The election, and after
The election, and after
The Losers
The first thing to say about the 2024 General Election result is this: Labour lost, and lost badly. They lost, in fact, half a million votes compared to their 2019 result; they lost three million votes when compared to their 2017 result. They also failed to win anything remotely resembling a majority of the popular vote.
3D file formats
3D file formats
I'm going to be doing a lot with programatically manipulated models. Therefore there's a benefit to me in using a file format which is human-readable, and also easily parsed. Compactness is also a virtue, but it's a virtue I can achieve by compressing human readable files, I think.
Loading time is an issue, but I will be loading relatively few models and manipulating them in memory to produce large numbers of variants, rather than loading a new model for every asset I wish to place. So both from the point of view of total disk space and from the point of view of performance, I think that formats which are optimised more towards my needs as a developer than to raw performance or storage size are probably justified.
The Triumph of the Mediocracy
The Triumph of the Mediocracy
[Yes, actually, the title of this essay was intended to be 'the triumph of mediocrity'. I mistyped. Sometimes, to err is divine.]
The Game Engine Problem
The Game Engine Problem
[this note was first written on the 18th April 2024 and substantially revised on the 25th of May and 24th of June]
The Dogs of War
The Dogs of War: a review of Phantom Liberty
Phantom Liberty is the only extension planned for Cyberpunk 2077. I've had it installed on my big computer since its release last September, but until this week have not seriously played it. I've not played it partly because, with all the technical failures I've had over the course of this winter, I rarely had enough electricity to run the computer; but also because the first two hours of Phantom Liberty are an utterly miserable experience, shockingly poor game design, which really do not encourage you to explore further. If you're caught in this trap, take comfort: it does get (much) better.