Andrew Meggs

My career has been writing C++ code for game engines.

Most of those engines were in-house. I did the work as a part of teams developing specific games.

The current engine is a separate thing, used by several games but apart from any specific one.

Categorize that as you like.

....aaaand it doesn't wake from sleep. It's been TWO DECADES since I last tried to use Linux on a desktop. How is this STILL the thing that it can't get right?

Oh. Oh no. I picked a distro that buries the lede until you commit to an install, then boom. Unironic anime catgirl as the mascot.

Welp. In for a penny, guess this is who the Linux Desktop is by and for in 2026, etc.

Might as well just embrace it.

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.

Not this year, but I have been in the past. Right now I'm helping create tools and engines and platforms to enable other creators. I'll come full circle at some point.

What this underscores is the sheer danger of market consolidation in gaming. While companies like Valve and Epic do not legally have to carry a game, to not do so is functionally a death knell for that game on the PC; Santa Ragione has said it threatens the studio’s continued existence. This is not equivalent to a theater chain declining to carry a movie; this is two (mostly one) American companies more or less deciding what content is commercially viable across most of the world, in ways that are somehow more vague and opaque than the MPAA. This is a hegemony of American prudishness, applied globally, incoherently, unevenly, and unseriously. Anybody responsible for these decisions would be vaporized in seconds by a Pinku movie from the 1970s, and if a single person in this chain of command has an arts degree they are pretending they don’t for the sake of an ill-defined idea of business. Horses cannot be the ceiling for what is artistically and commercially possible in games, because otherwise we are in deep horseshit.

Chris Person takes a look at Horses, "the indie game that is too scandalous for either Valve or Epic, is only beyond the pale if you're not familiar with any other art form" (quoted from the article blurb).

aftermath.site/horses-indie...

At least read this paragraph:

OK @skantron.bsky.social liked this, so I'm just going to put this out there... Imagine the emergent jankfest sandbox classic for the ages if they actually let me be lead on ES6.

“Dark role-playing masterpiece/dropped bag of spanners” is kind of my whole IRL personality, so that would totally track. @pcgamer.com www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/22...

Literal centuries—maybe even millennia—of brilliant effort went into making this thing, and I'm totally fine saying "meh" to all of it because of one typo that's entirely my own fault, and a huge backlog of Overwhelmingly Positive games.

IMO the core of game industry unsustainability is simply: More really great games than people's free time can sustain. I believe Arc Raiders is a really great game. But this one tiny thing is all it took to make it a razor's edge less great than all the other really great choices I have.

Not really complaining; there's a TON of great releases right now; I'll happily play those. But observing—as a dev—how one tiny missed keystroke, in conjunction with a one-size-fits-all policy, had made all the difference in which of those new releases get my money and which particular one won't.

A study in quit points: Joined the #ArcRaiders playtest pre-coffee. Typo'd the Embark screen name in way I find too embarrassing to be seen in public. Can't change for 30 days, thus won't play Arc Raiders for 30 days. By that time I'll have missed any real chance to onboard, thus likely never.

TFW the Google Photos AI generates a "Sand & Sea" album containing your family beach pics and some in-engine video of a water shader that you wrote a few years ago.

Meta Says New 'Horizon Worlds' Engine Update Brings Faster Loading and Up to 100 Concurrent Users Today at Connect, Meta said it’s rolling out an updated version of the engine that powers Horizon Worlds. The new tech will purportedly speed up loading of Horizon Worlds spaces and allow up to 100 us...

Nice to finally decloak. Here's what I've been working on.

There's much more to do, if you're into making these sorts of things.

www.roadtovr.com/meta-horizon...

Expectations are everything. If they'd just called it something like "VtM: Blood & Phyre", everybody would have been super enthusiastic to see how Chinese Room did their own modern take on WoD. Hope folks give this a shot for what it is, instead of raging at what it isn't — so there'll be more WoD.

a man in a purple shirt is standing in a field with two other men . ALT: a man in a purple shirt is standing in a field with two other men .

No reason.

I think of WGSL as human-readable portable object code, optimized for very fast conversion to both SPIR-V and Metal IR, and supporting "linking" via simple string concatenation. That's actually a pretty solid combo; just not the one for primary authoring.

Currently sitting in an airport with a laptop, using a phone hotspot to VPN into a data center to control an on-demand devserver to orchestrate automated testing on a rack of VR headsets. I am still blown away that we've somehow made this future Just Work.

Aw shit. Here we go again.

OUR son, now. I've adopted him.

Art by • Keith Rankin

Feels like there's some kind of cute algorithm for dithering where you alternate back and forth between picking colors in Oklab, then computing and diffusing errors in linear RGB.

New physics simulation technique just dropped

graphics.cs.utah.edu/research/pro...

Real-Time GPU Tree Generation - Supplemental YouTube video by Bastian K (KU BA)

The total unification of scholarly talks at respected conferences and "Check out my 64k demo".

Real-Time GPU Tree Generation; Kuth, Oberberger, Faber, Pfeifer, Tabaei, Baumeister, Meyer; HPG 2025

diglib.eg.org/items/93fc78...

youtu.be/DZlJ4bHx1OQ

High-Performance Graphics 2025 High-Performance Graphics 2025 - June 23-25 Copenhagen

Hi Copenhagen! I'm excited to be giving the first of the Hot3D talks tomorrow at HPG. Hope to see some of my fellow graphics nerds there!

highperformancegraphics.org/2025/program...

Because aggregating and selling PII for marketing purposes is part of the business model. None of this was ever for our benefit.

Yes, even the local pizza chain. They're not running an ad business, but are selling to a broker, likely without understanding (or caring about) non-pizza implications.

Nothing will ever top EIEIO. www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/...

Imperial units as a cautionary case study in letting your DSL grow beyond its original scope.

if you face swap Mulder and Scully they look like a great Synth Pop band. (above a photo of face swapped Mulder and Scully)

the Inhuman League