Delaney King Profile picture
Jun 24, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
A fundamental problem with mathematics is that it hides beautiful poetry behind an ugly wall of pretentious language and cryptic shorthand, and guards its gates with its most desiccated corpses dressed as teachers.
I hated maths because of the ugly encounters I was forced to endure through my formative years. Abusing, arrogant teachers, walls of arcane symbols and nobody to explain them, the problems impractical, more a punishment than a power.

That isn't what maths actually is.
This is how it is sold to us...
But this is what it is
And this
Its this...
This is how we are given maths
Maths can take us to a fun, and magical place.
Maths education is thankfully changing... but I want us to do more to dissolve down the barriers left by previous generations and build a language that is far more human and engaging.
I didn't learn to love maths until I started working with video game shaders years ago. Suddenly, those numbers and operations exploded into full color on my screen. Things warped, scaled, offset, danced to sine waves.

Maths became real to me. I finally got to see the magic

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More from @delaneykingrox

Nov 6, 2023
A video game that simulates #ADHD. The mission objective changes at random every few minutes and whenever you walk into a new room, your inventory shuffles one item and sometimes it becomes invisible for a few minutes.

You auto steer into table corners.
Whenever you get more than one sidequest there is a chance you go into overwhelm and your controller will pretend it is unplugged.

The corners of the level starts filling up with laundry.

You put down an item and it vanishes when you look away.
You have timed missions but during loading screens that can dramatically shorten by an hour or five.
Read 19 tweets
Oct 28, 2023
A 3d character walks into a bar.

The bartender doesn't say anything.

You realise you haven't put collision or a trigger volume on the bar asset.
A 3d character walks into a bar.

The bar jitters and flies off into the distance.

You need to turn off "use phsyics" on the bar asset.
A 3d character walks into a bar.

The bartender says "why the long face".

You sigh and open your 3d modelling ap. Long thin triangles are bad for quad draw performance.
Read 19 tweets
Oct 18, 2023
In Life Is Strange Before The Storm, one truth Rachel Amber tells Chloe during "two truths and a lie" that she is a Leo.
The brilliant thing is later if you pay attention, her birthday is the day after Leo ends. But her starchart has her on a cusp.

This is brilliant.
The series has a few moments of absolutely brilliant subtle clues in it that add layers of meaning, but you have to be sharp to spot them.
But if you miss those, there are still blatant clues around the place that give some level of depth.
The main mysteries of the game aren't hard at all, probably to a fault, but on replay there are far more little ones.
Read 21 tweets
Oct 13, 2023
A technique I highly recommend to #gamedev artists is to look at actual shipped game assets.

There are various ways to get hold of them, such as programs like Ninja Ripper, Utiny ripper or via archives.

And I must stress this is for learning purposes ONLY. NEVER use them.
Being able to look at models from a wide range of titles, see how they are rigged, how their Uvs are layed out, the triangle count and modularity... it all helps you understand the ACTUAL end result you are aiming for.
I think it is really important that students bridge the gap between where they are at, and what the end products are at.

You may think "oh, the models in X game are super high end, high tech stuff" but when you actually crack it open and examine it in your DCC...
Read 11 tweets
Oct 10, 2023
There is no ethical use of AI art.

There is no future for humanity in a world where all human endeavour is stolen and boiled down to something that replaces humans.

What do humans do in a world where humans are not employed to create?

Is that a world you want to live in?
If you take away the creative process of human artists into pool, the zeitgeist becomes entirely manufactured from an ever decreasing pool of looping cannibalism.

Pop literally eating itself.
Endless product without exploration. Product feeding on product.

No art movements, no re-evaluations of our place and relationship to the world.

Homogenisation and starvation.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 9, 2023
Draw calls are responsible for a good 50 percent of the chugging issues I have helped games with.

A draw call is "okay now draw me an apple, and come back when you are done for the next instruction."
Then you ask for another apple. Then when they return you ask for another...
So the GPU is running back and forth to the CPU when it could just do that once and "draw me a pile of apples".
Rendering an apple, in this example, takes a tiny amount of what a core on the GPU can render. So by welding all the apples into one bigger mesh, it can be done faster in one draw call than all the fucking around to draw them one by one.
Read 15 tweets

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