We've Moved


The blog has been retired - it's up for legacy reasons, but these days I'm blogging at blog.theodox.com. All of the content from this site has been replicated there, and that's where all of the new content will be posted. The new feed is here . I'm experimenting with crossposting from the live site, but if you want to keep up to date use blog.theodox.com or just theodox.com

Sunday, May 6, 2018

State of Decay 2

SOD 2 box
It’s no accident that there have not been a lot of blog entries in the last several months, but hopefully life will be returning to normal soon. I took the time to clean up my site generator and simplify the site theme, though I expect I’ll probably waste a bunch of time fiddling around over the summer.
In any event, the game is looking good — although I’ve got one HUGE bug I must squish before we go out the door! — and it’s been a real blast to bask in some of the reactions from people who’ve seen the game.
The last couple of years have been kind of a wild ride, professionally — I certainly never thought I’d spend more time staring at C++ than anything else ! — but at least, now that the dust is settling, there should be time for blogging again. With all the crazy stuff I’ve had to learn I’m sure there will be lots to chew over, too.
In any event, the press embargo will lift on May 1st, and opening day will be May 22d. In the meantime, here’s a little video teaser from the company stream with a special shout out to my colleague Jeff Sult, who helped me ferret out a truly insidious bug in the Xbox shader compiler.

PS If you’re wondering… sometimes the Xbox decides to ‘optimize’ exponent operators to use a logarithm instead of a multiply… Which is very nice unless your exponent somehow goes negative, in which case the result is a NAN which can really mess up your PBR G-buffers. Sigh…