Michael Labbé

19 Nov 2024

High time for a reintroduction! I'm Mike, lifelong game developer drawn to on online games, system engineering and performance. I've attached key art from some of the games I've worked on. After twenty years of making games, I'm still swinging for the fences - no signs of slowing.

2 June

Announcing Grain DDL: code gen by & for demanding engine developers. Define structs/data once. Write custom generators for protocols, saves, shaders, etc. No macros. Generate reviewable code on every keystroke. 300kB exe (Win/Mac/Linux). Apply for Closed beta: www.frogtoss.com/grain

14 Apr

We are fortunate to have a Handmade event in Vancouver. The format is a mix of presentations and conversations -- if striving for great software is your thing, this is worth checking out.

Ben Visness@bvisness.me

On June 6 we are hosting the Handmade Network Expo in Vancouver, BC, an event celebrating software made from scratch. Among the lineup: a new game from Anton Mikhailov & @nicbarker.com, a time travel debugger by @leddoo.bsky.social, a language and IDE from @frogtoss.bsky.social, and more. (1/2)

frogtoss.comPrintable Base89 LUT EncodingNeed In state logic or semantic markup with text strings, there are two options: in-band formatting, or out of band formatting. In-band formatting indicates changes in a string. For instance: Hello...

21 Oct 2025

Printable Base89 LUT Encoding - Embed LUT indices in your utf-8 strings www.frogtoss.com/labs/printab...

affinity.serif.comCreative Freedom Is Coming - AffinityCreative Freedom Is Coming. October 30

1 Oct 2025

Whatever is next, this is playing messaging games with apps that people use for productivity. That doesn't feel good. affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

30 Apr 2025

Steve Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians Satya (interpreted): 30% of Microsoft's code is written by a computer that learned to generate code from reddit opinions and incomplete github repos

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

(CNBC) - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said that as much as 30% of the company's code is now written by artificial intelligence. @cnbc.com $MSFT www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/s...

19 Mar 2025

An educational use for LLMs would be to diff two compiles and explain the changes between them at a disassembly level. You could set up a start checkpoint and then work on making various changes and have it explain the impact of those changes on the code generation.

14 Mar 2025

My unpopular opinion on hidpi monitors is to put them closer to your face instead of using scaling. Now you have more real estate and the font size is the same after factoring perspective dimuntion!

1 Feb 2025

Why is it that there are these handy "Minecraft server operator moms and dads" that host game servers for their kids, but we need a 1.74 trillion dollar company to share our photos and videos with our family members. The core value of the platform should be commoditized by now.

30 Jan 2025

Some other things that didn't exist when I shipped this messageboard in 2000: - blogs (this code fingers .plans) - frontend, node - remotely affordable multicore servers - javascript that could update the DOM after page load - best practices like not logging error messages to the browser

30 Jan 2025

In 2000, I wrote a news posting/threaded forum software in Perl for threewave. At 5.5kloc of Perl, it ran well for 3 years. Things that did not exist back then: - CSS - Firefox - The cloud - CI - Stable usb support in Linux - SSL by default - Python 2 - SaaS

30 Jan 2025

We were able to make a bit of money off of ads to keep it running while we worked on Capture the Flag, but missed the dotcom bubble by a hair. Reviewing the code, it looks like I got the security things right, and this could still be used.

28 Jan 2025

"I have to switch languages because the one I invested time, knowledge, code and tooling in has a flaw and there is a better one" Past a reasonable point, the flaw is not worse than the reset. A good programmer can write good software in a bad language. Stay the course.

28 Jan 2025

Regarding the youtube/social media systems language wars: Ship, don't quip.

27 Jan 2025

I jump between debuggers a lot (VS, Xcode, Remedy) and find the keyboard shortcut muscle memory to be a challenge. The 8Bitdo Micro controller has a mode where it is a bluetooth HID keyboard and you can emit any keyboard keys, so I do the usual step into/over/out/jump to location using it with

27 Jan 2025

my left hand while my right hand stays on the mouse. This appears eccentric but it is really comfortable to effectively have the same inputs on every debugger.

16 Jan 2025

A screenshot of my web browser checking out a Gamecube purchase in 2001 from Future Shop. The last time Nintendo boosted spec without drastically altering the core intent of the console!

mastodon.gamedev.placeMichael Labbé (@michaellabbe@mastodon.gamedev.place)MacOS runs a lot of code on pointer update. I can get my WindowServer process to utilize 80% of an m4 performance core by moving my mouse. A builtin trackpad can bring it as high as 16%. After an i...

14 Jan 2025

Do you make games that have mouse move events? On MacOS, this event code is running up to 8,000 times a second on gaming mice, and you must do your own collation or suffer extremely high CPU both in the OS and in your application. mastodon.gamedev.place/@michaellabb...

20 Dec 2024

It would be cool if there was an indie-ran OST app that let you explore by composer, organize music by intensity, included stage-appropriate imagery and controlled your smart lights to match the game's visuals at the time the music played in-game. I would pay a monthly fee for that.

It's unbelievable to me how far the Windows brand has slid with enthusiasts in a decade. It's unfortunate that the largest audience of people who pay for PC software have an antagonistic relationship with the OS provider. Microsoft forcing hardware upgrades on so many users is a baffling choice.

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more-closed platforms and the continued adoption of ARM hardware, it makes sense for Valve to invest heavily in building support in this area.

Microsoft has never really rang the division bell like they are here. In 1995, Win95 requirements were basically a protected mode 386 which was relatively easy to attain. This time they are EOL'ing computers with 16 and 32-core CPUs from half a decade ago. This is not business as usual.

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that broadly supports hardware and Windows applications. My prediction for 2025-2026 is that gaming is going to push to non-MacOS arm desktop, and devices like Chromebooks and ARM PCs are going to receive more game library support.

Valve's most valuable asset, in my view, is their users' perception of the value of their Steam library. Given that, it makes sense for them to ensure as much of the Steam library works on ARM devices (and anywhere they can, really). Given Microsoft's handling of Windows, the emergence of

Likely result of Oct 2025 will be many Windows power users users dispersing to a variety of Mac, gaming consoles or cheap Windows 11 laptops. Probably a few Linux-curious people, but not a market shifting amount. Game buying will become more fragmented across platforms as a result.

It's likely Valve is aiming to ship SteamOS for a broader set of designated hardware by 2025, which could also play a role here. But it seems to make sense that effort would only be for targeting specific hardware, turning it into a console. Not a general purpose enthusiast OS

2 Dec 2024

Cool things in games we lost for no great reason: - Adhoc wifi (play Mario Kart games around a campfire) - Second screen (Battlelog live updates) - Same friends, same server (screw matchmaking, play with same group every night)