Simon van Bernem

[Erin Catto @erin_catto]

I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: https://t.co/2d9aVuUsxj

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@lauriewired @xXshaurizardXx I think the brightness chasing game is mostly done so that the projectors become usable under non-optimal conditions, e.g. a living room during the day. Which is nice! But in a dark room, I agree, it's pointless.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@lauriewired I was hugely surprised that my 1080p projector looked great on 80", whereas a 1080p monitor looks ass at 27". Projectors just don't seem to produce the same harsh pixel edges as monitors, so the image looks way less pixelated. Very nice!

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@tukarsdev @BadVertexDev The default wins. Whoever sets the default values of the character controller will determine the feel of the vast majority of games made with it.

Unreal Engine allows plenty of rendering customization, yet there is an unreal-look. Because the default always wins.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@csaurageul I may agree with the overall conclusion that many things about modern gaming are worse than they have ever been, but your reasoning is just way too black and white.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@csaurageul Nah

"People complained about <neutral thing>, but <neutral thing> was actually good because <one positive aspect of it>. The complaint led to <neutral action>, which is bad because <neutral action> led to <one negative aspect of it>."

Very much cherry picking conclusions

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@EtienneToGo @d_h_ofenkaese Dieser ganze Fatalismus um RBTV nervt. Ich bin bin einfach froh, dass ihr macht was ihr macht und hab spaß damit. Dankeschön für die vielen Jahre geilen scheiß, mögen viele weitere folgen!

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@valigo I wasn't aware of that! It would be a surprise though, just because Sims 3 makes/made so much money. I think they would rather go for a remaster and keep it all in house.

Anyway, if that ever happened, I wouldn't need weekend plans for the following year 😂

[Nic Barker @nicbarkeragain]

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.

But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:

- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.

This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.

All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.

It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@BLUESKY_host @vkrajacic In what world would that not result in File Pilot being cancelled/washed down/stuffed full with ads/getting a copilot button? Why would you wish for this??? Please god no

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@_mamoniem Oh my God is that from the short film with the alien learning to park a UFO, that was on the DVD of Ratatouille? I LOVED THAT ONE.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@sssmcgrath I use Faststone image viewer. It's fine.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@lisyarus @JustSlavic If you think it's going to be bad, just ignore it. You can judge it when it becomes public.

Like, just imagine people demanding that an unfinished game is released NOW so they can judge if it's going to be good ... Just wait until it comes out and forget about it until then.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@lisyarus @JustSlavic Dismissing the language because it is not publicly available is a fine reason imo. You may not trust in it becoming public and useful, and that's fair.

But I don't get the drama and anger. People act like Jon Blow owed them to release the compiler NOW.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@lisyarus I have been working on my game for 7 years and 1 month now, thinking initially this would be a maybe 3-4 year endeavour. The stress is real!

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@nicbarkeragain @hasen_95dx I like command pallets, but have to disagree hard with "you think of the things you want by name". NEVER have I thought "undo", but just pressed the shortcut that is hardwired into muscle memory, or clicked a button that I just remember to be the right one without thinking.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@SheriefFYI And then I also just have a "break in tick function of this entity" button in a context menu, which is helpful for simple things.

[Simon van Bernem @pulp_user]

@SheriefFYI My engine can bit-perfectly replay play session, so when a bug happens I look at the logs, tell the engine to break on log messages #15, #166 and #201, rerun and then I break where things went wrong. I often add prints when rerunning, just to able to break more granularly.