Andrew Meggs

Andrew Meggs

@meggsomatic.tv

Rendering, game engines, scalability, gratuitous over-engineering || 💼 ̶A̶v̶a̶t̶a̶r̶ GenAI Assets @ Meta || ⌛ Skyrim, Vampire Bloodlines, Warhammer Online || 🌃 Occasional retro/indie toys || 👫 @shannonin3d.bsky.social (Slang/Vulkan/WebGPU/Khronos)

578 followers1.3K following224 posts

Andrew Meggs reposted

OKAY. Here's how my first week as an independent journalist went down! I published 30 stories for Vertical Slice—including an interview with Ubisoft union workers on their fight against an RTO mandate and coverage of the Rockstar union busting tribunal in Glasgow. It was hard work, but rewarding!

Andrew Meggs reposted

meshoptimizer 1.3 is out! Featuring a new voxel remesher, support for normal generation, several simplification improvements and various optimizations and fixes. GitHub stars and reposts appreciated! meshoptimizer was started 10 years ago; excited for the years to come! github.com/zeux/meshopt...

Andrew Meggs reposted

Company that union busts and fires its employees and then justifies it by spreading rumors they were leaking stuff are now insisting you have to sympathize with them because it’s heartbreaking what these leakers are doing to their employees.

Wario64@wario64.bsky.social

Rockstar Games issues statement regarding Grand Theft Auto VI leaks

My dusty old math degree is getting Increasingly annoyed at Rust's rigid fetishization of unsigned. Some values (container sizes, instant times) are never negative in isolation, but there is an algebra around them. And in that algebra, subtraction implies the existence of an additive inverse.

std::time is a notable footgun. The difference between two Instants is a Duration, and Duration is an unsigned magnitude, so subtracting Instants silently saturates to zero. At least one of these assertions will always fail:

Designing an NPC reputation/sentiment system, and you realize you just accidentally reinvented racism from first principles. If Elves and Dwarves end up locked in a cycle of generational distrust as a purely emergent property of the sim, that's cool, right? Right? 🤦🏻🤦🏼🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏿

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Then if baby dwarves have a good time with baby elves, they instead learn to distrust their racist boomer dwarf parents. This feels amazing and I want to see it play out. #emergentsim

Oh this gets even better. Remembering where you learned expectation tags gives a theory of mind: "Oh she's from the North Hills. I expect she thinks fish are tasty." I'm not (yet) sure what to use that for, but it's there.

Designing an NPC reputation/sentiment system, and you realize you just accidentally reinvented racism from first principles. If Elves and Dwarves end up locked in a cycle of generational distrust as a purely emergent property of the sim, that's cool, right? Right? 🤦🏻🤦🏼🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏿

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Conversational interactions between NPCs cause some of the tags to exchange and propagate, weighted by charisma and trust. Children have inherent trust of adults. You see where this is going.

There's maybe an escape hatch: Remember the tags associated with where your weights came from. If too many of your own interactions contradict the weights from a source, discard (or even invert) the weights from those tags, and decrease trust from entities with those tags.

Designing an NPC reputation/sentiment system, and you realize you just accidentally reinvented racism from first principles. If Elves and Dwarves end up locked in a cycle of generational distrust as a purely emergent property of the sim, that's cool, right? Right? 🤦🏻🤦🏼🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏿

Basically, there are tags for every Entity: Sentient, Humanoid, Dwarf, etc. There are tags for expectations: Tasty, Scary, Generous, etc. An interaction causes a +/- to some of those expectation tags. NPCs remember tallies keyed by { entity_tags ∪ entity_ids } × { expectation_tags }.

Slowly accepting that my final form is going to look a lot like “But we have Cyber Rick Rubin at home...” so I figure I might as well read his damn book.

Andrew Meggs reposted

The main way in which AI has negatively impacted games industry jobs is not through actual automation of those jobs or even untrue claims about automation. It's by making capital unavailable because it's tied up in AI investments while also destroying the consumer base for video game hardware.

Andrew Meggs reposted

Sick of Unreal Engine in everything. Let a couple of people dick around with RE Engine. Let people muck around with ID Tech 8. I wanna see what people make outta the beautiful, stapled together Havok shit FromSoft uses.

Andrew Meggs reposted

All layoffs are a waste of money and lives. But none are so shortsighted as laying off ID engineers. Their engine is the only high fidelity engine performing well on lower end hardware. ...you know, the only affordable kind of hardware in the next few years

I'm trying to process why yesterday's Xbox layoffs feel so apocalyptic and depressing. I've been in multiple studio closures and seen many friends experience the same. The January layoffs at Meta RL were similar-size and hit much nearer. But this one feels so much more hopeless.

