A Look Back Over 2023

This is my longest blog post by far!

Time Flies Like an Arrow

It's been 21 months since I last posted on here, which is a ridiculous amount of time. But, importantly (to me at least), I still haven't missed a single year since I began this blog 16 years ago. Dang, that makes me feel old. So, what have I been busy doing for this period of time?

Work

A lot of my time, energy, and mental problem-solving have been spent toward work. I've been busy leading a team where we come up with new rendering tech for Killing Floor 3. I probably can't go into much detail without divulging trade secrets, but my team focuses on making state-of-the-art gore systems. I would love for us to be able to present our solution as a GDC talk, or something similar.

Pipeline

I've been continuing work on Pipeline off and on, but it's going much slower than I anticipated. I'd love to implement some cutting edge features like raytracing, more mesh shaders, indirect drawing, and virtual texturing (with sampler feedback), but I find myself getting distracted with serialization, UI interface, and pondering the best ways to make undo/redo systems. Looking over the new shader Work Graphs, I wonder when I'll actually catch up to the latest graphics features. I'd also love to tinker with the new DirectML features.

Lately, I've been focused on parsing the C++ DX12 header to auto-generate most of the boilerplate code for me automatically, but that is also taking far more effort than I originally anticipated. I find myself making very custom parsing and generation code to create the wrappers, which kind of defeats the original intention and purpose. Ideally, the auto-generation would create the XML serialization and ImGui methods with little to no specialized generation code. Should this instead auto-generate the starting point instead of the the final methods? Something for me to think about and consider.

Birthday

This year I turned 40. That number still seems very large to me and I don't feel anywhere close to what I thought that age would feel like.

What do they do with engineers who turn 40? They take them out back and shoot them. - Primer

To celebrate my birthday, I travelled to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. I had never been to the Caribbean before, and it was beautiful. My goal is to eventually visit the South Pacific and in some ways, the Caribbean islands could be considered a "poor man's" South Pacific. Okay, maybe not that poor of a man.

I'm a big fan of whiskey, so I decided to splurge for my 40th birthday. I bought a $400 bottle of Japanese whiskey. I figured a bottle that cost $10 per year of my life was worth it. Honestly, I would say it's not the best whiskey I've ever had, but it was quite tasty.

Pilot's License

I'm very proud to say that just weeks before my 40th birthday I took and passed my checkride to be able to get my Private Pilot's License! I actually began my pilot lessons back in 2008, which is 14 years ago. I stopped my lessons in 2010, thinking I would be taking a temporary hiatus, which ended up lasting over 11 years. You just never know how life will distract you and lead you in different directions.

I don't yet have my own plane and I'm not a member of a flying club or anything, so the only way I can fly currently is to rent a plane, which is quite expensive. I've been researching lots of different aircraft trying to figure out which one best fits my mission. I've been mainly considering the Cessna 170, Ran's S-21 Outbound, Van's RV-14 or RV-15 (not yet available), or Zenith CH-750 Super Duty. In fact, this past summer I went and visited the Zenith factory in Missouri. Who knows what I'll eventually end up with though. It will likely be a completely different and random plane that I can afford to buy and fly while I potentially build my own plane.

I would also love to continue to extend my license with a tailwheel endorsement and an instrument rating. 

Bucket List

Getting my pilot's license makes me think of my unofficial "bucket list" of things I want to accomplish in my life. I now have several published games with my name in the credits, which was one of my major life goals. Getting a pilot's license and my own plane is another.

What remaining goals to I have?

• Be the author of a published fiction book

I've been working on a multi-book story for nearly 20 years at this point. I've written several drafts of the first book but I never got it to a state where I can even send it to a publisher.

• Be the lead engineer/designer of my own published indie game

I've attempted to work with artists in my free-time at least twice now to make an indie game. The problem is that it's hard to keep myself and others motived on a project that we're all doing for free, with the hope of success later in the future. One of goals would be to try to use as little human and financial resources as possible. This raises the question of generative AI, the latest hot topic. I could likely utilize generative AI for art, animation, music, sound effects, text to speech, etc. These would all greatly help a single developer be able to make a full and complete game in a  reasonable amount of time.

