Max Lebled

So good!

Congrats!!!!!!!

I added a "grab stance" with 4 actions (three swipes & one "button push") to all of our first-person weapons. Inspired by what "Left 4 Dead" did when you looked at item pickups. sbox.game/news/july-2025 #animation

Looks really solid!

This is a great thread @hillsguy.bsky.social, I'll add a bit more context here for anyone interested.

Yes there's no fancy sim - it just uses a water interaction buffer as a target for the particle system rendering, so we could use the power of particle system we already have.

For UE4 it was definitely the tonemapper that stood out. In UE3 it was the splotchy, blocky bloom and SSAO layers

Every time I hear about terraforming another planet I think about the woman who put it this way: we can't even keep our own planet terraformed

Must be great to be whoever made that meme originally, and have Matsuno officially sanction it 😄

Could you please show how you've skinned this corrective bone? I can't quite tell what it's doing (results look great though)

I knew you were gonna do this 😄 Great writing, really liked it

"Do you currently have I'm canadian" got a good laugh out of me

I have a vague memory of a sort of alt-history article that talked about FPSes as if they never existed until now b/c "how could we expect players to be satisfied with such simple ballistics modeling on guns? It's so hard to get right, unlike simulating relationships"

Does that ring anyone's bells?

Yeah, a few games interfere with my system-wide binds; for example, in those cases, Winamp stops receiving my keyboard's multimedia keys. It might be a similar issue.

Joyeux anniversaire !

This is the true M5S progging experience

We need a name for a thing I'm about to describe. *I* need a name for it at least. I'm sure there's a name for it. There's a modern (or at least louder in modern era) tendency in both fiction and the interpretation of fiction that every narrative be some sort of very specific kind of hyper-literal puzzle box that can be "solved" by wikis and lore and clues

and that this is in fact the goal of fiction, to create such a thing, the raw materials for this after-the-fact puzzle solving. All aspects of a work must be read hyper-literally so that they can all be made into puzzle pieces. Metaphors can't really exist except to further the puzzle-solving. All parts are gears, locks, or keys, essentially. I saw someone refer to this as wiki-culture, but that's already a term. It's a good one for this, though. There are a lot of stories that follow these assumptions that I like, btw! Not like saying it's "lower". Just that it is often assumed to be the "correct" way to do or interpret narrative and that leads to very specific kinds of storytelling and story reading

The replies are really great on this already and I'll RT some in a bit. First, some context: After we released our game I was really blown away by how large the hunger for really concrete literal explanations were for things that were by design shadowy and vague and open to interpretation. But like, not in the sense of "hey I'm curious", but "hey, you left this out, when are you going to finish it or write the backstory lore etc" Or, for example, we spent a lot of time on in-world fiction. Stories about constellations, fairytales, religious narratives. And I'd get emails asking if Mae was the descendant of an in-world fictional character. B/c what was the point of the in-world fiction otherwise?

The fairytales have to have a literal fact basis that directly drives the literal facts in the primary plot. They need geneologies. Birthrights. Gear A needs to turn Gear Q. etc And again, let me stress, there's nothing wrong with stories that do this kind of thing. I like a lot of them! But this mode of /analysis/ just doesn't lend itself to discussing themes, or metaphor, or subjectivity. And those are to me the most interesting parts of stories. And it leads to seeing things that aren't written like that as incomplete or broken or full of "pointless" bits. It's like reading Watchmen and trying to figure out how Tales Of The Black Freighter literally fits into the literal history of not just the world, but the main cast. Like Ozymandius needs to be the great great grandson of the guy from Freighter, a thing that actually happened, or else it's just a vestigial pointless frustrating addition.

That part has to do with what Scott Benson (Night in the Woods) dubbed the "wikification" of narrative, the tendency to see every little detail in the story as the piece in a puzzle to be solved. OG thread: twitter.com/bombsfall/st...

I think the most concise way to phrase it is that "lore", in the way most people think of it, is narrative technical debt

He increasingly feels like Data from Star Trek: TNG

I guess back then, they knew kids would read the instruction booklet... I know I did that with every single one of my GBA games

I think we use Blazor for sbox.game

And Motoi Sakuraba's music!

Delicious delicious delicious art

Really awesome animation work... inspirational

I dislike that the well has been poisoned with the obsession over e.g. Valve cut content (although they have arguably finally nipped that with official releases of HL2 beta stuff) + how the YouTube gaming ecosystem seems to treat any cut content as monetizable content to strip mine for their videos

The "arbitrary", "unmotivated" (in quotes because I've only seen this GIF and have no other context) late 90s coloured lighting style can be rad as hell. The skies from Unreal 1 are some of the best examples of it IMHO

Incredible

None of the games really looked like they used temporal reconstruction to me, except Split Fiction. I wonder if the whole DLSS rumour thing was false after all, or perhaps it's a version that's very cut down (to avoid the many-watt overhead of the PC version), much more aggressive, temporally sharp

Gut feels like if they really wanted to charge people for upgrades, they should've done "remaster" rereleases, like a 2-in-1 Zelda Switch remaster collection. The optics of charging for PS4/PS5 Pro style upgrades are... interesting, to say the least

Félicitations 🚀

Specifically, developers are much more pessimistic about tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and MidJourney than they were the prior year. In 2024, 21 percent of game developers thought generative AI would have a "positive" impact on the video game industry. In 2025, that number has dropped to 13 percent. Meanwhile, the number of survey respondents who think it will have a "negative" impact on the industry increased from 18 percent to 30 percent. This change comes even as more developers report using generative AI tools, with the number rising from 31 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2025. But one eye-opening slide shows who is adopting AI tools in game development—and for the most part, it's not the people programming or creating assets for games. The heaviest AI use showed up for those working in "Business & Finance," at 50 percent of respondents. Next up were those in "Production & Team Leadership" and "Community, Marketing, & PR" at 40 percent of respondents each. Developers in all other departments reported less use.

A month ago, the annual GDC survey had the responses at a staggeringly low "13% feeling positive": www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dev...