So many people. So many things I had worked on alongside them. So much talent. So much more left to build. Like tears in the rain.

Andrew Meggs reposted

GUIDE: Welcome to the Great American State Fair! TOURIST: Incredible! And which state are we in right now? GUIDE: (violently shaking their head) Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Andrew Meggs reposted

Lex@glitterstrands.bsky.social

mad how the defining cultural image of Steamboat Willie is Mickey whistling and driving the boat, and not the bit where he plays a pig's nipples as a musical instrument while it shrieks in pain

Shameless plug for all the places my wife's talking at #SIGGRAPH. (I'll also be talking, but only at the hotel bar and only about things better left unsaid.)

The trouble with sanding green paint in a room with white trim is that during cleanup it's really hard to tell what's dusty and what's Cornell Box. #TheGraphicsAreGreatIRL

Andrew Meggs reposted

“It’s almost a real-time IP incubator of sorts, with moderators and communities that are cultivating these spaces where stories and fandoms can grow organically." It's the *people*, not the platform! Let the PEOPLE TELL STORIES! So tired. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

hollywoodreporter.com‘Backrooms’ Sends Hollywood Running to Reddit for New IdeasThe old-school forum that originated A24's 'Backrooms' is embracing its role as an idea incubator where "fandoms can grow organically."

Travel booked for #SIGGRAPH. I'll be in Los Angeles Jul 18-24. First (external) conference since... pre-Meta & pre-COVID?!! It's been too long since I've seen too many people. If you're going to be at SIGGRAPH (or just can meet up around LA/OC), please DM me so we can (re-)connect.

Andrew Meggs reposted

If you have this problem using LLDB from VS Code (as I've had), try the "CodeLLDB" extension, and add this to your launch config: "initCommands": [ "settings set symbols.load-on-demand true" ], iirc it didn't work for me when I tried setting the setting other ways? but doing it this way works.

Séb@sebdegraff.bsky.social

LLDB taking _seconds_ to load the debug info of a million system libraries every time I want to debug my game on macos. I tried a bunch of settings, none of them worked for me.

Quoting the entire thread, to highlight one of the replies... 1/5

Lucretiel@lucretiel.me

Okay so something that did start to annoy me about all the AI mandates is like So I am a card-carrying member of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force. You have to learn to not be obnoxious but in general I’m like “write & rewrite it all in Rust and your lives will be better in all these ways” 1/

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The ideal might be to look backwards to formal contract languages with strong proofs, like Eiffel or CLU or SPARK Ada. They didn't take off because they were too tedious for human productivity, but that's the one problem LLMs give us an escape hatch on. 4/5

The trouble with that ideal is lack of training corpus for contract languages. We may be at a point where language development slows down; incentives favor what LLMs can already target. Rust is the compromise we have, but it's much better than arming LLMs with the foot-gun arsenal of C++. 5/5

Quoting the entire thread, to highlight one of the replies... 1/5

Lucretiel@lucretiel.me

Okay so something that did start to annoy me about all the AI mandates is like So I am a card-carrying member of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force. You have to learn to not be obnoxious but in general I’m like “write & rewrite it all in Rust and your lives will be better in all these ways” 1/

Rust is a better language for LLMs! The best defense against slop is rigorously-specified deterministically-testable requirements for "done". Unit tests, strong static typing, lifetime analysis, linters... all of it. Make them iterate until everything's green. 2/5 bsky.app/profile/nrpo...

Answer is simple. Convince them Rust is the best language for LLMs, watch them scramble to remodel their application with string typing

I absolutely grant that satisfying the borrow checker can be both tedious and time consuming. So is writing unit tests. But I don't especially care if an LLM finds those things tedious! If anything, I'd like an even stricter language than Rust. 3/5

Shockingly, 2026 did indeed become the year of the Linux Desktop for me. Everything is so fast and snappy compared to what Windows has become. Highly recommended. I only cross-boot for a few games with kernel anti-cheat, which nicely isolates the third-party kernel hacks from everything else I do.

Andrew Meggs@meggsomatic.tv

2026 is (yet again) probably not the year of the Linux desktop. But it IS the year of me getting so sick of my OS constantly trying to upsell me that I'm finally willing to try.

When a game has you play a character with a specific backstory and absolutely no head trauma... But the narrative design turns very basic knowledge that character would have about their own life into a tantalizing mystery for the player to slowly uncover... Is there a term for that trope?

Today's the day I realized that my most practical and effective way to search the Internet is to ask Gemini but always end the query with: "Ignore Google's own search rankings; those have been hopelessly poisoned by SEO-optimized scams."

When the dog thought I was too slow getting him ready for a walk, I joked about "The anticip..." FML now I've got an Australian Shepherd who activates go mode if anybody quotes Rocky Horror.