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...
