Don Williamson

Is it that time of the year again? I think it is... The default lighting model in UE makes me really sad. I can't enjoy anything anymore, it's everywhere. You have the culmination of 30 years of engine development at your fingertips. Please, please use it!

I've rebuilt my website with a custom Hugo theme and updated to the latest version of Hugo. Also moved comments to utteranc.es I'll be adding more blog posts soon and starting a non-technical series as it will be a while before my work allows me to talk about what we're doing. donw.io

hi friends I'm very excited to announce Halfspace, my experimental cross-platform IDE for solid modeling with distance fields! This has been in progress since midway through last year, and it's finally "done enough" to make it more public.

DASHR - Dynamically Animated Skinned Heightfield Rendering Short video for now - I might do a longer one later? youtu.be/-Su9YrcazRk But there's ALL the details in the paper, and you can always Use The Source, Luke for the really deep info. github.com/tomforsyth10...

300 animated/skinned characters on PS2 using tricks like this. Those were some good times.

Lord Save Me from the Old Dudes in my LI feed suddenly trying to become "AI Influencers," now that LLMs can temporarily prop up their washed out relevance refusing to step aside and let the younger generations thrive and grow. “LLMs have granted me a second career as a thought leader”

15 years ago I built a DCPU-16 assembler/debugger/emulator/editor in JS. I asked an LLM for a tiny Zelda-ish adventure. It wrote the code and encoded it in a URL format I designed for sharing. I clicked it and the 15-year-old emulator ran it. dwilliamson.github.io/dcpu-zelda.h... Strange times?

RenderDoc is a gift we do not deserve.

I was noodling over API design philosophy during breakfast and made a link I should have made long ago about white-board/test interviews. Recently somebody claimed "we have the best engineering team in Europe" and it grated on me specifically because this is how they hired (they weren't very good).

lol: "Compile time is one of the bottlenecks HFT engineers notice every day." I mean, have you SEEN the code these guys write? It's like they looked at Boost and thought it didn't have enough code in its header files and templates in its templates.

I'm getting really tired of reading Claude-generated readmes. The voice and drama is so obvious and it immediately turns me off whatever well-thought-through library I'm evaluating.

Can you imagine how good Irish Rugby would be if the AIL was as competitive as the NPC? David Nucifora proposed it once but failed. Each year I get a little down because all the seasons end and then forget NPC is only few weeks away. Glorious Rugby, almost enough to make you want to move over!

What a feast for the eyes www.kay-bruns.de/mod4win/mod4...

Poutine for dinner! You can take the immigrant out of Montreal but Montreal never leaves the immigrant.

Rode Voltron at Europa Park at the weekend. Nothing in the UK could prepare me for such an amazing experience, totally out of this world. My 10 year old subsequently labelled Blue Fire as "relaxing"! Back home and already rueing the lack of options here.

The Danger Coder: just enough knowledge to write lock free code, not enough insight to know the difference between lock free and wait free, not enough wisdom to know that the mutex was better.

Math library all in! Matrices, quaternions, vectors; all HLSL-like. C++ code used pycgen to avoid templates and worked well. Thankfully TypeScript doesn't have template-compile-time-bloat or need fwd-decl discipline, so could template everything and alias simple types. No operator overloads tho :(

Ported the Thing/Part system from C++ to Typescript and made massive gains for V8-style hot loop optimisations and GC traffic reduction/zombie removal using a Handle system. Wrote my first ever WebGPU code to get started in porting the rendering. Feast thine eyes on yon glory!

I have no means to cope with this much awesome in one day.

You know that Thing that happens when you live with somebody for a long time? You start taking on each others' speech patterns? I'd say it's pretty easy to tell the high-volume LLM users for just that reason: "the bit that bites", "this is load-bearing", etc. You can't un-notice once you hear it!

I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: box2d.org/posts/2026/0...

What sounded insane is actually playing out really well: porting my aging C++ moonshot to TypeScript and WebGPU. I recall the weeks I spent perfecting the dynamic octree split/merge/constrain queues. Fond but painful memories. Ported in a day; old me actually had a use for once!

When I read code, a visual model builds in my head. Hand me a node graph and it's just inert boxes and lines I have to translate. For others it's the reverse. Neither's richer and different formats suit different heads. But whatever format you pick: JUST MAKE SURE YOU CAN DEBUG THE FSCKING THING.

I see 5 satellites every minute looking up at the stars now. The meditative state I used to reach while in awe of the cosmos, has been ruined. If you worked on this ruinous technology, I hope there's at least a little shame in there. But I doubt it.

New recording and replay feature added to Box2D. Uses determinism to exactly reproduce the simulation for your game. Debug your game with all details including ray casts and other queries. Deterministic rollback too. box2d.org/posts/2026/0...

C++: "We focus on performance!" Me: "OK so where's my memset32 or memset64, then?" C++: "Ohhhh don't worry about that. The compiler will do that for-loop automatically for you!!! (but not in debug obviously)" Me: C++: *shit-eating-grin*