Rich Geldreich

It didn't work. See Rich Geldreich's blog, http://richg42.blogspot.com/. People still try and optimize for looking good vs their coworkers on other teams vs simply doing the best work possible. Examples, http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms… http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/microsofts-digs.html

Also, while AMD's OpenCL implementation has more features on paper, the runtime is frequently broken where NVIDIA's claimed features actually all work. Everything I've heard from people who've used it is that they ended up with so much vendor-specific code to patch around AMD's bugs and deficiencies that they might as well have just written CUDA in the first place. This is an old article but the old "vendor B" stuff still rings incredibly true with at least AMD's OpenCL stack as well. https://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-qualit… Thus NVIDIA actually has even less of a lock-in than people think. If you want to write a better OneAPI ecosystem and run it on OpenCL runtime... go hog wild! NVIDIA is best at that too! You just don't get the benefit of NVIDIA's engineers writing libraries for you, all that obviously takes place in CUDA.

miniz is already on GitHub: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-great-github-migration.html

http://richg42.blogspot.ca/ Disclosure: I'm probably the only person to release a game that uses LZHAM other than Rich… I chose it because because I needed an LZMA-like compression ratio with a faster decompressor. Performed up to expectations.

I researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message). Some interesting bits I found: - The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees or so). - In spite of the seemingly ideal flat organization, many people find themselves unhappy there. One former employee hints at some reasons here: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms… From other employees, I have heard that the flat organization and bonus structure leads to unnecessary drama/rivalry, poor communication (or even fear of communication), lack of innovation (creating your own project is discouraged, and teams have financial incentive to stick with projects that pay the highest bonus), etc. This is not to say Valve is a "bad" place to work at, I am sure it beats the hell out of many other job environments, even ignoring the excellent pay. - If you do want to work there, you will probably have had to shipped multiple titles AND be recommended by an existing team member (alternately, writing a popular mod is equally lucrative). Typically, applying through their website will not get you a job - they usually hire by actively looking through a pool of candidates that they already know of. They also look for…

In this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911369 someone quoted this page http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html as saying it compiles to about 150k. I can't find the current listing, but I'm on mobile :/ Btw: the author's blog talks about LZHAM quite a bit http://richg42.blogspot.com/ edit: Looks like it's up to 190k Compression Compressed size Decompresser Total size Time (ns/byte) Program Options enwik8 enwik9 size (zip) enwik9+prog Comp Decomp Mem Alg Note ------- ------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----- ----- --- --- ---- lzham 1.0 -d29 -x 25,002,070 202,237,199 191,600 s 202,428,799 1096 6.6 7800 LZ77 70 xz 5.2.1--lzma2=preset=9e,dict=1GiB,lc=4,pb=0 24,703,772 197,331,816 36,752 xd 197,368,568 5876 20 6000 LZ77 73 gzip 1.3.5 -9 36,445,248 322,591,995 38,801 x 322,630,796 101 17 1.6 LZ77

The initial link in this piece, Compression is Compilation, was really helpful to read before reading this piece: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/10/compression-is-compilation.html. I think I got more out of it than this piece.

The rest of the story: the rights holder granted the open source community "immunity" from the patent. https://richg42.blogspot.com/2012/07/doug-has-updated-his-blog-hes-now… "Immunity," but not a license. Whatever that is good for.

Somewhat related, one of the developers discussed some of the issues he faced when working with the re-mastered "Age of Empires: Definitive Edition". https://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-develo…

What was this write up? This one? http://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-develop…

I found the answer here: http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.… Nvidia is strong-arming developers not to support Mesa because they are afraid of open drivers. Nvidia is afraid of Mesa.

This is a bit outdated http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.… overview of driver status by a game developer, vendor A is NVIDIA and as the article points out they are the only one with a performant relatively bug free implementation. Also notice how he mocks Intel for having two driver teams: That Linux expects to get special treatment by integrating the driver into their Graphics abstractions leads demonstrably to worse performance and less features than if you bypass all those abstractions and use essentially the same driver for all kernels.

Also this, from the guy who ported Valves Source engine to OpenGL: http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quali… The vendors are Nvidia, AMD, Intel/Linux and Intel/Windows respectively. Yes, Intel maintains two completely separate OpenGL implementations.

