aeva

I'm a just a small town AAA graphics programmer in Chicago. I worked on Gears 5, Gears Tactics, and other games. My work is secret, but my personal projects are not.

I like to post about my numerous personal projects, and I like to think out loud a lot. Expect weird humor, esoteric ramblings, odd thoughts, my home made synthesizer visual programming language, sculptures, digital painting, and lowfi 3D.

Fervently anti-ai. Chronic pain enthusiast. 🏳️‍⚧️

Curses are blessings with caveats.

Public Key

npub1q0g8uzdx0xhqx04nxv3f7tn93cuhn2a7j2890t7r3sw6edqcqstq2u9ssx

NIP-05 Address

aeva@mastodon-gamedev-place.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsq85r7pxn8ntsr86enxg5l9ejcuwte4wlf9rjh4lpcc8dvksvqg9spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsr3qzgq

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1q0g8uzdx0xhqx04nxv3f7tn93cuhn2a7j2890t7r3sw6edqcqstq2u9ssx

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Last Notes

2026-08-11 20:20:18 UTC

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@nprofile…3vpz 6. even though you said the intent is for this to be generic, it would be a good idea to pin down some specific use cases you want this to be really good at so the design can account for them early and you're less likely to need to bring in painful breaking changes later. ie, being easily translatable to shaders or wasm, being part of a stable archival safe platform abstraction layer thingy, live reloading, etc.

2026-08-07 08:02:59 UTC

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do you think they'll still have limbs

2026-08-06 04:11:02 UTC

i'm in need of examples of well known ordered sets of five things, anyone know of any well known ordered sets of five things? #OrderedSetsOfFiveThings

2026-08-05 09:12:18 UTC

a programming language where swearing is permitted only in sections marked "unsafe"

2026-08-05 03:39:36 UTC

oh no, i have idea for a short platformer...
i wonder how grumpy wayforward would be if i made "Shantae and the Unauthorized Fan Game"

2026-08-04 05:32:11 UTC

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@nprofile…96k2 i don't think the horrible orange man's mandate also included batman references but i could be wrong

2026-08-04 04:40:17 UTC

you know what my home office is missing? a giant penny. I bet a giant penny would look dope as hell in the background of video calls. video call bookshelf backgrounds are so 2019

2026-08-03 05:25:38 UTC

i think "what if Tom's Diner had more energy" is the wrong question to ask, the correct question to ask is "what if Tom's Diner had even less energy"

2026-08-02 07:00:53 UTC

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mr sun 🎶 sun 🎶 super nova sun 🎶 please don't 🎶 blow up 🎶 on meee 🎶
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/117/024/610/104/880/377/original/7b84ff4bf7afbebc.mp4

2026-07-30 23:59:31 UTC

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how do you people watch major corporations rip all of the copper out of their own walls to sell for scrap in broad fucking daylight and go "oh yeah this the future this is definitely so sustainable we'll all have to do this some day whether i like it or not"

2026-07-30 23:54:38 UTC

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i feel like i'm taking crazy pills every time someone says that ai is inevitable in software development. like people say this even when they're denouncing it, and i don't understand what world they live in. this company has gone all in on this bullhockey and i've been staring at one of their flagship products and it's been at the very knife's edge of non-functional for at least a month now and i am completely beside myself how it is that anyone can pretend they have a real product anymore.

2026-07-30 23:50:46 UTC

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like... windows millennium edition was a better, more reliable product than this. like, somehow they hit rock bottom and said you know what this isn't good enough! get out the drilling machine we gotta keep going

2026-07-30 23:42:30 UTC

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Last I remember looking, codeberg's messaging describes small low impact projects are something that is merely "tolerated", so I'm keeping old github repositories around as backups, and only moving over stuff I'm actively working on. So far it's been *really* nice, and I hope they keep "tolerating" small low impact projects.

