Linkblog/2025/02/28

Seeing the background of Billy in this documentary is so cool.

Must watch.

As mentioned yesterday, Karl threw together a dope template for doing hot reloading in Sokol, today he’s dropped a video going over the project!

Undo/redo mechanics in the context of a game, very cool.

Turns out, Minecraft since launch, has had an extremely small offset from truly being at where the players camera should be.

Sean shows that off here:

private void moveCameraToPlayer(float a) {
    glTranslatef(0.0F, 0.0F, -0.3F);

    glRotatef(player.xRot, 1.0F, 0.0F, 0.0F);
    glRotatef(player.yRot, 0.0F, 1.0F, 0.0F);

    float x = player.xo + (player.x - player.xo) * a;
    float y = player.yo + (player.y - player.yo) * a;
    float z = player.zo + (player.z - player.zo) * a;
    glTranslatef(-x, -y, -z);
}

That first glTranslatef call is the culprit: it moves the camera back 0.3 units on the Z axis before rotating it, causing it to orbit 0.3 units away from the location it should actually be at.

Wow.

It was fixed in 1.14.4, which was released in July of 2019.

Another Sean old Minecraft deep dive post, these are good.

The above screenshot, is not a fan project, but a built in applet you could view in a webpage to get a isometric view of the game.

Sean goes into details with when the feature was removed, but fragments of the code remained, until it broke (become nothing but a red screen), and was ripped out, “likely a victim of the giant refactor that made singleplayer run a local server”.

Lots of praises of Jolt, lots of hate for Bullet.

I’d love for there to be good C bindings for one of these, I’m currently not sure what I would choose for 3D physics in Odin.

Thankfully, Box2d is vendor’d, but its 2D…

I don’t know the scope that would go in to making a proper set of bindings to Jolt for Odin, there are some work in progress bindings, but supposedly they are nothing more than a preview of what might be possible, running only the ‘hello world’ of Jolt.

One of the most frequent comments from developers about the Switch’s CPU was that “Main processing would take up its full capacity, making it difficult to deal with background loading.”

The Nintendo Switch has 4GB of RAM, whereas the PS4 and Xbox One have 8GB. With the Switch’s RAM being half that of the other consoles, the developers had to find ways to optimize and reduce game data when porting titles originally designed for more powerful hardware. As one engineer mentioned, exceeding available RAM would cause crashes, so significant effort was required to carefully manage how much data could remain in RAM, as well as how loading and preloading could be handled.

As far as a quick vibe check over ~2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.

I have yet to give Grok 3 a go, but I keep hearing great things.

Would be nice if this was built into Cursor though, I seldom AI code out of a VSCode fork these days.

From Simon Willison’s Webblog

People can’t get enough of the Roblox business model it seems…

First Fortnite, now GTA VI.

Bring back the popularity of Garry’s Mod…