q_andrew

Note to the dev - FYI one of Steam's terms is that your game can't be sold cheaper somewhere else. Not sure if they enforce that though.

You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.

Dollar General is a mega corporation that can operate on an entirely different level than local stores. They pay their workers less and the profits go out of state. On a store-by-store basis though, Dollar general is a fragile establishment, management will not hesitate to abandon the location if they are spending too much money propping up the store. And the overhead for these stores is higher than it needs to be - they build way larger stores and parking lots than they actually need. The local dry goods store has grown only to the size that it requires, and those profits go towards its own survival. It provides cultural value, economic opportunities, and is more likely to improve the lives of people living nearby.

Strong towns (who made the article) is a grassroots nonprofit that finds concrete ways for US cities to curb the effects of urban sprawl. One of those ways is to acknowledge that inviting huge commercial ventures into your small local economy is like bringing a giant mammal to roam free on a small island nation. It's probably going to affect the ecosystem in ways that don't suit the environment.

This is actually why rotational math is more complicated in 3d than you would expect. It's something game developers get used to, because accessing and modifying a rotation requires knowing what the orientation is relative to a fourth axis. That's what a quaternion is. In the situation of this story, it's in reference to the milky way's vertical axis.

Something I noticed in the lawsuit (complaint 5.12) I haven't heard mentioned about this story:

Other than TITAN, no commercial manned submersible has ever suffered an implosion (only early military submarines have done so).

That's a pretty damning statement if true. As a land-dweller, I thought implosion was the main concern when using new submarines.

Economists would probably get a lot of enjoyment from reading about what game designers do, incentive is such a big factor for a successful game.

Model viewer is a nice tool! I was paid to make some assets for a model viewer website, but I couldn't get any of my model's colors to show correctly. Once I realized that AO was used as direct exposure value, it was smooth sailing ahead.

Most of the time I can't control what light my models are shown in, so it was great to have some control of how it was presented.

My guess is that their dubious disposability works against them. You can get self-heated coffee and ramen in a lot of Japanese vending machines, which makes sense because Japan is the capital of non-biodegradable disposables.

Can't wait to pull this up on my desktop tomorrow.

I was hoping their big announcement was going to be Procreate for PC, but I'm happy for all the people out there who will benefit from better accessible tools.

Pretty amazing results. It would be fun to work as a traveling 3D capture artist, going to novel locations and scanning assets to use in fantasy worlds.

As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work.

Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/...

tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.

Certainly a step above what a normal person could do in a 3D modeling program. The interesting thing about this type of stuff is that it would be harder for a professional to use those meshes as a base model; the topology doesn't lend itself to their process. For example -- the banana peels are puffy and two-dimensional. It would have to be completely restructured to be a convincingly peeled banana. So either the generated model has to be a finished product, or they are cost-effectively useless. CAD files are notoriously bad, and those are nice and mathematically easy to break down.

Material Maker is surprisingly alone in the PBR material department for FOSS, I have started thinking about diving into the PRs just to get it up to snuff with Substance. I can hardly pay for Photoshop, Adobe!

Hi Evan, I enjoyed this blog post a lot. I released my first indie game this February, after working on it since graduating college. It has made 3x my normal job's salary -- I'm still torn about whether to make a sequel and go full time, or stick with my usual 9 to 5. Let me know if you have any good tips!

I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.

I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -> modeling -> rendering -> programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.

Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game's "experience" if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I'm afraid of doing myself!).

The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational/resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.

Impressive numbers.

-Up to 60x Faster copying mesh attributes

-10x Faster loading curve objects

-9x Faster loading point clouds

-4-6x Faster loading large meshes

Ironically, if they are using attention methods, then dictionaries are not the only thing you'll need.

Depth is a useful parameter for controlnet, especially when you want really specific forms. I've found that it can hamper outputs because blank sections of solid color are interpreted as flat walls, when really I'm trying to make those parts ambiguous!

Agreed. I made this as a personal experiment and it was not all that hard to make form-fitting buildings for straight road networks:

https://andrewq.myportfolio.com/procedural-city-generator

Curved roads are a bit more difficult, but definitely possible.

Observations from a long time fan and game developer:

1. Early on in the trailer, it shows a road segment being drawn across an existing road, with the intersection getting automatically added. This is a big step up from the original road system where every intersection must be placed at the end of a road segment. I imagine this will make it easier to create nice geometric patterns.

2. Some cities shown have surface parking taking up a whole plot. I hope this isn't just cosmetic - allowing more/less parking should really influence the economics and transport methods of each citizen.

3. In the data view mode, bright colors bleed onto the white building models. I suspect there's some dynamic ambient light bounce rendering going on here!

4. It looks like the old method of plot zoning is still around, showing as grid squares along the side of the roads. I would have liked to see non-square parcels that fill up the availible space, but I also understand why square plots would make it easier to fill with pre-made assets.

