@rogerbennett.bsky.social

Software engineer, Games programmer, Developer advocate, toy collector, drinking coffee, Technical Director Elite Dangerous at Frontier.

This week in #EliteDangerous has seen it all happening! An ambitious release with a lot going on and just the latest in a series of iterative and incremental improvements. Over the past few years delivering new features and revisiting existing mechanics, and a stepping stone to the future. O7

This week in #EliteDangerous Either you are an explorer, and we've got a cheeky little vessel for you, or you are kicking ass for Frontline and there more options than ever before. And yes, frontine will send a runner to pick you up from the Black too. Just park up and get into the action. O7

This weekend in the code mines, slipped and wrote some GPU lodding with OpenGL 4.6 I sat down to fix a 6502 pixel error, but ended up knee deep in RTX shaders. Now I have a kinematic hierarchy with mesh shaders so I've got that going for me which is nice. I like writing code by hand.

This week in #elitedangerous ... The Lynx Liner! I joined FDev 5 or 6 years ago becoming a custodian of the massive space adventure sandbox I loved. It's been hard work, I'm proud of my team and the Lynx has become a symbol of the shared journey we have been on together as a team and community. o7

Modern GPUs are faster than you think. I've now written a tumbling cobra at every tech level from 6502 assembly to compute raytracing. Holy smokes when did hardware get so good? 200μs render is... five thousand frames per second? Yeah no. I'm thinking I need more evil plans and stuff. Any ideas?

kicking ass is back in town. This week in mad code plans... writing a barycentric approximator! You know triangles? What if you were bad at drawing them but it was faster. Sure they are a bit blobby but those blobs are a couple of pixels and the GPU isn't fill rate bound. Yes I have gone wrong.

My 2020s AI journey has come to an end. As a long term professional game developer who cares about the human experience more than anything, I've come to a dead end with the technology. I'll get back to writing about games now :) The full goodbye is here. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Well, my AI coding adventurers have been fun but are coming to a close, and I'm working on the final write-up. An 80b qwen with 256k context is woefully insufficient to help with simple tasks in code ~1% the size of a real game. I've still been unable to find anything it can help with.

If you like languages where whitespace matters please reach out. We can help you. If you design a language where whitespace matters you are going to hell. Straight to Hell. To the boiler room of Hell. All the way down. Python and yaml I'm looking at you.

My AI coding "assistant" just gave me a inappropriate singleton that I'm going to have to remove. And uses strings where it should very obviously use integers. If it makes bad decisions like this, whose code was it trained on? I can identify and reject these, but would an inexperienced developer?

This AI agent has suggested that perhaps we should try again later when I have more patience or try something else. An alternative would be that its less wrong all the time. There are only so many times I can call out a liar who responds with "You're absolutely right!" before I give up.

I'm on a train so no AI programming adventurers this week, but I am able to sit and develop some human made code. I did encounter the phrase "Slop jockey" as a pejorative for AI programmers. This week I'm trying to pull every trick to not allocate memory, and reduce, reuse, recycle my footprint.