Ken Noland

GDC was a lot of fun this year. Glad I went!

Anyone know a good text layout engine? Pango feels a little heavyweight and writing my own turns out to be a nightmare if I want to support more than Latin based languages. I've been trying to roll my own with HarfBuzz and libunibreak, but dealing with all the edge cases is just annoying!

I've been wrestling with a font layout manager for two days now. My initial thoughts were "oh, this'll be easy!"... Then I found out about the Hebrew and Arabic languages... Looks like I'll be here a while longer!

Well, it hasn't been a great first full week back, but trying to be the optimist here, I'm hoping these are just the leftovers from 2024 and the trend will get better!

GitHub - ken-noland/OpenXcom: Open-source clone of the original X-Com Open-source clone of the original X-Com. Contribute to ken-noland/OpenXcom development by creating an account on GitHub.

I've been working on something new for a while now. It has taken quite a bit longer than I expected, but that's also been the fun part.

github.com/ken-noland/O...

Removed SDL, implementing custom Vulkan renderer, and restructuring the project to use ECS to manage object lifecycle for Lua.

I'm fairly optimistic about 2025... The industry has been through the ringer this year and I feel as though the winds of change are only getting stronger, but, there's some amazing teams being formed out of the ashes of the former companies and I can't wait to see what happens next! #gamedev

I'm not very good with this short form posting(bsky or x). My thoughts rarely boil down to quips and snippets. How do you express yourself with limited characters?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My son has a mud kitchen in our garden. These would be considered his pristine cooking tools. You should see the ones that have survived the past winter.

Ever get the feeling like you've been indoctrinated by the games industry into doing things a certain way, even though there might be different or better ways? I'd love to hear some good examples of this! #gamedev #gameprogramming

Lots! There's a few #gamedev lists.

YouTube video by hankschannel Twitter (and Threads) Have Made a HUGE Mistake

@hankgreen.bsky.social 's latest video sounds a lot cynical about micro blogging than in the past. Sure, he's always pointed out the flaws, but this last one felt like he was about to throw in the towel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4gh...

Looking forward to seeing more UKGI contacts(once my application is approved)

We've got some roles available. Happy to have a chat!

@gamedevlist.bsky.social - mind if I join?

I always enjoy buying programming books. I rarely read through them all, but it brings back memories of when I was a kid and my father would buy stacks of reference books for all sorts of hardware(he was a robotics engineer). Flipping through the pages to find that one reference sheet was good times

No, no, no... don't you know how this works? Programmers, blame artists, artists blame programmers. Everyone blames the producers. It's how it's always worked! 😜

I started with PS2 porting, similar to you. I moved into audio programming, then to network programming, and now I do AI programming. I've always been fascinated by procedural generation and now I do that and more full time(when not being a boring paperwork pusher)

3/3 When someone says that GenAI(LLMs and Transformers in general) has no more room for growth, I fundamentally disagree. However, the next big leap is still a long way away in my opinion. I'm an AI "realist", not an evangelist.

#ai #gamedev #genai

2/3 I started as an audio coder, writing low level mixers for audio for games. I then shifted to be a network programmer, writing more low level UDP packet handlers. I've been shifting to AI for these last few years and I'm fascinated by the low level maths involved in a multiheaded transformer net.

1/3 Okay, I've been developing video games for 25 years now. I've had many different roles.

I guess I should introduce myself. I'm a developer with 25 years experience in the #gamesindustry. I've worked on countless games and I'm still an active programmer.

I'm a father of two awesome boys and I am an American living in Germany, on a horse ranch, next to a gun range... and I hate guns!