Bitdancer

All views are my own and do not represent the positions of Roblox.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@UwU1568097 Certainly

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

Implementing custom hardware cursors in SAL took less than a lazy Sunday, whereas getting the scaling and positioning right for multi-monitor support took me several weeks. It is not always the flashiest feature that eats up the most development time.

[John @MrJayLC]

How it must feel being a MS / Windows CEO these days
@vkrajacic

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

I burned myself out with multi-monitor support for SAL, so I did some of what I call recreational programming and ported Wolfenstein 3D to SAL.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

SAL offers the function salChangeWindowMonitor(), which not only allows moving the SAL window to another monitor but also maximizing it or even setting it to Windowed Fullscreen on the target monitor.
This feature proved extremely painful to implement, and it took far too long to get it right.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@0x18000 Hello there

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@kyleeflam @hesipullupjim No idea what that is, nor is it me. Also, I certainly would not use the word "bestie".

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@ziadweam8 @windows8point1 Here you go

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@windows8point1 I would love to take credit for it, but sadly, when it comes to art, I have to rely on AI. This one was drawn by Grok.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

Short answer: It bothers me, that's why. Having said that, the real benefit of SAL's design is a clean separation between OS scaffolding and user code. OS events never stall the render loop, so the freezes that single-threaded apps are susceptible to (not only when resizing but also for example during device hot-plug, high message frequency due to precision input devices, and so on) are simply gone.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

Showing of SAL (Simple Abstraction Layer), a GLFW-like library I'm working on. The idea is to offer only the features that are needed for game development while at the same time removing annoyances such as freezing or stuttering of the scene when resizing the window.

Edit: I realize the attribution is hard to see in the video. The shader is by Otavio Good. Check out his work at https://t.co/mtBkdwpyuG

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

Zig is a beautiful language. I hope one day there will be Zig bindings for SAL.
I admit I'm a bit worried about porting SAL to macOS. On Windows, I basically reversed the traditional setup and have the main thread as the render thread and a dedicated worker thread as the window thread with the message pump, which is harder, if not impossible, on macOS.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@JohnShaffstall Certainly, I expect to have version 0.1 ready to put on GitHub soon. Having said that, SAL will always just have a subset of SDL3 and GLFW features. I'm really hell-bent on keeping the Simple Abstraction Layer, you know, simple.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

The first feature that comes to mind is multi-window support. All a game typically needs is a container to put the framebuffer in. Next would be the somewhat more obscure window properties such as passthrough and transparency.
Of course all this is debatable. My philosophy is: Design the framework to be extensible, but don't write all the extensions you can possibly think of upfront.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@ziadweam8 @JamesMcNellis Oh yes, the burger patties were Wagyu, and the buns were potato-based, pretty good stuff.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

Had a great time participating in the anti-cheat team's team building effort today. @JamesMcNellis missed you. Looking forward to join us next time.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

When working with the basic building blocks of a game engine, the lack of text rendering out of the box in OpenGL is painful. Check out https://t.co/pZ1YlQ22Cz for an easy drop-in to get some simple text rendering done.

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

@ziadweam8 Unfortunately I'm on diet right now ☹️

[Bitdancer @Bitdancer]

In lieu of recent events, I feel it is important to revisit an old post of mine on Reddit: https://t.co/RLVnyLLDZT