robmaister

10 ms·

1.
by robmaister 6y ago
Part of the original thing was Epic offering a discount of 20% on V-Bucks if they processed the payment through Epic instead of Apple. The end user got a nice discount and Epic still pockets more because interchange fees are ~2.5% and not 3
2.
by robmaister 6y ago
Retailers take far less than 30%. Consoles provide first-party QA, disc/cartridge manufacturing and distribution, bandwidth, and customer service among other services. Whole apps on the mobile stores also have similar services provided
3.
by robmaister 6y ago
I 100% agree and I also work in AAA. On the subject of StackOverflow being worthless... I've been working for 4 years now and I have learned pretty consistently over that time that the best way to solve a problem is to just keep diggin
4.
by robmaister 6y ago
AMD GCN absolutely supports async compute[1]. Radeon cards for years would only make use of the ACEs in pure compute contexts, as OpenGL and DX11 had no concept of a secondary command queue and could not make use of them. This is a big part
5.
by robmaister 6y ago
I work in AAA. I'm talking lower level things like picking which "type" of GPU memory to allocate, access to specific registers in shaders, etc. PC didn't have real async compute capabilities until DX12, for example. On
6.
by robmaister 6y ago
Unreal's Python integration is incredible. I made some modifications to it at work to run a version of WinPython (both for loose scripts outside the engine and pip access) It's great for complex asset pipelines and quick one-off e
7.
by robmaister 6y ago
Trying to find a GC-related crash on a stale pointer that is only reproducible in a Shipping build on a single platform is fun (depending on your definition of fun) (Shipping in UE4 means release mode with full optimization enabled, most lo
8.
by robmaister 6y ago
It's possible that it's an async compute task, which could potentially miss a frame and show old data (instead of the whole frame missing vsync). Also this demo is supposed to be running on a PS5 devkit, which means that you'
9.
by robmaister 7y ago
I'm 25 work at a relatively large game studio. My boss and the whole chain up (3 people) are all in their late 40s or older. I've learned so much from them as well as the senior engineers that I sit next to. After my experience he
10.
by robmaister 7y ago
Very true, I did just recently pass up a great deal on an NVMe drive because I can't use it in my current setup. I believe PCIe 2.0 will also bottleneck USB 3.2 (or Gen 2x2 or whatever the naming scheme is now), and whatever GPU I upgr
11.
by robmaister 7y ago
My i7-2600k @ 4.4GHz agrees with you. The only reason I would upgrade would be for better USB 3+ support (I have a hard time with anything more complex than a SuperSpeed flash drive). SSDs are by far the most cost-effective upgrade you can
12.
by robmaister 7y ago
I work in games doing mainly graphics work - it's amazing how many of these concepts still exist and have been recycled in interesting ways. Well worth the read if you're in my line of work. For example, the concept of "sorte
13.
by robmaister 7y ago
From my experience (graudated in 2016), most interviewing is centered around algorithmic complexity or at least regurgitating logarithmic complexity algos. Potential hires still in or just out of school should have no problem answering thos
14.
by robmaister 7y ago
In high school, I had a bash script + cron job that did this exact thing so that I could host my own Minecraft server on a junky old Dell desktop. I learned a ton from that setup about Linux and the web in general.
15.
by robmaister 7y ago
I personally have a huge amount of respect for all 3 as engineers. There are plenty of legendary gamedev engineers who are somewhat known, most of them hang out on Twitter (Carmack has a great Twitter account IMO) I've only worked in t
16.
by robmaister 7y ago
You still get to deduct half of your SE tax from your ordinary income, which is fairly generous from the IRS's perspective. From the perspective of someone like me, my W2 job already puts me in the 24% bracket this year. If you use a p
17.
by robmaister 7y ago
One year I made around minimum wage (paying myself just barely enough to live during the early stage of a startup) and paid I think around 25% effective just for federal. I now make a lot more than that with a W2 job as my primary source of
18.
by robmaister 7y ago
The thing about contracting is you don't have to take the job if they aren't willing to negotiate. If no one wants to build your website for $5, then the client is either going to have to pay more, or not make a website. All of
19.
by robmaister 7y ago
Yes, it's absolutely inefficient but for those platforms it's the only way to execute your own code on the GPU. Metal has a bitcode format that I know nothing about and I believe older DirectX had some intermediate format that was
20.
by robmaister 7y ago
The first link I included has a wonderful diagram of this (but from the perspective of HLSL instead of GLSL), the gist of it is: GLSL gets compiled to SPIR-V ahead of time by a compiler of your choice (probably glslangValidator). You can ta
21.
by robmaister 7y ago
I'm not familiar with the specifics within gfx-hal, but it's most likely taking in SPIR-V and translating as needed. AFAIK DX12 still requires DXIL so it might be saving both SPIR-V and DXIL, or taking in HLSL and compiling/t
22.
by robmaister 7y ago
Gamedev, but even then actually implementing the data structures is rare. And nothing outside of geometric/parallel data structures listed towards the end. I've had to use a concurrent priority queue once (locking a regular priori
23.
by robmaister 7y ago
I've found that a lot of times it's not an onramp merging into you, it's people waiting until the last second to merge to an offramp and slamming on the brakes and/or cutting off someone to not miss the exit. I deal with
24.
by robmaister 7y ago
This is definitely the way to go, especially with the more recent trend of embedding UI elements in world space, and VR/AR essentially requiring it. Internal tools tend to be IMGUI, Winforms, or WPF from what I've seen. Essentiall
25.
by robmaister 7y ago
There's a few companies that are allowed to efile that do very little besides convert the IRS paper forms to web forms and do the arithmetic for you. They tend to be a lot cheaper than TurboTax/H&R Block. I've been using
26.
by robmaister 7y ago
This is something the IRS does directly to encourage people to file even if they can't afford to pay right then. This helps with cases like self-employment income or capital gains where you can end up owing at the end of the year even
27.
by robmaister 7y ago
Generalizing a bit, it's fascinating that it's possible to break the law without being able to afford knowing the law. You guys are definitely doing something that is innovative and a win for everyone (except ICC). Best of luck on
28.
by robmaister 7y ago
Perhaps I just got lucky, but I started my first games industry job almost a year ago and I've been doing graphics work for the vast majority of that time. I came in as a regular junior level Software Engineer, mentioned I liked graphi
29.
by robmaister 8y ago
As someone who develops primarily on Windows and occasionally uses a Mac Mini to build iOS binaries, I feel vastly less productive when I'm using macOS. I've also come to realize I use my Home/End keys a lot since my Magic Ke
30.
by robmaister 8y ago
> In a way, managing WSL feels a bit like managing a VM and it is not completely integrated with Windows. I think the author missed the point of WSL, I can't see any benefit from that

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