What grinds my gears

Currently there are two options to play video games: Use vsync, which causes frame rate stuttering if the game renders more slowly than the monitor's refresh rate, or not use vsync, which causes image tearing (unless the game can render at exactly the same framerate as the monitor's refresh rate; which is practically impossible without vsync.) Frame stuttering happens when the game is constantly jumping between eg. 60Hz and 30Hz frame rate, due to the game actually rendering at something in-between those two, and syncing with the monitor's 60Hz refresh rate. Same thing happens, but even worse, if the rendering speed drops below 30Hz. On the other hand, frame tearing causes annoying horizontal artifacts when the image updates while the screen is refreshing. The position of the tear tends to jump randomly on the screen on each refresh, worsening the effect. (And if the game is actually rendering faster than the monitor's refresh rate, you'll get multiple tears on ...

Nowadays video sharing sites such as YouTube and twitch.tv have become so big that many people can actually make a living off of the ad revenue of their videos. This is a rather new form of entrepreneurship that was basically impossible in the past. (The closest thing decades ago was to have such a great idea and be so talented and extremely lucky, that you got your own TV show at some TV broadcasting company, but this was exceedingly rare.) Oftentimes these people will sell merchandise in their videos (eg. books or other stuff), or simply outright ask for support (eg. through Patreon), in order to be able to keep doing the videos. Almost invariably you will see a ton of "get a real job" comments. This is amazingly annoying to me. (No, I'm not a video producer and this hasn't happened to me. The sheer stupidity of those comments is what annoys me.) What exactly is this mythical "real job" that these people are talking about? How is an online content p...

One of the biggest problems in creating a modern computer game is writing the game engine. You may have the best ideas in the world, and the talent to implement them, but if you don't have a game engine you don't have anything. For this reason many companies have developed game engines that they are licensing to developers to ease the menial low-level tasks, allowing them to concentrate on what actually matters, ie. the content. Examples of such game engines include the Unreal Engine , id Tech , CryEngine and Unity . Especially Unity, with its accompanying IDE, has been designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible to create 3D (and nowadays also 2D) games. There are wonderful demonstration videos out there where a developer creates a small but decent first-person shooter from scratch (although using some ready-made geometry assets) in something like 5 or 10 minutes. While this is great, there is, however, a dark side to all this. In a somewhat ironic way, thi...

I have complained about this in a past blog post , but man... Firefox 30.0 just came out and... well, nothing really. The version number has become completely meaningless with this software. Not only does it not tell if this is a major, a minor or a bugfix release, this time the "what's new" page that it loads the first time doesn't even tell what's actually new (at least not clearly.) This has reached a point where even they themselves don't care much about what has really changed. Or at least they don't care much about telling you. This is completely ridiculous. It really doesn't make any difference at all whether this is Firefox 30 or Firefox 154. The number means absolutely nothing. This is rather unique among popular software that has version numbering (or an equivalent naming scheme). For example with most programming language compilers the version number is quite a big deal (especially if it's a major version increment.) The same is...

I was watching a Moon hoax conspiracy theory video on YouTube, just for amusement, and because I hadn't watched any in a long time (I have watched quite a lot of them in the past, as well as related websites), and one of the comments to the video made me realize something. The comment was something along the lines of "my childhood is destroyed". My realization was: This is one of the reasons why conspiracy theorists are assholes. The space program is one of the great achievements of humanity, a marvelous show of technology, progress and human courage, of people willing to go beyond, to surpass all previous limits. The Moon landings are among the greatest achievements of our entire history, and something that we can marvel and admire. Then the conspiracy theorists come, confuse you and fill your head with all kinds of lies, misleading you into believing falsities. They use all the dirty tactics in the book to mislead you, and are preying on your gullibility and lack of...

(This is not something that annoys me, but this is my main blog, so... Since I keep doing this, I think I'll have to rename this blog some day.) I find the computer game Jurassic Park: Trespasser a very interesting case because of its history. The development of this game started approximately in 1995. This game was intended (and in a few ways resulted to be) way ahead of its time, with innovations and game mechanics that people only could have dreamed of previously. At that time 3D games were in their infancy. Doom -like games were the trend ( Quake hadn't yet been published), and perhaps the most advanced 3D game of the time was Descent , which was extremely innovative (and in itself ahead of its time), as it was one of the first games that allowed complete freedom of movement and orientation (and had other quite advanced features considering the era it was published, such as surprisingly good enemy AI). However, Descent limited the gameplay into extremely narrow co...

Dialog trees are a staple of many adventure games (especially point&click games) and role-playing games, and sometimes they appear in other genres as well. Most typically a dialog tree is used when the player talks to a non-playable character in the game: Typically a list of sentences will be shown for the player to choose, and the NPC will then respond to it. Especially if there may then be further options based on what you chose (and sometimes based on what the NPC responded), it makes it an actual "tree" (because the conversation path can branch to different directions depending on which option you chose.) I don't know if and what these may be named, but I would divide such dialog trees broadly into three categories: Trivial exclusive trees, subtler exclusive trees, and fully inclusive trees. An "exclusive" dialog tree is one where you have to make a choice and it will be "locked in". You can't go back and change it. The other branches...