Ben Sunshine-Hill

Lead developer of Havok AI. My opinions are my own. AND YOURS

[carl 🥦 @NightlifeMingus]

Let’s link up bro. Let’s build. Let’s collab [running at you] Let’s collab

[Keara Sullivan @superkeara]

Your password must contain two characters who talk to each other about something other than a man

[Havok @HavokBuzz]

Closing out our talks at #GDC2025 is The Discovery of the Perfect NavMesh
Why attend? Attendees will be inculcated into the deep truths of navigation datasets and will thereby gain uncanny powers over them.
Who could resist such world changing knowledge? https://t.co/ltamlrK6Ko

[pikuma.com @pikuma]

Finally, a linear algebra book for #Direct3D programmers.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

Weird realization: thanks to mirrors, you are the only person in the world who thinks you part your hair on that side

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@TheBurlison @ID_AA_Carmack Goodness, that confidence did not last long.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery Two hundred pages of worrying about daughters and hedgerows and such, then fifty pages of “doctor will you PLEASE get to the ship already,” and then the rest of the book is Hope You Can Figure Out What A Wind-Struncheon Is

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery I’m imagining all this as Act 1 of a heartfelt family drama, and in Act 3 everyone’s crying and hugging and sobbing “stone-a! It was made of STONE-A!”

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery Hey guys! I was driving next to this big truck and the driver ho-

(assistant runs in; urgent whispering)

Seriously? Like, the kind with the scoop?

(more whispering)

Hey, guys. Nothing much happened to me today. :-(

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery It would be a little dismaying if one of your friends was a barber-surgeon and you’d always assumed they were into it for the personal style stuff but then it turned out that for them it was all about getting to cut people open

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@cmuratori Not if it takes down their account management site! Dogfooding FTW!

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@annetropy If there's one thing academia trained us for, it's filling in long, complicated, poorly-explained forms. Applying for Irish citizenship is a notorious pain, but it was *nothing* next to grant applications.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery The “Thanks for not ravishing my ______” section on the Hallmark cards shelf

[Havok @HavokBuzz]

The last few years have solidified what AI means in the tech world, so to avoid any confusion (no we're not creating an all-knowing simulation intelligence… yet) we've renamed Havok AI to Havok Navigation.
Same great games middleware, slightly less confusing name.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

Edward Tufte's first full-length novel

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@istitz @MercunaDev As a contrived example, maybe instead you’d like a grid sampling, but sparse; well, the navmesh defines and serves as partial lookup for that sparsity. So you get the domain, but not the minimal-ish convex decomp (which you didn’t care about anyway).

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@istitz @MercunaDev Oh, absolutely. And what you’re describing is the navmesh’s domain, which is available even if the external data isn’t stored in the namesh.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@MercunaDev I think people are too eager to stuff AI-related data into nav structures. There’s a few areas where that fits, but I think it’s often just because it’s the structure that particular dev is familiar with and controls.

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

OH GOD

THE SHEER CARNAGE

[Havok @HavokBuzz]

We might have taken testing ragdolls with real world physics a bit too far this time.
But there’s always space for one last demo while packing for #GDC2024 !

[Ben Sunshine-Hill @Sneftel]

@daniel_m_lavery His whole life was mumbling nonsense syllables into a mic for sound effects. Until one day he was forced to adopt an unfamiliar, and mildly problematic, accent.