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darzu

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Dumb Pipe 12 months ago

Does anyone know if this tech (or Iroh) is suitable for real-time networking for games? Basically, once connection is established, what's the overhead on top of UDP in terms of latency and bandwidth?

Edit: after digging a little, Iroh uses QUIC which looks like a reliable, ordered protocol as opposed to the unreliable, unordered nature of UDP which is what many games need.

Now what I'd love to figure out is if there's a way to use their relay hopping and connection management but send/receive data through a dumb UDP pipe.

Take a broader view of what "building secure systems" means. It's not just about the code being written by ICs but about the business incentives, tech choices of leadership, the individual ways execs are rewarded, legacy realities, interactions with other companies, and a million other things. Our institutions are a complex result of all of these forces. Taken as a whole, and looking at the empirical evidence of companies and agencies frequently leaking data, the conclusion "we cannot build secure systems" is well founded.

Ambient Garden 1 year ago

Everyone's talking about the music but I also love the dot rendering system you're using for terrain and plants! Very neat effect, simple but it's a nice style. I'd love to see a whole forest done like this, maybe a flowing river too.

Steve put the nail in the coffin but the downfall started and was primarily caused by Macromedia being purchased by Adobe, IMHO. All the problems of Flash were solvable had it continued to been driven by a team and leadership that understood and cared about product quality. IMO this is one of the clearest cases of tech acquisition making the world worse.

Roblox uses a heavily customized version of Lua, and in it they've fixed many of the pain points of Lua and JS. One example is their Lua allows value types/copy semantics, native number types like f32 / i32, and simd. These are important if you care about tracking performance carefully which I believe they do.

They use Lua heavily in Roblox so they've got a lot of tools and expertise in it, so I assume they see a lot of benefit to further standardizing their high level language.

I'm guessing they have some tooling to auto-translate typescript into Lua to massively speed up their porting. TypeScript has a very good compiler API for doing exactly this sort of thing and I've written a decent TypeScript <-> Python translation before.

Pretty sure these are very different phenomena both called "ubershaders". As far as I understand it, outside of Dolphin, when people say "ubershader" they mostly mean a large material shader that has branches and constants to handle all the material variants used in one game (e.g. wood door, metal shield, shiny forcefield). It's produced by the engine so it's under full control of the engine developers. This means instead of loading separate shaders for the wood door and metal shield you can just tweak pipeline parameters. It's a work around for the various overheads, like compilation, involved in creating specialized shaders.

But Dolphin's "Ubershader" is a different beast. It's about handling all the shader variants for _all_ Dolphin games (which are made in different engines) with one shader, and the variant parameters aren't passed as nice constants (data) but as shader programs (code) that need to be interpreted to be understood. It's more like a meta-shader that takes shaders as input and produces shaders as opposed to a "normal" ubershader which takes configuration to specialize it at runtime.

I think that's right anyway. I haven't worked directly with ubershaders in either variety and my knowledge comes from building my own hobby engine and 3D pipelines.

I've tried many but never gotten into any Zachtronics games for one simple reason: they are all puzzle games.

For me the motivation just never materializes. Contrast this to 100s of hours w/ each of Factorio, Satsifactory, and DSP amongst others.

Yikes I hate that Thierry is using "#freefortnite". You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority. Epic is not some oppressed minority that needs saving.

Yeah, definitely a sloppy analogy ironically enough. But as a woodworker I’ve realize most people when they hear plywood they’re really thinking OSB or cheap particle board. Quality high-ply with a hardwood outer layer isn’t in their vocabulary. So the analogy sorta works.

I read and loved that book however nowadays I highly recommend playing the game “Turing Complete” instead.

It does a fantastic job taking you from nand gates all the way to function calls but in a delightfully interactive way. Instead of just imagining how it all must work in ur head as u read, u get to build it.

I went so far as to build a little simd/gpu that drives an led matrix with my own cpu assembly and programmable shader language.

Apple Vision 3 years ago

Anybody that goes to work alone in a home office room is isolating themselves more completely than sitting in a common area with an XR mask.