@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2w ago

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117313713101758213 I’ve been saying for years that the idea of a project being “dead” because it was stable and not getting weekly updates was idiotic. In the slop era, software that hasn’t had significant changes barring a few small careful fixes for 3 years is S-tier in my book

Quoting

tante

@tante@tldr.nettime.org

Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.

Open quoted post

tldr.nettime.org

tante: "Open Source hot take: A software project is allow…" - tldr.nettime

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 1mo ago

My “strategy” is to keep creating as if GenAI never happened because I do not respect the outputs, I do not respect the process, I do not like the externalities, and I do not like the concentration of power.

I know it will achieve nothing in the grand scheme of things except to maintain my self-respect, preserve the joy in what I do, and retain confidence in my ability to maintain the outputs of my work longer term.

But it will have to be enough.

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 1mo ago

Tapping the sign that says “Yes the cloud is STILL just someone else’s computer, and especially if they’re a giant company they absolutely DO NOT give the slightest toss about you or any of your data”

Faceless corporate clouds should be your backup, never your primary IMO. They’re too big and you’re too small, you’ll always come off worse https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html

slate.com

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 1mo ago

Websites that are “we need to talk about your adblocker”:

On my phone I only run an adblocker in full fat Safari: when I open a link from say Mastodon it uses an embedded browser which doesn’t load the ad blocker. I only hit “Open In Safari” if the ads are obnoxious and ruining the reading experience, because I know sites need to fund themselves. So if I’m blocking your ads, it’s because you suck at integrating them in a way that doesn’t ruin your whole site. Maybe we should talk about *that*.

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2mo ago

Replying to

AI Hacks

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Warhammer 40K: we will implore the machine to do our bidding by reciting the litanies, and will castigate those who would try to understand the underlying technology as vile heretics

Tech 2026: hold my beer

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

I think what I've learned since being introduced to the idea of a cyberpunk dystopia in the 80's, is that it isn't dystopia just when big rich tech companies control everything, it's when most people start being fine with that.

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

“Software will be built by machines, directed by people” - fine, you guys do that, I’ll still be over here actually understanding wtf I’m doing

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online

Replying to

Software development as a process is a mirror of the general trend in software itself to use more and more resources for no particular reason except developer laziness and that it increases velocity and feature churn (which software users hate). All incentivised because pointless complexity and thrashing around using 200 things you don't need gets you promotions / job security / tech talk slots

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

I propose that we already solved most of the challenges in software development years ago and now a lot of people are looking for ways to make it appear more complicated because it makes them look busy & important which is required to hold down a job in a basically stupid industry which is running out of actually useful things to make. LLMs just turbo charge that

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2mo ago

For me the question “do you want to write more code faster, but with less quality control and a more superficial understanding” is a ridiculous one - of course I wouldn’t want to make that trade. What has upset me most is realising how many developers are completely fine with that. But it’s nice to see that many aren’t. So I take comfort in the fact that I still have a dev community, it’s just much smaller than appearances would have suggested a couple of years ago

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

I know I'm an old man, but I remember when you decided what to put in your software largely based on what people were asking for. Apparently what the "best" developers in the world who work for all the "best" companies do is the exact opposite of that

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

One of the reasons I don't trust LLMs is there's so much incorrect info on the internet that they're ingesting. While researching shader stutters, some people confidently state that every time you start the game you should load every level and play every effect behind an opaque loading screen for a few seconds to prime the shaders. And sure, this works, but it's just not needed. UE gives you a way to record shader use while in dev, and exposes it as a "shaders left to compile" var at startup

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

Staring at mustaches for too long this afternoon has caused my brain to remind me how much of a banger the Magnum P.I. theme still is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIaXl7SqkBw

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

I upgraded the live Gitea system this morning, followed my script that I’d made while testing all this in the test environment, and we’re all set. Trello issue migration can now begin. 👍 It occurred to me that since this is just a little home office server for 2 people, my process is perhaps a little extreme; most people would probably just have YOLO’d it on their main system. Maybe you can take the guy out of ops, but you can’t take ops out of the guy 😉

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@glassbottommeg@mastodon.gamedev.place I'm not sure I'll be able to tell the difference pre/post in terms of my video game revenue 😬

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place @sylvia_ritter@mastodon.social my only concern is that they still get some reputational benefit from being a donor and I’d rather they didn’t. But I am ok with them having less money and Blender having it. I just would have preferred them to be flipped off rather than (initially) glad-handed

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

Suits you, sir

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

I'm writing a script for my UEHelpers suite to do the various tasks required to collect and incorporate the "bundled PSOs" data (aka shaders to be compiled at startup), because it's a multi-step process of commands and copying files around and I just don't like leaving that up to future me, who will not remember the nuances

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@MikkoMononen@mastodon.gamedev.place @floooh@mastodon.gamedev.place oh that’s great, lack of rolling friction in PhysX was a huge pain point for me in a previous project, faking with damping was never quite right

