Impossible

Pico-8 isn't super accessible as a game making platform, although it is a very accessible programming introduction platform.

HN tends to over use "boilerplate" as Pico-8 has zero boilerplate and is super minimal. Your post is no exception. Core gameplay code is not boilerplate and Pico-8 is not a game engine in that sense.

Playdate has Pulp, which does include built in collision, dialog systems etc and is inspired by Bitsy. Pulp has it's own (optional) scripting language and is specifically designed as an accessible game making tool. Even the Playdate Lua and C SDKs have more gameplay functionality than pico-8 though, including a simple game object model, collisions, animation, etc

I always have a desktop computer and mostly can only do real work on desktop (graphics/VR/game programmer). Laptops are nice for portability so I always try to have one or two available. Because of my role my jobs have always provided one in the office, but I keep a personal one for gaming and side projects/learning.

All of these are used in the wild at various companies. Maybe these companies are entirely staffed by subpar engineers, but FAANG style whiteboarding is extremely gameable, especially if you know someone in the inside already, but even if you don't and leetcode enough.

I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)

The platform is still web, even if it's not using HTML and CSS. The success of figma has lead to a lot of start ups targeting the web as there main platform, but using WASM (C++ or Rust) and WebGL (soon WebGPU). This makes sense in creative tools, I think. We're also starting to see tools that run on the server and stream video to the browser.

Having worked at Facebook and seeing where they are headed I think the HN numbers are way off and this poll is mostly "what company does HN hate the most" not which is most likely to decline. Hating FB as a company is fine, and FB as a product is probably likely to decline, but they are as OP mentioned significantly better at shipping new product than any other company listed except Apple. Facebook's biggest challenges are not owning a real platform (platform holders could hurt them) and having lots of serious competitors. These are real problems, but I think their ability to fast follow can put them in #2 for a lot of different categories they care about.

Netflix has a lot of room to grow in new markets, gaming and possibly other types of media. I think they can continue to produce good content and I think some smaller players that are locking content to their own services might return to Netflix in the future (like Microsoft, Sony and EA are now all back on Steam)

I don't think any of these companies is in serious threat of decline, but out of all of them Google seems most stagnant.

Nanite doesn't do any rendering on CPU and does a lot of work that is traditionally done on CPU (culling) on GPU. Nanite does use a software rasterizer for most triangles, but it runs on GPU.

This is one of the main advantages of using a lower level library like Vulkan or DX12. Higher level APIs like OpenGL and DX11 do a lot of work for you, but that work can result in extra allocations that you can't control, starting driver threads, extra resource transitions, etc

I agree with similar level of immersion, I actually think a lot of parser IF would translate to VR well (at a much greater cost). I thought that Andrew Plotkin's dual transform might make for a good VR game, for example https://eblong.com/zarf/if.html

When I worked on Call of Duty (~7 years ago) almost all of our source images were TGA. The runtime format that almost all games use are various block compressed formats (BC7, ASTC, etc) and usually these are grouped in some kind of package/archive format (although engines are moving away from that in order to stream at the asset level) and lz4 compressed on disk.

GC has a lot of issues, especially in engine level code, but in practice every game I've worked on or shipped has had at least one garbage collector running for UI or gameplay code. Lua, Actionscript (Scaleform), Unreal Script, Javascript, managed C#. Every game had GC performance issues as well, and we wrote code to generate minimal or no garbage

They are sold at a loss or at best at cost. $200 is possibly extreme, but I couldn't find a BOM estimate for Quest, so it could be much higher than that. This isn't unusual, most game consoles are sold at a loss initially. Also, even though I said "Quest" in my first post I meant "Quest 2" as the original Quest is being phased slowly out, and Quest 2 has sold significantly more units. The current retail price of the 128 GB model is $299, and 256 GB model is $399. So if you're bothered by my price difference assume I was talking about Quest 2 256 GB sold at cost. Regardless, it would cost them more than they want to spend. If you watched the keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg specifically mentioned not wanting to lose too much money on hardware while still selling it at the lowest price that makes sense... Giving away hardware for free is the complete opposite of that strategy.

For b) assuming each Quest costs Meta around $400, and they are sending to 1B users, $400B, so about half their market cap and 10x yearly revenue :).

It seems like you aren't associated with Epic? What's the long term outcome here? Have Epic take your PRs? Get hired\acquihired (it's unclear if you are a company or a group of hobbyists)? It seems like when WebGPU is production ready Epic will support it as well as WebXR...

