Doug Binks

Gamedev, making Avoyd Voxel Editor & Game with and open source tech with @juulcat.

https://www.enkisoftware.com/about#dougbinks

Runtime Compiled C++, enkiTS, GLFW, ex-physicist, ex-AAA. He/Him.

Public Key

npub1th46rew0fz9nwjq7l2esvp7xd0zkmmz8kg9xgrp03kwsm9lx8a0qj5wmja

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9m6apuh853zehfq004vcxqlrxh3tda3rmyznypshcm8gdjlnr7hspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsvhgqej

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-04-02 11:55:37 UTC

Apparently the Artemis II mission is in danger of being in deep shit... after their toilet system registered a fault. According to NASA "Mission control teams are continuing to assess the data and are actively working with the crew to troubleshoot the issue".

2026-04-02 09:48:05 UTC

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@nprofile…ds0l @nprofile…hmra I read Jip and Janneke when I was learning Dutch, borrowed from a friend who's kid no longer needed them before moving on to other more complex books. This was back before the internets but you might be able to get them online as they're quite old so may be out of copyright. Be aware that knowing German can throw a bit of a spanner in the works for Dutch as much as it can be helpful.

2026-04-01 07:02:33 UTC

I am on the third day of decrypting my backup drives from Bitlocker (to use a more xplatf alternative). The soft purr of the mechanical drive reminds me of the old days.

2026-03-30 16:06:10 UTC

I was writing some C++ code, involving a new struct type to go into an array. Naming was obvious for what it was. Tested the feature for that compilation unit and deployed.
Only it turns out that I had also used a struct with that name in another compilation unit. The structs created with that are now broken, and that feature crashes when used.
So I renamed the struct, tested and deployed the fix.
There are ways around this one definition rule issue which I normally use, but hadn't here.

2026-03-30 06:57:07 UTC

The authorities placed the daylight saving time [1] change on Sunday so you get a day of feeling "this is fine" before being plunged into abyss that is Monday running an hour early.
[1] Years of daylight saving and yet I still have no daylight in the bank.

2026-03-30 06:50:21 UTC

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@nprofile…jj29 Just avoid any that look like Yul Brynner.

2026-03-29 13:41:58 UTC

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@nprofile…x9sp When I worked with US folk this was a great period where we're an hour closer for meetings. But in general I find the hour change sucks, though as I work for myself I suppose I could mostly ignore it.

2026-03-29 09:01:44 UTC

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@nprofile…x9sp European daylight saving time change.

2026-03-29 08:48:44 UTC

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@nprofile…j05z At the end of the day everything is (well there's an on-going debate about gravity)!

2026-03-29 08:36:32 UTC

People keep talking about quantum computers being the next big thing and I'd like to remind everyone that all semiconductor devices work on quantum principles.

2026-03-29 08:33:53 UTC

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@nprofile…j05z I think that's how we market it: "True pixel GPU" :)

2026-03-29 08:30:10 UTC

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@nprofile…j05z Sure but without certain features for efficient tensor operations and low bit float support a given GPU could be made which was great for gaming (both in terms of cost and performance) but bad for LLMs. It's a bit harder on CPUs but removing AVX support might be a good step.

2026-03-29 08:21:04 UTC

Dreamt I was part of a team founded to make CPUs and GPUs which can't run LLMs (missing features) so gamers can afford hardware. Got into an argument about ramping up a production test first as I had some experience with the process of making integrated circuits and it was pretty tricky. Of course in my dream the production process was μm scale, which is manageable in a fairly small lab and the sort of thing I'd had experience with. Making modern chips requires multi-billion euro facilities.

2026-03-29 08:14:25 UTC

Happy frack up your circadian rhythm day again for those that celebrate.

2026-03-28 10:35:34 UTC

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@nprofile…nkpn Both cooling and cosmic radiation are already issues similar satellites such as starlink have to deal with, so I presume these are manageable.

2026-03-28 10:20:07 UTC

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In other words, the GPU LLMs will likely be obsolete before the solar panels start generating more energy than it took to launch them. So you might as well power the same datacentre with the fuel you were going to use to launch it.

