iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 1h

pretty sure that was Chan Karunamuni. still on the design team, still doing terrific work.

noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

looking forward to reading this. the Returnal → Saros gameplay change I’m least fond of is the emphasis on permanent progression. Returnal makes you learn its world and Saros just lets you muscle through eventually. which does entirely fit with the character changing from a “scout” to an “enforcer”.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

it’s really good—one of my favorite action games of the last decade. incredible atmosphere and super intense combat. some v cool VFX tech too, about which they gave a GDC talk (gdcvault.com/play/1027742...) and also blogged (housemarque.com/news/2021/9/..., though the video embeds have gone missing)

gdcvault.com

Visual Effects Summit: Can We Do It with Particles?: VFX Learnings from 'Returnal'

Learn how Housemarque used their programmable particle system to create key vfx features in Returnal. Covering aspects such as volumetric fog driven by realtime fluid simulations and usage of particle...

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

have you played Returnal? it wasn’t exactly this but one of the levels does something in the same vein as you approach a boss and it’s my favorite music thing I’ve ever encountered in a game

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

sorry yes I did misread the Shadertoy—at a glance it appeared to marching to handle scene depth but it’s just clipping the ray. if I’m not _further_ mistaken though, I think my original point about optical depth stands—you’d just swap the ray-box intersection in the ST for the ray-cone from the link

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

there’s a good article about how they did this for an old demoscene project—you could use the ray-cone math linked there to do a basic optical-depth thing, or march it like that Shadertoy does. www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2018/a-dive-...

ctrl-alt-test.fr

A dive into the making of Immersion - Ctrl-Alt-Test

This article is also available in Russian, courtesy of Vlad Brown: Погружение в создание Immersion At last. Last December, we finally finished it. This video here is our last production, a 4 minute an...

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

yeah there were good ones. lots of people from big shops like ILM / Dneg / Disney shared their thoughts, as well as assorted academics who’ve studied this stuff

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

honorable mention to the folks showing off their flexible electrostatic speakers—got a demo of a napkin-sized piece of fabric playing music which went away and came back as they folded and unfolded it, which felt not unlike some kind of surreal prank

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

belated highlights of #siggraph day 3: “Online Radiance Cache Acceleration” (real-time path tracing, _sans temporal accumulation_), “Tool UX Design and Workflow” (tons of insights from across the industry), “Spatiotemporal FLIP” (drastic speedup for fluid sims by treating particles as 4-dimensional)

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

favorite sessions of #siggraph day 2: “Co-Design in Computer Graphics” (how to work better with users of art tools), “Single-View Holographic Volumetric 3D Printing” (whole-object-at-once prints in resin—early but super cool), “Differentiable Polyphase Filtering” (clever approach to a tough problem)

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

successful day 1 of #siggraph. favorite talks: “Breathing Life into Illustrations” (stylized rendering for GOAT—fancy artist tooling), “Hybrid Stylization” (ditto for recent Last Airbender with a neat technical approach), and “In Defense of Euler Angles in Game Programming” (made a compelling case!)

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Reposted by noah witherspoon

noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

hey graphics friends, foes, etc.: I’m gonna be at HPG and SIGGRAPH in July. let me know if you will be too—I’d love to meet up and talk shop

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

met these folks at their SIGGRAPH booth a year or two back—inasmuch as I’m qualified to judge, which is not very, they seemed like a real company with a real plan. hope they can pull it off.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

it’s obscene. I am already paying someone to connect me to the Internet. if they want a fee on top of that then it’d better go to there being a server keeping the Titanfall and Anthem backends up in perpetuity.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

would definitely expect the former to be better; you could use a RotatingMovementComponent to save implementation work and probably a sliver of perf. another option if you really can’t afford CPU time would be to rotate vertex positions+normals in the material, but it’s a pain so I’d start with RMC.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I did love the original from the get-go but am a huge sucker for brutalism, reflections, and throwing things, which let me look past a bunch of the stuff you disliked about it. the narrative situation does worry me though—I really hope they can pull off something interesting in 2

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

hey graphics friends, foes, etc.: I’m gonna be at HPG and SIGGRAPH in July. let me know if you will be too—I’d love to meet up and talk shop

