I didn’t know how to title this. It’s not about technical work. Why software? The answer varies with our frame of reference: the level of detail at which we consider the relationship between software and human beings. A software developer will usually specialize on writing applications at a given scale, ranging from a single person up to billions of people. Usually, the more people using it, the... [Read More]

I’ve been learning the Unity Job System, Burst Compiler, and Collections package. They all go together. You don’t need ECS to use Jobs, which is a fact I sort of missed initially. ECS is not that useful for the code I am working on. I am prematurely optimizing, but specifically for the sake of learning how to optimize. But actually, first I am rewriting a large set of custom types. In fact, I am ... [Read More]

I have had a lot of difficulties with motivation. It has been going on for decades. I keep asking what I really want to accomplish, as a software and game developer. I’m afraid that I am not even that interested in developing an actual game, but only in the means by which computer games are developed. I am curious, but perhaps I have no real interest in any particular computer game existing or no... [Read More]

One of the things I’ve been working on is learning the Unity Entity Component System. This is the central technology underlying DOTS—Data-Oriented Tech Stack—the other of which is the Jobs system. Jobs are fairly straightforward. They are a Unity-friendly alternative to the .Net Task Parallel library. Tasks are the basis for asynchronous (and concurrent) programming in default .Net. The asynchro... [Read More]

I have various projects on the go, but only two are worth mentioning. Workshop. Between 2018 and 2022, I spent at least eighteen months (could be more) developing Workshop. Workshop is a building game, made with Unity. Imagine Minecraft (creative mode) crossed with Populous (an 80’s game from Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux) and MacPaint. You build with cube-shaped blocks using various 3D drawing to... [Read More]