2026-07-30 23:40:07 UTC

I wasn't originally planning moving my shit off github since the service had been very reliable in the 15 years I've used it and I figured it was better for discoverability (which in retrospect, I'm unaware of anybody coming to one of my projects via any means other that me talking about it on socials or directly), but the quality of service has been so poor for such a sustained period of time I've already started moving things to codeberg.

2026-07-30 07:41:00 UTC

frobject oriented programming 🐸

2026-07-29 16:30:27 UTC

I'm looking forward to the sudden influx of expensive data center GPUs on the steam hardware survey a year from now 😎 https://nerdculture.de/@fzer0/117004011410638187

2026-07-28 17:30:02 UTC

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and if it turns out nobody knows of any such thing, and I can't find one myself later... would anyone be interested in having their self-hosted html5 games listed if I were to potentially host such an webring / index in the future?

2026-07-28 17:16:27 UTC

Anyone know of any html5 game webrings / indexes? I was thinking about how once I've got a game ready and polished I'd probably list it on itch and newgrounds and wherever else, but it would be nice to host my games on my website and have people be able to discover them by more ways than just being around when I post about them on here.

2026-07-28 09:00:01 UTC

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everything is exactly as i like it and~~get this~~i know exactly what it does, too. shocking, i know

2026-07-28 08:57:46 UTC

i wrote programming code today using my brain and my own two hands (i do this every day) it was really nice

2026-07-26 07:20:05 UTC

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@nprofile…3v4s free up human capital to do what exactly?

2026-07-24 17:58:27 UTC

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@nprofile…6ddv I would love to be able to see these all as still images on a webpage + the combined view I could compare with. Do you have them online anywhere?

2026-07-24 08:48:10 UTC

get a tub of vaseline and write "TAA" on the label with a sharpie

2026-07-21 21:49:28 UTC

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@nprofile…6ddv i love the style of the early 3D era so much. the use of color was so much more direct and intentional, like paintings. i miss that.

2026-07-20 22:56:52 UTC

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@nprofile…5raw being the unicorn programmer who studied computer science at a liberal arts college, i can tell you with great confidence that this probably has nothing to do with sigmund freud

2026-07-20 21:54:20 UTC

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anyways the attack boils down to there being part of your program or the program that makes your program that you are not able or willing to read (eg nobody's got time to disassemble clang, and how do you know your disassembler isn't in on it too)
I just think it's funny because the slopists don't even need a compiler to create those pockets once they give up trying to review anything

2026-07-18 18:18:35 UTC

me: "wouldn't it be great if squeezing two house cats together would cause them to tuvix together into a larger house cat and then they'd safely revert to normal next time they got the zoomies"
the evil genie i accidentally freed from eternal torment who has been trying to trick me into wishing for normal things for like several months now: "ok now i want to see that too"

2026-07-18 09:09:52 UTC

i think dr mario might be a psychiatrist actually cuz real doctors are usually less eager to click together random medications like legos

2026-07-17 20:51:11 UTC

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@nprofile…zlye "Hello! Ma Baby" is a widely parodied song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUKqs51EMqM
Apparently it's the first well known song to refer to telephones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello!_Ma_Baby

2026-07-17 16:18:52 UTC

(a small frog wearing a tophat walks onscreen, and starts singing)
hello my buddy, hello my friendo, hello my internet pal 🎶
send me a \o/ by wire 🎶
buddy your post's on fire >:D 🎶

2026-07-16 19:32:31 UTC

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never seen the subway tunnel full of smoke like this
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/931/311/766/697/809/original/f445f910643a3c8f.jpg

2026-07-16 18:50:50 UTC

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the draw distance is really bad in #chicago today
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/931/144/603/623/239/original/3dd3dc1c526943fc.jpg

2026-07-16 16:35:09 UTC

imagine if snakes evolved to have a long row of tiny wheels on their bellies much like inline skates and moved around like someone rollerblading

