My talk about the time-travel powers of cross-platform determinism talk at the @conference.aiandgames.com is now freely available! www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3B_...
Debug across time & platforms. PC, Xbox, Playstation, Switch. x64 to Arm64, release builds to debug builds. Thanks determinism!
Proc gen that creates the same world for everyone. Might have to resort to fixed point on the GPU but I haven't been able to find performance characteristics for that yet. (I haven't spent a lot of time on research yet) Maybe @tomforsyth.bsky.social has an idea?
I read through the slides when they were first posted but In don't remember it was mentioned - what is determinism like on the GPU? If I run a shader doing various math, let's say I don't do trig, but read from textures, are GPUs gonna get identical results? A quick googling indicated no...
You *can* use it to find weird bugs (oh this is where people fall into the void via a gap in the collision) but like.. those types of bugs are easy to find in other ways.
And here, they made the gun audio seemingly worse (clearly it had players more engaged) to make it "spreadsheet balanced"...
Mmmm. I've been asked to generate heatmaps for where players get killed at a few studios and it's easy enough to do but like... what do you want it for? It's not like "Oh more people die here so .. we need to change it?" Like, is de_dust a bad design because there are chokepoints? (no)
Of course. I just think that the author wanted to talk about indie games specifically and their "hey, you know how mobile games are terrible in this aspect right? Yeah? Ok good" was enough for me. It's a topic we've all thought about for a long time and I'd rather someone discuss this new thing.
For clarification, I'm not saying that Balatro etc are crap or that they are just like F2P mobile games, but there sure is a good reason why they have become popular and I'm personally not sure it's 100% a good direction.
I mean mobile games was mentioned (and called out) in the third paragraph and the article is clearly focused on indie games (PC titles implied), which is an interesting narrowing imho. Because it is a relatively new phenomenon in that scene. Surely we don't want to bring that crap to "our" space?
Tried it, very nice!! :)
My erosion filter is out! Video, blog post, and shader source.
It emulates erosion without simulation, so it's fast, GPU friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks.
Explainer video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4V2...
Companion blog post:
blog.runevision.com/2026/03/fast...
#ProcGen #vfx #GameDev
I woke up and felt kinda rested, looked at the clock and saw that it was just before 6, perfect, I had slept for almost eight hours for once.
But I was deceived, for there was another hour made (up of thin air because of DLS).
But perhaps the player's action space is too large for that to be helpful?
Could you use the player character as a simulated pawn and roll the simulations during the players turn and then just filter the ones that matches the player's move? I imagine you'd get a lot of sim time that way (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding something) :)
It might be worth trying a different client. I switched from ST to Fork some years ago and it is quite nice!
I dont think you mentioned it, but what is your time budget?
I have been working on data inheritance recently. The kind of stuff that you usually see with prefabs, but I believe that all the assets should support data inheritance.
Concerning...
Great analysis. Love the golden idol games and I don't think it's a coincidence it's referenced multiple times :)
Of course :) but it never hurts!
Wow. You should feel good about your work! It's very cool and impressive. :)
Interesting! I was just thinking it would probably be a good idea to do it for Tides now too. Do you have any resources on the topic? Like of there were any clever ideas, or gotchas to look out for.
I'm so thankful I grew up with an Amiga, a gaming computer that of course had its share of platformers and bullet shooters but it had a mouse and keyboard and so also had a bunch of games with UIs like this, and it definitely made me what I am today.
It's a good video! And such a good song for a voice coach to "react" to :)
Here it is in context (along with the other ones) :)
We use discord for planning of our game and I've made a few emojis for different states of the tasks, but we didn't have one for the overarching goal of an iteration yet, but inspired by this drawing by Philipp and the fact that we call our major iterations "hills" (because reasons) I made this:
We've started on a new technical foundation for Tides of Revival and it's starting to pay off. Still very early so ofc a step back from our last release but look at this:
This is an game entity moving and rotating at 1hz but looking perfectly smooth at whatever framerate the renderer runs at.
New blog post: A Decade of Slug
This talks about the evolution of the Slug font rendering algorithm, and it includes an exciting announcement: The patent has been dedicated to the public domain.
terathon.com/blog/decade-...
I have pretty grand plans for our content design pipeline for Tides. I'm not sure when I'll have the time to take a proper stab at it but when I do I really wanna share and hear people's opinions.
The goal is to be ultrascalable!
We have finally released Hill3 of our open world RPG, Tides of Revival. You can download it on itch and play it - should take ~15 minutes to play through.
Here's a video where I talk about some of the things that went into it, mostly on the design side.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-viH...
