I hope I get a medal one day for bad project filenames:
LBP1 = ps3test1
LBP2 = ps3test1
LBP server = pagetest
Dreams = dd
Dreams server = aaa
Plinky = omgwtf
one of my fave easter eggs in Black&White 1: we recorded, for every language, the most popular 10 or so names as a spooky whisper. we then fuzzy matched this against your windows login name, pc name, creature name etc and triggered the voices if you played after midnight.
@AeornFlippout
I feel your pain! We had a โfunโ one on LittleBigPlanet 1: 2 weeks to gold, a Japanese QA tester started reliably crashing the game by leaving it on over night. We could not repro. Like you, days of confirmation of identical environment, os, hardware, etc; each attempt took /
@fullbright
i suffered from that too! did you ever play after midnight and hear ghostly voices whispering โsteeeeeve... steeeeve.... โ? most hilariously evil easter egg ever. we localised the voice actors reading top 20 names in each lang and scraped your pc for your name....
Hey! so a few months ago I did a bit of lockdown-inspired soul searching & decided to step down from 'dreams dev' to 'dreams fan' - take a break from gamedev, a career I've been lucky enough to enjoy since I was a spotty 15 year old 1/3
@AeornFlippout
To find out. Eventually the answer came: cleaners arrived. They were more thorough than our cleaners! One hour of vacuuming near the eye toy- white noise- caused the in game chat audio compression to leak a few bytes of memory (only with white noise). Long enough? Crash.
@fullbright
on black and white 1 theres a memory leak we never found. so it detects if low on mem, saves, quits and restarts itself without explanation. passed overnight qa soak after that...
random shader/visualization tip: when you need to visualize a value that varies over a large range, its handy to remember x/(1+x) as a way to 'squash' it from 0->inf into 0->1. tanh is good for signed x, +-inf->+-1
so excited by the explosion of gaussian splatting; cant wait for the community to start playing with painterly styles; on dreams, we used splats with tiny alpha-textured meshes called 'flecks' (not flat!) that selectively can replace the little 'blob' with painterly texture 1/n
the old lfo trick to get stable sin & cos waves still amazes me, especially as it looks like a complex multiplication done wrong: c-=a*s; s+=a*c; that's it! start with c=1,s=0, a small constant. fp errors cancel, stable forever. note no temp copy of c/s in update!feels like magic
I keep procastinating writing more UI for plinky, so instead of waiting here's a video of me noodling around, direct audio from plinky, shaky iphone 6 video. it's a multi-touch (v sensitive!) surface + 8-voice, 32 oscillator + granular sampler + reverb + tape delay. it's fun!
Yay! I can finally say that my first 'proper' academic paper - with NVIDIA friends Thomas Mรผller,
@c_schied
& Alex Keller - is coming to SIGGRAPH! It's old news in the fast paced world of ML research, so I thought I'd add a note on where it come from: .
daughter out of hospital after 4 long days of needing oxygen. virus panel showed she had flu + cold combo, plus asthma, leading to pneumonia. people saying โcovid is just fluโ irritate me even more now. they both suck, wear a mask and protect the vulnerable around you.
@AeornFlippout
Over 24h, plus time differences, and still no repro. Eventually we realised they had an eye toy plugged in, and set to record audio (that took 2 days of iterating) still no joy. Finally we noticed the crash was always around 4am. Why? What happened only in Japan at 4am? We begged
For anyone worrying about dreams - don't! what MM are doing on dreams atm is gonna *blow your minds* & though I'll miss them all, I'll be cheering from the sidelines! thanks to them for the first 13 wonderful years & here's to MM's next 13! 3/3
twas my last official day at
@mediamolecule
on friday. thankyou to the loveliest boldest smartest gamedev team in the world (not biased i dont work there see!) but im afraid you wont miss me coz im gonna haunt you from twitter & twitch woohahahaha
i think this by
@BrianKaris
is my favourite talk of all time. must watch. his answer in q&a about average triangle size being higher than he thought (4 pixel edge ish) reminded me of a long forgotten sw rasteriser someone at bullfrog wrote in the 386 era! (around dungeon keeper..
At the
#HPG2022
in-person event,
@BrianKaris
presented his Journey to Nanite. He talked about the process of inventing the groundbreaking geometry engine in UE5, highlighting the perseverance, confidence, and fear that comes with research.
Watch it here:
right everyone, you need to tell all your friends, pets, etc to buy
#DreamsPS4
because it's good and stuff, right? and out now! the best game on PS4 I reckon!