2026-03-28 10:11:31 UTC

I did a very rough calculation of how much energy it might take to launch a datacentre to low earth orbit, vs the power draw of such a datacentre.
For a ~1 tonne GPU LLM rack satellite consuming ~100kW the energy of the fuel (i.e. not including oxidiser, launcher and ground energy costs) needed to launch this into space alone is comparable to that required to run the datacentre for 3-10+ years even on a future Starship.
So my assumption is that this isn't a good idea.

2026-03-26 15:15:22 UTC

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@nprofile…fnex I think you might be right, but the use of the term "data" makes me think it's potentially more than that. The linked document clarifies nothing sadlly.

2026-03-26 14:22:10 UTC

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@nprofile…fnex It states "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training", which seems pretty clear.
There is another setting for "Repository access: Choose which repositories Copilot coding agent should be enabled in." which is here:
https://github.com/settings/copilot/coding_agent

2026-03-26 13:17:08 UTC

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@nprofile…h0jy Personally I 'd rather neither train on the code I write, but I am indeed more perturbed by those who want to sell access to it back.

2026-03-26 08:57:05 UTC

Github has a setting "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" which defaults to Enabled. You might want to turn it off, thought it's probably too late and likely won't stop other bots crawling your code.
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

2026-03-25 07:16:27 UTC

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@nprofile…3v4s Wow I also didn't realise they'd moved to UE5 for shipping games.

2026-03-19 15:01:47 UTC

I think this article about LLMs is pretty accurate from The Register, and it's about more than just the technical issues.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/

2026-02-20 09:37:19 UTC

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@nprofile…3vpz @nprofile…hm63 You can simplify an awful lot of OpenGL these days, but the largest problem is that tool support for decent profiling has pretty much disappeared. A secondary issue is that I have experienced some performance issues due to shader compilation for long shaders, which is why Avoyd's path tracer runs on Vulkan.
A lot of Vulkan's verbosity issues can be worked around with some support code, and it is getting simpler to write (though I stick to an older subset for compatibility atm).

2026-02-19 11:31:12 UTC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c70kjr9wjw0t
He is a systematic failure which will re-occur in another member of the family without change. The UK monarchy should go.
When I mention that I am for the removal of the UK monarchy* I am often asked what would I replace it with. My answer is nothing. Their powers should disappear or go to parliament. This would also conveniently help divorce the state from the Church of England.
Republicanism, not to be confused with the US pro-monarchist party of the same name.

2026-02-07 18:29:44 UTC

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@nprofile…9wsp Your answers are likely better found by watching the video, but it's not limited to a US plug. However some homeowners might be, and they are usually limited to less power than this device can provide to each hob (10kW to one hob).

2026-02-07 18:27:27 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e @nprofile…yk06 Indeed!

2026-01-29 17:42:17 UTC

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@nprofile…vdqu Yeah glsl is a bit primitive in that regard.

2026-01-27 11:18:32 UTC

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Naturally trying to time this is a pain because the driver caches compiled shaders in such a way that I have to frack things around a bit to get it to recompile fully.

2026-01-27 11:15:28 UTC

It seems that the 'reform' in Reform UK means reformed out of Conservative party members, much like reconstituted meat but less wholesome.

2026-01-25 16:57:25 UTC

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@nprofile…hw6s Indeed! I got a call from the bank which started with them asking me to prove who I was by providing information from my account, I responded by asking them to prove who they were and they were surprised, didn't have any way to respond so I just told them I'd call their support directly. I can't believe they make this kind of call given how easy it would be to fake.

2026-01-25 16:03:31 UTC

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@nprofile…x7h4 I've not seen that here in Europe.

2026-01-21 15:41:02 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 In my case the frustum code change was fairly small, as I cull against projected planes. There are a few rendering tricks for orthographic cube rendering which you could use to improve the occlusion culling performance, but I don't have the links to hand.

2026-01-21 15:35:35 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 You probably have to do culling for the shadow camera as well, that's what I do in Avoyd (though currently I only frustum cull).

2026-01-21 10:03:13 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 These single reflections are pretty cheap once you go down the ray tracing path. It's things like diffuse bounces, multiple reflections and volumetric scattering which can kill performance. That and traversing a deep data structure (which is somewhat needed to fit entire large maps in VRAM).

2026-01-21 09:59:39 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 No, though I think I can get close with LOD and denoising at some point.

