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Ben Golus⚠️⭕
@bgolus
Tech Artist, Graphics Programmer, general Game Dev, racing snail. (cis he\him) mastodon.gamedev.place/@bgolus ko-fi.com/bgolus
Kirkland, WAmedium.com/@bgolusJoined August 2010

Ben Golus⚠️⭕’s posts

I was talking to my Dad about flight delays and staffing issues, and my dad pointed out a problem I'd missed entirely. There are no new pilots.
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Basically, airlines are fucked in the next decade, because there won't be enough pilots left in the world unless they bite the bullet and start paying to train new pilots themselves. Something they absolutely don't want to do because it's expensive!
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When the pandemic hit, passenger airlines in the US laid off all their pilots. If those pilots were within 5, maybe 10 years of retiring, they mostly decided to retire early. Fast forward to now and the airlines are trying to hire back all those pilots, who are responding 🖕
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The other way is via the military. The vast majority of airline pilots in the US are ex navy or air force. But there's the big problem. The military isn't training many aircraft pilots anymore, they're training drone pilots.
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And thus, the pool of new pilots has disappeared. This happened a while ago, but it hadn't yet become a big problem for airlines because their (aging) pilot workforces were flying for longer. But they just laid off all those older pilots, and they aren't coming back.
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So they're trying to hire new pilots instead. But there's a problem with that. There's no such thing as "new pilots" that you can just hire.
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Drone pilots never leave the ground, and as such any "flight time" they might have doesn't count towards that 1500 hour requirement. Just like simulator training doesn't count.
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An interesting Game Dev Fact for tech artists out there. Infamous: Second Son is perhaps best remembered for its incredible and varied particle effects. It only had one particle shader, with no variants. All transparent particles were rendered in a single draw.
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Some people say Phillips is good enough, others exclaim the virtues of Torx, and others argue Robinson is vastly superior to all others. Me personally? I like the friction ball drive type. Guaranteed to never strip!
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One of the hardest things to do in modern game dev is make players notice things they’re supposed to notice. In the past we often had the “problem” that dynamic objects rendered differently than static ones. Which was the case for RE4. That got “fixed” in the new version.
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So with GPUs now able to read directly from the SSD, and allowing shaders to spawn shaders, what's the ETA on games being 100% run on the GPU and the CPU only existing to ferry user input and networking data around?
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As a graphics programmer, I cannot understate how important this title was for the games industry as a whole. It's a travesty we'll likely never get an official PC release of this game. Especially since my understanding is it already ran on PCs for dev.
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Remember The Order: 1886? It's a visually stunning vintage 2015 PS4 game that still looks great today. @dark1x revisits Ready at Dawn's work, plus we've got footage of the game running at 60fps on PlayStation 5: youtu.be/QJm0wreAOK0
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A quick explanation for why this happened, from a technical side. With 2D animation, the artist has complete control over every frame. Limitations are resolution, frame count, and color palette. But late era 2D games like KoF XIII those were mostly gone.
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Been thinking a lot lately on how when we moved from 2D to 3D we lost high-frequency motion WITHIN silhouettes due to skinned meshes. Hope to see this rectified via cloth/muscles this generation rather than just on secondary like cloaks etc. Image source: youtube.com/watch?v=Wz2VAI
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The common wisdom of "don't use conditionals in shaders" is one of my biggest frustrations with how shaders are taught. step(y, x) _is_ a conditional! It compiles to identical code as: float val = (x >= y ? 1.0 : 0.0) or float val = 0.0; if (x >= y) val = 1.0;
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SHADER BASICS 4 STEP AND SMOOTHSTEP As I mentioned, having conditionals in shader is usually frowned upon, so "step" and "smoothstep" come in to save the day by giving you a whole lot of flexibility in that regard! twitter.com/HarryAlisavaki #shaders #shaderbasics
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Fun fact, the infamous Sony Playstation 2 Development Tool, which while much larger shared a lot of design elements with the consumer Playstation 2, are both based off of their now demolished Sony Playstation Tool building in the Ginza district of Tokyo, Japan.
The Sony Playstation Tool Building.
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Hi-Fi Rush is an excellent example of how strong art direction can beat rendering technic novelty. There’s nothing being done in Hi-Fi Rush that couldn’t have been done one, or even two console generations ago. Apart from the high triangle counts on characters at least.
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Comments about the GTA6 leaks are painful to read… … because gamers just have no idea how game dev works. Games look like shit before they’re shown off to the public. Sometimes when they’re shown off, the parts that are shown off are literally the only parts that look good.