2026-07-16 09:03:22 UTC

if python is so good how come there's no borland turbo python

2026-07-16 08:35:19 UTC

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@nprofile…d6hc @nprofile…26hz @nprofile…4fmn it's not a warning, it's always a prompt to install an addon

2026-07-16 08:20:50 UTC

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@nprofile…26hz @nprofile…4fmn how come when a site uses webmidi firefox pops up a big scare thing saying the site is installing an addon instead of just having webmidi be a normal api

2026-07-15 17:05:51 UTC

this project is a dignified non-dogmatic rationalist marketplace-of-ideas meritocracy. that is why this particular controversial technical issue is beyond discussion, and we will be moving forward with my personal opinion without any community input. it is fine for me to have this position as the BDFL because if you don't like it you can always fork our open source code and spend decades building up the institutional material support necessary to maintain this critical infrastructure

2026-07-14 05:57:06 UTC

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alright, the OST is live on bandcamp now! check it out I accidentally made an album lol https://aevascontraption.bandcamp.com/album/asepsis-original-soundtrack

2026-07-14 03:53:58 UTC

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as mentioned in the edit, I changed my mind and went with https://aevascontraption.bandcamp.com/ instead. by complete coincidence i came across a horror story about name collisions in music distribution and while this is definitely not a realistic risk in this particular situation i feel like having something unambiguous instead is probably a better idea than an old internet thing nobody owns

2026-07-11 00:08:57 UTC

the word "unnecessary" has very pleasing number of letter repetitions that do not aid in its recognition nor meaningfully change the pronunciation, but i think it could have gone harder

2026-07-10 15:37:06 UTC

shaders would be better if they were made out of chocolate so you could gnaw on one while the remaining zillion are still compiling

2026-07-07 23:40:58 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag @nprofile…4e67 keep in mind I'm also not immediately planning on doing any kind of volumetric scattering model either, despite that it absolutely would give the rendered image a more striking appearance and me having ideas for how to best implement it.

2026-07-07 23:37:13 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag @nprofile…4e67 and since I didn't register distance tinting as being particularly significant in my recent cloud watching adventures, I suspect it wont make much of a difference in the periphery of the player's vision either

2026-07-07 23:35:40 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag @nprofile…4e67 I'm not too worried about the specifics of distance tinting for the clouds because I'm just trying to get the broad strokes of the sky rendering sorted out for now before moving on to other aspects of the game. The player's attention under normal gameplay is going to be below the horizon, so the purpose of having striking cloudscapes is in part to tantalize the player into look somewhere other than where they need to be looking.

2026-07-07 08:06:18 UTC

ok so like no spoilers please but i honestly don't remember if joe biden is still alive or not

2026-07-06 23:31:41 UTC

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@nprofile…6ddv this is really neat :O

2026-07-06 21:18:50 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag correct, the sprites are untinted at the moment. it wouldn't be hard to add some tinting, and i have been considering it for a fake scattering model i'm on the fence about. i haven't considered tinting based on distance and my direct observations of local weather don't support it. i think when i add more variety for the clouds and more things on the ground the scale will be easier to gauge. however, the scale of clouds are hard to gauge by eye irl, so a bit of ambiguity is good

2026-07-06 16:32:47 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag however, the plan right now is to nix this approach entirely in favor of the sprites dissolving as they travel and having new sprites materialize near by to keep the density up. the clouds would have an (as of yet undecided) abstract volume representation (preferably cheap) on the CPU for the purpose of particle spawning, and the clouds themselves would be composed of clouds of particles instead of individual sprites.

2026-07-06 16:27:39 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag as for the other stuff, continuously sorting the clouds was more distracting, so what I'm doing right now is only re-sorting them once every second or so and then cross fading to their new positions, except that cross fading via alpha blending wasn't workable so I opted for dithering instead. I suppose I could fade the pairs in and out one at a time such that one half is always at full opacity.

