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Dave Colson

@dcolson.bsky.social
99 followers 122 following 82 posts

Lead Programmer at Climax Studios. Previously worked on Star Citizen. Personal account though. I mostly post about coding and coding projects. He/Hm

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Reposted by Dave Colson
Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
sebastianaaltonen.com
No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen
Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Finally able to announced what I've been doing professionally for the past couple years! I've been one of the lead programmers working on porting Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 to PS5! Been so excited about this and it's been difficult not being able to talk!!
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Huge congrats to Paul and team for this launch, probably the one of (if not the?) best Irish developers out there right now!
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The Séance of Blake Manor - COMING TO CONSOLES🔮 @blakemanorgame.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Doors open in 1 hour!
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Spooky Doorway @spookydoorway.com · 17/10/2025
We're happy to say that The Séance of Blake Manor has been #SteamDeck verified. Launching on the 27th of October. You can wishlist it or check out the demo in #SteamNextFest. Check out the demo: bit.ly/47Pm8XA #indiegames
A steam deck with a screen shot of The Séance of Blake Manor on a Steam Deck. A large green verification tick is in the centre of the screen.
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Kirk @kirkwoodes.bsky.social · 31/08/2025
The new clouds still need some better lighting effects, but chasing planes through them feels pretty good #gamedev #flightsim
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
I came into a frustrating issue in the design my text editor. I had this great mechanism for caching linked list nodes to make it faster to jump around the file and query stuff. But I've just realised, caching nodes like this is wildly not threadsafe. Going back to the drawing board for a bit lol
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
I'm supposed to post more but I frequently forget, but anyway, major text editor update! - Completed a rewrite of the UI and text rendering - Implemented syntax highlighting!! - Smooth scrolling, and countless bits of UI polish Really coming together, I'm able to use it day to day more often now
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Mikko Mononen @mikkomononen.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
The devil is in the details! In design, things are often made just a bit different so that they appear consistent and balanced. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversho... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical...
en.m.wikipedia.org
Overshoot (typography) - Wikipedia
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Why485 @why485.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
The prototype version of this spaceship landing thing is now available on itch. The prototype has been done for weeks now, but it's taken me a while to put to paper what I wanted to about how this works and how to fly it. I'm really proud of how this little prototype came out.
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
Been a while since I've posted, still working on projects. I have completely rewritten the renderer and UI system for the text editor, it now looks vastly nicer, and we can have a lot more interactive, better looking and complex UIs. #programming #texteditor
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
I've been playing a game called Janes Fighters recently, it's a flight game from the 90s that I've heard a lot about and always wanted to play. It's a bit annoying setting up old games on modern PCs, but I gotta say this game is really cool.
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Why485 @why485.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
I don't normally like these kinds of "building" games but Aviassembly actually has gameplay and isn't just an aimless sandbox. It's really fun the kinds of things you can come up with to solve specific problems. I completely lost track of time with this one and went to sleep at 5 in the morning.
Aviassembly screenshot with a red and black plane.Blue and white plane with triple pusher props and 3 sets of wings.
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Rabbit Engineering @rabbitengineering.com · 07/04/2025
Load testing today - huge furball, 84 fighters at the same time over a city (Amsterdam). No perf drop, the bottleneck is with rendering the scene, not with AI perf, so that's a big relief! Very chaotic and fun #solodev #indiedev #indiegame #retrogaming #flightsim
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mackerel sky @mackerelskydev.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
I said I would try to maintain a presence here and immediately dipped out for a month lol. Anyway, I've been pretty busy with work, but I try to work on the game every day. Here's a very early WIP of a catapult system! #flightsim #acecombat #unity
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
This was much more work than I initially expected, but you can now hot reload any asset that's currently loaded into Polybox (my PS1 inspired fantasy console) #gamedev #programming #psx A little more detail on why this was tricky 🧵
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
