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MichaelEstes's comments

MichaelEstes | 3 months ago | on: Blender 5.0

That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.

MichaelEstes | 5 months ago | on: Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)

I might be in the minority, but I hate type re-definitions, I want types to just tell me how much memory a variable is using and it’s bit interpretation. Every variable already has a name, use that to communicate the data’s representation and if it’s really important that representation mismatches are caught at compile time wrap it in a struct. I don’t want to guess how much memory the compiler decided a variable needed (though that is also present to an extent in C/C++)

MichaelEstes | 2 years ago | on: Do you conduct backchannels on candidates you're moving to offer?

A long time ago I had a company backchannel someone I actually would have listed as a reference except I knew he was out of country and on vacation. That left a sour taste in mouth and I ended up not going with their offer. So if you’re going to backchannel I’d suggest at least not cold calling.

MichaelEstes | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2023)

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Remote: Ideally

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Python, React, Unity, Three.JS, AWS, Maya, C4D, Substance, Photoshop

Résumé/CV: estes.es

Email: [email protected]

Red Flags: I spend too much time picking fonts, I have trust issues with black box code, I spend more time on making things easier to make than just making the things, I pace when I’m thinking and I can’t solve most problems without drawing it out.

MichaelEstes | 2 years ago | on: Unity to Godot Docs

Depends on the asset, most code or UI tools would probably be a no without a good amount of effort to port, 2D and particle assets you can most likely rip the image files and recreate in another engine with some work. 3D assets usually come with an FBX file (If they were made using Probuilder or something inside Unity you can use Unity's FBX exporter to get an FBX file) that you can easily transfer to another engine, there may be some edge cases where you'd have to re-rig the assets depending on the engine you're moving to. For animation assets they'll either be an FBX file that you can transfer over or an Unity Animation Clip that you can also convert to an FBX using the FBX exporter. Shaders are a little bit vendor locked if they were made with Shader Graph, you can get the generated source for the shaders, but it is generated which can make it hard to read (single letter variables/function names). There's a ton of edge cases you could run into depending on the engine you're moving too, like Z being up vs Y being up or engines using a different normal map tangent basis, but there's tools that can fix those issues when you come up against them.

MichaelEstes | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Technical cofounders, what's most important to you?

I’ve spent a good amount of time on YC’s cofounder matching service and my biggest problem is not anything that can be fixed by a better platform. Most the “ideas” for products are dystopian, moral-less get-rich-quick schemes that I’d have to abandon any semblance of ethics to get behind. Web3 especially has brought out the “music men” of the world and given them a platform. Fuck this “do anything for a buck” world we’ve built.

MichaelEstes | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What uses have you found for ChatGPT?

I’ve mostly used ChatGPT for finding functions in more obscure or densely documented APIs, it shaves some time off when I go “I know Maya must have a python function that can do this” and I can ask CharGPT without having to dig through their documentation. I would say it’s been about a 60% success rate, 20% of the time it gets it completely right, 40% of the time it gives me a good starting point and the other 40% I’m stuck digging through documentation anyways.

MichaelEstes | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?

Similar to the rest of the tech industry, game dev is a very wide field, if you want to work on large games I would suggest you figure out where in the pipeline interests you most (technical art, gameplay, tools/engine, networking, audio, rendering, live Ops) and build projects that revolve around that domain. If you want to work on smaller games then you just have to start making games. To me, the only real difference between game programming and most other programming is the need for more complicated math so making sure you have a solid understanding of the maths used will serve you far better than learning any specific language/engine.

MichaelEstes | 3 years ago | on: No to AI Generated Images

It’s still odd to me that the sentiment on HN around the iCloud CSAM scanning was very negative, but from what I’ve seen the sentiment around AI tools built on scanning prior works (Dalle, Copilot) seems pretty positive. In my mind they’re one in the same. There’s an expectation that the files you upload to a cloud service won’t be viewable to anyone without your permission, but until recently there was also an expectation that the work you upload to the internet, no matter where you uploaded it, wouldn’t be used by entities for their own personal profit. At least the iCloud scanning had the facade of being for an altruistic purpose going for it.

MichaelEstes | 3 years ago | on: Craft

One interesting thing I’ve noticed over my career bouncing between the video game industry and general software industry is that every decently sized game studio I’ve worked for has had people in the role of technical artist, these are the people who bridge the gap between art and engineering, but I’ve never seen a similar role though at massively larger software companies. I’ve seen people with strong design sense in engineering and people with engineering skills in design, but it’s always been siloed enough that they’ve never been able to really make an impact one way or another on the final product. I’ve always thought I would reuse that same structure even if I was making non video game software.

MichaelEstes | 3 years ago | on: News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta

I’ve had to opposite experience as someone who’s worked extensively with platforms that utilize webviews, when Safari 15 released it broke a lot of WebGL things with their shift to using Metal and all I can say to users that are experiencing problems is update your OS or disable the experimental feature to use Metal with Safari, which both feel like awful answers. Safari has become the modern IE in my mind.

MichaelEstes | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

Spending time reminding myself that there is no soul, god, afterlife or anything likewise as a reminder that we’re just animals and our consciousness’ need to be anything more is ego getting in the way of being truly empathetic and reverent of the time we have here.
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