Changing Note-Taking & Blogging

While I do have this dev blog, you'll notice that I don't update it very often anymore. This directly correlates to my general note-taking in life. I will write a bunch of notes in one place and then never gather them together into anything meaningful. And they often get lost over time and especially after job changes. (For example, I used to have tons of notes for Unity, but now that I haven't used Unity professionally for over 6 years, I have no idea where those notes went or how useful they still are.)

I've often admired friends and co-workers who keep copious, well-organized notes. Unsurprisingly, this made them extremely knowledgeable and also made them grow tremendously. I would like to apply these same aspects to myself.

I started using Tangent Notes, mainly for a way to organize my world-building for my book series I mentioned above. However, I soon found it very helpful for organizing all of my notes. I transitioned over to Obsidian, mainly due to Obsidian Sync, and I now have separate "vaults" for novel-writing, hobbies, work, and even blog posts.

Speaking of these blog posts. I think it's time that I transition away from Blogger/Blogspot. It's served we well over the past 16 years, but I now want something I have more direct control over. Ideally, I can write all of my posts in Markdown in Obsidian and export those as HTML to be hosted on GitHub (or my own server). I've already begun some work in this regard, but it's not ready for a full transition yet.

Closing

2023 was a big year for me with some big accomplishments and changes. I consider myself to be very lucky with my life and career and I hope that continues though 2024 and into the future.

Until next time...

Announcing Pipeline!

In my last post, I mentioned that I was working on something big in my free-time and that more information would be coming around GDC.

Well, GDC begins tomorrow, so it's time for me to announce Pipeline.

Pipeline is a data-driven, interactive, runtime editor of the entire DirectX 12 pipeline. It merges together my love of low-level graphics rendering and tools.

It's still very early and nowhere near a full 1.0 release, but I figured it was usable enough to have folks start tinkering with it and give me feedback.

Check out sample projects here.

Read documentation here.

If you encounter any problems or want to request features, you can do that here.

I'm excited to continue to improve Pipeline by adding new features and making it a much more powerful tool for graphics developers to utilize.

A Look Back Over 2021

It's hard to believe that 2021 is already over and done with. Little did I know that when the global pandemic rolled-in in March 2020, it'd still be lingering about in December 2021.

A lot has changed for me over this past year.

Back in January, Vicarious Visions was moved under/merged with/taken over by Blizzard. Previously, they were under Activision, which itself was under the larger entity known as Activision Blizzard King. It all gets confusing. Not only did this transition mean that VV would no longer be able to work on Activision games (Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot, Call of Duty, etc), but it also meant that the entire studio (outside of a small handful of folks) would be entirely devoted to supporting Diablo.

From January to July, I was specifically working on the Tools team on Diablo IV. I won't get into the details here, but I'll just say that that position was less than ideal for me and the direction I wanted my career to take.

In July, I got married! The ceremony was on a beautiful day on top of a mountain in Vermont.

In July, I also left VV/Blizzard. I had been at VV for longer than any other place in my career, and it was hard to make the decision to leave. They allowed me to branch out, try new things, take risks, and grow my skills way more than anywhere else I ever worked. I will forever be thankful to them for that.

On my second-to-last day at VV, the news broke about the widespread gender discrimination at Blizzard, which I was saddened, but unfortunately not surprised, to hear about.

In August, I began working at Tripwire Interactive as their Lead Engine Programmer. My team helped finish up the raytracing update for Maneater that was released on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 in November. We are now hard at work on an unannounced title.

Meanwhile, I've also been working on something big in my free-time. I'm not quite ready to fully unveil it to the world, but know that it combines my love of graphics and my background in tools. I've given myself a deadline of GDC to have something shareable, so look for more information in March 2022.

Hang in there everyone! Everything can, and will, get better.

A Positive Note

2020 has been a crazy/scary/disappointing/frustrating year for many different reasons.

Thankfully, I've had at least one big great thing happen this year.

I was officially a graphics engineer on a game that some folks called "one of the best games ever made": Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2.

It's crazy to think of where I started, back with those simple XNA projects. It just goes to show you that you never know where you might end up!

Here's to the rest of 2020 and the hope that there are many more happy moments! We need them.

Another Year

I started this devblog 11 years ago (wow!) to showcase the game development tech I had been working on in my free time.