I’ve got an unreal idea for a side project consuming my thoughts and demanding I start working on it. I’ll make a language/compiler/linker that can produce roms for a DS/GBA to run. My own fully custom toolchain for making retro handheld games!
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
Been working on Polybox, my PS1 fantasy console recently. A lot of non-visual work such as a virtual filesystem and project system. Mostly to support it being an actually usable little product rather than a demo. While doing this I got the swamp scene from Crocotile3D imported #gamedev #programming
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Arnaught @arnaught.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
New Blog Post: The Year of the Picotron Desktop arnaught.neocities.org/blog/2025/03... It's been a year (March 14, 2024, I believe) since Picotron's alpha released, so I made a big blog post cataloging (most of) the stuff I've made in #Picotron in the past year!
arnaught.neocities.org
The Year of the Picotron Desktop
$CurrentYear+1 will be the year of the Picotron desktop!
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
This weekend's work has been back on my PS1 fantasy console project. I've been working on making custom file formats for things like meshes/scenes/textures that are more easily compatible with lua. Heavily inspired by what @lexaloffle.bsky.social has done with picotron.
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
I've been trying to use my text editor at work day to day, it's useful to help decide what's the most important thing to work on. The other week I realised I the most notable missing feature was file search, so here we go! It's a full regex engine, so you can search however you want
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Been using this all day today. Absolutely unreal, blows every other file explorer in any OS I’ve ever used away
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
A new hobby is developing for me haha. I made a custom modded GBA. Has a backlit high-res IPS screen, USB-C charging and an all new case and buttons. Can’t get over how good the screen looks. Leaps and bounds better than the original.
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
Been working on my Vulkan rendering project this weekend. I've refactored and tidied up a lot of messy code into something inspired by @sebaaltonen.bsky.social's talk on his renderer. Setting up the rendering pipeline for a cube now looks like this, much neater. Also we can draw textured meshes now
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Lot of work recently on my text editor, almost all the basic editing features are in and working, plus countless bugfixes for tabstops and line endings (I hate these things). You can now save the document, which means the editor is useful as a real editor in my daily work! This feels so good
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
Been mostly relaxing and playing some games this holiday, but did do a small bit of work on the text editor. This is a modal (helix-like) editor, so I started work on the various motions, such as jumping to start and end of line, as well as skipping over words. Can even jump by subwords!
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
I've implemented my optimization for my text editor, tldr, it was not easy, but I've got something cool and novel (at least by what I've seen online) Here's it is, I can load a 130mb log file, consisting of 600k lines, it loads more or less instantly, and I can navigate and edit with no lag
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Slow progress in my journey of learning about modern graphics APIs. It's the most cliche learning screenshot ever but here is a cube I made in like 1500 lines of vulkan code haha
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
New Sebastian Lague video for me is like, “get the popcorn it’s movie time”
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
I’ve had this great idea to optimise the piece chain mechanism in my text editor. Because piece chains are linked lists at their heart, querying for data in the document requires a O(n) lookup of the list, and so queries are not as fast as a normal buffer, or even something like a gap buffer 🧵
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Progress update on the text editor today: - You can now select text, and delete whole chunks - Fixed a lot of weird bugs in text editing - Created some debug tools for inspecting the piece chain - Fixed a lot of issues with line endings (I hate line endings)
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Been coding this weekend on my text editor, specifically the actual bit where you edit text. It's been a lot of effort to get here cause this editor uses a somewhat more complex data structure for storing the document to make edits on large files really fast.
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
Thought I'd do a little thread introducing the various side projects I'm currently working on. I intend to use this account to share progress, talk about coding and gamedev and so you'll be seeing a lot of these projects 🧵
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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 07/11/2024
Hi bsky! Finally come over here now that friends are here! I’m a lead programmer at Climax Studios. I’m a big fan of low level coding and I have a few side projects on the go which will be using this account to share! My most known project is a PS1 style fantasy console github.com/DavidColson/...
github.com
GitHub - DavidColson/Polybox: Late ninties, PS1 inspired fantasy console
Late ninties, PS1 inspired fantasy console. Contribute to DavidColson/Polybox development by creating an account on GitHub.
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