Noel Austin

Owner of Strange Horizons, video game development. Ex Studio TD at d3t Ltd.

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@polymonster Well said, mate 👏

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS was formed 40 years ago today. A groundbreaking filmmaking studio, and acclaimed as among the greatest storytellers of the last 50 years, their story is one of innovation, near-disaster, and creative genius…

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[Apogee Entertainment @Apogee_Ent]

30 years of Duke Nukem 3D.
One loud, unapologetic legacy.

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@GhislainGir Check this site out, its brilliant for visualising the structs. VS 2022 has a visualiser for C++ structs too, to compare.
https://t.co/y9A5MQu5oD

[Sebastian Aaltonen @SebAaltonen]

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)

https://t.co/uL8HsfIlNV

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@SebAaltonen What are you thoughts on using ISPC instead of rolling these for each architecture?

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@SebAaltonen Looks like it was exported from a visual node editor. Terrible code gen, though.

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

Sadly, this situation is very common. Even very 'simple' cases have unreliable codegen across compilers and even across minor versions when tested. See compiler vectorisation as a prime example that rarely vectorises as expected.

[Sebastian Aaltonen @SebAaltonen]

More testing on struct equality codegen...

What if we write normal code comparing all the eight 8-bit fields...

Clang optimizes to a single uint64 compare. GCC and MSVC don't. They emit eight cmp+jump pairs. This is horrible. So many unpredictable branches.

[Alex 🦅 @OutoftheboxP]

A huge shoutout to AActor::EditorReplacedActor which saved me today.

Here is how you can use it to ensure relevant data remains intact when switching between actor types in your Unreal Engine project.

A short thread 🧵

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@MindResting Smashing

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@XorDev Amazing stuff, as always. I have a question though, why write 8e1 instead of 80?

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ Automating dep file would be great, I wonder if you could build it into AC by having input file pattern for IN and output file pattern for OUT. That might cover the vast majority of cases.

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ Asset Cooker is awesome! Took me just a couple of hours to convert my BuildAll.bat to use asset cooker. Most of that time was figuring out how to handle a folder of sprites as input, with a single spritesheet as output. [1/n]

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ Oh, that's a great idea. Would this enable automatic hotloading in game, by detecting when something is updated?

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ I think the 'dummy' file approach is good tbh, it can also be a config file describing some extra metadata of needed. Workflow is way improved since integrating Asset Cooker, thanks again for building it!

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ Anyway, I can highly recommend Asset Cooker, great job! Massive improvement over my simple bat file.

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@_plop_ My solution was to create a "xxx.spritesheet" dummy file in the folder and use that as the InputFilter. Then I wrote a bat file to cook the folder and write the .dep file. I don't know if there's a better solution? [2/n]

[Noel Austin @noel_austin]

@georgebsocial Yep definitely, if it's not 'work', you have to protect the intrinsic motivation to keep plugging away at it.

[c0de517e/AngeloPesce @kenpex]

REAC 2025 talk details have been posted on the website! Register today - it's free! https://t.co/cwrCfbUKTf

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