2026-07-06 15:56:34 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag ramps as in gradients. the atmosphere has a lighter color near the horizon and is a deep blue higher up, whereas the ground is a pair of slightly different green ramps that become more blue / gray near the horizon

2026-07-06 04:45:59 UTC

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triple-aye pee bee arr "realism" only strives to capture what is mundane about physical reality whereas i'd like to leave that at the door and run away giggling with what is sublime about subjective reality, and i want it to run great on your computer even if you pulled it out of a time capsule from 2008

2026-07-06 04:29:36 UTC

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also I've been staring at these too long and now they all look like thumbs to me lol

2026-07-06 04:28:22 UTC

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this is more or less the same thing as yesterday, but now the ground is really fancy about how it uses the oklab ramps, and the sky has a different ramp. also more cloud layers
https://zone.dog/games/firmament9/
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/871/123/602/565/758/original/37c878242c723eb5.png

2026-07-05 06:00:06 UTC

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fun thing about this project is when i take a screenshot and am like ugh it looks better in motion i don't have to then go and record a video i can just be like HEY HERE'S THE URL SEE IT FOR YOURSELF IN YOUR WEB BROWSER https://zone.dog/games/firmament8/
also btw I put together a better gradient drawing system for the sky and also for the ground
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/865/827/050/067/912/original/ff5dfe772ba1941f.png

2026-07-02 19:14:21 UTC

http status code 200: "You Got Served"

2026-07-02 09:25:14 UTC

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@nprofile…h98k it's such a beautiful instrument

2026-07-02 09:24:03 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag so parts of the patch do that polyphonically so it can match incoming midi notes, and then the remainder of the patch attempts to approximate a large space with a bit of reverb/echo

2026-07-02 09:22:44 UTC

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@nprofile…vmag several feedback loops with low and high pass filters. if you make a feedback loop's period 1/hz eg 1/440, and you feed noise into it you get something that sounds a lot like a string being agitated at that frequency, and then you can tinker with it by subtracting harmonics or adding resonance with low/high pass filters.

2026-07-02 05:40:02 UTC

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same patch as the breath controller resonator I posted four days ago, but i'm using my mandolin to agitate it instead
anyways if you were just thinking "wow i'd love to hear aeva noodle on a mandolin for exactly 11 minutes and 14 seconds while trying (and intermittently failing) to be *very* careful to be super super gentle when hitting the notes that match the resonant frequencies of the cord she's simultaneously holding down with her foot on a midi controller", i've got fantastic news for you
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/848/732/877/997/477/original/2056d4a20b4d4fa3.mp3

2026-07-01 16:02:27 UTC

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i was thinking something like this for the moon passing behind clouds:
basically, have the moon drawn with an alpha masked texture after the atmosphere gradient but before the clouds. when the clouds draw, use the angle between the moon ray and the view ray to blend a different texture onto the cloud texture to add scattering and a halo or something weird like an iris
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/115993303072692434

2026-07-01 15:56:49 UTC

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i had a bunch of cool ideas last night and upon waking up this morning for how to add celestial bodies to this (the moon should back light the clouds in cool ways, if i use a celestial sphere to determine the positions of the sun and moon and fixed stars, then i can animate time moving away too fast in a cool way, and also i should put some refraction on them when they're near the horizon) but i've gotta go to work in a few shakes, and i've got a commitment tonight, so probably not today

2026-07-01 08:26:23 UTC

remember you swing every miss you take don't

2026-07-01 04:06:35 UTC

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@nprofile…pwwx oh wait sorry i misread i have no idea

2026-07-01 04:05:14 UTC

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@nprofile…pwwx !!!!!

2026-06-30 15:47:22 UTC

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@nprofile…uyaz woot!

2026-06-28 18:17:35 UTC

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@nprofile…wgz8 you guys don't get clouds in europe D:???

