In the study, 183 children, ages 7–13, were asked to copy the dance-like movements of a video avatar for 1 minute, while their imitation performance was measured using CAMI. CAMI was able to correctly identify children with autism vs neurotypical children with a 80% success rate – importantly, CAMI also differentiated autism from ADHD with 70% accuracy.
Articles:
Developer: “Yesterday was mostly meetings. I wrote some code, but there was backlog grooming sync, then a retro, then another meeting about improving our meeting efficiency.”
Lead: “My friend, one glorious day we will simply do the work instead of talking about it for hours”
How is this an improvement from waterfall development? Meetings should serve a purpose and have a clear outcome or decision. Meeting should have the minimal people needed to avoid disruption. Steve Jobs threw people out of meetings if they weren’t necessary to the decision being made. There should be no meeting if there is no decision.
Scrum is too often poor at timely decision making. Instead of meeting after meeting in which everyone has to be present and people with stronger wills get their way too often; I have found a subset of scrum meetings can, and should, be done by just the people needed with a report out generated for others to remain in sync and give feedback if they were wrong. Example: PO’s exploring feasibility for direction don’t need the whole team there to make estimates. One or two senior folks can give good enough estimates. The whole team doesn’t need to be involved in a component design discussion – leave it to the story owners who then double-check if it doesn’t impact others. Map day shouldn’t be an 8 hour long snooze fest about scoping each story from scratch. If the scoping/design work is done by people interested in those stories before you get there, they can present a single slide on the estimate/work and get any critical feedback. Team leads and the PO can do backlog grooming alone.
Yes, this is a bit of a twist on the scrumm idea that the entire team commits to a delivery – but some decisions can be made by senior/trusted individuals owning the story/architecture.
Layoffs, generative AI, PC gaming, AAA and Online service games, how games are financed, and many other topics. Read the report here.
Collada was an interchange file format for 3D application that started around 2004 and largely died around 2016. I actually worked in a group with Remi Arnaud when it was being used for a project at Intel.
It was a sound idea. With lots of 3d packages and engines out there, getting files from one tool or engine to another was never easy. Since every authoring tool and game uses different structures for storing mesh, material, animation data, etc – the Collada format tried to define a open-standard format to store these relationships in an XML style text file. This allowed maximum flexibility to define relationships; but had the unfortunate side effect of generating sometimes gigantic files that were extremely slow to load.
While it was an extremely flexible format for exchanging data between packages or game engines, once you got there, it was dramatically faster to use a native binary format. Trying to load or save a XML based file format to load a block of content often took 10-100x longer than a binary version. The speed alone meant that it wasn’t practical for any realtime purposes.
Additionally, supporting the entire Collada spec would mean supporting every kind of data relationship – even if the tool or game didn’t need it. It meant that loaders often only implemented the desired features – which meant that you were almost back to where you started from. Custom loaders and savers with limited features. Except Collada files were gigantic and slow to load/save. A real problem when your primary costs are the speed of your content development.
Collada’s practical use was therefore primarily in one or two time transfers between tools. As time went on, and tools and engines consolidated on a few efficient binary formats, formats such as Collada became less and less useful. By the early 2010’s, development and work on it largely died. The last loaders were apparently updated in 2018 and the github site that hosts the binary versions is kind of broken.
At any rate, if you do need to load an old Collada file (.dae, etc) then you’ll need a copy of 3D Studio Max or Maya, and a plugin loader. You can download one of the last collada loaders here.
Install the plugin (make sure Maya is closed) and then start your tool (Maya in my case).
Ensure the Collada plugin is loaded. Go to the Windows-> Settings/Preferences -> Plug-in Manager in Maya and ensure the fbxmaya, FBX, or ColladaMaya pluings are loaded and/or set to auto load:
When you want to import a Collada file, go to File->Import and select the fbx/collada file you want to load and it should load it up.
Links:
It’s hard for us to conceptualize heaven, but we do know from saints and scripture that it is a place of complete fulfilment. That there are no secrets and all live in light and truth that is god.
But think about that: there are no secrets. You live in truth.
We also know that what we have done here on earth affects our experience of heaven. Those that have proven faithful will shine like the stars. Some that are last will be first, and some first shall be last. There will be distinctions – based on how we lived.
But think deeper – this means that every single person in this world we have encountered may be there. That at the last judgement, the nations will be laid out before the lord and we will all confront everyone in our lives we dealt with. Those we loved, those we hurt, those we cheated, the hard words we said, the lies we told about others, or even those we might have killed. If we expect to enter into heaven – where they may be – everything must be resolved and put right.
Do you live a life of hidden habits and behaviors? Hidden words? Hidden actions? Hidden infidelity? Do you live today with perfect honesty with those you love? Are your business deals honest and fair? Is there anything you do or say during the day you wouldn’t want EVERYONE to know? What if everyone knew your finances? How you conduct your business deals? How you pay or treat your workers? All of this will be on display to everyone – especially those it affects most.
If any of that makes you uncomfortable, then it’s time to evaluate your life and those actions. Because they must all be set aright before you can enter heaven.
If you get a chance to see Brit Floyd, I can 100% recommend it to any Pink Floyd fan. It’s not a cover band – Pink Floyd officially licensed and let them play their songs under the condition they are exactly as they played them. And boy do they deliver.
GDC used to be known for extravagant and wild industry parties. You usually needed to know someone and be invited to them. Those older days of extravigance seems to have faded as has the exclusivity. There are more and more public parties – and now there is even a website to catch many of them.
SeanHodgins made a really cool 3D Printable Christmas ornament marble machine. Even better – he released the designs all open source. Try it out yourself! https://makerworld.com/en/models/908637#profileId-869076
He has lots of other amazing builds – so check out his channel.
And here’s the thing about burnout—it’s not just exhaustion. It’s losing a piece of yourself.
I used to be a machine. An unstoppable, relentless force of will. A whirlwind of productivity. Thinking clearly, making decisions, holding massive amounts of information in my head—it was second nature. But after this? My brain fogged over. I’d sit down to solve a problem I’d spent years mastering… and I just couldn’t.
TomManages wrote one of the best accounts of the serious developer burnout I have ever read. It took him years to recover (fully?) from after working on Halo Wars 2. The comments about it on the gamedev forum were just as insightful.
I have been on a project like this in my early 20’s. Crunch and burnout like this are real. They take both professional and personal tolls. Some folks have to disengage from their career for months, years, or even permanently to recover. Sometimes folks never fully recover. Even if you do recover, you often find you have a new ceiling that is lower than before, or you start getting scared when you start getting those old feelings of being pulled too far. On a personal front, your mental health and relationships suffer. Many developers find themselves having to choose between game dev and having a family or a serious personal relationship/marriage. Relationship issues and divorces are common.
As I have gotten older, this kind of burnout seems to come with even less hours/mental strain. We don’t have the infinite energy of our 20’s forever. One of the things I’m most proud of is that when running a team of my own was reducing the crunch that was going on until we could deliver reliably, on-time, and without crunch.
Crunch that leads to burnout is a leadership failure. Period. Technical leaders cause this by mis-estimating time required for tasks, taking on too much technical complexity/risk that later turn into fire drills, or simply not doing their homework to ensure all the use cases and design pieces will work. Managers cause this by agreeing to ridiculous timelines, accepting marketing demands that should be out of scope, and poor change management that just keeps adding things instead of trading one task for another of equal complexity after the schedule is set.