2026-01-18 10:55:26 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 This was done as part of moving to multidraw, but even with older GPUs without multidraw I saw big performance gains from this. The fewer state changes you can make the better.

2026-01-18 10:50:23 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 With OpenGL I saw a large performance increase by putting all uniforms for all drawcalls in one buffer and binding the buffer range per draw rather than changing buffer each draw. I have now forgotten how to do this with older DX versions.

2026-01-18 10:38:14 UTC

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@nprofile…wgz8 @nprofile…40t9 Yeah I just noticed that. I'll ping him and ask if he's moved it if I can't find it.

2026-01-18 10:33:43 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 There are ways to work around all of that, but all of them take a lot of time to write and have their own issues. There are bigger wins than vertex/triangle reduction to try first.

2026-01-18 10:30:17 UTC

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@nprofile…wgz8 @nprofile…40t9 I was lucky enough to work a bit with Stan when we were both at Intel (the Larrabee days).

2026-01-17 19:36:21 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 Personally I think the first one works better as a thumbnail/preview.

2026-01-17 10:21:05 UTC

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@nprofile…40t9 My reasoning is that gltf is a fairly simple and straightforward format with an excellent ecosystem of open source software. It has a reasonable extension system, and you can implement the parts you need in a fairly small amount of code.

2026-01-16 09:50:52 UTC

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@nprofile…zdn5 Given that I need to redo our undo/redo system I would love to know if you find any interesting articles/posts.

2026-01-08 08:57:48 UTC

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@nprofile…mmts @nprofile…x9sp The mesh shader version would make sense if the voxel data is stored on the GPU and the mesh shader emits visible faces towards the player.

2025-12-30 11:54:58 UTC

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The above post implies a filter: those whom I am helping are by definition lacking the domain knowledge I have on that particular subject and I am not saying I am *far* better at internet search than them in all domains.

2025-12-29 15:04:09 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy If your Spirit Medium has high absorption or scattering you might not.

2025-12-17 10:49:00 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy As someone with dyslexia who has worked with both I am always reading GLFW and GFWL inverted.

2025-12-12 15:13:22 UTC

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@nprofile…h2az @nprofile…enqw The simplest cross platform way for inter process communication I used to use was file transfer and locking on a shared drive. I used this when doing research to farm out processing to a bunch of servers in the department. For large data processing with no real latency requirement it worked really well.

2025-12-12 15:07:00 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy Well just let us know if you need anything. There's a lot of Minecraft users who use Avoyd for renders, so it can also be another way of advertising the game to a similar community.

2025-12-12 14:55:30 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy If you want editor support for your structures let us know and we can add something to Avoyd to export to this json format. It won't look the same in Avoyd, but we can create a material palette based on your blocks.

2025-12-09 17:23:29 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd @nprofile…j2qh Thanks I didn't spot that one!

2025-12-09 16:38:33 UTC

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@nprofile…nzck Funny to hear you mention Sega and Rez: @nprofile…q933 and I both love Rez (it's an influence for Avoyd), and I was lucky enough to work with Sega on some Dreamcast to PC ports. Sadly didn't get to go to Japan during that time.

2025-12-09 16:35:34 UTC

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@nprofile…kmm9 Corrected, sorry about that! Now you have to do a podcast :)

2025-11-30 10:32:16 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd @nprofile…t5tr This explains the Quake story - Carmack goes into a nail salon to get some pro filing and comes out with well optimized software *and* nine inch nails.

2025-11-29 20:54:00 UTC

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@nprofile…mksd I admit that I did a bad job in the mastodon post of describing what we're doing!

2025-11-29 11:44:50 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr It's only debugging if it's from the municipality of Buggingen, DE. Otherwise it's just sparkling printf's.

2025-11-26 09:39:43 UTC

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@nprofile…yspl I mentioned that in the start of the discussion under USD since usdVOL uses OpenVDB. I think it's a bit too complicated a format for my intended use.

2025-11-24 11:51:53 UTC

Yet another bug carefully relocated out of my code by a combination of Runtime Compiled C++ and Dear ImGui. Being able to add debug output after observing an issue, and then fix it whilst never having to exit the program really helps.

2025-11-22 11:11:46 UTC

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@nprofile…aels I've made a draft PR for this as https://github.com/glfw/glfw/pull/2792 which you can follow if you want to know when/if it's merged or chime in on the design questions.

