Clik here to view.
A look at 2016, and onto 2017
I don’t have any technical insights to share right now, so you’ll have to bear with me blabbering about random stuff!Unity WorkBy now it’s been 11 years at Unity (see 10 Years at Unity a year ago), and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chrome Tracing as Profiler Frontend
Did you know that Google Chrome has a built-in profiler? Some people assume it’s only for profiling “web stuff” like JavaScript execution. But it can also be used as a really nice frontend for your own...
View ArticleClik here to view.
UI is hard, and other Typical Work Stories
Recently I’ve seen a mention that game engine programming is considered a mysterious, elite, and highly demanding type of work. So let me write up what often actually happens in day to day work. Also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Every Possible Scalability Limit Will Be Reached
I wrote this the other day, and @McCloudStrife suggested I should call it “Aras’s law”. Ok! here it is:Every possible scalability limit will be reached eventually.Here’s a concrete example that I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Font Rendering is Getting Interesting
Caveat: I know nothing about font rendering! But looking at the internets, it feels like things are getting interesting. I had exactly the same outsider impression watching some discussions unfold...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stopping graphics, going to build engineering
I’m doing a sideways career move. Which is: stopping whatever graphics related programming I was doing, and start working on internal build engineering. Been somewhat removing myself from many graphics...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Developer Tooling, a week in
So I switched job role from graphics todeveloper tooling / build engineering about 10 days ago. You won’t believe what happened next! Click to find out!Quitting GraphicsI wrote about the change right...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A case of slow Visual Studio project open times
I was working on some new code to generate Visual Studio solution/project files, and that means regenerating the files and checking them in VS a lot of times. And each time, it felt like VS takes ages...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How does Visual Studio pick default config/platform?
Everyone using Visual Studio is probably familiar with these dropdowns, that contain build configurations (Debug/Release is typical) and platforms (Win32/x64 is typical):When opening a fresh new...
View ArticleClik here to view.
User's POV and Empathy
Recently someone at work said “hey Aras, you write great feature overview docs, what are the tips & tricks to do them” and that got me thinking… The only obvious one I have is:Imagine what a user...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Solar Roof
I had some solar panels installed on my roof, so here’s a post with graphs & numbers & stuff!TL;DR: should more or less cover my electricity usage; easy setup; more involved paperwork; cost...
View ArticleClik here to view.
South Korea Vacation Report 2017
This June we’ve spent two weeks traveling in South Korea, so here’s a writeup and a bunch of photos.Caveats: my first trip there, and very likely I mis-planned something or missed some obvious “oh my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unreasonable Effectiveness of Profilers
A couple months ago I added profiling output to our build system (a fork of JamPlus). It’s a simple Chrome Tracing view, and adding support for that to Jam was fairly easy. Jam being written in C, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cross Platform Shaders in 2012
Update: Cross Platform Shaders in 2014. Since about 2002 to 2009 the de facto shader language for games was HLSL. Everyone on PCs was targeting Windows through Direct3D, Xbox 360 uses HLSL as well, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Non Power of Two Textures
Support for non power of two (“NPOT”, i.e. arbitrary sized) textures has been in GPUs for quite a while, but the state of support can be confusing. Recent question from @rygorous: Lazyweb, <…> GL...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Adventures in 3D Printing
I shamelessly stole whole idea from Robert Cupisz and did some 3D printed earrings. TL;DR: raymarching, marching cubes, MeshLab. Now for the longer version… Step 1: pick a Quaternion Julia fractal As...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Parallel for" in Apple's GCD
I was checking out OpenSubdiv and noticed that on a Mac it’s not exactly “massively parallel”. Neither of OpenGL backends work (transform feedback one requires GL 4.2, and compute shader one requires...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mobile Hardware Stats (and more)
Short summary: Unity’s hardware stats page now has a “mobile” section. Which is exactly what it says, hardware statistics of people playing Unity games on iOS & Android. Go to stats.unity3d.com and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reviewing ALL THE CODE
I like to review ALL THE THINGS that are happening in our codebase. Currently we have about 70 programmers, mostly comitting to a single Mercurial repository (into a ton of different branches),...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Iceland Vacation Report
tl;dr: Just spent a week in Iceland and it was awesome! Some folks have asked for impressions of my Iceland vacation or some advice, so here it goes. Caveats: my first (and only so far) trip there, we...
View Article