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First person guns is one of those things where there is no perfect solution. All "solutions" are really different hacks with different pros and cons. I feel like this would be a great topic to do a long form article on to discuss the problem, and the different work arounds.
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Creating an FPS? It's a good idea to render the weapon on a secondary camera, that way you can lower the FOV and it'll never clip through walls! Need weapons? I got pretty cool stylized blasters here: kenney.nl/assets/blaster (public domain, free to use) #unitytips @KenneyNL
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I'm sure they're a factor, but it's a smaller factor than everything else in this case. The lack of new pilots issue is one that's been going on since well before COVID.
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The answer to solving the problem of sexual orientation is too use sexual quaternions. Unfortunately no one understands them.
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One thing that bugs me about 99% of the post process outline shader examples out there, including several paid ones, is almost no one takes into account the current pixel normal when checking the depth. This is a big differentiator between hobby outlines and AAA outlines.
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A very useful and cheap technique for getting fake lighting on 3D meshes is the good old Matcap technique. The basic implementation is to take the view space normals and use the x and y values remapped from -1 .. +1 to 0 .. 1.0. But they have a problem with perspective cameras.
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Since a number of people have asked "why is this game important?" I thought I'd post a short explanation. First I'll say the video does a pretty good job of saying why, but I'll add some more context.
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As a graphics programmer, I cannot understate how important this title was for the games industry as a whole. It's a travesty we'll likely never get an official PC release of this game. Especially since my understanding is it already ran on PCs for dev. twitter.com/digitalfoundry…
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Have you never heard of this type of screw before? You'll find them in any workshop. For some reason people usually store them on the ground next to trash cans.
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It relied entirely on dynamic branches in a giant über particle material. Why would they do this? For sorting. They used compute shaders to generate and update the particle position and display data in one giant list, and then they just had to sort that one list.
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To be clear. I don’t mean one draw per emitter, or type of particle. I mean _all_ particles. If you’re someone who’s used to using Unity or Unreal, every single particle used one shared material. All the different textures, all the different rendering modes, all one shader.
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Some argue it's hard to get a lot of torque on this type, but that's the beauty of it! It's impossible to over tighten!
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At some point, I need to do a write up of how I handle volumetric particle fx. This is using a simple Niagara particle system and a fairly inexpensive material that significantly improves interactions between particles and objects in the world.
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I do hope someday Epic becomes profitable enough to hire a few more people to help out. I know they’re quite understaffed.
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Not to mention there just weren’t that many objects around except those that could be destroyed. So everyone complaining that “the original RE4 didn’t need this” is misremembering that it didn’t need it because those objects where super obvious in other ways.
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Normal people discovering the horrors of NaN propagation.
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In Super Mario Odyssey, if the Snapshot Mode is activated on the same frame the B button is released while capturing an Uproot, the Uproot will become visually glitched. Over time, it will create areas of corrupted black pixelated space within itself.
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It’s a big problem for modern games. We keep pushing the amount of detail in games, and it’s making them harder to play games because of it. So nearly every modern game has glows, or a special view mode, etc. that effectively simplifies the world to highlight the important items.
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I want to comment on this, because it’s very misleading. And I’m not even going to go into the main article. There are three tools presented to “help reduce vram”. Let’s go over them real quick.
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Free dev tools by NVIDIA to help game devs reduce VRAM usage in their games: nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/
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Realtime GI is one of those weird things that I feel like we game devs are super excited about, and most gamers absolutely DGAF about. We've been faking / baking it for so long it means the average gamer probably doesn't see the difference compared to the last 20 years of games.
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As someone who worked on Beast Rider, it should have been rated N for Nobody.
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Would you like to know more about the history of this classic Penny Arcade strip? @cwgabriel and @TychoBrahe have you covered in the latest episode of Penny For Your Thoughts, available exclusively on #ClubPA! patreon.com/posts/penny-fo
Tycho talks to Gabe. Gabe is holding a can of soda.
Tycho: Picked up Beast Rider. I'm surprised it's only M! It seems like it would have been AO. 
Gabe: Why would it be AO?
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Yesterday I tweeted about a technique I like to use, flipbooks on trails. Here's an example of what that looks like.
Smoke trail flipbook animation.
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So the original version of RE4, any object that could be destroyed would be much brighter than objects that couldn’t be, likely because they used the dynamic lighting system instead of the baked lighting.
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And again, that was for a tiny fraction of the users. Adding Linux support ended up likely costing Uber hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hundred dollars in sales revenue.
