Hauke Thiessen

Planet’s first catastrophic climate tipping point reached, report says, with coral reefs facing ‘widespread dieback’ Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

Stuff like this should be the top story, not today, but for weeks, until we actually start giving a fuck. Runaway climate change will make everything happening in the current wars look like a rounding error. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

One of the biggest flaws of the Mip Explorer was the missing support for tga files, caused by Open CV not supporting that format.
Turns out, it does support it, as long as you read it as a video and extract the first frame of it as an image. Sounds weird, but, hey, as long as it works...
#gamedev

New update for the Mip Explorer:
github.com/HaukeThiesse...
There's now a dedicated mode for (tangent space) normal maps which compares normalized vector directions instead of averaged channel diffs. The results aren't that different, but it's just the proper way to deal with them.
#gamedev

Speeding up the Unreal Editor launch by … not opening 5500 files? In my last article I wrote about some tooltip optimization to reduce the start time of the Unreal Editor by 2-5 seconds. Turns out people do really care about their editor start time. So much that …

It's understandable that Unreal needs to touch a lot of files when starting the editor. But what if I told you that >5500 of those files are not needed for the editor to start at all and are just adding seconds to the editor launch time?
(Fix included!)
#u5 #gamedev
larstofus.com/2025/09/27/s...

GitHub - HaukeThiessen/Mip-Explorer: A tool to display how texture information is distributed between mips, using a Laplacian Pyramid A tool to display how texture information is distributed between mips, using a Laplacian Pyramid - HaukeThiessen/Mip-Explorer

Becoming obsessed with adding QoL features to the Mip Explorer:
- Navigate directories with the arrow keys
- Taskbar notification when directory scan ends while app is in the background
- Resizable UI
- Support for single-channel textures (ok, not just QoL)
github.com/HaukeThiesse...
#gamedev

A screenshot from Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance in 4k resolution with texturing turned off

A screenshot from Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance in 4k resolution with texturing turned off

A screenshot from Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance in 4k resolution with texturing turned off

Goddamn, Metal Gear Solid 2 with texture filtering turned off is a hell of a vibe

With the latest update for the Mip Explorer, it now also reads and compares the alpha channels if existent, and can process entire directories, returning the results in a sorted list.
The goal is to turn this from a toy into a tool for actual production.
github.com/HaukeThiesse...
#gamedev

Exactly my type of humor. The developers at Epic know better than to allow AI-generated slop in their code base, but Unreal 5.7 will ship with AI code generation tools.

The directory scan is coming along nicely. Still need to figure out some issues, but getting there:

Speeding up the Unreal Editor launch by … not spawning 38000 tooltips? If there is one thing the Unreal Engine doesn’t suffer from, it is it’s lack of features. Over the past years it has been transformed from “just” a game engine into an &#821…

There are a lot of reasons why starting the Unreal editor can be slow. In my latest blog post I fixed 38,000 of them.
#ue5
#gamedv

larstofus.com/2025/09/02/s...

Thanks you, nice to know you liked it! And yes, you're right, it works as a visualization tool right now, but to be effective in a production context, it needs to work on whole directories. I want to extend it once I have some more free time on my hands🙂

How to fix Motion Blur for RTS Games in Unreal TLDR Open Unreal's SceneView.h and change the default value of bCameraMotionBlur to false. If you're using Unreal, you're probably aware of the engine's history and how it started as an engine for...

I wrote an article about how to disable camera motion blur in Unreal, which is a good idea for city builders/RTS games, etc.

You only need to change a single line of code, so I won't hold it against you if you only read the TLDR (also just one line).
haukethiessen.com/how-to-fix-m...
#gamedev

what framerate is perceptually halfway between 30 and 120 fps?

A: 75 fps
B: 60 fps
C: 48 fps

Starting the weekend with an update for the Mip Explorer: github.com/HaukeThiesse...
- Several bug fixes (3-4, depending on how you count)
- In the Channels mode, the list now actually shows the per-channel differences
- Tooltips for the settings
#gamedev

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 405 - August 24th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

🚨 BREAKING: 44 MONTH SENTENCE FOR £150 RETOUCH OF 'SUNFLOWERS' PAINTING

During their trial, it was acknowledged that only £150 was spent retouching the frame.

But Phoebe and Anna were banned from talking about monetary value, so the jury were not informed.

novaramedia.com/2025/08/22/t...

We're getting closer and closer to 2027, and I get the feeling that Human Revolution's ceiling predictions were overly optimistic...

A warning above a wikipedia article, warning that part of the article might be written by an AI: "This article may incorporate text from a large language model. Such text potentially includes hallucinated information or fictitious references. Copyright violations or claims lacking verification must be removed. Please see the associated project page for additional guidance. (July 2025)"

Even Wikipedia isn't safe from being flooded with AI slop!
I hate this timeline😠

Introducing the MIP Explorer This blog post is the second in a series of posts based on my talk at the German Dev Days 2025, which covered various methods for reducing the size of textures in games. You can find the first one, wh...

It would be a boring weekend without a new blog post about game optimization: haukethiessen.com/introducing-...
This time, it's about the genesis of a tool that I wrote a while ago to identify overly large textures. #gamedev

Ritual of Raven is OUT NOW! 🔮✨🌱

🌿Grow a magical herb garden & automate your farming
💌Befriend a cute bunch of weirdos
💫Perform powerful rituals & find the portal keepers

10% launch discount 💸

RTs greatly appreciated! 💜
#indiedev #indiegame

I love how optimizing game performance oscillates between replacing the entire second half of the level with a screenshot and digging through compiled shader code to replace divisions with bit shifts.
Both optimizations are done at the same time and in the same project, and both have their place.

🔮 5 MORE DAYS until Ritual of Raven is out! 🔮

Prepping the tavern & tuning instruments…
█████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 29%

#indiedev #indiegame

Perfect, I just finished working on an AI version of myself that can pretend to listen to multiple podcasts simultaneously.

That's the stupidest sentence I've read in a while.

Profiling without Source code – how I diagnosed Trackmania stuttering A very common side effect of working as a programmer is the constant frustration of not having source code access to all the software you use. Bugs, problems or missing features in your own work ca…

My new blog post is there, and it's a bit different from usual: Fixing stutters in your own code is hard enough, but this time I try to fix performance issues in a closed-source game. No source code or debug symbols, but a lot of guesswork. larstofus.com/2025/07/27/p...
#gamedev
#Trackmania

UI Textures – Worth Optimizing? A few days ago, I gave a talk at the German Dev Days about reducing the size of textures in memory and on disk. Some parts of the presentation were based on my articles on Mip Flooding and Game Sizes,...

Wrote a new blog post about making UI textures use less memory: haukethiessen.com/ui-textures-...
It's an expanded version of what was originally only one section of my talk at the German Dev Days.
#gamedev #techart

This isn't immigration control, it's genocide.

Laura Loomer‘s tweet: Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.

The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us.

SetMaxTouchpadSensitivity function - Win32 apps Sets the touchpad sensitivity to max for the calling process.

TIL that Windows disables the touchpad while you're typing. Ofc, this causes issues in most games.
Thankfully, there's a way to disable that behavior:
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/window...
(If you're using Unreal, you don't need to do that yourself, because it was included in UE 5.6)
#gamedev

Found a bug in Unreal's static mesh editor: When converting box colliders to convex ones, the resulting colliders don't have the 'Collision Generated' flag and will be deleted upon the next reimport.
Here's my pull request to fix that (only one line🎉):
github.com/EpicGames/Un...
#gamedev