Dave Colson 's Avatar

Dave Colson

@dcolson.bsky.social

Lead Programmer at Climax Studios. Previously worked on Star Citizen. Personal account though. I mostly post about coding and coding projects. He/Hm

87 Followers  |  120 Following  |  79 Posts  |  Joined: 23.09.2023  |  2.5549

Latest posts by dcolson.bsky.social on Bluesky

Huge congrats to Paul and team for this launch, probably the one of (if not the?) best Irish developers out there right now!

29.10.2025 14:39 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

Doors open in 1 hour!

27.10.2025 12:00 β€” πŸ‘ 29    πŸ” 11    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 3
Preview
Polybox/shaders/core3d.shader at main Β· DavidColson/Polybox Late ninties, PS1 inspired fantasy console. Contribute to DavidColson/Polybox development by creating an account on GitHub.

I have been sitting on a follow up post about PS1 rendering based on my project about that which talks about doing this. I must get it finished one of these days.

Regardless this is the shader that does the dithering: github.com/DavidColson/...

20.10.2025 10:08 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A steam deck with a screen shot of The SΓ©ance of Blake Manor on a Steam Deck. A large green verification tick is in the centre of the screen.

A steam deck with a screen shot of The SΓ©ance of Blake Manor on a Steam Deck. A large green verification tick is in the centre of the screen.

We're happy to say that The SΓ©ance of Blake Manor has been #SteamDeck verified.

Launching on the 27th of October. You can wishlist it or check out the demo in #SteamNextFest.

Check out the demo: bit.ly/47Pm8XA

#indiegames

17.10.2025 09:01 β€” πŸ‘ 81    πŸ” 22    πŸ’¬ 6    πŸ“Œ 2
Video thumbnail

The new clouds still need some better lighting effects, but chasing planes through them feels pretty good #gamedev #flightsim

31.08.2025 17:33 β€” πŸ‘ 67    πŸ” 11    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
fred | about
YouTube video by starfreakclone fred | about

The current thought is to transition away from linked list and instead optimize queries with a tree like VSCode has done or like the Fred editor shown at handmade cities. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmIN...

14.08.2025 15:13 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I came into a frustrating issue in the design my text editor. I had this great mechanism for caching linked list nodes to make it faster to jump around the file and query stuff.

But I've just realised, caching nodes like this is wildly not threadsafe.

Going back to the drawing board for a bit lol

14.08.2025 15:11 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I've learned a lot of really interesting things about text rendering, syntax highlighting and UI stuff, which I hope to share bits of and maybe write some articles on stuff

04.08.2025 09:49 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

I'm supposed to post more but I frequently forget, but anyway, major text editor update!

- Completed a rewrite of the UI and text rendering
- Implemented syntax highlighting!!
- Smooth scrolling, and countless bits of UI polish

Really coming together, I'm able to use it day to day more often now

04.08.2025 09:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

This often comes up in the context of small game entity systems, where usually you don't have more than a hundred or so entities, and so a fat struct entity does not incur much performance penalty because you don't iterate over that many, and in exchange you get a simpler architecture.

24.07.2025 09:52 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

There is a tradeoff here that is worth discussing I feel. Fat struct architectures are simpler and more flexible, but yes they are worse for cache use.

The situations where one might use them would be when you don't have that many instances of something, so the memory throughput benefit is minimal

24.07.2025 09:52 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The devil is in the details! In design, things are often made just a bit different so that they appear consistent and balanced.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversho...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical...

15.07.2025 06:58 β€” πŸ‘ 8    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The lower leagues of motorsport emphasis driver skill _much_ more (they often race with the same, or at least normalized cars) and the difference is really noticeable compared to F1

01.07.2025 14:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

What I think is crazy cool about F1 is that the drivers are ridiculously talented, and it's super hard to drive at the pace they do. But they're all so close in skill after filtering out so many other drivers, that what separates winners from losers ends up not being driver skill in many cases.

01.07.2025 14:36 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

The prototype version of this spaceship landing thing is now available on itch. The prototype has been done for weeks now, but it's taken me a while to put to paper what I wanted to about how this works and how to fly it. I'm really proud of how this little prototype came out.

30.06.2025 23:29 β€” πŸ‘ 36    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I won’t say any more in public on this topic, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble (my dms are available if anyone reading this thread wants to chat), but yea it’s really nice for me to see you try to solve these issues with a fresh take on the matter.

17.06.2025 19:28 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

This whole topic is precisely the issue SC's flight model had/has lol. It's too good, we had to resort to inventing lore that allowed us to nerf thrusters in atmosphere to get it to look okay. And even then it wasn't the best.

17.06.2025 08:39 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Is it just any speed that contributes to this? I.e. if I thrust from a standstill on the ground, I start to get some forward momentum without any other inputs?

16.06.2025 15:42 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I have also come to realise that there may be less stabilization than it feels, if you take the stick as a yaw/pitch angle rather than a yaw/pitch _rate_ then when you let go it settles?

16.06.2025 15:16 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The blending is also very interesting, you can just take off from a standstill in normal mode and I guess you just lift off because it's 100% down thrust, but it very quickly starts moving forward. I have been trying to land vertically in manual mode, but haven't quite seen if I can do that

16.06.2025 15:14 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

An immediate thing that strikes me is how much stabilization you have. Hovering was always such a precarious state when we tried it on Star Citizen. But this feels "managed" which I gives you that "looks cool but is easy" feel. It's very cool, I am a fan

16.06.2025 15:09 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

Oooh yes please!

16.06.2025 15:05 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Is this something like helicopter style hovering but with assists?

16.06.2025 08:58 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Is the auto-aim done with a gun gimbal such that it's decoupled from ship orientation? Or something else?

16.06.2025 08:52 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I don't know how well it'll show up on bluesky, but the text rendering in particular is vastly better.

11.05.2025 14:18 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Been a while since I've posted, still working on projects. I have completely rewritten the renderer and UI system for the text editor, it now looks vastly nicer, and we can have a lot more interactive, better looking and complex UIs.

#programming #texteditor

11.05.2025 14:18 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Hopefully @why485.bsky.social's game can scratch that itch as a modern day game

13.04.2025 19:34 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image Post image Post image Post image

It's more arcadey than I thought it would be, but as a result it's very simple to pick up and play when you want a quick bit of fun. There's loads of planes and loads of content, so it's very easy to enjoy without getting too in depth with anything. It's what I want war thunder to be haha

13.04.2025 19:33 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

I've been playing a game called Janes Fighters recently, it's a flight game from the 90s that I've heard a lot about and always wanted to play. It's a bit annoying setting up old games on modern PCs, but I gotta say this game is really cool.

13.04.2025 19:33 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 1
Aviassembly screenshot with a red and black plane.

Aviassembly screenshot with a red and black plane.

Blue and white plane with triple pusher props and 3 sets of wings.

Blue and white plane with triple pusher props and 3 sets of wings.

I don't normally like these kinds of "building" games but Aviassembly actually has gameplay and isn't just an aimless sandbox. It's really fun the kinds of things you can come up with to solve specific problems. I completely lost track of time with this one and went to sleep at 5 in the morning.

12.04.2025 15:04 β€” πŸ‘ 15    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

@dcolson is following 20 prominent accounts