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I see, thanks for all the details! hadn’t heard of SDSM before but I looked up the presentation—seems handy, will have to give it a try. y’all have done some wonderful work with this game; it’s really inspiring to see what’s possible when developing the rendering tech hand-in-hand with the gameplay.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

glad we can all agree to use HEIF instead

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

fantastic! thanks for doing this—I hope it gets y’all a bunch of new players. would love to know more about what the rewrite entailed (presumably complications around TBDR and maybe scheduling?); will keep a hopeful eye out for a blog post.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

congrats on the release! I’m looking forward to trying it; been a fan of y’all’s work since Remember Me, which I wish more people had played

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

delighted by the health/shield change, but have y’all gotten reports of people being unable to use text chat on PC? I checked the keybind and it’s still there but hitting Enter does nothing.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

sure it was technically possible to use splash damage or plasma bursts or charged ballista to kill it, eventually, but you’d use all your ammo and more trying to get there. I think that was the one place where you could actually feel the per-weapon damage-scaling discrepancies, and was worse for it.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I didn’t have a prescriptiveness problem with 97% of the game but whenever (sorry, you probably know this is coming) a Marauder showed up the entire thing ground to a halt while it repeatedly slapped my hand going “no. super shotgun. not that gun you like. super shotgun or you will be here all day.”

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

as others have said, the illustration and expressions here are terrific. a detail I love that I haven’t seen anyone else mention: the four or five different emoji styles you used. great chaotic touch.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

ahh Anthem had so much potential. picked it up again recently and the things I loved about it were still great. it might or might not be relevant for what you’re writing but this GDC talk explains the design of the flight mechanics which are the best part of the game: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPtr...

youtube.com

Rocket Man: Creating Flight for Anthem

YouTube video by GDC Festival of Gaming

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

“diffusion models” is probably the right technical term

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

this was a good read! I love that movie almost entirely for its aesthetic and soundtrack; the story is clearly Not Good but I’ve never seen the “why” so well articulated.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

somebody’s definitely decided this site is worth targeting—I’ve been seeing tons of fake accounts in Discover, mostly cryptocurrency boosters and sketchy-looking “news” bots. hope they can get it under control.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

they did something fun like this in the recent Prey—deliberately generating wrong motion vectors for the aliens so that they got motion-blurred even while standing still. very cool disquieting effect.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

ashamed to admit I didn’t know there was a second reason to use en dashes but eager to put it to use

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

I tend to gravitate to “palomas all day”

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

machine text has so many _actual_ tells that give it away and it bugs me so much when people miss those and call out em dashes or elaborate structure or “delve”

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

have you seen the Lost In Space remake? her Dr. Smith was enthralling.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

the Lake House DLC has a very pointed take on this

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

the “progression blocker” line early on made me grin. ludonarrative… consonance?

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

I’ve tried it for the basic ellipse case—as the presentation notes the method breaks down when you get farther in/out from the edge (e.g. for shadows/glows) but for antialiasing it seemed to work well

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

there’s been a paper or two about generating extra motion vectors for shadows specifically, but IIRC it looked like a headache. isn’t NV’s newish optical-flow stuff meant to kinda address that though?

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

I think you’d have to raymarch / numerically integrate it, the same way you do for e.g. the warped space around a black hole—with no hard interfaces to apply Fresnel refraction at, you’d pick intervals through the medium at which to place “virtual” ones and refract from the previous IOR to the next.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

those are equivalent; pow() with an arbitrary exponent is indeed more expensive than a multiply, but no reasonable vector length code is calling pow()

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

hey Heather! good to see you here too. your Tumblr post really resonated with me—can’t have been easy to leave such a large audience behind but it’s the right thing to do. hopefully enough folks moving elsewhere will start to break the stranglehold that Twitter and IG have had on everyone.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

you’re close I think, but “i” in Spanish is pronounced like “ee” in English—to my ear it sounds as if it’d be spelled with a diphthong like “ay” as in “playa” or “ai” as in “maiz”.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

it’s so comfortable! feels luxe. our last car was a Leaf so this is a huge improvement in a whole lot of ways.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

oh hey we got the same color! haven’t seen that one anywhere else yet—everyone seems to have gone for the more ordinary ones. how do you like the car?

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

hah I figured it was time to update to one that’s only a few years old instead of more than a decade

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

only tried out a bunch of characters in the practice range so far, but it feels very promising. lots of clever ability ideas, like Loki’s duplication and Mantis’s crit-attack-to-recharge-heals. maybe once more people have a feel for it the games will get more strategic.

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

ah that works, thanks! my go-to is the Apple Books store, but if it won’t be there then I’m happy to go with the printed version 🙂

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noah witherspoon @mahalis.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

looks like a lot of good material! is it going to be available anywhere other than Kindle?

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