2026-06-28 02:46:24 UTC

i made a horn in #mollytime that you operate by blowing into a microphone while holding down keys on a keyboard
here's 9 minutes and 21 seconds of that :3
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/825/415/083/584/908/original/8f03ff1fb8e44361.mp3

2026-06-27 21:46:36 UTC

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@nprofile…tsex try it again, I got a report of it working on a pixel 7a after I reworked things to get better fp precision

2026-06-27 16:54:28 UTC

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@nprofile…tsex which phone

2026-06-27 16:35:50 UTC

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I uploaded a speculative fix proposed by a friend, so if you have a nvidia card please give it another try and tell me how it goes https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/116814363698646279

2026-06-27 07:29:40 UTC

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honestly I had no idea that drawing the same polygons in the same spot with the same UVs with just one draw call could do that, i figured the fragment positions were like, supposed to be deterministic

2026-06-27 07:27:45 UTC

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https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/116814363698646279
ok so this is broken on GTX and RTX series nvidia cards, on any OS, so it's probably something with the cards themselves or the stock drivers
what it looks like to me is when I draw the same sprite at the exact same location, what is happening instead is it gets jittered, and thus the dither effect which is supposed to be invisible most of the time is in fact very visible because the pixel positions are not lining up between the two.

2026-06-26 17:28:50 UTC

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@nprofile…ffys when you watch it in VR is it a virtual flat screen, or do VR systems have a way to introduce stereo into games that weren't designed for it :O?

2026-06-26 17:26:10 UTC

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@nprofile…ffys awesome :D! <3

2026-06-26 04:34:18 UTC

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@nprofile…55k5 let me know how it goes!

2026-06-26 04:29:34 UTC

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@nprofile…ks0x I haven't played it, but they have a really nice volumetric cloud rendering system. I'm guessing they're using stacks of ground-parallel alpha masked layers to make them so nice and round, and might be doing ray marching to figure out the light propagation. Much fancier than what I've got, though I have the math worked out such that I can generate the geometry needed to do layers like that. Those are aspirationally good clouds.

2026-06-26 04:20:34 UTC

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@nprofile…55k5 oh noo :(

2026-06-26 04:06:22 UTC

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I'm probably going to replace this with a system where the sprites mutate and fade out as they travel and new ones appear to replace them, since that'll likely look cooler and also let me draw more sprites at once.
buuut, I'm gonna need to draw some more sprites first before I can do that well

2026-06-26 03:54:55 UTC

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I think I am probably on to something with this sky rendering system because I showed this to my mom and she exclaimed "oh my gosh!" when the page loaded :3

2026-06-26 03:48:55 UTC

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okie I like this version a lot more (click the link to see it)
https://zone.dog/games/firmament7/
this version has the clouds draw twice fading in and out in opposite phases. the clouds that are in the invisible phase are re-sorted, thus the system is able to make gentle intermittent corrections to the draw order without being super obvious. I'm using stochastic transparency to do the blending because it turns out using alpha transparency makes the math much harder to get right.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/814/181/148/078/615/original/ed2b7af7e84d4f1e.png

2026-06-25 01:46:57 UTC

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@nprofile…hn2d I think you mixed me up with eniko :)

2026-06-25 01:26:00 UTC

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also, if anyone has recommendations on general reading on the topic of designing particle systems (both in the sense of engineering and in the sense of making cool art), or on the topic of particle sorting i'm all ears

2026-06-25 01:24:03 UTC

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I'm considering working around this by drawing every sprite twice so I can change their order intermittently and then blend out the old sorting position, but I'm wondering if anyone has any better ideas for how to handle the ordering problem without introducing popping?
I'm keeping this strictly limited to forward rendering without any render targets or other newfangled rendering features so keep that in mind.

