What are you coding?

[SharkyUK]

My really early attempts (over 20 years ago) - though more using very simplified ray tracing to do real time shadow mapping:

A whole 2 FPS... I later sped it up by over 100x but it was quite crude.

Haha, very cool! It's quite staggering just how far things have moved on. Was this a hobby project or for work/career?

 

[Rroff]

Haha, very cool! It's quite staggering just how far things have moved on. Was this a hobby project or for work/career?

Mostly something I dabbled with as a hobby - I used to hang out with a bunch of game developers though so we'd kick stuff around a bit which went on to be implemented in games.

 

[SharkyUK]

One area which really lets games down - especially things like waterfalls really pull me out of the immersion with the lack of proper 3D volumes.

Yup - it's always disappointing to see a lush open-world landscape rendered with high fidelity and then to encounter a p*ss-poor water "body"! Mind you, they are quite expensive to render and simulate with any degree of realism! As we move towards a more ray-/path-traced future then better volumes will hopefully become a thing. Once we figure out how to squeeze orders of magnitude more performance out of the GPU using new and novel algorithms and neural rendering.

 

[SharkyUK]

Mostly something I dabbled with as a hobby - I used to hang out with a bunch of game developers though so we'd kick stuff around a bit which went on to be implemented in games.

Ah, gotcha!

I keep thinking of trying to get back into game development as that is the job I always wanted to do as a kid, and a job I very much enjoyed (if not so much the ridiculous working conditions, redundancies, and poor pay!) Many happy memories though, and I got to work with some good people (including my heroes, the Oliver Twins!)

 

[Rroff]

Ah, gotcha!

I keep thinking of trying to get back into game development as that is the job I always wanted to do as a kid, and a job I very much enjoyed (if not so much the ridiculous working conditions, redundancies, and poor pay!) Many happy memories though, and I got to work with some good people (including my heroes, the Oliver Twins!)

My personal opinion is that in this day and age game development is not fun as a career - the way publishers are involved, project management and so on it leeches any of the passion side out of it and the fun that many had with it back in the day - probably a significant factor in mid_gen going it alone.

I dabbled with the idea of it as a career back in the day, did some behind the scenes stuff for Activision - mostly as a gamers tester rather than developer though but didn't pursue it.

 

[SharkyUK]

...the way publishers are involved, project management and so on...

You've hit the nail on the head. Things have not changed much over the last 25-30 years in those areas. Still the same mistakes being made, the "exploitation" (for want of a better word) of employees. And so little money actually heading back to the developers (assuming the game makes a profit). It has never been as glamorous a job as people think!

 

[FredFlint]

Decided to add very basic Midi Controller support to Audio Playground. Though it would be difficult and a lot of code but it was quite easy(NAudio is very good) and most of the code is mapping things to the UI piano control. It would be a big challenge to add full function as my Midi controller has 30+ dials and buttons, I have no idea what they all do as I have not used it much since I got it.
Its cool to be able to use it though.

 

[Rroff]

Whelp - two of the projects I'm working on have hit silly IPCH cache sizes in Visual Studio, what on earth are MS playing at. One is a little more complex being the Quake 2 RTX source with a 5GB cache, the other is a relatively small project with 20 files and 176KB of code with a near 10GB cache W T F (mind you that one had a lot of wrestling with Raw Input - which is a horrible interface and has a ton of linked libraries so dunno if that is part of the reason).

 

[SharkyUK]

Whelp - two of the projects I'm working on have hit silly IPCH cache sizes in Visual Studio, what on earth are MS playing at. One is a little more complex being the Quake 2 RTX source with a 5GB cache, the other is a relatively small project with 20 files and 176KB of code with a near 10GB cache W T F (mind you that one had a lot of wrestling with Raw Input - which is a horrible interface and has a ton of linked libraries so dunno if that is part of the reason).

Lots of linked libs shouldn't cause IPCH to explode. IPCH grows based on what Intellisense has to parse, not how many libs are linked.

Are you using header-file heavy template libs - or things like STL? Header-only libs (like Boost) can cause IPCH to grow significantly. It might be worth trimming your PCH to only include essential headers and maybe look to isolate third-party heave headers behind smaller wrapper headers.

 

[SharkyUK]

I finally put together a video of the volume / scatter / participating media rendering system in my path tracer.

 

[Rroff]

Lots of linked libs shouldn't cause IPCH to explode. IPCH grows based on what Intellisense has to parse, not how many libs are linked.

Are you using header-file heavy template libs - or things like STL? Header-only libs (like Boost) can cause IPCH to grow significantly. It might be worth trimming your PCH to only include essential headers and maybe look to isolate third-party heave headers behind smaller wrapper headers.

I don't tend to use stuff like STL - I mostly use an old school C like approach heavy on struct use and build my own basic framework for utilities, etc.

 

[Noxia]

Anyone had a rummage through the MGS2 source code?

 

[Rroff]

Didn't even know it had leaked.

I keep meaning to have a proper nosey in the Command and Conquer Renegade source code at some point - the code behind some games can be fascinating for both good and bad reasons.

On a semi-related note just realised I'd accidentally used VectorScale instead of VectorMA in a bit of code when giving monsters in Quake 2 the ability to jump - which I've had a lot of problems with making it work decently - straight switching over has some hilarious unintended results.

EDIT: One thing which always amuses me looking at older game code, especially FPS games, is the assumptions that players will be slow moving sitting ducks and not the strafe running, glitch or bunny hopping maniacs of post 1996 or so heh.