2025-11-21 18:01:43 UTC

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@nprofile…aels In case you just tried this I have just pushed a bugfix :)

2025-11-21 11:12:17 UTC

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@nprofile…aels Did you stick with Fedora Kinoite or another distro? It would be great to have a local distro to test with.

2025-11-20 18:28:26 UTC

@nprofile…nzck Another use of Dear ImGui: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=9861 see about half way down the page for their tool.

2025-11-20 17:34:44 UTC

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@nprofile…aels Damn I copied the wrong line, apologies! Glad you got it to work.

2025-11-20 17:34:03 UTC

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@nprofile…aels This is non trivial in Wayland, events are dispatched to callback functions. I've been intending to add a GLFW event counter or flag so we only exit on events the user code cares about, but haven't yet had time to write this.

2025-11-20 13:20:38 UTC

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@nprofile…aels I'm likely going to be out for most of the rest of the day but if you add some info I can look into it. To check which platform your GLFW program is using on Linux see https://www.glfw.org/docs/latest/intro_guide.html#platform

2025-11-17 16:49:33 UTC

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@nprofile…548d Conservative Stupid Guys (CSG)

2025-11-17 14:09:34 UTC

@nprofile…nzck Kitten Space Agency (spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program) is using Dear ImGui (see 5:57) in game for some of the UI at least: https://youtu.be/Z5_g5zXV5_Y?si=QgMoxi9nJ8K5ck8Z&t=357

2025-11-17 14:00:51 UTC

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@nprofile…04cx I like the IDE, particularly it's powerful debugging. However I turn off pretty much every smart developer tool, even those from before Laughable Language Manipulators. I do find basic code completion useful though (type object.M and get a list of functions) beginning with M.

2025-11-17 13:20:02 UTC

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@nprofile…yspl Indeed. I think what these people want is artificial intelligence without agency/self-awareness. Something obedient to replace those pesky workers with their free will.

2025-11-16 11:40:22 UTC

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@nprofile…5e4e The need for cooling does depend on a lot of factors, and admittedly many scientific sensors need to be pretty cold. However the sun will heat stuff up pretty quickly with no convection or conduction to space if you don't design well.

2025-11-16 11:36:01 UTC

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@nprofile…5e4e Actually one of the big issues in space is cooling. Fortunately if you can orientate your craft correctly you can point your cooler at something very cold. Lots of different approaches - at the Atmospheric and Planetary Physics labs I did my PhD at I recall we had Sterling cycle heat pumps, and passive conical black body radiators. Looking into the later was like staring into an absolute void - a high surface area structure deeply black in visible and infrared wavelengths.

2025-11-15 11:13:16 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd @nprofile…vlqt Ah! So DWORD is actually short for Dos Word.

2025-11-07 16:50:51 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr I am imagining Sauron's Eye but with a turbine where the eye is.

2025-11-07 14:30:33 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr At this point I should add that I think Wind Power is great but only at larger scales. Things start to make sense when you can place a 6m+ tower with 3.5m+ diameter blade, and grid scale stuff is superb plus I love how they look.

2025-11-07 13:14:49 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr I'm not sure what you mean, but what I mean is that most of the time there is insufficient available power in the wind near buildings to be useful.

2025-11-07 13:12:31 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr The big problem with any design is that to extract power you must first have power. And most of the time around housing you don't. No amount of efficiency will increase the maximum power available.

2025-11-07 13:00:36 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr I have seen some ducted designs which are intended to be placed on top of large buildings. This might work, but you need a large well placed building and I'm still going to wait to see their results. I'm not sure this approach is suitable for home use though.

2025-11-07 12:35:17 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr As an ex fluid dynamics researcher I would not buy any home wind turbine, or rather anything which doesn't need a 6m plus high tower sat in an empty field several times its height away from anything else.

2025-11-07 12:17:08 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr If they quoted reality there would be no small wind turbines

2025-11-07 11:25:51 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr Yep. The quoted power is often at a wind speed you will rarely see except during storms, and most of the time you'll be seeing something a lot lower, plus with turbulence. Wind works really well for large high towers, but not so much close to the ground.