#notbiased
daughter extremely frustrated that the bookshop had no good books about spiders, so she got her head down and produced this. โpeople need more knowledge but what if they donโt want to learn?โ Ah honey, i think you have uncovered something universal with that one...
photopea (in browser, free, photoshop clone) is staggeringly good. super fast/responsive, matches photoshop 'of old', and gets lots of important ergonomic/quality details that others (cough gimp cough) dont. I feel more at home in photopea then eg affinity designer,
MM is a wonderful place, I can't imagine making games anywhere else; but I wondered what /else/ an old fart like me could do in this world? I've been in the gamedev bubble so long I'm not yet sure what's next, or even out there, for someone like me. 2/3
30 years ago my lovely parents bought me this book, which is falling apart from the years of intense reading. it goes thru all the classics - fractals, alife, puzzles, primes, and was absolutely formative to my teenage brain.
so proud of dreams & the team that made it; it's big, imperfect, messy,ground-breaking, still-in-progress; most wonderful of all, tho, is the community that's grown up around it. unusually inclusive, supportive, creative, cheerful. thanks to everyone who was/is/will be part of it
every gamedev knows and loves the โ5 cent filterโ aka easy easing: if you have a (persistent) value x, perhaps its the position of something eg a ui element, instead of setting it to a new value, say N, nudge it 1% of the way there each frame: x+=(N-x)*0.01; /
time for the traditional trip to game on guildford high street to see our game in physical form! with โฆ
@marcoshealey
โฉ . thanks for the support game!
thanks to everyone at mm for pouring their hearts into dreams for >10 years (long r&d!) the result is still something that has no right to exist, yet it does! thanks also for keeping it online going forward. 1/2
one thing i love about the
#DreamsPS4
engine is that this is entirely hand modelled & painted; no textures at all. it also looks unlike most other SDF stuff - this is effectively all a directly sphere traced distance field. on a relatively slow ps4 gpu!
Here's a piece of artwork made in Dreams by one of my big Dreams idols,
@Johnee_B
. We haven't seen much of his Dreams work yet (hopefully we will see more when Dreams is released February 14th).
This scene was made by him on a Playstation 4.. what a game changer!
#MadeInDreams
still processing that dreams is actually gonna be properly out in just a few weeks. thanks to all the creators who participated in the early access, and the lovely molecules for slaving away for 7+ years on this bonkers project.
the # of background processes running on a modern windows 11 pc is just such a disaster from a security, perf, stability pov. all named like gjepxjtsvc.exe. taskmanager is just incomprehensible. i want clear indication of what each exe is, who launched it, who/when installedโฆ
in my 20s i just did stuff without worrying too much about its success or audience, but thru my 30s and onwards i got more and more crippled by doubt, rejecting things as crap before theyโve really begun. havent figured out how to reverse this trend and its depressing at times
ever wanted to play
#dreamsps4
? after a bajillion years, you can finally get it on the playstation store, april 16th. YAY? yay. <server coder sweats begin>
#DreamsPS4
Early Access launches on *deep breath* April 16th, 2019! ๐
Read more about our exciting announcement, and answers to some of your most asked questions regarding Dreams Early Access, right here:
gave my 9yo an old chromebook and set up a gmail for her, and now she randomly sends me โlove you daddyโ emails ... this is a good phase please never grow up thankyou
semi-secretly filmed my youngest sketching on the back of a menu while we waited for food. heโs really into gothic architecture atm so this stuff just pours out of him.
@rexbox
would be proud!
I normally make it a rule not to tweet negativity but I just have to say cmake is monstrous I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. thank god cmake and jira can't have kids. /whinge
*this* excites me about dreams. people who've never dared create (games) in 3d, finding a new outlet. so cool. I also encourage everyone who doesnt think they have a musical bone in their body to try out the audio tutorial. its one of the most fun things just to mess around with.
I can't believe I was able to do something like this without ever touching a 3D modeling program in my life. I will upload a video very soon... PROJECT PARADISE ISLAND๐ช๐
#MadeInDreams
@mediamolecule
#DreamsPS4
thinking about recording a stream about 'how dreams works under the hood'. would be interesting perhaps to coder/devs perhaps, and it would explain why the thermometers in game are the way they are. but! would introduce tonnes of complex concepts that may confuse people /
TIL (from , who is not on twitter afaik) if you interpolate camera matrices in log space, the center of rotation is preserved. this is awesome for smoothing camera paths and I cant believe I didnt do this before. may this tweet make you less dumb than me
still messing around with spheres on a plane in shadertoy, having my
@Peter_shirley
inspired christmas pathtracer moment. I think my refraction math is completely borked, god damn it.
really cool new paper from NVIDIA colleagues! give it renders of a hires model (sdf, mesh, anything!), it will figure out & optimise a lores mesh with textures, material, normalmap that matches the original... MAGIC!
Automatic LOD generation via differentiable rendering?
Yes. Indeed.
