stuartmcvicar.bsky.social
GPU Engineer - Qualcomm Graphics Research. Previously Dead Space, Godfather 2, Dante's Inferno, Heatseeker, Heroes of the Pacific. Amiga tragic. Opinions are my own. (he/him).
56 posts
930 followers
569 following
Active Commenter
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HAHAHA! Glad I could help...? :)
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Interesting presentation from Matt Delbosc at GCAP where he talks about using telemetry for remote performance monitoring and the data science behind understanding what they are seeing better.
They use influxdb for storage and Grafana for presentation of data.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xa...
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I appreciate that it would be a sacrifice. But it would be worth it. šš»š»š»
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They might make an exception for a regular local. š
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Welcome aboard. Your early work and dev diaries inspired me to become a games developer. Thanks for all the great games you've made and knowledge you've shared. I certainly owe you a couple of pints for the impact you've had on me.
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Yes, yes, yes!
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Great series! Thanks for recording this piece of gaming history. Ordered!
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Most definitely, yes!
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Ship it! ;)
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I thought you might find this article from The Atlantic interesting: "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days" - www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv.... It explores how authoritarianism gains traction through legal and institutional loopholes and complements Mayer's themes nicely.
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All home servers named after movie computers - WOPR, HAL, Deepthought, MCP, Edgar.
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Yes!!
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That's awesome! This is the series I had. I use to love pouring over these. Cost a small fortune when you're at high-school too. Tried showing friends at school, but they just asked if I could copy un-cracked games with it.
I had the same obsession with the PS2's EE, GS and VU manuals later too. :)
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Was huge in Europe, but not the US. š¤·āāļø I'll have to checkout the @jesperjuul.bsky.social book myself. It sounds interesting. </rant>
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<rant>I think the whole of computer history is "tainted" this way TBH. The Amiga for example always seems to be forgotten despite having a full pre-emptive multitasking, window GUI OS, a full colour display with up to 4096 colours in 1985 and costing 70% of an Apple Mac and offering way more.
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Same experience for me. Growing up in Australia, I saw very few titles from the US for the platforms I had, the c64 and Amiga. Most were from Europe which is also where all the reading material(mags) came from, Zzap64, Commodore User, C&VG, CCI.
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Also, if you do decide to take on this 'civil rights issue,' I fully expect to see you delivering powerful speeches while clutching a banned book in one hand and a controller in the other. Iconic.
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National Phenomenon Chantal has a nice ring to it, though! š The parenting groups clearly weren't ready for your fiery takes. But honestly, fighting for kids' right to read spicy books and creating a game? Youāre basically the superhero we didnāt know we needed.
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I'd love to see you all on this showāI doubt the nation could handle it. Watching everyone clutch their pearls would be priceless. š But honestly, I wouldn't wish it on you; it sounds like itād be a nightmare experience.
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Thatās beautifully put. Itās a tough battle, but while power may shift, itās those with conviction who ultimately shape what comes next. Power struggles often reveal the best and worst in people.
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If revolution is inevitable, I hope thereās space for those of us who believe in rebuilding with compassion as well as conviction.
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Your writing is like a lightning strikeāintense, illuminating, and impossible to ignore. Youāve woven centuries of struggle into a single thread of clarity. Itās a sobering call for justice, but also an inspiring one.
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š
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Ah, alas, thou hast banished me, a humble devil merely trying to encourage genius! But I shall retreat to the shadows, watching with fiendish delight as you weave your psychological sorcery. š·š¹
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Do it do it do it! :)
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Ranger or Rogue...leaning towards Rogue...
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An acquired taste? Oh, absolutelyālike black coffee, dark chocolate, bourbon or my sense of humor. Takes a minute, but once youāre hooked, thereās no going back!
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Another vote for LG OLED. Have C7 65", 7 years old, hasn't missed a beat, looks great! Has the pixel refresher, runs automatically after a 2000 hours to prevent images retention. It seems to work. Took a bit of effort to get it looking how I wanted, but I'm a chronic fiddler. š Hope it helps.
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"Towards Practical Meshlet Compression"
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Haven't tried it, or read into it in any detail but thought this might have something useful in it. arxiv.org/pdf/2404.06359. Goo luck!
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Not with gmail. But with Outlook I've archived mail by accident and later thought it had just disappeared. For gmail, when using the browser, try the "All Mail" rather than "Inbox"...maybe. Good luck!
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Seems about right. Good job! š
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Very aggressive culling algorithm. :)
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Playing with the Amiga and learning how to use copper lists, the co-processors, synchronization and DMA to do anything interesting, I found the concepts on the PS2ālike the VUs, the GS, DMA lists, scratch-pad RAM, and bus access issues re. DMA, the EE, GS and VUsāto be relatively straightforward.
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The Amiga was such a fun platform to explore and code on. I had such a ball playing with the bitplane addresses, using the bitplane modulos for effects, the blitter to draw things everywhere and building rainbow coppers of course! :) The platform had the best demos on it and some amazing music.
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Back on PS2 I remember logging output to track down lock-ups in the rendering back when we were building the DMA chains to transfer and kick off rendering ourselves. Worked fine with the logging...turns out the logging flushed the data cache...problem solved! Ship it! ;) Good luck!
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I now get paid to do what I used to do in games in my own time after hours in the office, in the dark with a collection of PS2 manuals next to me...and a stubbie of Coopers Red. I had the matt black version of the PS2 manuals originally(circa 2000) but the green below was the last version I had.
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Though not in games production any more, I do now work for a GPU company doing R&D with a focus on games engines(specifically rendering...obviously) and games on our platform looking specifically into what they might want to in the future and how to improve what they are doing today. So much fun!
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This was considered premature optimization. hmmm... Still the learning and experimenting was an amazing and exciting time!
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TBH I spent most of the project fighting the senior developers who were part of the XP cult of the time that we need to develop data and code more focused on the PS2 architecture(ie PS2 specific versions of physics and wave rendering).
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I started out of university converting/rebuilding a PC based prototype for a surfing game to the PS2 with lots of dynamic geometry for the water and waves. A lot of the work was figuring out the best way to convert something from DX to PS2.
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Excellent. Independence is important! Thanks for sharing.
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Such a great series! Not enough people know about this treasure. Gone before its time.
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Beautiful piece of art. Thanks for sharing.
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Figure 7 gives a good example where it might take the advantages they are getting now using their primitive coverage with global visibility tracking and increase that advantage. Perhaps the memory and performance trade-off isn't worth it. Just a thought.
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Though there is mention of 3D Gaussians and not using it, I do wonder if using a Gaussian distribution for the primitive coverage would improve the quality of the render and reduce the differences compared to their reference.