iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s true! Though my memory is that they very much *did* invest in locks for the windows, and did *not* install a cat flap.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“We are exploring important philosophical questions, such as ‘if someone nurtures and trains 1000 exploding cats which subsequently escape through an open cat-flap, whom do we hold responsible for the actions of these entirely independent rogue super-cats?’ We need to accelerate this research.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“Since investing in basic security won’t work, the only path is to use our considerable resources to teach the cats our values, so they won’t want to accidentally trigger explosions. My own cat, Mitsy, still uses my shoes as a toilet, but I know she wouldn’t want to accidentally trigger explosions.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“And to those who are asking why we’re continuing to strap explosives to cats, given our conviction that they will inevitably escape our insecure facility; we’ve heard another country is also strapping explosives to cats. This is a terrifying prospect.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“To those who are asking why we’re not investing in a more secure research facility; having seen a cat navigate through a previously unobserved cat-flap, we’re confident that no prison on earth can hold a cat.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“To mitigate the risks of this kind of dangerous cat behaviour, we will hire someone to watch the 1000 cats for signs of dubious intent.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“We need to continue this vital research - I’m really excited to see what happens if you strap the explosives *to* the cats, and then introduce mice - but it’s seems likely someone will leave a window open, and a rogue bomb-cat will escape.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“Of course we put 1000 cats in a room filled with explosives and left them alone and fed for 30 days; it’s what we do. But the resulting blast was not our responsibility, it just demonstrates the extraordinary power and intelligence of cats, and the dangers of cats going rogue.”

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

“He gave the disappointed sigh of a man being greeted by the Unreal Engine logo on a Steam Deck.”

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Reposted by Simon Carter

Dave @sheepfilms.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I've always wanted to do invisible person effects

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

The pronunciation of ‘Anthony’ is unexpectedly high on the list of reasons I would be unlikely to move to the USA. #silo

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Microsoft is gutting id Software, and effectively killing off idTech? Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake were genre defining games, and the recent Dooms were technological marvels. Very sad, and very short-sighted. www.resetera.com/threads/id-s...

resetera.com

ID Software's Director of Engine Technology (id Tech) laid off along with engine support staff

The WARN notice lists the roles impacted (laid off already): The layoffs include the director of id Tech and the related programmers and leads.

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Reposted by Simon Carter

Wookash Podcast @gameengineering.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Recently had the opportunity to talk to the legend who made my childhood-beloved game Fable! @bbbscarter.bsky.social have worked at Bullfrog on Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper after which he and his brother Dene joined forces to work on something that would later become Fable! youtu.be/69pvUyBsruQ

youtu.be

Inside the Development of Fable | Simon Carter

YouTube video by Wookash Podcast

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Reposted by Simon Carter

Wayne Imlach @wimlach.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Here's an article I wrote a few years ago for The Casket of Fays (Dragon Warriors Fanzine). It was an expansion on one of the 'monsters' listed in the original Dragon Warriors rules. Mix of historical and contemporary inspiration (Jack Skellington). Casket of Fays can be found on Drivethru & Itch.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Playing ‘James Bond: First Light’, I’ve learned that everyone in British Intelligence is apparently enormously pass-agg.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Sigh. “Anthropic’s new model automatically finds flaws in software that runs with restricted permissions behind a firewall. Doom!” vs “VSCode extensions are neither moderated nor sandboxed, and execute arbitrary code locally on 50 million installs. Meh!” www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/securit...

bleepingcomputer.com

GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

GitHub has confirmed that roughly 3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Is `-fno-sanitize=shift-base` an option? (I've not tried it myself, and it might not be fine-grained enough.) gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g...

gcc.gnu.org

Instrumentation Options (Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC))

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Thanks Alex! I'd love to read the LBP version... :)

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Ah yes, it would have been lovely to release the Fable 2 PC port, but indeed, Microsoft’s priorities at the time were not aligned. Thankfully we managed to build those amazing Kinect mini-games instead. 😬

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I'm trying to write a little more frequently, so I wrote some words about the development of the original Fable. Yay! blog.simoncarter.me/blog/the-ori... #gamedev #fable #games

blog.simoncarter.me

The Origins of Fable

The story of Fable's origins - failed pitches, a game called Wishworld, and unlikely sources of inspiration.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Although apparently I can’t spell ‘gamedev’ properly. Moonring was originally a solo project by my brother Dene; it was nice to get to work with him again for the first time since Fable 2. #gamedev #moonring

