user avatar
π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
@mmalex
synth tinkerer (plinky); runway; midjourney; NVResearch (InstantNGP/NeRF); cofounder MediaMolecule (Dreams, LittleBigPlanet); demoscene/vj (statix/bluespoon)
london
plinkysynth.com
Joined March 2008
3,565
Following
14.6K
Followers
  • Pinned
    user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Dec 17, 2019
    I hope I get a medal one day for bad project filenames: LBP1 = ps3test1 LBP2 = ps3test1 LBP server = pagetest Dreams = dd Dreams server = aaa Plinky = omgwtf
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Oct 23, 2017
    one of my fave easter eggs in Black&White 1: we recorded, for every language, the most popular 10 or so names as a spooky whisper. we then fuzzy matched this against your windows login name, pc name, creature name etc and triggered the voices if you played after midnight.
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Apr 2, 2022
    when code actually works
    β˜…Francescaβ˜…
    00:00
    β˜…Francescaβ˜…
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Nov 23, 2018
    I feel your pain! We had a β€˜fun’ one on LittleBigPlanet 1: 2 weeks to gold, a Japanese QA tester started reliably crashing the game by leaving it on over night. We could not repro. Like you, days of confirmation of identical environment, os, hardware, etc; each attempt took /
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Dec 15, 2018
    Replying to @SteveGaynorPDX and @fullbright
    i suffered from that too! did you ever play after midnight and hear ghostly voices whispering β€˜steeeeeve... steeeeve.... β€˜? most hilariously evil easter egg ever. we localised the voice actors reading top 20 names in each lang and scraped your pc for your name....
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Sep 3, 2020
    Hey! so a few months ago I did a bit of lockdown-inspired soul searching & decided to step down from 'dreams dev' to 'dreams fan' - take a break from gamedev, a career I've been lucky enough to enjoy since I was a spotty 15 year old 1/3
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Nov 23, 2018
    Replying to @mmalex
    To find out. Eventually the answer came: cleaners arrived. They were more thorough than our cleaners! One hour of vacuuming near the eye toy- white noise- caused the in game chat audio compression to leak a few bytes of memory (only with white noise). Long enough? Crash.
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Dec 15, 2018
    Replying to @SteveGaynorPDX and @fullbright
    on black and white 1 theres a memory leak we never found. so it detects if low on mem, saves, quits and restarts itself without explanation. passed overnight qa soak after that...
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Nov 23, 2018
    Replying to @mmalex
    Our final repro: radios tuned to noise, turned up, and we could reliably crash the game. Fix took 5 minutes after that. Oh, gamedev....
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Oct 1, 2021
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Oct 6, 2017
    random shader/visualization tip: when you need to visualize a value that varies over a large range, its handy to remember x/(1+x) as a way to 'squash' it from 0->inf into 0->1. tanh is good for signed x, +-inf->+-1
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Oct 3, 2023
    so excited by the explosion of gaussian splatting; cant wait for the community to start playing with painterly styles; on dreams, we used splats with tiny alpha-textured meshes called 'flecks' (not flat!) that selectively can replace the little 'blob' with painterly texture 1/n
    84K
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Aug 25, 2019
    the old lfo trick to get stable sin & cos waves still amazes me, especially as it looks like a complex multiplication done wrong: c-=a*s; s+=a*c; that's it! start with c=1,s=0, a small constant. fp errors cancel, stable forever. note no temp copy of c/s in update!feels like magic
  • user avatar
    π–’π–’π–†π–‘π–Šπ–
    @mmalex
    Sep 12, 2019
    I keep procastinating writing more UI for plinky, so instead of waiting here's a video of me noodling around, direct audio from plinky, shaky iphone 6 video. it's a multi-touch (v sensitive!) surface + 8-voice, 32 oscillator + granular sampler + reverb + tape delay. it's fun!
    00:00