Almost three years ago I (finally) got a job in an actual AAA game dev studio. In those three years I've been busy working on several games but I've also been very active on a private, internal devblog shared by the studio.

Unfortunately, that leaves little desire to write different devblogs in my freetime.  On a positive note, I'm scratching the devblog itch with something officially supported by my employer, which is great.

So the lack of posts here shouldn't been seen as me no longer working on any game dev projects.  In fact, quite the opposite is true.

I'm not going to commit to posting here more, because that frankly seems untenable. I hope to keep up the minimum of one per year, which I barely hit this year.

Onward to 2020!

NuGet For Unity Released!

In my free-time for the past several years, I've been working on building a NuGet client from scratch that runs entirely within the Unity Editor.

I have finally launched NuGet For Unity onto the Unity Asset Store.  It is completely free and open-source, so have at it!

Asset Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/nuget-for-unity-104640
Source Code: https://github.com/GlitchEnzo/NuGetForUnity

Making Blender Like Unity

I'm not an artist let alone a 3D modeler.  Whenever I open a 3D modelling app, I quickly become frustrated due to cumbersome user interfaces that are different than everything else I'm used to. Game editors and videos games don't have user interfaces even remotely similar to 3D modelling apps.

Several years ago, I was able to tweak Blender to behave somewhat like Unity. However I soon after lost that computer as well as the configuration. I kept meaning to configure it again, but I never remembered what I had done.

Today, I finally installed the latest Blender (2.78c) and decided to get it configured correctly again. Here is what I did.

1) Open the User Preferences 

In the Info window (the default menu bar on the top), select File → User Preferences

In the User Preferences window click the Input tab

2) Make the Left Mouse Button the selection button

Blender is very strange in that it defaults to use the right mouse button for selection.  Let's change that to the standard left mouse button. In the left column, set the left mouse button.

3) Ensure View Navigation is set to Walk

Blender allows for two navigation modes: Walk and Fly. Fly might sound like what we want, but it behaves more like a spaceship where the rotational speed is based on the position of the mouse onscreen and you use the mouse wheel to control "throttle". Walk is actually what we want, since it behaves like standard FPS controls.  This is the default setting in Blender, but we should ensure it is set.

You should also ensure that the Gravity checkbox is unchecked (the default) to prevent falling due to gravity.

4) Create a new input configuration called Unity

We don't want to muck with any of the existing input binding configurations, so let's create our own. Click the + button next to the Blender/Max/Maya settings.

Give it the name "Unity" (or whatever you want) and click OK.

Ensure that is now your selected input configuration.

5) Disable the setting of the 3D cursor

Normally the left mouse button sets a "3D cursor" in Blender. I'm sure it's useful to many people but I find it confusing and gets in the way. Since we switched left mouse to be selection, Blender switches the right mouse button to set the 3D cursor.  We don't want this, so we disable it in the input bindings.

3D View → 3D View (Global) → Set 3D Cursor

6) Create new input binding for Right Mouse Button to enter View Navigation mode

This took a bit of sleuthing, and is one of the most important parts. Blender lets you enter View Navigation mode by hitting Shift+F.  Searching through the input bindings I found the Python command Blender binds to that key combo.

We now want to replicate that functionality for the right mouse button. In the 3D View → 3D View (Global) section, add a new input binding by clicking the + Add New button

Now, change the input to be when the right mouse button is pressed. Enter the view3d.navigate Python command to the binding. Like so:

7) Disable the Right Mouse Button from cancelling View Navigation mode

By default the View Navigation mode is cancelled by any right mouse button action. We want Blender to leave View Navigation mode when we release the right mouse button, but we want it to retain our final position and orientation. In Blender the is Confirm action, versus the Cancel action, which resets to view to whatever it was before View Navigation mode was entered.

In the 3D View → View3D Walk Modal section, disable the right mouse cancelling binding.

8) Add new Right Mouse Button confirmation

Now to make Blender save the position when releasing the mouse butotn, we have to bind it to the Confirm action. In the 3D View → View3D Walk Modal section, add a new input binding by clicking the + Add New button

Then, set the right mouse release to be confirm, like so:

That's it!  You should now be able to use the right mouse button to fly around a Blender scene just like in the Unity editor!