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And you genuinely need _something_ for most types of games and most players. And personally I’d rather have a bit of yellow paint than a big glowing outline for something like a Resident Evil game.
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Or, like RE4, there’s some conspicuous splashes of in-world paint on things. It feels like no matter what you do players complain. I don’t think players are necessarily wrong, I just don’t there’s a right answer that works for everyone or every game.
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"Chat AI perfectly mimics a white guy mansplaining with complete confidence on a topic he knows nothing about."
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That "how Anthem went wrong" article makes me sad. Not so much because of all of the unfortunate things that happened on that project, but because non-game devs don't realize these things happen on _every_ big project. I'm sad because those problems aren't at all remarkable.
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We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support.
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I've heard it's good practice to add comment blocks to your Unreal materials to make it easier to work on in the future. So I've started commenting them like I comment my HLSL shader code.
Spaghetti nodes with one big comment saying "Good Luck Future Self".
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It’s kind of frustrating how hard it can be to write an article about shader / GPU stuff in a way that’s accessible to people who don’t already know what’s being written about, accurate enough for those who do, and concise enough to not make both of those groups bail early.
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Instead of using TAA for everything, GPU hardware makers should just make their GPUs 16 times more powerful. There, problem solved! Was that so hard?
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Game dev is way more explorative. We’re usually literally just making random shit up and seeing if it works, and then trying to put them together with other stuff and hoping it still works. And then the poor story writers have to try and make it seem logical.
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How to become a Unreal graphics programmer in two steps. Step 1: Wait an hour for the engine changes to finish compiling. Step 2: Wait an hour for all of the shaders in the game to finish compiling.
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A lesson every good tech artist / vfx artist should learn early ... vertex positions, UVs, normals, vertex colors ... they're all just arbitrary data. Use them however you want if them being something else is useful.
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#UnrealEngine #UE4 #UE5 #UETips Here's one WPO trick I used to create this night sky. The challenge was to create subtle per-star lens flares that would always face the camera and remain straight, exactly like billboards. 🧵⬇️
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There’s no point in putting in the visual polish on stuff that’s work in progress or testing out ideas. The level of pop visual polish that already exists for the GTA6 leaks is astounding, even with crash test dummy looking characters.
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By the end of my time at Uber I believe very nearly 100% of both crashes and support tickets actually for the game were still Linux related, even after significantly engineering time. Way more Linux specific time put into that project than any other platform.
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This also wasn't a condemnation of Linux itself, or its community, or really even in the volume of (generally very helpful!) support tickets. It's about the financial realities of supporting a platform with few users and high fragmentation.
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Also for giant projects that take several years to complete, characters might get remade several times. And I don’t mean minor updates to the artwork, I mean completely deleting the content pipeline and tools and starting over as new technologies or hardware becomes available.
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So for Unity we have the HDRP, and URP. And I'd like to recommend we call the old rendering path the DERP (Default Engine Render Pipeline)
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Hilarious fact, every few months Twitch contacts LTT about the fact they live stream content to YouTube and Twitch simultaneously and warn them that it's not allowed. And LTT responds back by replying with the contract Twitch signed that lets LTT ignore those rules in perpetuity
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Twitch has moved their simulcasting rules to the Terms of Service, which I believe means it now applies to ALL users, not just Affiliates and Partners. Those that revoked their Aff/Partner to stream to Twitch and YouTube at the same time are no longer allowed.
When you are streaming live on the Twitch Services you may not simultaneously live stream or broadcast (“Simulcast”) on any other “Twitch-like Service,” meaning any web-based network, platform, or service that supports live streaming of user generated content, without advance written permission from Twitch. For clarity, you may Simulcast on mobile-first services that support live streaming. This Section does not apply to non-profit or government entities that are live streaming for non-commercial purposes.
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I love slice / cutaway shaders. They're fairly simple to implement, but also very satisfying to look at. The short version of the basic implementation is clip based on height or simple plane, and draw the back faces unlit. Done!
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I don't know how many people are interested in this, but I wrote a blog of: 3D printer-like vfx ~How to fill the mesh cavity?~ heyyocg.link/en/3d-print-fi actual working data is here: heyyohanashima.gumroad.com/l/nlujvf
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Graphics drivers are a shit show on Linux. Maybe it's better now, but back then every driver had a new crash on otherwise totally banal code. But sure, you're welcome to blame the programmers.
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There’s always this weird sense from people outside the games industry that we game devs know exactly what we’re making from day one. That once we start work in a game, we’re just making final content for everything that immediately becomes the finished game.
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