Hauke Thiessen

Pixels don't have to be square. For anisotropic textures, it can make sense to use different resolutions for the x-axis and the y-axis.
With the next update, the Mip explorer will display the information density per axis, allowing to scale down textures along the axis with less information.
#gamedev

Helldivers 2 just shaved 131 GB off its install size in a beta you can join And now I need to know how many of the other storage-hogs on my hard drive could do this.

It's great for players as well, but I can't stop thinking about how much easier this change makes things for developers.
I don't know Arrowhead's internal pipeline, but copying 154GB from the server every time you want to test the build has to be excruciating😬.
www.pcgamer.com/games/action...

That's an important point, there are many players out there who aren't interested in technical details and don't even know that VSync exists. And even I wonder why it should be my responsibility as a player to enable it to prevent my GPU from catching fire.

Kinda funny to see Tim Sweeney claiming that AI is going to be part of 'nearly all' future games, while at the same time, AI-generated code is bad enough for Epic Games to have a strict No-AI stance when it comes to Unreal pull requests.
www.gamesindustry.biz/epics-sweene...

Good news! Epic submitted a fix for this issue!
The even better news is that they didn't just merge my proposed fix but wrote a better one, which can even handle arbitrary tooltip types, not just text-only ones.
Much better outcome than I could have hoped for 🥳

Graphics Programming Conference The Graphics Programming Conference is a conference for graphics programmers, from student to industry veteran, taking place in November in Europe.

Very excited to be at the Graphics Programming Conference in Breda next week! www.graphicsprogrammingconference.nl
Anyone else there? If yes, I'd happy to meet up!

Waiting for the inevitable Microsoft ad campaign announcing that the upcoming Steam Machines are, in fact, also Xboxes.

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

The Mip Explorer now also works on Linux🐧🥳
There was never a good reason for it to be Windows-exclusive to begin with, and today I finally had some time to fix this.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, but it should work with basically every distribution out there.
github.com/HaukeThiesse...
#gamedev

Steam Deck - Display-Off Downloads - Steam News Steam Deck now has a display-off low-power download mode

With many games nowadays reaching sizes of 100GB or more, this is really a critical update. Not sure why it took so long, but I'm just happy that it's finally there!
store.steampowered.com/news/app/167...

Most people don't know this, but before he founded a city in the Forgotten Realms, Baldur had a successful restaurant in Germany.

cpp2better, an il2cpp postprocessor | Sebastian Schöner It’s been a while since I last talked about cpp2better. Time for an official “here it is” post. What is cpp2better? cpp2better is a tool that hooks into your build pipeline for Unity to achieve better...

Do you want to improve the performance of your il2cpp Unity projects, without changing your code or your assets? My il2cpp build processor cpp2better is now officially available (on request). Reach out to me, details here: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-11-04-c...

New blog post: haukethiessen.com/why-you-shou...
It's about best practices when adjusting material parameters for individual mesh components in Unreal. The information itself isn't new, but most tutorials covering this present the most inefficient way to do this.
#gamedev #Unreal

Finally updated my blog's robots.txt, it's now blocking 119(!) AI crawlers.
For anyone interested, I'm using wordpress.org/plugins/bloc... with automatic updates enabled. Additionally, I used github.com/ai-robots-tx... to add missing entries.

🚨Matt Waltz, Ambassador to the UN, is called OUT during a General Assembly by Cuba’s Foreign Minister! 🚨 Sound ⬆️. 1/2

Not commenting is commenting.

aftermath.site/microsoft-halo...

Got reminded how important it is to visualize the data you're working with🙈.
The normal map normalization in the Mip Explorer was incorrect, causing deviations of ~10 percent.
Only when I added the option to display the generated mips, I noticed the colors were off and had a reason to investigate...

If you regularly use the PC Gaming Wiki, for example as reliable source to get older games working on modern systems... consider backing up the pages you are interested in ⚠️
According to staff members on their discord, none of the active staff members have full access to the backend anymore.
(1/?)

Wouldn't that be a bit bland to them? Visiting a park about everyday stuff?
And what are the miniatures built from? Does an appropriately scaled down version of Lego exist in the Lego world?

Even though it was released 25 years ago, I still wonder about about the lore of the Legoland game. It's about building Lego theme parks, but set in the world of Lego. So I'm watching Lego minifigures visit a park about Lego.

The first step to any impressive optimization work is to really mess up the original implementation.

Originally, my Mip Explorer created the thumbnails for the file browser at the resolution of the original images, creating copies of all textures in all directories visited in the current session😬.

Scientists create ‘Superwood’ that’s stronger than steel | CNN A US company has engineered a new type of wood that it says has up to 10 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, while also being up to six times lighter.

This is cool. How to make wood stronger than steel, but use 90% less emissions. This should be front page news. This is nobel prize worthy skillz.
edition.cnn.com/science/supe...

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: