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Kingsley Hopking

@beardyking.bsky.social
1K followers 490 following 215 posts

Personal | Engine programmer | Tinkerer of triangles | 🏳️‍🌈 💼 - Activision, Central Tech 📌 - Manchester, UK 🐀 - Keith gang 💭 - Opinions are my own 🌐 - sharkwithlegs.com

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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
I agree I suspect that the effort to port specific medium size features out of one engine decomp to another is something no one would want to do by hand unless they are absolute sickos for both those games. All of this is a totally unexpected usage of LLMs.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
I do think there is going to be genuine concern for large businesses around a groups of folk decomping a new game and porting “some” of the new features to some abomination project or maybe even a live service platform that has scripting support. Which could potentially affect sales if widespread.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
I should clarify that when I mentioned about exe distribution / patching, it was meant as a: “the modding community used to be very careful because it’s a legal grey area” using LLMs in any capacity puts you at risk, as the models essentially contain a compressed representation of the source data.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
MW2 (2009)*
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
Oh my… I’m mostly aware of the rust MW3(2009) x Skate3 code which from what I can tell basically ported 2 OSS clean rooms to rust under a different license and them merged parts of the codebase w/ additional BSP loading code. I suspect that a bunch of that also contains Quake3 code too.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
I believe that with clean room reimplementation of 2 different games that you should be able to merge them. it’s specifically a problem with LLM usage that creates significant legal risk. Historically the modding scene used exe patchers to avoid exe distribution for a reason, It’s illegal.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
Source available is not open source. It is not your code to distribute. Even if it was OSS there are licensing & legal terms for OSS code It’s either an unintended consequence of the language / engine or intentional feature intended to sell copies in the long tail after release or build community
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 8h
Totally agree, I feel like I’m going absolutely insane when i see someone actively gloating about how they reverse engineered a project with an LLM. They are admitting wrong doing… Even if there is little to no legal precedent at this very moment, I have to believe it will catch up eventually.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 9h
I just have to assume that if someone/ business uses LLMs in a paid or OSS software that person/business is perfectly fine with thievery.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 9h
I think that it’s increasingly going to become a massive legal bomb there is no way these fucking companies aren’t taking premium software and running the c# / Java / gdscript reverse engineering tools that spit out basically the source code for use as input.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 9h
There is absolutely a storm coming when a group decomps a game that just released and it’s proven that the LLM is directly trained on leaked source code & thats why it could partially rebuild the code I think most know slop mashups kinda work this way but the games are old / not worth fighting over
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 18h
Day 6: Ogre for #inktober #inktober2026 Saw some interesting dark area hatching on the internet recently and wanted to give it a try, I think that it could be an interesting effect to use projected around a light source. Which I would like try another day.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
This is so cool!!!
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Aaaa, thank you!! It’s been very rewarding to make illustrations again, it’s been ~5 years since I’ve finished a piece of art. barring things like game design sketches & doodles for my daughter.. I feel it’s an important time to make with one’s hands considering how many folk are treating art rn
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Day 5: Smack for #inktober #inktober2026 Sketched this one over lunch, was originally planning on drawing a boat but decided against it as yesterday’s sketch included clouds.
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ShizuokaBen🌱 @shizuokaben.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Day 3 - Miniature Only day three and I’ve already drawn a frog. This was a little tricky given how small my sketchpad is. #inktober #inktober2026 #art #イラスト
Ink and marker drawing of a tiny frog walking through a messy forest of plants
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is so cool, I absolutely love the vibe!!!
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Day 4: Cactus for #inktober #inktober2026 Originally planned this as a starry night scene, but the largest black pen I own right now is a 0.4 that bleeds
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Day 3: Miniature for #inktober #inktober2026 Really happy with how the little mouse came out for this one, the character is from a game design doc I made a few years back and I’ve been dying for an excuse to re draw them!
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Luis Roding @luisroding.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
For this Inktober, I matched a selected group of prompt words to a scene from an original story: Complex City. A science fiction novel in which individuals are treated as disposable assets by groups of power, but will someone rebel? #inktober2026 #inktober2026relic #inktober #complexcity #luisroding
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
#inktober day 2: Relic (Micron 0.03, 0.05 & Brushpen)
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It’s been a long time since I’ve participated in #inktober publicly, but I believe it’s more important than ever to just make shit with your own hands! (Micron 0.03)
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Joe @joegamedev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I'm making a #blender add-on that lets you sculpt directly onto low poly models via the manipulation of object space surface normals under the hood
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Delaney King (She/Her/Whomst) @delaneyking.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Vibe coding? Oh you mean technical-debtmaxxing?
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
These frog shoes absolutely complete the vibe 10/10.
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kukyuk @kukyuk.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I coudn't resist and drew one of my favorite Palico outfits ( + added little frog shoes) #monsterhunter #fanart #palico #frog #art #artist #doodle #digitalart #procreate
Palico frog outfit fanart ~ Monster Hunter RiseOriginal Palico frog outfit ~ Monster Hunter Rise
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
That’s so cool I am incredibly jealous! It’s crazy how large they are in person!
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Wrote a chip8 emulator over a few evenings Im designing a little automation toy project that chain i/o of tiny machine I understood the gist of how they work, but never sat down to write one. Have a good base to go on from here Also somehow the windows term cant keep up printing a 64x32 display??
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
That’s cool as hell, keep it up!
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
A while ago I mentioned writing a set of blogposts around the joy of programming / rolling your own. I’ve been busy this last year but I’m nearly at the point where I wanted to be before I start writing. Last thing is a packager that bundles up all the trivial data into mmapable blob from disk.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
For the release version of my engine hashmaps don’t need to remove entries or resize so I can use a much simpler data structure without over allocating the hashmap. I’m considering building a minimal perfect hash from the data & then storing a salt, this way I can remove all the probing code.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Wrote a trivial to serialise append only open address hashmap last night. landed on a pow2 sparse indirection table that indexes into flat arrays of KVPs All the buffers use relative pointers so loads in a single mmap. Im surprised at how little code was required for the implementation.
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RossyDoesDrawings (commissions open) @rossydoesdrawings.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I drew a comic strip.
a comic strip. The first panel shows a goblin in a long coat approaching a guard. The second panel has the goblin saying "we're just normal men!". The third panel has the guard replying "what do you mean normal men?". The fourth panel shows both the goblin in the coat and the guard. The coat is beginning to open to show many goblins within. The guard looks suspicious and a goblin emerging from the coat is saying "We're just innocent men!"
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Sharlock93 @sharlock93.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We have a buncha senior positions open, we have very exciting projects coming down the line, I promise you won't be disappointed, we also have pizza fridays: careers.castirongames.com#jobs
careers.castirongames.com
Games Industry Careers with Cast Iron Games
Discover the range of games industry roles available with Cast Iron Games. Based in Wakefield, it's an exciting time to join the Cast Iron Games team.
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Froyo☆Tam @froyotam.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
you can use my released fonts, free or commercial, for video games!! i allow it. links are in alt text!!
TROD: https://itemlabel.com/products/trod-
font
ferrite core dx: https://github.com/froyotam/
ferrite-core/
(free)baudotpunch, included in TROD purchase https://itemlabel.com/products/trod-font
baudot encoder and dot punch fontultra hi-gloss, my first commercial and most popular font.
https://itemlabel.com/products/ultra-hi-gloss-font
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pmamtraveller.bsky.social @pmamtraveller.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
"Alcohol is the cause of injuries at work", Soviet work safety poster, 1987.
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pmamtraveller.bsky.social @pmamtraveller.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
By Jocelin Carmes
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about a cayce in the kinki region @cayce.zone · 24/10/2024
1973 Ferves Ranger...beep beep
Red Ferves Ranger, it's basically a real life Richard Scarry carYellow Ferves Ranger Yellow Ferves Ranger from back 3/4 viewGreen Ferves Ranger from the front
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Pekka Väänänen @pekkavaa.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I've been racking my brain over linear space dithering. Adding noise sounds simple but how much, exactly? Finally, I found a trick: scale the dither down near zero. Found from Timothy Lottes 2016 slide deck. Attached is an exaggarated example.
A two-pane comparison of Floyd-Steinberg dithering with threshold noise. Left: linear space noise is added with constant magnitude. Right: linear space noise but magnitude is scaled down near zero.A slide from "Advanced Techniques
and Optimization of
VDR Color Pipelines" by
Timothy Lottes (2016)

https://gpuopen.com/download/GdcVdrLottes.pdf
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Inigo Quilez @iquilezles.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Distorting space with sine functions #math
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Agreed I’ve found that the extra hoop for a static variable to persist across DLL reloads is annoying. When in “script” code the memory for an instance of a script is also serialisable so statics don’t really exist in my gameplay code. For core Live++ would be useful, as I have a bunch of statics.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
In retrospect my home engine should have been designed so the core engine could be hot loadable too with core being built on a thin platform layer which would own all the memory to the app. If I find I really need engine hot loading Live++ will be my go to, it’s been brilliant at work.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The experience of writing a line of code, saving and by the time you tab in it’s showing the updated change is an iterative loop every dev that works with a compiled lang should experience. My runtime code lives in a .dll & the memory is owned by the engine so I can hot reload without using Live++
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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
there's a pretty simple connection here 1. humans become good at what they practice doing 2. outsourcing to an AI or even other people, means you have stopped doing the thing 3. if you stop doing the thing, you will stop improving, and, long term, get worse at it (cont.)
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I imposed some restrictions on the immediate mode library to keep my sanity. No cmd last reordering, all container elements must know their size upfront so “flex” layout is calcd in place. (resize is still possible just stored on the backend element) Backend is just a table of trait UI elements.
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Kingsley Hopking @beardyking.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The UI library I started working on is shaping up well All base UI elements are a single struct with traits and depending on the function it’s passed into it does different layouting/behaviour These base elements are used for both hierarchy and immediate mode ui w/ theming using callback per state
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Brett Codes @brettcodes.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: brettcodes.com/im-done-usin... The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
brettcodes.com
I'm done using AI
Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.
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alicia 🍳 NYCC AA I-24 @acorviart.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
a murder [ #art ]
Illustration of a crow on a branch, surrounded by the old windows XP ghosting error screens, all duplicating the crow's face so it looks like there's a murder of crows.
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Eniko Fox @enikofox.com · 30/08/2026
rich fuckers and corporations not respecting the social contract is behind a lot of society's ills, and now it's also destroying the internet people.kernel.org/monsieuricon...
people.kernel.org
Creepy crawlies
You've probably heard me complain about the "AI crawlers" before, but now I actually have some hard numbers I can put up to show their im...
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mothcub @mothcub.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Thanks.
A rat sits with a small piece of cheese. Text reads: "leave me alone with my cheese".
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