phoboslab's comments

I'd argue that if you have an IN() with more than a dozen values, you're doing it wrong. Especially so if that's something that your app does often and it needs to be fast (as opposed to one-of analytic queries where you don't care about performance).

The unlicensed source makes this difficult. My current plan is to trim the game to a demo with one race track, compile it to WASM, put it on my website and get Sony's attention (maybe through Nightdive Studios?) for a proper re-release.

In the likely event that this fails, I'll just YOLO it and put it on Github. After all, Sony didn't care that I published[1] all of wipEout's assets seven years ago.

[1] https://phoboslab.org/wipeout/

I've been working with the leaked wipEout source code for a while[1] and I can assure the quality of the Quake source is absolutely stellar in comparison. While Quake's source may not be up to modern best practices, the overall architecture certainly has a lot of structure and thought put into it.

Modifying Quake to run on the Occulus Rift was a breeze[2], compared to the mountains of garbage I have to wade through with wipEout.

[1] https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/1653707447586922498

[2] https://phoboslab.org/log/2016/05/quake-for-oculus-rift

You assume that the quake maps were built sequentially, but that's not the case. Since this was all new technology, the "best" maps were conceived at the end of development, after the team was familiar with the tech. You want those maps to be at the start of the game, as it's the first thing the player sees.

Also, the distinct style of the last episode is easily explained by the fact that all of its maps were built by Sandy Petersen. E3 was mostly American McGee, while John Romero and Tim Willits worked on E1 and E2.

I'm not a fan of Petersen's maps either, but they are regarded (and liked) as quite unique, compared to the rest of the game.

In Germany you can pay 35€/mo for 5GB of data traffic (t-mobile) and then enjoy the bandwidth of 5G for a full 40 seconds. It's a total joke.

Good catch! That's likely an artifact of the LMS state being quantized[1] at every frame border. I will look for ways to improve this.

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/qoa/blob/master/qoa.h#L324-L336

Curiosity mostly. As stated in the article, Opus is excellent and better than QOA in every way except in complexity (and as a result, performance). A possible application for QOA is games, where you need to play dozens of audio files immediately.

I haven't done any formal benchmarks, but with a simple `time` on the command line QOA encodes 10x faster and decodes 7x faster than Opus.

QOA should be quite suitable for SIMD optimizations, which would improve performance even more. Still on my todo list.

Traditional ADPCM is not terrible, it's just "meh". Compare:

- Original, 4039kb: https://phoboslab.org/files/qoa-samples/adpcm_comp/orig.wav

- MS ADPCM, 1022kb: https://phoboslab.org/files/qoa-samples/adpcm_comp/ms_adpcm....

- QOA, 812kb: https://phoboslab.org/files/qoa-samples/adpcm_comp/qoa.wav

IMA ADPCM is in the same ballpark as MS ADPCM. ADX (not listed) comes close to QOA, but at 1136kb is also larger than those traditional ADPCM flavors.

While what you're saying is true - QOI performs badly with some types of images - I want to push back on the notion that the demo images have been "carefully selected" to tell a narrative. TFA alleges the same. This is absolutely not the case!

The benchmark suite[1] I compiled contains many different types of images. The "industry standard" sets like the Kodak and Tecnick Photos, texture packs and icons are complete. No images have been removed from these sets. Some of the other collections (photos and game screenshots from Wikipedia and those from pngimg.com) are a random sample. I did not remove any images just because they compressed badly.

Also, the fact that some images compress badly is a non issue, if the whole set of assets that you need for your game/app combined have an acceptable compression ratio. If that's not the case, by all means, chose another image format.

On average, for a lot of assets types, QOI usually performs quite ok.

[1] https://qoiformat.org/benchmark/

I first encountered this in the Flac source[1]. They do the bit twiddling a bit differently than in this article:

    uval = (val<<1) ^ (val>>31);

Variations of this have probably been used countless of times in other libraries.

[1] https://github.com/LordJZ/libflac/blob/master/src/libFLAC/bi...

Very true. Apple has removed several of my games (all working perfectly fine) because, well, they felt like it:

> Since this app hasn’t been updated within the last three years [...] it has been removed from the App Store

True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics.

We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.

Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!

> What is Krebs' false positive rate?

You only ever hear about it when he gets high profile cases wrong.

When my project was targeted by him, he ended up going down some conspiracy rabbit hole and doxed all the wrong people. This forced me to issue a correction - mission accomplished, I guess.

During his "investigation" he accidentally sent an email that was meant for his business partner to some of my friends. It offered a glimpse into his sensationalist mindset. I don't have much respect for that guy.

Pardon my ignorance: Are messages sent through this guaranteed to arrive in order?

This repo says how it relates to other implementations but curiously fails to mention what "expect" actually is.

So for everyone as ignorant as myself, I guess it's referring to this[1]:

> Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc.

[1] https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/index

You can get some IDE support with a simple preprocessor macro[1].

It's a crutch, but at least you don't need to stuff the shader into multiple "strings" or have string continuations (\) at the end of every line. Plus you get some syntax highlighting from the embedding language. I.e. the shader is highlighted as C code, which for the most part seems to be close enough.

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/pl_mpeg/blob/master/pl_mpeg_pla...

> MPEG is not free. A license is required for using MPEG.

For MPEG-1 this is not true anymore. All patents have expired. It's also far less computationally expensive and easier to implement/integrate than more modern codecs. This makes MPEG-1 a "good enough" solution for (e.g.) short video clips in a game.

Disclaimer: I wrote pl_mpeg[1], so my opinion is biased.

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/pl_mpeg

> Square Enix says the transaction (which was only $300 million) "enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud."

~ https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1521017861803704321

Doesn’t seem like an official release, but really cool either way. Time to dig in and see what I got wrong in my 2015 reverse engineering[1] of the data format!

[1] https://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeou...

Sorry to rain on your parade, but this looks seriously over-engineered. There are 71 files in this github repo (6914 after `npm install`) for something that requires ~100 lines of code.

Related: here's some PHP code I wrote 14 years ago that does something similar, but tries to generate aesthetically pleasing avatars:

https://phoboslab.org/log/2008/12/instant-avatars