2026-06-23 03:53:31 UTC

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@nprofile…c9pu why on earth would anyone want to watch someone vibe code

2026-06-21 17:18:57 UTC

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having a plaintext backing format makes it play ok with revision control systems like git that don't handle binary files well. plaintext diffing is not useful, but i think creating a visual diff tool / merge conflict resolved is possible, and i intend to try to make such a thing for #mollytime

2026-06-21 17:14:10 UTC

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syntax is already intrinsic in the gui, so you can't write syntax errors. most let you make invalid connections and then admonish you for it (but it's easily corrected so I think most people don't mind anyway) and there's the tricky kind of error where the program was fine but now it isn't (which is harder to categorically eliminate but i think can be solved architecturally).
also the main complaint of hell spaghetti can be solved procedurally, idk why most visual languages don't bother

2026-06-21 17:06:49 UTC

with unreal having announced their plans to kill off blueprint because they apparently expect that drooling into llms is going to somehow replace visual programming languages, i think it's worth repeating that one of the really cool (and imo underexplored) things that visual programming languages can do (which ironically most don't including blueprint) is make it impossible to construct an invalid program

2026-06-19 00:38:47 UTC

you ever wonder why there's always ads all over the city for exactly one or two accident lawyers with improbable phone numbers at any given moment, but you never see an ad for those specific accident lawyers with improbable phone numbers again next time you go outside? do they retire once they score the big haul? do they take turns smiling powerfully from the sides of buses?

2026-06-17 05:18:20 UTC

you ever wonder what it was like when you were a kid

2026-06-11 23:28:51 UTC

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@nprofile…ghvv I assumed they run it to make money

2026-06-11 22:18:17 UTC

i can't believe i spent the summer of '16 teaching military drones how to loiter in a large crowd of millennials milling about in one specific corner of Loyola Beach Park for long enough to make the cops nervous

2026-06-11 17:34:33 UTC

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@nprofile…0yqm frankly this is the most liberating mindset one can possibly have
i went from this https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/114612264992461462
to this https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/114946016340774053
over the course of roughly two months of simply building something because i really wanted to
i made the mistake of thinking maybe i should pivot to Turning It Into $omething, but thankfully quickly realized that would be a huge mistake so i immediately pivoted back to just simply doing stuff i actually wanted to again

2026-06-11 08:39:16 UTC

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i had an idea for a sculpture i wanted to make and i was explaining it to my folks while chatting with them on the phone tonight and my dad wisely pointed out that a disembodied hand with a comically large number of nails pounded into it might come off as blasphemy to some rather than mild shock art, and in thinking about it i think that's not quite what i'm going for so now i'm thinking what if I make it a flower with fingers for petals and the nails pounded into it are the flower's stamen

2026-06-11 08:29:49 UTC

every drawing is a diagram that attempts to explain what art is

2026-06-11 05:05:06 UTC

>>> len("longer")
6
>>> len("shorter")
7

2026-06-11 00:32:08 UTC

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I found that concept very alarming for some time, that you could take shrooms, hear the universe, and then like, quit your job without really having a plan.
However, I've since met many people who have taken shrooms and none of them to my knowledge have found the infinite wellspring of courage needed to quit their jobs on a dime and live life on fully their own terms. Now days I worry if I tried shrooms I wouldn't find that wellspring of courage either.

2026-06-11 00:25:54 UTC

once upon a time at a much earlier point in my career I was visiting a small two-person startup in Milwaukee to evaluate if their new open source 3D scanner project was something my employer at the time would have been likely to want to do a collaboration with, and I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere (they seemed nice enough), but I do remember one of the founders casually explaining the company's origin story as he tried shrooms, had a profound revelation, and then quit his job.

2026-06-10 05:41:03 UTC

u ever just wanna use an undeclared identifier

2026-06-07 05:49:41 UTC

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idk maybe a regular triangular grid is good enough and I should just fudge vertex positions and tessellate as needed

2026-06-07 05:46:06 UTC

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It seems like maybe what I want to do instead is just keep track of which edges in a hull are perimeter edges, only add new points outside the hull such that they're appending new triangles and adjusting the perimeter accordingly. Likewise, points can be deleted from the mesh working outside-in. This on its own would not be a delaunay triangulation, but I imagine there's probably a point placement heuristic I can follow that produces one or something close to it.