iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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 · 16/12/2025

Still desperately need to make time for this game

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

It's such a wild dream come true to work on a game I've been playing since I was a kid!

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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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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

I have been sitting on a follow up post about PS1 rendering based on my project about that which talks about doing this. I must get it finished one of these days. Regardless this is the shader that does the dithering: github.com/DavidColson/...

github.com

Polybox/shaders/core3d.shader at main · DavidColson/Polybox

Late ninties, PS1 inspired fantasy console. Contribute to DavidColson/Polybox development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Reposted by Dave Colson

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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Reposted by Dave Colson

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

The current thought is to transition away from linked list and instead optimize queries with a tree like VSCode has done or like the Fred editor shown at handmade cities. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmIN...

youtube.com

fred | about

YouTube video by starfreakclone

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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've learned a lot of really interesting things about text rendering, syntax highlighting and UI stuff, which I hope to share bits of and maybe write some articles on stuff

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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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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

This often comes up in the context of small game entity systems, where usually you don't have more than a hundred or so entities, and so a fat struct entity does not incur much performance penalty because you don't iterate over that many, and in exchange you get a simpler architecture.

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

There is a tradeoff here that is worth discussing I feel. Fat struct architectures are simpler and more flexible, but yes they are worse for cache use. The situations where one might use them would be when you don't have that many instances of something, so the memory throughput benefit is minimal

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Reposted by Dave Colson

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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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

The lower leagues of motorsport emphasis driver skill _much_ more (they often race with the same, or at least normalized cars) and the difference is really noticeable compared to F1

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

What I think is crazy cool about F1 is that the drivers are ridiculously talented, and it's super hard to drive at the pace they do. But they're all so close in skill after filtering out so many other drivers, that what separates winners from losers ends up not being driver skill in many cases.

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Reposted by Dave Colson

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 · 17/06/2025

I won’t say any more in public on this topic, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble (my dms are available if anyone reading this thread wants to chat), but yea it’s really nice for me to see you try to solve these issues with a fresh take on the matter.

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

This whole topic is precisely the issue SC's flight model had/has lol. It's too good, we had to resort to inventing lore that allowed us to nerf thrusters in atmosphere to get it to look okay. And even then it wasn't the best.

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Is it just any speed that contributes to this? I.e. if I thrust from a standstill on the ground, I start to get some forward momentum without any other inputs?

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I have also come to realise that there may be less stabilization than it feels, if you take the stick as a yaw/pitch angle rather than a yaw/pitch _rate_ then when you let go it settles?

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

The blending is also very interesting, you can just take off from a standstill in normal mode and I guess you just lift off because it's 100% down thrust, but it very quickly starts moving forward. I have been trying to land vertically in manual mode, but haven't quite seen if I can do that

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

An immediate thing that strikes me is how much stabilization you have. Hovering was always such a precarious state when we tried it on Star Citizen. But this feels "managed" which I gives you that "looks cool but is easy" feel. It's very cool, I am a fan

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Is this something like helicopter style hovering but with assists?

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Is the auto-aim done with a gun gimbal such that it's decoupled from ship orientation? Or something else?

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

I don't know how well it'll show up on bluesky, but the text rendering in particular is vastly better.

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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

Hopefully @why485.bsky.social's game can scratch that itch as a modern day game

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

It's more arcadey than I thought it would be, but as a result it's very simple to pick up and play when you want a quick bit of fun. There's loads of planes and loads of content, so it's very easy to enjoy without getting too in depth with anything. It's what I want war thunder to be haha

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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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Reposted by Dave Colson

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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Reposted by Dave Colson

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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Reposted by Dave Colson

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 · 31/03/2025

Yes you are correct! Not sure how I missed that haha. I will make an amendment. Thank you!

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

I should really try a casual server like that, I think that’s my mistake

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

How is that possible haha. I rarely play it cause it’s too much effort

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

So when you edit a raw asset, we can reimport it, and then figure out which lua table that asset corresponds to and patch all the data in it live, so the game coders have no idea anything has happened, and can just write their code as normal!

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

This is very simple for users, loading assets, is just loading a lua table. But how does hot reloading work then? Well, the lua registry contains a hidden "weak" (not a GC reference) table, listing every imported asset and the tables that they correspond to plus the original asset it came from.

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Behind the scenes raw assets get changed into a special format, which is just lua tables, with extra features to handle large amounts of binary data. That's what the swamp.scene file is. When you "load" the file, we just load those lua tables into actual lua tables in the VM you can do stuff with

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

It's really important in the design of this fantasy console that it's quick and easy to develop things for, and so loading assets it's very simple it's just, load(assetname) in code.

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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

There’s a great Q&A in handmade hero where Casey points out “don’t reinvent the wheel” assumes that what exists already is as good as a wheel, an invention so perfect it’s lasted thousands of years. How could we possibly assume software is perfect and cannot improve haha

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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 · 19/03/2025

As someone who’s not used it seriously in quite some years (pre render pipeline split) now I’m oddly curious to try it and see what it’s like now

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Dave Colson @dcolson.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Another cool thing I've worked alongside a lot of filesystem features is hot reloadable code. It's one of those features that feels like absolute magic when it works nicely. I'm hoping to absolutely everything be hot reloadable, meshes, textures, code, audio etc.

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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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Reposted by Dave Colson

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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