dmbaggett

6 ms·

1.
by dmbaggett 4mo ago
In the same era (age 7-12) I went to school on an airbase in Germany and at some point “they” (no idea who) decided I should not do normal math, but should instead spend time with the Airmen who ran the computers. They had an Interdata-some
2.
by dmbaggett 4mo ago
I had “Microsoft Adventure” on the H89, which I played for a million hours and was why I dug up the original (probably not really; it’s complicated) Don Ekman Colossal Cave FORTRAN code and ported to TADS, which then led to Graham Nelson’s
3.
by dmbaggett 4mo ago
WUT, I had no idea. That’s cool!
4.
by dmbaggett 4mo ago
I remember reading Byte Magazine when I was 7 and not understanding why I couldn’t plug one of those cool S-100 bus graphics cards into my Heathkit H89. So I made space invaders out of box drawing characters. BASIC was slow so I tried using
5.
by dmbaggett 10mo ago
I don’t know how much time Andy spent building the “poor man’s VM” system, but I know it was a significant effort that underpinned the rest of the game. The packer was something I probably put a few days into in the beginning (greedy and ot
6.
by dmbaggett 10mo ago
Thank you. Too many startups ago. :)
7.
by dmbaggett 10mo ago
Sort of. While it was helpful to have the delta-compressed polygon list for each part of the level in its own 64KB chunk, the minor miracle of fitting >10MB levels into 2MB of RAM (half of which was VRAM as I recall) was down to two thin
8.
by dmbaggett 10mo ago
Exactly right! I had been working on a prototype for a Doom-style game in the summer of 1994 for the 3DO and built out the beginnings of the “sort polygons AOT” concept. While the idea was conceptually simple, the details were a bear. I gue
9.
by dmbaggett 1y ago
Insomniac was down the hall from us when we wrote Crash 1 and yes, the Hastings brothers definitely wrote some very tight assembly code!
10.
by dmbaggett 1y ago
I don’t know about other developers at the time, but we had quite a lot of hand-written assembly code in the Crash games. The background and foreground renderers were all written in assembly by hand, as was the octree-based collision detect
11.
by dmbaggett 1y ago
Many years ago (circa 1993) I ported the original Colossal Cave adventure by Crowther and Woods to TADS, a language created by Mike Roberts specifically for authoring text adventures. (Colossal Cave just came up recently here.) https:&#x2F
12.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
It depends on when you do the query. Years ago (mid 2000s) at ITA, Carl wrote code to find the longest possible shortest route between any two airports with scheduled flights. At the time the winner was Wasu, New Guinea to Peawanuck, Ontari
13.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
We used these to make Crash Bandicoot and we even had a mode where you could run on the game on the SGI. It was ... sort of ... playable.
14.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
They were once required to do so (and may still be; I’m not sure at this point), at least if they want to offer flights to or from the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPCO However, interpreting this data properly is
15.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
For inference you could use a maxed-out Mac Ultra; the RAM is shared between the CPU and GPU.
16.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
Full disclosure: I worked with Andy on Crash and am an angel investor. If you’re interested in AI and gaming I recommend you reach out. This is an extraordinary team and opportunity.
17.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
Hopefully you’ve read the Polygon article and seen the videos with Andy Gavin talking about the underlying tech. I was going to do part two of the video series but COVID killed it. Maybe we’ll revive that; it would be fun.
18.
by dmbaggett 2y ago
Yes, for Crash Bandicoot we had to entirely skip the C SDK for everything performance-critical; pushing arguments onto the stack and the SDK popping them off for each function call used more cycles than the underlying operation in many of t
19.
by dmbaggett 3y ago
One of the best teams on the planet!
20.
by dmbaggett 3y ago
An authoritative source on this Inventing the Alphabet by Johnanna Drucker. She covers not only the modern evidence but also attempts to classify alphabets throughout history, with particular focus on the Middle Ages. The first half is a
21.
by dmbaggett 3y ago
Unfortunately it's not perfectly supported. If you set up a private registry on gitlab and try to push packages with epoch versions, gitlab will normalize the ! to _ so everything breaks. (We found this out the hard way recently.) Anot
22.
by dmbaggett 3y ago
I distinctly remember buying a 1GB hard drive in 1992 for $1300 via an ad in Computer Shopper. And that was a really good price!
23.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
At age 15 I wrote a pacman clone for the Atari ST and was both impressed by and jealous of Minter's Llamatron for the same platform. My game was 30Hz only rarely, usually degrading to 15Hz, and you could really feel it in the gameplay.
24.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
We didn’t use BSP trees for Crash 1-3; instead we pre-rendered frames of the game on our SGI workstations and recovered the sort order from the (software) Z buffer. Then we stored the sorted list of polygons, using differential compression
25.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
I honestly don’t know, but I’m guessing an expert 2022 3D game developer is around here somewhere. :)
26.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
Interesting — TIL. Thanks for commenting.
27.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
Your intuition is correct. However, in the context of an O(N^2) comparison sort you can implement a tie-breaker check that at least ensures order stability between frames.
28.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
Occlusion culling is still relevant and of course BSP trees help with that as well. What I meant is there is no value in sorting polygons any longer. (As far as I know; the last time I worked on a game was 1997.)
29.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
As someone working at the same time as him on similar problems, I honestly and sincerely disagree. At the time my reaction was "this is space cadet stuff". 486 hardware was really slow, and the idea of doing any kind of real compu
30.
by dmbaggett 4y ago
Amazingly brilliant work, especially given the CPU capabilities at the time. Carmack's use of BSP trees inspired my own work on the Crash Bandicoot renderer. I was also really intrigued by Seth Teller's Ph.D. thesis on Precomputed

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