Tricky Bits
Nowadays when you are learning software, so much of it takes place in a carefully crafted and abstract world, far away from the hardware and even the operating system, programming languages don't help because they have runtimes on top of runtimes on top of various third party libraries. TrickyBits is going to strip away these layers and look at the world beneath to get a better understanding of what is really happening. This is not a place for the faint of heart. It is a place for all those that love reveling in the deepest parts of the architectures and seeing what wonders you can unlock. Down the rabbit hole we go...
Nanite was a new addition to UnrealEngine 5.0 and it rightfully got a lot of attention, but what is it?? Epic call it a “virtualized geometry system” but it the “virtualization” part is only a tiny part of it, the “geometry” part is the impressive bit.
Rob Wyatt
Windows has never claimed to be a real time operating system but in reality its not even a timely operating system.
Rob Wyatt
Managing display latency plays a big role in the architecture of game engines, video playback and display systems in general. In a typical consumer environment there is one component that we have little to no control over; the TV. Modern TVs and monitors have an unknown and undocumented latency between a frame being received and displayed - this is the latency we want to measure and in this post we are going to make a HDMI latency tester with a Raspberry Pi.
Rob Wyatt
Programmers have always needed reliable timestamps and programming on Windows is no different. But getting accurate timestamps efficiently from user mode, a seemingly simple task that every operating system supports, seems to have at best made Microsoft jump through hoops for 30 years, and at worst eluded them completely.
Rob Wyatt
Feb 5th - Meta’s Earnings Report, The Dividend, and What That Means for Other Tech Companies (Spoiler Alert: Expect More Layoffs)
PJ McNerney
In this episode, Rob and PJ explore the history of consoles. How did some of the technological advances from the 80s and 90s influence the rise of capabilities we see today?
In the second of their two part series on AR, Rob and PJ discuss the Apple Vision Pro, the use case displayed thus far, and whether this thing has legs in the marketplace.
Rob and PJ explore VR, AR, and XR, discussing some of the challenges that these related pieces of technology have faced off, how companies have tried to solve these problems, and where limitations still exist.
Barely in 2024, the week of January 8th saw layoffs across multiple tech companies: Google, Twitch, Discord, and Unity. To be sure…this is foreboding sign for 2024.
On December 12th 2023, Insomniac Games was hacked by Rhysida and they announced they had access to more than a terabyte of data. On or around December 20th, when nobody had paid the 50 bitcoin ransom, they released all 1.7TB on the dark-web for anybody to access.