Interesting preface to this, http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/zlib-in-serious-danger-of-becomi… However, the compression is nothing compared to Pied Piper's algorithm.

It's not that you couldn't write a triple A game with a managed language. It's that you can _quite easily_ write a triple A game without using a managed language. For games, managing memory is not a big problem. For other kinds of apps, it can be. In some apps the lifetime of an object is not well defined. But in games, it tends to be very well defined. If you want a good explanation of the problems game developers face when trying to use GC, go read Rich Geldreich's post on it (http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/lessons-learned-while-fixing-memor…

Minor nitpick: using LZMA to compress large text files like this before distribution is normally better; here 7z is LZMA, zip is DEFLATE: 739M 2013_data 37M 2013_data.7z 78M 2013_data.zip Using [1] for reference, if the download speed is less than ~20MB/s, LZMA is faster than DEFLATE. Though, the data there is a bit less compressible than these csv files, so the break-even point for transfer rate would be higher here; even so, in my case, the download speed was much slower than 20MB/s. 1. http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/parallelized-downloaddecomp-with.h…

The ones that have to program for them beg to differ: http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.…

Rich Geldreich, the guy from Valve working on their Linux OpenGL debugger uses Qt Creator and looks really satisfied: I've been using QtCreator full-time now for 6 months and I think it's awesome. I would buy it in a heartbeat, but it's a free download and it's even open source. A bit of the background behind my need for a VS alternative: For more than a decade I've been using Visual Studio (since VC5 I think), and various other IDE's from Borland/Watcom/MS before that. [...] http://richg42.blogspot.fr/2013/10/a-shout-out-to-qtcreator-28x-on.htm… Considering how VS is for games developers the gold standard by which all C++ IDEs are measured, this speaks a lot.

I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though. My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K (which eventually got upgraded to 32, then 64K), and then still later a Color Computer 3. An NES was in there somewhere, and I played on friend's Sega Genesis systems and C=64 computers (plus Apple IIe, PCjr, and others). Pixel art (back then, they were just "sprites" or "tiles" to us - I'm not sure if the term "pixel art" was a thing then - I never heard it, but it doesn't mean it wasn't) wasn't fuzzy or soft, unless things weren't adjusted right. The only other time it might be a little funky was if the machine in question was trying to use artifacting in some manner: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-overlooked-artifact-co… As you can see - artifacting could introduce a certain level of "fuzziness" to graphics; but scroll to the bottom of that page, to see what the CoCo 2 could do in the hands of someone competent with the effect. The CoCo 2 got 4 colors on an effectively black/white screen mode by interleaving black and white values - spaced close together on the screen, the NTSC system…

Nvidia's proprietary driver breaks upon every new kernel release, which is why they have a shim. Furthermore, Nvidia can't ship their driver in the official Linux kernel due to copyright issues, and they're forced to handle all the maintenance burden of their driver (whereas AMD reaps the benefits of Intel's GPU driver bugfixing, and vice versa, thus lowering both Intel's and AMD's driver costs on Linux). Besides, Nvidia's been having trouble with their Tegra GPUs on Android, and as a result have been forced to pitch in a bit on Nouveau (the reverse-engineered open-source Nvidia driver). They're still having trouble with their driver situation on mobile, as a result of their unwillingness to play ball with the kernel. Actually, that last sentence above - I'm really not too confident on that, I've heard various hearsay but the only source I concretely remember is the "other drivers" section of http://richg42.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-qual…

Some of this is because I'm wrapping it inside a ghetto CSS 3D presentation framework I've been reusing for almost 2 years, built when this stuff was buggy as hell. Mea culpa. But compared to any game running on the same underlying hardware... Remember all the aimbots, wallhacks and more that people have been hacking in for years? How many crashes you've experienced? "Please install the latest driver". "You must restart the game to apply this setting". How about the fact that every game pretty much freezes the UI while it's first loading? You don't want web sites to work like that. WebGL has fundamentally different priorities, but they're not all bad. GPU drivers have favored performance over stability for years. Modern games are a giant pile of hacks, but devs can afford the massive QA operation required to hide this fact. Heck, Nvidia turned game engine hacking into a feature, allowing you to add modern effects into old engines through their drivers. See for example if you can figure out which vendor is which in this Valve developer's tell-all: http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quali…