Worst Volume control
In 2017, there was a contest to design the worst possible volume control. It goes to show you that just because you make something look cool – it could be the worst design ever.
Even more can be found here.
Economists alarmed by dramatic declining school enrollment as people leave Portland
Besides bad management leading to a 10 year academic decline until Oregon is the 5th worst school system in the country, Portland has another new problem: dramatically declining student enrollment.
In 2023, Portland schools saw an astounding 17.3% enrollment decline. Parents simply pulled their children out of the failing, dangerous school system into private schools or moved elsewhere. What’s worse, is this trend has not only not stopped, but continues to see loss of students. This, all despite some of the highest spending per student and 30 years of complete Democratic party control.
Part of this may be due to the steady, 3 straight year population decline of Portland as people leave some of the highest taxes in the country, one of the highest property crime rates, and some of the least affordable housing due to urban growth restrictions. How bad is this decline?
The 2015 forecast, for example, predicted about 55,000 students for the 2028–29 school year. The latest forecast predicts PPS will dip below 40,000 that year, enrolling 39,945—about a 27% decline.
This means that Portland schools are about to see their funding dramatically cut since it’s based on student population – probably by about 30%.
Links:
Game Biz landscape in 2025
The greatest challenge to future games will be competing against those already out there – and that are refusing to go anywhere.
GamebizIndustry did a very interesting 2 part write-up on the current state of the game market that provides some data and commentary on the current gaming marketplace.
Some interesting points:
- Game spending is down as inflation and food/housing costs have gone up after Covid over-exuberance. Player counts are back to a more stable and sustainable level.
- Total game spending has been flat the last several years as we exited Covid. However, more games are getting released all the time so the simple math tells you the average game is making less than it was a few years ago.
- When a game now cost $200-250 million to make (instead of $20 million like in the past) risk tolerance goes to zero. Expect far less innovation in big titles and low-risk sequels.
- Behemoth games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, or Call of Duty are sucking all the air out of the room. They are ‘black hole’ games that suck everything in and keep it there.
- Those games are amazing at funneling players and keeping them there with their social hooks.
- Every IP holder is trying to get their IP into a Fortnite or into a Minecraft rather than building out their own games, because that’s where the audience is.
- A third of people who turn on their consoles every week are playing Fortnite. Half of the total hours spent on PlayStation or Xbox every month is in just the top ten live-service games. That’s before anyone else even gets a chance to be played even once.
- The data is clear: console buyers are becoming older and more affluent and the younger generations are choosing mobile or PC because of the ease of entry and because they already have the devices.
- What you’re seeing, particularly with younger consumers, is a default to the free-to-play entry point.
- Platform exclusive content’s days are numbered
- Everyone’s publishing everywhere. The expectation is that whatever I want to play, I can play it wherever I want. If not, I’m not interested.
- $80 price points
- Upfront price is a huge barrier to get people even to try a game. Why pay $80 when Fortnite is free and “big, complex, and with so many different ways of playing”
- Anything targeting the $80 price bracket is likely to either be a sequel or something that’s similar to another game that sold well – a ‘comparable’.
- Women make up a huge segment of the audience – accounting for roughly half of Switch players.
- They play and pay a lot less.
- They generally don’t self-describe as a gamer
- Even though the combination of outsourcing and AI could help to curb the rapid acceleration of game development costs, they are not sure it will actually create the deceleration of cost. AI is like Excel for accountants. It’s a tool that makes part of their job easier, but it’s still hard work that requires expertise.
- The future of game development will probably look more like movie production. Studios will likely only retain a small band of creative directors and producers, then hire contractors or co-development studios once the pre-production is done and concept set.
Links:
Database Normalization
I had forgotten the rules for the levels of database normalization. Not surprising since I last had the class over 20 years ago. Those problem sets immediately came back to me.
Nanite Foliage and Translucency
Dylan Browne demonstrates a 321 billion-polygon forest on UE5 (77,376 instances of 20 million poly trees). Nanite Foliage leverages a voxel-based method to achieve dense forests. The Witcher 4 uses it and it about to be debut in the upcoming release of Unreal Engine 5.
He also did a fascinating ray-traced translucency experiment
Links:
Architectural installations in Burning Man 2024
Dezeen did a good report on 10 different architectural installations at Burning man 2024
They also did one for Burning Man 2025
Imphobia demoscene magazine
The 90’s were an amazing time to learn to code. Especially in Europe, hundreds and even thousands of people would gather for weekend-long, round-the-clock caffeine fueled coding sessions to flex their latest graphics programming tricks on Amigas, Commodores, PC’s, and other hardware.
Imphobia was the leading PC demoscene diskmag of the first half of the 1990s. Founded in 1992, it issued until 1996. In that period, 12 issues were released.
Early issues of Imphobia run in DOSBox except issues 6 and beyond where the graphics are not displayed correctly, probably because of the use of an obscure video mode. Nevertheless it’s possible to read the articles. All Imphobia issues are available at scene.org and can be seen at Demozoo.
Reducing tree rendering bandwidth
AMD researchers have published a VRAM-saving technique that leverages procedural generation techniques to eliminate the need for sending the GPU 3D geometry altogether. The GPU utilizes work graphs and mesh nodes to produce 3D-rendered trees on the fly at the LOD (Level of Detail) required for the current frame.
Instead of requiring massive amounts of geometry, the only thing transferred is the code needed to generate the trees in the scene – code that is only a few kilobytes instead of megabytes or even gigabytes.
Read the paper here.
Using hiking poles properly
A lot of folks don’t understand how to use hiking poles on ascent/descent to their fullest potential. Those straps are more than just for looking good or to avoid dropping them – they’re for leverage and to help pull yourself up hills and ease yourself down descents. You can hike with your arms as much as your legs and save your knees.
Zelda’s sound rendering mechanism
Game audio has come a long way from the days of Pac-man. Those original games could manage some beeps and bloops from a single channel speaker. As time went on, sampled sounds and stereo allowed for more realistic material sounds and music. Then was the introduction of surround sound systems and directional effects.
Like most modern games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild relied on a standard library of sound effects blended into the gameplay. But this would not work for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It needed a much more complex system to meld sounds together and interact anywhere in the game world. It would simply become to much work to simulate an arrow shot in all the different environments found in the game. Caves need to echo, desert sands absorb sound, and what if the arrow lands in water, or ice, or on stone? Further, all of this must be attenuated based on distance and obstructions so players can tell where things are coming from and how far away they are.
Junya Osada, the lead audio engineer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, started sharing the mechanisms of how they achieved this. They use a variety of specialized filters that were attached to informational voxel geometry under the map used to describe the environmental characteristics above it. Those voxels were used for game mechanics – and were co-oped to also help the sound. This environmental information is then combined with the players distance and direction from the sounds using their unique method to create some interesting emergent properties.
The system isn’t a full-fledged sound rendering system that has been explored before, but it’s a very interesting halfway ground from what we have today to such a system. It’s definitely worth a listen (which happens after the equally interesting talk about the physics engine):