Epic's goal is very obviously to disrupt Steam and app stores as well... Ignore all of this if you actually are an Epic employee of course :)

Quest is basically a game console and not a peripheral. Even "dumb" non-standalone HMDs like Index have complex software stacks for tracking, input and rendering (compositor). HN loves the narrative of a VR device being "just" a monitor but that's really not the case. If this rule is applied to VR as it exists in 2021 (not 2013 DK1 which kind of was a 2nd monitor + HID) then it has to apply to all PCs, game consoles, smartphones, IOT devices etc. I'm not saying that legislation shouldn't happen but it does have ramifications for users and for security. On Quest you could do this, but social features and store might stop working at some point, and newer games and applications would definitely stop working, especially ones that use new features implemented in software like hand tracking.

TLDR this legislation could be fine but it would have to target Windows, Android, Steam, Playstation, Mac OS, etc and has ramifications that eventually software might just stop working. It might accelerate the push to move everything to the cloud also and make all devices dumb terminals that play video.

I believe this is what OP means by "covert" levels. There are no official levels but you were equivalent to senior principal even though you had no official level. Either all ICs are doing senior principal level work, which probably can't be true because no org has that many jobs with that scope of work and generally you're talking about cross org, architecture level work, multiple "lower level" engineers need to support and implement that work at that level. All flat organizations have implicit hierarchies, especially once they grow to a certain size

VR with pass-through might still win this because it's more practical for work scenarios. Arguably this is still AR, but subtly different than HMDs with transparent displays.

Playstation uses PSSL, which is basically HLSL with some slightly different semantics. It's possible to compile hlsl as pssl with a single (small) header file with some preprocessor defines in it. PSSL and HLSL are not developed in lock step though so all valid PSSL is not valid HLSL and vice a versa even without defines. It's not possible to actually get into details without breaking NDA and I haven't actively done Sony development since PS4 days (5-6 years ago)

Vulkan supports both officially, although GLSL support is better. To be fair Vulkan kind of assumes the game engine shader compiler does most of the heavy lifting and using either glsl or hlsl directly in a small Vulkan application is a pain compared to OpenGL or DirectX.

Miegakure was first shown at GDC in 2009. The first blog entry is also April 2009, so not as early as 2003, but it definitely began development in the late 2000s. It's been at least 12 years in development

I'm really hoping Jonathan Blow sees this and responds to it :)

What about this project made it L6? Is it because it was a high priority for execs? Is it because you had to get a lot of buy-in from external team(s) in the Chrome org?

I ran into the same situation at FAANG. I was explicitly told I had failed to lead a project because of my level by my direct manager. I was not named as a tech lead (which was not necessarily level dependent) of my area and had multiple coworkers ask me why.

The final product was shockingly close to my original documentation and implementation. Part of the reason for this was the core implementation was all done by me, but I actually set good enough direction that after I left the company, a year later the final product was closer to what I designed than when I left. This product is still being maintained and the core functionality is the same and has been expanded upon (that is no full rewrite). The implementation isn't ideal imo and could be improved in a variety of ways, but it works well enough for the users 2 years later.

This entire ordeal burnt me out hard enough that I took 5 months off and I'm still recovering, and I've basically given up on leveling up in a traditional tech company in anyway. People might tell me I didn't play the game right, and I didn't, but it did really drill that politics and appearance is more important than impact. Especially anything that can be made to look like indirect influence can be used to take credit. I made the mistake of trusting managers and senior engineers with my ideas and they didn't return the favor.

It makes a lot of sense to me as well having seen code for model viewers using WebGL. Before gltf, (relatively) standardized PBR materials, etc. it kind of made sense to just give people WebGL and tell them to figure it out. Also WebGL clearly was designed for browser games and game engine ports where it makes sense. As 3D models become more common, having robust fast implementations, standard controls, etc makes sense. As long as WebGL/WebGPU interop is good so it's possible to customize materials or still use model loading (if you want) but do your own draw calls I think it's fine

This almost exactly sums up the major issue of the times I've been burnt out. Combination of high passion for the project and a toxic, hostile or unsafe/unsupportive environment.

Can this be changed to the original title?

From Our Kitchen to Yours: NVIDIA Omniverse Changes the Way Industries Collaborate

You can always say no to this. I've seen recruiters do this other places and people got their pictures taken down after the fact.

Calling this "Draconian" is a little bit of a stretch, but I agree that it's a good thing for employees this policy has changed. Amazon does makes and publish games, and it is common to have clauses that you cannot compete with your employer. Given Amazon's success (or lack thereof) in gaming it's not 100% unrealistic that a lucky employee might make a game that is more successful than anything Amazon has made. Most game publishers and developers allow you to submit prior work, and get exceptions so ownership is clear. California labor code 2870 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...) also offers some protection, but when working at a company as large as Amazon they could legitimately claim almost anything is competing with them.

Oh, I think that will be a great change for them. It especially makes sense with the new focus on metaverse.

The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.