John McDonald

I write high performance code and oversee gradient descents. And work on games @ Valve.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

I don’t like blocking anyone on Twitter.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions and I don’t really like to dictate how they can or cannot express those opinions, or what channels they can use to give me feedback.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@ZPostFacto My basement flooded in the one hour I was out taking my daughter to dance class. 😭

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@FitWaveNL Are you referring to the case where you jump and bump your head during the jump?

That case is indeed a little inconsistent. Is there a case where that is relevant to gameplay?

It could be made consistent but it would cost fps that I suspect users would rather have.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

Best analysis I’ve seen of subtick movement here, worth a read if you have concerns about movement.

https://t.co/Lp3zbdKFY5

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@Bobby_Anguelov A bunch of us play regularly, you should come join us! We are all old.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@cl_minmodels Honestly—I didn’t play 1.6. I played original CS, but I wasn’t very good.

I was a Quake player through and through and didn’t start playing CS seriously until I started working on it ~7 years ago.

Now I have a few thousand hours. I’m basically a newborn.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

This is how I call it. Oh no am I calling it wrong in my games?

[DayDaBeep @TerraTheToaster]

@vooCSGO Firebox is the blue circle, green is ninja, and the stack of boxes is triple.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

Is it St Patty’s Day already?

[Dan Pantelo @danpantelo]

So there’s literal green sludge bubbling up from the ground next to World Trade Center right now

[Rob @thegallowboob]

This owl stole a kid’s stick-horse toy and has been riding it around town in true Halloween spirit

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@Abzol @Masterkrombi @GustavSterbrant @b3agz @andytouch I’ve literally improved performance in shipped video games by removing useless LOD systems that didn’t buy them anything but cost them time on the CPU—which was where their bottleneck was.

Oftentimes it’s worth it to do more work but much more efficiently.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Mike Pence should be forced to carry his Presidential campaign to term.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@gu3st Lolwut

[John McDonald @basisspace]

I do not follow college football, but I am watching the huskies play Stanford now and I have a couple questions:

- how can a team be 7-0 but ranked 5th?

- how can a team that is 7-0 struggle so much against a team that is 2-5?

[John McDonald @basisspace]

100% this. This may matter, but it may absolutely not matter at all.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@BattleAxeVR I love this picture. And I agree that process is much more important than degrees or titles.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@BattleAxeVR The question there is necessarily “does this cost any perf?” The answer may surprise you! We have to measure things to know what they cost—not in a vacuum; in situ.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@BattleAxeVR In a city builder, like Cities Skyline 2, if the game paused simulating and was totally smooth while panning the camera around (like it ran at 120-240 during that time), stable 30 fps the rest of the time probably would be completely fine.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@BattleAxeVR Mostly I find it disappointing to see devs bag on other devs. The work is challenging and everyone operates in their own environment with their own set of tradeoffs.

To my knowledge no one has yet ‘solved’ fun, so every release comes with risks.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@BattleAxeVR LODing may be beneficial; it generally is and for a city builder (or GTA V, like you worked on), I would definitely expect it to help.

By comparison, on a game like, say, Diablo or DOTA, I wouldn’t expect LODs to really help at all.

But LODs wouldn’t have reduced overdraw.

[John McDonald @basisspace]

@0xgaut Bagel skin. 🤮