2025-11-07 10:46:19 UTC

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@nprofile…t5tr Well in this case it somewhat works against us, since it means that those home turbines quoted at 1kW power will likely generate an insignificant amount of power most of the time.

2025-11-06 13:27:47 UTC

There are lots of images of excited cats on the internet because it is held together by hyper lynx.

2025-11-05 09:41:34 UTC

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@nprofile…2ypz @nprofile…0wzw I use Creatine Monohydrate Powder from https://www.bulk.com/uk/products/creatine-monohydrate/bpb-cmon-0000

2025-11-03 11:38:04 UTC

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@nprofile…04cx This might be too scary for us, but might give it a try at some point!

2025-11-03 11:35:45 UTC

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@nprofile…0wzw We've found creatine really helps eliminate morning brain fog, but we're vegetarian where supplementation has a greater evidentiary basis.

2025-11-01 14:35:15 UTC

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I hope to get time to update the RCC++ with GLFW and Dear ImGui to show how to use Dear ImGui and GLFW from a shared library, though this should be pretty straight forward for folk to do themselves from the documentation: https://github.com/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/wiki/Using-libraries-from-runtime-modifiable-classes

2025-10-26 17:13:17 UTC

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@nprofile…f6jq The Albanian domain suffix is .Al so are they trying to get folk to register .Al domains with them?

2025-10-26 14:30:26 UTC

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@nprofile…ft9c Admittedly if you use the git hash as a tag you can get both of those, but then you run into the issue you have and most folk I see use a branch or release tag which can be easily changed without your knowledge.

2025-10-26 14:27:19 UTC

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@nprofile…ft9c Also less likely to be hit by a supply chain attack, and builds more reproducible.

2025-10-21 16:58:17 UTC

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@nprofile…u4nf It's Friday the 24th by the looks not 21st. I guess most people will realise this but maybe get be worth editing the post to be sure!

2025-10-20 09:19:59 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy @nprofile…fnpd Mint is certainly a good choice to move to from Windows as it feels a bit similar, and has decent low spec support.

2025-10-20 08:34:57 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd I'm on Windows 11 Pro, have been for a while. There are a few things I prefer on Windows 10, but overall the experience is not bad enough for me to switch to Linux for my primary OS and I turn all the AI and annoying stuff off. I regularly use several Linux OSes and when I was an academic Linux was my primary work OS for a number of years, but I still prefer Windows for development.

2025-10-19 10:36:34 UTC

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@nprofile…ckpc @nprofile…5l4m I'm currently using GLSL, and before Slang became a Khronos standard was considering moving to HLSL since other than extensions for GPU features the GLSL language itself doesn't seem to be advancing to help write larger programs.

2025-10-19 10:29:47 UTC

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@nprofile…5l4m I've been considering using Slang for Avoyd, particularly my Vulkan compute shaders where better modularity and generics would be a decent win. However I'm generally wary of tech which doesn't have a strong user base, and at the moment I don't see many people using Slang.

2025-10-15 08:31:15 UTC

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@nprofile…ckpc @nprofile…cpuy @nprofile…wvm8 @nprofile…8z3d I'd agree with that, even though I use (and license via Mercuna) an SVO-DAG octree. The extra complexity of more complex data structures can be worth it, but it is a lot of work to make them so.

2025-10-15 08:29:54 UTC

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@nprofile…tdd9 @nprofile…cpuy It depends on your use case, so difficult to know, but if you have a lot of ray casts for AI line of sight it might add up. Even iterating through an array has a cost in Morton order (to get the XYZ coords). If you have voxel sections of 32^3 you may not benefit much from Morton order, but it's worth trying both.

2025-10-15 08:26:41 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy You'll probably end up with some form of data locality in your arrays by following a storage scheme similar to Minecraft, with a region file storing 32x32 chunks which store N regions of 16x16x16 vertically.

2025-10-15 08:17:38 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy The cost isn't too bad (see @nprofile…wvm8's blog on Morton codes: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/decoding-morton-codes/) but in my experimentation it does add some cost over just a standard array aligned with your access patterns.

2025-10-15 08:11:30 UTC

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@nprofile…cpuy I think it might be worth storing 2^3 or 2x2 horizontal (your game has gravity so up axis is special) voxels in morton order similar to how textures are stored on GPUs but going beyond that might make random access much more expensive.