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

TBF even when running macOS I used Finder replacements and custom launchers like Alfred because these things are too important to be left to OS designers without the focus to do them justice. Microsoft just did them actively badly instead of simply uninspiringly

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Working on this shader precompilation thing which defaults to Dx12 / SM6, I decided to do some testing in DirectX 11 / SM5 instead. It's pretty easy in UE, provided you've kept the defaults you can just pass `-d3d11` on the command line. I expected problems, but everything seems to work fine, probably because I've got Nanite and Lumen disabled. Good to know for the small % of people with older cards

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

It doesn't help that they obscure this behind confused naming conventions in the docs, admittedly. "Precache PSOs" actually means "on demand shader compilation with placeholders" in practice, wheras the far more useful feature is "bundled PSOs", which involves recording your shader usage in dev so that the engine startup process can know which shaders to make sure are compiled (a one-time thing barring the cache getting wiped by driver updates etc)

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place I was liking what I saw before, but now it's absolutely gorgeous

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place it’s good that they listened, although they *did* still take the money, and just labelled it differently. Still not sure if I think that’s ok

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

In my defence, because of the maybe-overkill prep, the live upgrade contained no surprises and only took about an hour. The test system took me over 3 times that because of hiccups with the database upgrade path and having to look up new config options, change backup scripts etc. I like having no surprises https://youtu.be/u5CVsCnxyXg?si=CfE9X1Mw22L_Df-z

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place @Bobbins@bobbinsrobots.com Nice! Lovely bit of capsule art there

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@SonnyBonds@mastodon.gamedev.place the fun thing is if you like retro machines and have an Amiga/emu/FPGA, Dopus is available & still getting updates there as well 😂 Edit: I should clarify, not by the same people, it’s a separate open source project forked from the Amiga codebase https://github.com/BlitterStudio/dopus5

GitHub

GitHub - BlitterStudio/dopus5: A modern, actively-maintained fork of Directory Opus 5 Magellan II, the legendary Amiga file manager, ported and updated for all Amiga-like platforms.

A modern, actively-maintained fork of Directory Opus 5 Magellan II, the legendary Amiga file manager, ported and updated for all Amiga-like platforms. - BlitterStudio/dopus5

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place idiotic and indicates the moderator thinks of the forum more as a chat room The whole point of forums is that they can store information for longer, and updating old threads is very useful

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place I raised it in Gitea and they’ve fixed it for the next version already

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place nah I tried it back in the early days on the same assumption and it choked constantly even under light load (Edit: possibly it’s better now, I tried it literally years ago)

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@frankreiff @ikuturso @chaucerburnt people behaving semi automatically sometimes is absolutely not a basis for claiming that an LLM thinks unless you’re in marketing

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@aj@home.ajacks.net it’s great, I pay for 2 copies for our PCs and there’s even an open source Amiga version still being developed

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@chaucerburnt @frankreiff and a human can learn from that experience and won’t do it again whilst tomorrow the LLM will be just as likely to do the same thing again

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place I pack the repos and LFS separately already but I’ve always used gitea dump, it works and is the recommended way. Can’t use SQLite because we’re multi-user (gets upset if >1 person tries to hit the web server at once)

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place Yeah, at least locally it's easier to test and is deterministic. Timing issues on the network are the worst, you have to make it feel good to the player even though their view of the world is guaranteed to be out of date by some number of ms

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 3w ago

Replying to

@ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk @gilesgoat@toot.wales 1.5h drive for coffee 😶

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2w ago

Replying to

@ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk @gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place FWIW SVN is shockingly bad at merging compared to modern VCS's like Git / Mercurial. It's basically "Mash the two final versions together" kind of approach and always needs far too much hand-holding. Git/Hg are much better at it because they're aware of all the running history and create merge conflicts far less often. SVN is also slow as hell compared to either of them

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales I am always amazed at what people will happily drink at coffee shops. The one across the street from us is always busy but their coffee is absolute garbage. There is one place in town that’s good but they’re very much the outlier. I guess Starbucks is a global success despite their terrible coffee so I shouldn’t be surprised

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@toerror@mastodon.gamedev.place oof the people that justify it as just like a compiler annoy me, it’s so much less reliable & deliberate than that

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@SonnyBonds@mastodon.gamedev.place I’ve barely used it since Windows 7 but every time I do it’s painful. Dopus is fantastic (once you configure its 700 options)

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I used CVS for years before SVN existed 😉 And I wrote my own basic VCS for ICL mainframes before that 😬

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I mean it makes me feel *slightly* better given all the shite I have to deal with for a networked multiplayer game, that doing local multiplayer wouldn’t have been a breeze either 😉

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The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

· 2w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place yeah I remember when I first discovered the ‘diff’ and ‘patch’ tools, that was a revelation. I used to manually keep patch files for 3rd party software before “forking” was a thing. It just got worse the longer you left it 😄

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