Wishlist: s.team/a/2922750 C Custom Engine. YouTube: youtube.com/@olexgamedev Objectivist (Ayn Rand)
Joined December 2009
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21 Jul 2025
I've been dreaming of this C profiler for my game for over a year. It's now here. It shows me the slowest code logic that runs over my game components in real time. Each one is a lambda that I can find at the file name and line number.
An hour after I made this, I already optimized my game significantly by actually seeing what was slow and then optimizing it. For example, I optimized a C lambda from 750us down to 50us (cost per frame).
This level of introspection into my game is god-like vision. Not seeing any perf impact of having this on either, so it's on by default.
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Struct of Arrays is not a religion. Measure the performance and use it where it helps. My ECS storage is explicitly not a Struct of Arrays per Component type, because my game logic access multiple component types for each entity. So it is faster for me to group component by entities, thus using the great sin of an Array of Structs. Oh no!
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Here is an example of a robot ability that has to grab all kinds of data for its logic. If each of these components were in separate arrays, that would be far away in memory.
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On the other hand where I need to perform a lot of operations on a smaller set of data then I break it up into separate arrays, such as in cloth sim on CPU.
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“Why would you reinvent the wheel, bro?” 🤡
20h
white pill for my nerds:
60fps e-ink display
a random guy outperformed entire eng teams by developing a pixel by pixel driver for e-ink displays that makes it 60fps.
he did that after work for months, launched it yesterday.
the future is bright
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AI is more helpful to a generalist than a specialist. My specialty was never graphics programming but as a solo dev, a few simple answers are a goldmine for me to get started and iterate until I am satisfied while quickly learning the topic.
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My favorite personal example of this is: easily beating the performance of an open source ECS system by 2x-3x that hates loops with my implementation that uses nothing but loops over linear arrays.
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AI application has no bounds.
Jun 12
“He [Fedorov] is leading an effort to monetize or trade Ukrainian war data, including a library of more than five million annotated videos of the battlefield filmed by surveillance and strike drones… Last month [April], the Defense Ministry, through a program called Avenger Labs, opened up the data sets to companies from allied nations to train artificial intelligence models… Access to Avenger Labs is conditioned on Ukraine receiving the A.I. models that are produced from the data. About 20 companies have expressed interest.”
nytimes.com/2026/05/15/world…
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Grab & Smack, working on the new robot mechanics. Here I am using the first item the idea I saw in Unreal Engine where an animation is driven by the distance to the target. This way the attack animation lands cleanly on the target as the robot closes in.
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An awesome new Steam personal calendar feature came out last year and indies paid absolutely no attention. But then a hard to use Popular Upcoming gets modified and the wailing begins. Bros, grow a spine and attention to details. It helps in making games and processing Steam changes.
store.steampowered.com/news/…
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See your own calendar here, it's amazing: "store.steampowered.com/perso…"
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Case in point: x.com/shawnownu/status/20629…
Saw someone on Reddit get 2k wishlists today after the change and it pointed to that
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Getting hired today involves doing an hour long interview with AI, where you wonder if the job is real or if you are just providing free training data for more AI. :P
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Okay, this is actually fun. It takes a different way to dodge these robots. Now I can experiment if a short stun on grab and a melee attack on arrival feels fun.
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What other version control system lets you see the server stats from the client? Ark VCS does! It's so cool to have unusual features. My repo just went over 2GB on the server.
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Starting another ECS pass of moving off overly large components into static arrays outside of ECS and referencing the data by an index (for example, Animation component points into skinned matrices with an index). I prefer to keep ECS for smaller components. So of course, I need a tool to measure the top 10 largest components I have.
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The megabyte component has been moved out into some large array storage. Going stop that at that for now.
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I love chatting with ChatGPT on a side while thinking about design and data structure. It came up with a name for my version of pool allocator: "Fixed-Slot-Allocator-With-Lowest-Free-Hint."
Hmm, O(1) implementation might be an intrusive free list (according to ChatGPT)? Interesting but I doubt that is any faster in my practice. Since keeping the smallest free index limits the linear search down to nothing, since less temporary entities tend occupy the start of the array and more transient entities tend to cycle in and out at the end of the array.
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Statistics has brainwashed devs to give up on reason. "Chance of a game succeeding on Steam is 1 in N, where N is a large number!" And the wailing begins. But wait, are you the average developer in that group? What were the chances of you becoming a good developer/designer? "No, no, I don't want to think and consider all angles. I want to cry about challenges!"
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Most devs are just not honest enough with themselves and their product and just complain about lack of visibility. No, bros, it's your game's quality that is hurting you not the lack of visibility.
I have only paid and played 1 game with less than 500 reviews in the last decade for more than 15 minutes, and even then it was mainly for market research for my game's genre (Diablo-likes). And even though I liked the game, it was very clear why the game stays at that level of reviews.
I am actually impressed that you can make even that much money on Steam. This game probably made in the range of 150k with 500 reviews in 1 year or so. Steam players are very forgiving.
store.steampowered.com/app/2…
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