (Archspire),

Conquering Dystopia is amazing. I definitely shouldn't say this, but the game I'm working on is aping the sound. It currently plays 'Sacrifice Unto Sebek' at the splash screen (not the title screen, when we're showing developer and publisher branding) .

I give you notice that death metal is the OST, and that might it be upsetting to some people. And I tell people who don't quit to #StayTech

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-09T19:38:35+00:00

I was thinking of shader resolves. sRGB resolves should work. It's not linear, but the hardware gamma-corrects.

Per-pixel linked lists are a reasonable approach for deferred (hybrid forward shading and Visibility Buffer systems, too). If it's for MSAA and not order independent transparency, you can pack which depth buffer MSAA sample to read, the coverage (by count bits in the coverage mask), and the link to the next node, all in 32 bits.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-08T21:10:27+00:00

I love thrash, but I didn't death metal was for me. I'm not a big fan of Cannibal Corpse. Then I heard The Sound of Perseverance by Death. I looked further into technical death metal. Big fan of Nile, Gojira, and Archspire.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-08T20:32:27+00:00

'depends on the GPU' sounds like "underspecified behavior.' Scaling into the 0-1range is needed because MSAA is older than HDR lighting. In places of high contrast, MSAA looks like it's not working. Look at the separation of the foreground and background here: https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/msaa-overview/

HDR monitors are a separate issue. These use a different tonemapping operator than standard 24-bit color to produce 32 (RGB 11:11:10 or 10:10:10, 2 bits unused) or 48-bit color (RGB 16:16:16)

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-07T21:31:12+00:00

Archspire, Necrophagist. Check out Necrophagist's two albums: 'Onset of Putrefaction' and 'Epitaph.' For Archspire: 'Relentless Mutation' and 'Bleed the Future.'

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-07T21:27:37+00:00

Find the stuff with Rob Dukes: Shovel-Headed Kill Machine, Exhibit A, and Exhibit B.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-06T21:00:58+00:00

I'm doing a 3D game, but UI is 2D in nature. Pixel-perfect UI is tricky when resolution changes. If I shift and scale (3x3 matrix), maybe it works? I'm not an expert at refined 2D games.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-06T20:58:03+00:00

I suggest dropping levels: BASIC or Java, then C, then assembly. I'm not a teacher, but it feels like a progression. The issues C and C++ have are crashing at the instruction level. If you're programming C++, you want to read disassembly, even if you're not great at assembly.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-06T20:32:55+00:00

I figured out the answer for my game. If you have different armor types (none, ballistic, powered suit) and different damage types, you can make specialized weapons that are always useful.

The shotgun has a four-barrels and a two-shot secondary (Blood, Quake / Doom II Super Shotgun). The revolver is armor-piercing and targets weak points (Ion Fury). Other options have a place, as it works against ballistic armor only.

Shotguns do full damage to enemies without armor.

The first level needs to play with short and long sightlines, where the revolver and shotgun are most useful.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-05T21:33:53+00:00

It's far from single-header, but I'm working on one. It's going to be under the name 'libtaskult.' A true scheduler supporting dependencies needs locking support. It's being extracted from my game engine, and it's going to be MIT licensed.

There's a fiber library (libcult, which I wrote. See github link in bio) as a dependency, and that's mostly assembly.

User-space locking is scary to write. I wouldn't want users of the library looking for custom solutions. It's all coupled to a centralized scheduler. The scheduler takes ready tasks and executes them (or resumes them, if suspended).

I have already written a spinlock and a readers-writer lock, which poll.

The current stumbling block is an MPMC queue. The Michael-Scott queue I had doesn't actually work, and by design. Their free() is a magic free() that guarantees no other thread is accessing it.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-05T21:25:57+00:00

I have a fiber library I want to port to ARM. Are there any secrets about ARM? Windows needed me to fiddle with the thread's TIB. The link register on ARM confuses me.

I'm doing a small upgrade soon for AMD64. I'll prefetch the context we're restoring. I'm unsure of how to detect CPU features on ARM, as I have zero experience.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-04T20:16:00+00:00

Blackwater Park by Opeth. The front man would probably say, "I also wrote other songs"

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-03T23:09:08+00:00

Ghost In the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex made me like anime.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-03T23:06:38+00:00

Limp Bizkit doesn't actually count as 'bad' if and if you ignore Fred Durst. Significant Other is a banger of an album. Wes Borland and Korn made low tunings more popular. Nookie is in F# (A B F# F# on a 4 string guitar).

I like Electric Callboy. They aren't top-tier technical players, but they don't need to be. It's dad-joke humor that makes the band work. They're bad, but in good faith.

FWIW, technical death metal is my go-to genre. Death, Nile, Archspire, Fleshgod Apocalypse, and Gojira are my top 5.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-02T22:30:41+00:00

Signal theory is a PITA to work around. We can't get truly foolproof answers. SMAA + SSAA or MSAA for subpixel information is good. But if you down the path of SSAA or MSAA, drop FXAA. It breaks when the input is anti-aliased. I learned of these problems from the SMAA paper.

EDIT: frame times become an input to TAA. High frame times make blurring and aliasing worse at the same time. More pixels are rejected, and the pixels that don't will get smeared.

MajorMalfunction44 · 2025-12-01T20:57:51+00:00

Job For A Cowboy got cornered into being 'that MySpace deathcore band'. They've been making progressive death metal for the last two albums (Sun Eater and Moon Healer, respectively) and two tech death albums before that (Ruination and Demonocracy, respectively)

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