Automatically generate geometry, displacement maps, and materials that preserve appearance at all scales.
every time i tweet this week a few people seem to unfollow, so im gonna clean house some more by uncharacteristically posting a kid pic and go cat cat cat stl::map sucks brothomstates is an anagram of bathroomtests brexit stinks dreams creators are lovely write c not c++
ok so this 48โ 4k oled is ace (120hz gsync with the right gpu!) for circuit design and pcb layout. i used a large tv for coding at mediamolecule so i know that rules, but i hadnt tried circuits; no zoom needed to see a whole euro module (5โ high) with 0402/0603 ๐
10yo daughter found an ancient (10yo) iphone 4 and it works just about well enough for her to send text messages. best idea ever - now at sporadic moments during the day, I get random messages 'love you daddy' and 'how you doing? โค๏ธ' etc and it just is the best.
my 8yo daughter recently got a simple calculator, which she loves... got to talking about making her own, showed her pics of adafruit 7seg displays, some strip board, arcade buttons and an attiny85 and discussed how they could work together... she came back with this: ma girl! ๐
this entire, well written, informative, article is a perfect accidental demonstration of why I hate even 'not very modern' C++ with a passion. it is *so unclear* to me what even basic stuff does. 0 cost abstractions my ass.
Sparse Octrees? SDFs? Good LODs! NEURAL ENCODING! ๐คฏSIGN ME UP! The best of the graphics and neural worlds collide inside Towaki et al's heads -> this awesomeness pops out. Effortlessly, I'm sure. Great work from new friends in
@CasualEffects
's brilliant research group at NVIDIA
๐ข Our new
@NVIDIAAI
paper is up on arXiv!
I'm happy to share Neural Geometric Level of Detail, which enables the first โกreal-time rendering of high quality neural
#3d
SDFs with a sparse octree feature volume and a tiny MLP!
if you want to pick a 'cosine weighted' direction in a hemisphere above a normal vector n, most code you see around messes with constructing a basis around n (yuck) etc; you can just do normalize(n+z) for some uniform random unit vector z! I love this trick. send tweet.
this is the magic behind the old dsp trick used in many synths to get stable sin/cos low frequency oscillator: start with c=1, s=0; small a const controls freq. update: c-=a*s; s+=a*c; that's it! note no temp copy of c/s in update!feels like magic
Tiny changes to the order in which you update positions x and velocities v can be the difference between your simulation blowing up or dying down.
But for many systems, *symplectic* integrators guarantee energy is preserved forever.
Full lecture here:
struggling to get a good picture of noodles. she is fascinated by the lens so you can only take front-on pics, as she turns to look at it wherever you come from. all came out a bit soft as I suck at MF & the depth of field is insanely shallow. more practice needed but fun!
oh dont mind me, im just chopping onions and looking at this one random dream
@dorien360
made with a load of lovely people who inspire me every day with their dreams creations. man, these onions are strong.
i have no idea how john manages to make stuff like this in dreams. mad skills + ... judicious use of softness? spinning tiny cuts into a hard surface? its magic is what it is
I hadn't appreciated this aspect of 'modern' C compilers aggressively inlining always_inline calls, even through function pointers, which permits writing code as efficient as C++ template specialisation in C, but with hand control of hot/cold paths. from
goodness me, what a *masterclass* in the composition of simple (mathematical) elements to create something charming. but the real joy is watching a master artist at work, and then explaining his genius & process so eloquently. thankyou iq!
a couple of kids in my sonโs kindergarten class smashed down a block building he was making because โhe was wearing glittery nail varnish and boys arent allowed to wear thatโ and he stood up for himself but came home all doubtful. raaaaah why do parents teach their kids this shit
#DreamPS4
is the first project where I've enforced strict instacrash on assert, no ignore allowed (as recommended by
@tom_forsyth
et al). its great, +1. to ease the pain, the crash handler kitten scribbles a random quote onto the frontbuffer...
this small c compiler (c11!) is being written to accompany a book where each chapter builds from nothing to compiler, and each commit corresponds to a chapter. canโt wait for the book by
@rui314
i think
i often got asked before dreams came out โcan you do more than 2 legged creaturesโ and i always said โonly bipeds are supported really...โ never underestimate the ingenuity of the dreams creators! ๐
my daughter just invented 2fa! in her words: โif your rainbow doesnt fit mummyโs rainbow or you dont know the secret password, you are NOT THE RIGHT DADDYโ.
#rainbowauth
dropped my kid off at the school gates with the words โin you go honey, ive got to go and vote those tory bastards outโ - turned around to the tory candidate standing toe to toe with me, holding a leaflet out and smiling awkwardlyโฆ
everyone left at the mm office is just scrolling through the creations people have started uploading to dreams beta. its really interesting seeing people learn everything from scratch (there's very little by way of tutorials & content on there atm). they're learning FAST!
im still super hyped for you all to discover the nutty, deep, granular semimodular audio/synth engine features in
#dreamsps4
. hopefully youll see a glimpse real soon
#psx
@kenpex
visualising the lifetime of allocations in LBP: time left to right, hue is linked the time of allocation, vertical thickness is thus amount of memory allocated at each time and hue change is related to churn. via
@HulkHolden
hmm demoscene tweets lose me followers; ok here's another! imho a lot of early scene technical progress was driven by misunderstanding & overestimating what others were doing! coding back then was this serene solitarity experience between you & the code editor /