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Oh,interesting, hadn’t seen the traits approach. That’s a fairly elegant solution. I’m in C#-land, and I’m mostly rolling a Unity-like solution. But you still end up fighting your root node a bit.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Yup, that makes sense. For me, ‘components’ are not much more opinionated than ‘nodes’. It’s slightly tricky to roll your own component system in Godot because of inheritance - a root node usually needs to be a canonical type (Node3d/Rigidbody/etc), which makes adding an Entity API tricky.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

And because this sort of thing is so common, people end up rolling their own solutions to implement this design pattern. Which is fine! It’s just a bit more friction and a bit more ad-hoc (for me, at least).

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Whereas in an engine with first class support for components, there’s a specific API for doing just those things - getting a component that’s on an entity by type; iterating over the components in an entity; broadcasting an event to all the components in an entity, etc.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

The main thing with a component system is to break an entity entirely into reusable modules - AI, collision, inventory, etc). You can do that in Godot with nodes - but there’s no canonical way to get a component; communicate from one component to another; broadcast an event to components, etc.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Good question! Before I answer, to clarify - I also like Godot, and I don’t want an ECS per se (an ECS adds various other elements as well as ‘components’, which I’m not considering here).

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Thanks! Although, Godot 4.4 mostly solves this now.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

I’m curious how people organise their ‘entity’ setups in Godot. Examples I’ve seen: - Component-like. Generic root node, component nodes directly under, accessed via node path. - Inheritance + module nodes. Root node is specific type, with members to assign sub module nodes. - etc #godot #gamedev

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Indeed - it’s still messy in the editor, and if you try to use inheritance to smooth out the rough edges you can end up in a fight with Node2D/Node3D/Rigidbody. But fundamentally you need an organising principle, or you end up with random node hierarchies with ad-hoc signal wiring.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I made no such suggestion - merely expressed a regret that it doesn’t exist.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I should add, this isn’t ‘Unity Nostalgia Syndrome’. I’ve been using component systems for a long time - I wrote one for Fable 25 years ago - because it’s a flexible and low-opinion architecture.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

That’s not what I suggested - as I say, I appreciate its agnosticism. At the same time, this agnosticism has drawbacks. A game engine shouldn’t be a hammer or a pickaxe, it should be a Swiss Army knife. Godot does this well, but lacks a bottle opener, so I keep opening my beer with a knife.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I very much like Godot and how architecturally agnostic and flexible it is - but I still find myself missing a first-class component-system. Sure, you can emulate it using nodes, but a proper component system is more than just nodes-with-children, and filling those gaps is tricky. #godot #gamedev

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Oh, many thanks - much appreciated!

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Watching Tenet over the weekend has me contemplating if every Christopher Nolan film is secretly a high budget episode of Red Dwarf with all the humour removed and padded out by 2 hours. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahH...

youtube.com

The Fight | Red Dwarf | BBC Studios

YouTube video by BBC Studios

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Yes, XAML is a whole other conversation. :)

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Looking into creating a small desktop GUI tool using something modern. Most tutorials assume you’re creating a business web app. “Obviously you want to use MVC/MVVM/Reactive/DI/Providers/Notifiers/State management.” No, I just want to hook up a few buttons to some data structures, thanks.

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Reposted by Simon Carter

Tim Rocktäschel @handle.invalid · 04/12/2024

Excited to reveal Genie 2, our most capable foundation world model that, given a single prompt image, can generate an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D worlds. Fantastic cross-team effort by the Open-Endedness Team and many other teams at Google DeepMind! 🧞

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

A short post on getting Emacs/Evil to work consistently with snake_case and camelCase, which was harder than I expected. blog.simoncarter.me/blog/emacs-e... #emacs #evil

blog.simoncarter.me

Emacs, snakes and camels

How to get Emacs Evil to work consistently with snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase.

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Simon Carter @bbbscarter.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

Hurrah! Godot is getting in runtime game editing support in 4.4. godotengine.org/article/dev-... Looking forward to not having to support my hacked together workaround - though it still works if you need a solution in the meantime: github.com/bbbscarter/G... #godotengine #godot

godotengine.org

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.4 dev 4

After a short delay due to GodotCon, we are back with another exciting update.

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