Scott Anderson

It’s wild that half my career has been spent on projects that never shipped. They either got canceled or the studio shuttered. I don’t mourn them with the exception of one sci-fi project that was so stunning. Years of work down the drain. I did get a couple Chris Foss sketches out of it though.

Half of the games I've worked on have been canceled, all catastrophically in the sense that funding was cut or ran out, the company was shut down, and everyone laid off. Not a big publisher killing a game in early development type canceled.

Back to the Rifter - Yaruki Zero Games | Weird Books | DriveThruRPG In 1990, Palladium Books launched Rifts, a post-apocalyptic-science-fantasy-horror-mecha-role-playing game using a game system from 1981.  In 2021, two guys who played it a bunch revisited the game an...

Leaving a link here for a book I co-wrote in which I detailed which dragons in Rifts are, rules-wise, the hottest dragons.

Also, @nekoewen.bsky.social (who deserves all the blame/credit) and I broke down Rifts' foibles. But there's also the risky romance of dating a three-headed drake...

RIFTS Ultimax

MADOX-01

One of my favorite RIFTS books is Triax and the NGR, not because it's a good book, but just because it has awesome mecha art. But, most of the mecha designs are lifted directly from anime. For example the Ultimax and MADOX-01 side by side :).

RIFTS mashed all that shit together and dialed it to 15, and introduced interesting ideas of it's own from various sci-fi and fantasy inspiration. While the system is clunky and unbalanced, there aren't many other IPs that blatantly rip-off random cool shit and happen to make it kind of work

One of the reasons RIFTS is so awesome is because Palladium, at that point had done licensed games or clones of some of the best IPs of the 80s and 90s (TMNT, Robotech/Macross, Palldium RPG was a D&D heartbreaker, Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas and Superspies, etc.)

I have a ton of RIFTS books and have still never played the game. I did have some friends in high-school that had a campaign going, but like all my multiple high-school attempts to join a TTRPG group, I wasn't invited 🤷‍♂️

this week on the Dogg Zzone i try to explain the early 90s tabletop game RIFTS and how a lunatic RPG writer from Detroit shaped my creative sensibilities

Introduction to the Fourier Transform | Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Courses

Really good, maths-free, introduction to the Fourier transform from this year's Siggraph, recommended watch: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

a tekken 3 arcade cabinet, turned off with an a4 white paper typed out note taped to the screen. the note reads: no more tekken 3 until daikatana ships the management

ion storm, game studio, break room, dallas, texas (1999) www.mobygames.com/game/1678/jo...

An image about the game developer's guide to publishing agreements feauturing otto the otter

Proud to announce Deviant Legal’s Game Developer’s Guide to Publishing Agreements: a free resource for developers wanting to learn about publishing deals. Publicly accessible, without requiring to provide your data: deviantlegal.com/guide/game-d...

Combat gameplay from Ragnarøkkr, PC-98 (1994)

A forgotten strategy role-playing game with some really great art. Developer Glodia would stop making games soon after, but ex programmer Hiroyuki "Hoee" Kuwata has since created a dedicated fansite with downloads:

quarter-dev.info/top.php

#chosting

a window within a window: 3d view of a simplified 3d house, garage, green backyard, surrounding fence, outside backyard. user interface takes up the rest of the screen, contained in menus up the top of the screen and smaller windows with icons and a further out view of the house and yard.

garden designer 2, magazine screenshot, pc (1995) archive.org/details/cd-r...

Launching Soon - Designers & Dragons: Origins From Evil Hat - Launching Soon - Designers & Dragons: Origins

I've done a few interviews about Designers & Dragons Origins over the last few days, and some folks have asked about the origins of Origins.

There's a long-ish story about the DnDClassics site and the return of D&D PDFs to the world.

The product histories emerged organically from that.

You would not believe how many stories like this have been popping up over the last ~5 years

Not just full games cancelled—entire characters and plot lines removed or changed, leaving less time for making the *rest of the game better*, to try avoiding a small and malicious contingent of voices.

A Reddit post from r/creepygaming by user SuperCamouflageShark - I saw these missing child reports on the attract mode of a Sente Mini-Golf arcade machine recently. The photo is of a Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying black-and-white photographs of missing children: Tahj Allen Merriman, and Steven Phillip Curtis. Their profiles are filled out in red text.

Another photograph of a different Sente Mini Golf machine, displaying the same photos of missing children.

Sente Mini Golf running under MAME, with the DIP Switches menu showing. DIP switches 3, 4, and 5 configure whether the missing children are displayed in the attract mode, with switches 4 and 5 showing or hiding a "LOCATED" stamp over the respective kid's photo.

Screenshot of Sente Mini Golf running under MAME; this screen shows two different missing children: Malinda Marie Smith and April Rose Yates. For the sake of demonstration I have enabled the "LOCATED" flag on the kid on the right. (DISCLAIMER: I do not have any information on whether April was located or not. This is strictly a demonstration and is not intended as documentation of a real event.)

Some inappropriately creepy golf content - Sente Mini Golf (1986) has DIP switches that add photos of missing children to the attract mode (and to enable a "LOCATED" message per kid). These profiles were replaced with new ones in updated ROMs.

Modern operators seem to leave them on, a lot. 😨

You could also read the official documentation in this case, but it's been established that it is harder than reading a random tweet or finding out the hard way 😅

It would be cool if the strided view could be used for indexing, and it still copied the entire array when not indexing, but there isn't a clean way to do that in C#

It's funny because the internal C++ code that copies the vertices does use a strided array view 😂. The reasoning for the full copy is the correct version of this code copies once to a temporary array, and then sets the vertices after all operations are done

The documentation and examples also clearly explain the behavior, but I guess people don't read docs :)

I know this is demonstrating the worst case, but Mesh.vertexCount would at least avoid the first allocation. The example code for Mesh.vertices also demonstrates a better usage of this property (copy it into a temporary vertices array and do the operation there)

In practice, it's a balancing act. Removing the properties and adding a method called CopyAndUpdateVertices might be fine. If you're too explicit,you end up with something like modern graphics APIs, which people also don't love

Unity does more heinous opaque transformations with Mesh, although this is bad. The best advice is not to use properties for Mesh ever if you care about performance. The question is, would outright removing these slow APIs make everyone happy or piss more people off?

I would like to see Unity Mesh split into at least 3-5 separate classes (roughly GPU, CPU, and editable, with skinned mesh variants) because the Mesh class does way too much in Unity

The alternative would be to keep an internal copy of non-interleaved vertices, which is wasting a ton of memory for an edge case situation or some how cache vertices after it is first accessed, which is completely doable but probably not worth the effort. If you need speed, use a different API

People are hating on this and calling it dumb, but if you think about how mesh vertex data is often stored as interleaved (which Unity does by default), and that the vertices accessor gives you only vertex position data, it has to make a copy and reapply it to the internal mesh data

I think performance minded engineers hate it, but if you're a solo developer or a designer making a small thing and just want code to work, this is more intuitive and less steps than SetVertexBufferData, MeshData.GetVertexData or an even more exotic path, but almost all of them create copies

Friends don't let friends use .vertices (if you care about performance, of course). These accessors are convenient, but they are terrible for performance. Unity has a lot of slow and easy to use paths, and there is an interesting discussion about whether that is a strength or a weakness...

This quote...

What people want to replace you with is what they think you already are. If companies, bosses, and boyfriends want to replace you with a robot or an AI model, that’s because they already see you and what you do as simply the workings of a machine with far too many bugs.