Notices by Tom Forsyth (tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place)

Applying for a passport renewal...

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Folks, I have startling news about JPEGs...

@fatlimey We already have two different float16 formats. Feels like you could add a whole bunch more pretty easily and fine-tune for your use cases. It's not quite per-app-specific compression (because you need a fast & cheap encode from f24ish to whatever 16 bit format you choose), but seems like hardware could easily support 8 different ones.

@fatlimey The paper then goes on to talk about different fp8 formats, but now we truly are just in LUT territory. Convert to the most appropriate fp16, then just look up whatever mapping you want. Whatever makes sense for your app.

@tomjennings @mcc Let us know if you find it.

@tomjennings @mcc That's the whole discussion. They do not have the *assembler syntax* which is a different thing.

@mcc IIRC a lot of the extended syntax was defined by MASM, sometimes to make life simpler for their extremely powerful macros. I don't know how much of that was also adopted by NASM. So well worth checking with both MASM and NASM. But yes - lots of oral tradition here...

@mcc I added a whole bunch of instructions to x86 (what became AVX512), including new syntax for the mask registers. I remember trying to find out who "owned" that, and whether we should use v0(k1), v0[k1] or v0{k1} or some other syntax.

Sadly I don't have my notes from that time, but my vague recollection is that the answer was "nobody cares - pick one". Which was very alarming! I did have some feedback from our internal assembler team, but they stressed that they were NOT a public authority.

@mcc The official tools Intel provides are the C intrinsics - and they are of course C syntax, so have no bearing on the assembly.

So yeah, my recollection is we picked what seemed sensible and went with it. BUT - that was just for the purposes of ISA documentation - there was no hard link to the actual syntax accepted by the assemblers (dramatically so in the case of AT&T syntax).

So it really does seem like a thing nobody owns, except for each specific tool vendor!

@sinbad It's an extremely mature "EA" - we're at 60 hours so far and from the size of the map we have not uncovered, but has quest markers, we're maybe a third of the way through? We are being fairly completist though.

I love the way brains work sometimes.

We're playing Enshrouded (good co-op PvE game BTW!) and my wife was talking about the "hoefahray". The... what now? She said "you know - the bunny animals?"

Ohhhhh, well yes I can see how you could parse it that way, but I suspect...

Still boggles my mind that DaVinci Resolve is free. Such an awesome bit of kit - I don't use half of it, and yet... free! I have no idea how they plan to make money, but could every other company in the world please adopt that business plan?

@sinbad You can still clearly see the limits, and that's the "retro" part - grappling with those.

SNES/MegaDrive had less CPU power, but more hardware, and for some of those games I think they got to "good enough" graphics to lose some of that "retro" feel. But I am absolutely open to debate on this.

Of course, as soon as you want to go 3D it all looks terrible again. 3D stays "retro" all the way up to the N64/Saturn/PS1 - all of which look eye-scorchingly bad in their own ways.

@sinbad Speccy lad myself. I think my "retro" line runs somewhere between the Amiga/ST and the SNES/MegaDrive. I do think every 8-bit thing counts - we were really wrestling with the capabilities back then. It was an achievement to make anything even recognisable. Actually getting to "art" was basically impossible. But it also means those games are... hard on the eyes.

The ST/Amiga was the first time things actually looked somewhat like the box cover.

@skinnylatte Ha. I had no idea some people thought H1-Bs were "poorly paid". I'm an ex-H1-B myself, and of course met and swapped stories with others on them, and one thing none of us were, is poorly paid.

The competition for H1-Bs is extremely fierce and you need a degree and industry experience at a minimum. Plenty of brilliant folks at big tech companies have failed to get an H1-B allocation, had to be on a temporary visa, and then had to return home after a few years - it's brutal.

Wat? No. I'm using it. Get your own.

@aeva

Me: hey did you know the ISS runs on Linux?

Them: oh, so that's why in space no-one can hear you stream?

@crk5 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."

@eniko It is amazing how much less sick I have been these past 4 years. Well, except that one time that started six months ago and is still going on. Getting better!

I wish I'd been masking on planes for the last 30 years. Think of the time and misery saved for a trivial bit of embarrassment.

@lritter @kojack @sinbad Yup, that's the first struggle - to get a reliable enough power supply that you can leave it for 5 mins and it won't go poof. It's very important at that stage to switch off stuff you don't need.

That's one reason NOT to funnel materials into containers. I just use a moderately long conveyor instead. That way it will fill up with 20-30 items of the thing, and then the machine will back up, stop, AND STOP CHEWING POWER.

@lritter @kojack @sinbad Don't worry - you will solve the power problem soon with... something new :-)