5. Speaking of pre-made assets, those skyscrapers look really similar and boring. Walk around any modern city with glass towers and you'll see a lot more variation and interesting nuances, while still being relatively performant to render in a game like this. I'm worried they will introduce actual variety via drip-fed dlc assets. Yes, mods can fix that, but you can't beat the visual consistency and performance of decent vanilla resources.

6. Looks like the town hall starts off as a huge parking lot with a small office in the middle, and can be expanded into multiple departments. Looks like a handy mechanic, and especially believable for North American development since a lot of government buildings are like 75% pavement.

I've had the pleasure of chatting with Jonas Hovgaard over the years. He has a real knack for simulation games and knows how to satisfy a niche while also creating wide appeal. I'm jealous of his meticulous approach to making complex systems with simple controls. Startup Company was a huge sleeper hit, Big Ambitions is looking to be a similar success!

It seems like these types of tools will quickly proliferate any kind of meaningful AI tooling, which makes more sense to me than the idea of getting the best result from a single offhanded request. I haven't used GPT a lot, but from my experience, a response or prompt from earlier in the conversation can taint the rest of the output since the LLM will try to keep a consistent tone.

Along the same lines, the best thing to come out of Sim City 2013 is Chris Tilton's orchestral soundtrack. It uses musical tropes from 50s/60s Hollywood futurism and adds some modern atmosphere to it. Somehow the composer manages to keep the 'camp' of old movie soundtracks without it being cheesy. As with any good OST, music changes with the context. New skyscrapers will trigger sweeping full pit orchestra music. There are nighttime mixes for each song that lean into distant acoustic bursts. Also I love that when building hospitals, the music incorporates rattling pill bottles, jingling metal instruments, and clanging beakers. So fun!

One of the reasons I drifted towards heavy hardware computing was that the software was still impossible via web browser. This is amazing tech and everyone has wanted a universal GPU interface for years, but I'll be a bit solemn when all my favorite tools are replaced by website equivalents. It was good while it lasted!

I'd like to thank the shoe company Wolverine for dumping so much of an untested chemical into the watershed that my town had to push for someone to figure out if it was actually bad for humans. Grand Rapids seems to be a magnet for new tap water inventions, we were also one of the first to put fluoride in our drinking supply.

A lot of people don't seem to understand the message these policies make. This district has now made it clear to students that they are not trusted by default. I graduated high school ~6 years ago, active shooter drills occurred twice a year. It always felt like being numbed to the violence, forced to picture traumatic violence in my head over and over again.

There's a term for that feeling you get when you start casually scheming up ways to sneak through TSA security -- reactance. It's a psychological effect in which being ordered to do something can make you want to do the opposite. Pair that with a developing brain and the notion that your authorities don't trust you, and it can backfire tragically. Someone predisposed to committing violence at their school is now being reminded every day that sneaking a gun into school is a common enough occurrence that they have to use a plastic backpack. And even worse, they are nudged towards thinking about alternative places they could hide a deadly weapon.

Hey! Congrats on the launch, the touted performance increases are mind blowing.

I think physics engines are difficult for a few reasons:

- They don't mesh with a lot of features that modelers take for granted (non-uniform scaling, concave meshes, lax model scaling)

- It's hard know intuitively what values to use for things like acceleration, density, velocity, damping, friction. Especially because they are very inter-dependent.

- Interaction with moving kinematic or non-physics objects is an undefined behavior that has to be tested pretty rigorously.

- In gamedev, rigidbody physics are basically a trojan horse for gameplay bugs like clipping through the map and sudden bursts of high speeds (Which is both magical and frustrating). It's a non-trivial task to sandbox those behaviors completely.

- Projectiles. There's no catch-all solution for small fast-moving objects, it's always a tradeoff. But that's mostly because big O dictates it to be so.

Yes, I'm a big fan of the documentation. According to the release blog, they are re-organizing the docs for 6.0 -- hopefully a further improvement:

https://babylonjs.medium.com/announcing-babylon-js-6-0-dcb5f...

Blender is definitely the weapon of choice. Substance 3D is almost required nowadays for proprietary rendering, and the occasional Autodesk+VRAY combo for older established clients.

Edit: On the coding side, python is great for pipelines (especially now that blender has its own module). Imagemagick is great for formatting textures and huge .tiff files. ffmpeg is the king of video formatting.

I think Havoc physics will be a very welcome addition. Threejs has an adjacent library based off of bullet physics -- a solid library, but one that can be a bit finicky to set up. Although, physics engines are inherently difficult to work with in the first place.

As a technical 3D artist, Babylon has been a great way to dive into web dev, and it parallels with standard game engines just enough that I can easily find my way around the documentation.