OG indie dev | indie before it was a thing | gamer | geek | science & sci-fi aficionado | writer | the Battlecruiser (BC3K) guy
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Joined January 2008
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
We have witnessed an inflection point in AI adoption and content generation in the gaming industry overall, and on Roblox in particular. For example, since Q2 those using our MCP server daily grew nearly 5x.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
We mourn the passing of Patrick Stewart, who inspired countless individuals at NASA (and beyond) to boldly go where no one has gone before.
ALT Image description: A packed, sparkling starfield captured by our Hubble telescope — with strange new worlds potentially awaiting. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, R. Cohen
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
I am hesitant to weigh in on discussions about 30+ year old details. I understand enough about memory in general, and mine in particular, to not have great confidence about it. I generally trust Romero’s memory more than mine — I was always a bit jealous of that capability.
In broad terms, multiplayer gaming was right up there with 3D gaming in my grand visions of what I wanted to accomplish. The early FPS games were very much “first person Gauntlet”, and Gauntlet had multiplayer.
I do clearly remember the first time I got two computers running Doom taking to each other. Moving around on one computer and seeing the character move on the other screen was sublime. And then, of course, I shot the other character. Every shared virtual environment inhabited by young men inevitably hosts deathmatch.
I suspect the confusion here may be around the fraction of people that originally bought Doom because of multiplayer. It was almost certainly well under 10%. Maybe under 1%. It wrecked some college networks, but most people didn’t have Ethernet cards or null modem cables. We probably did have some conversations correctly predicting that. Deathmatch was awesome, but most of our players never got to experience it.
Even four games later for Quake 3 Arena, being “deathmatch focused” was a huge internal battle, and not at all obviously viable.
John. First, 8 months before release is before I joined the company. So I have no knowledge of what you did then.
second, AFTER I joined we had a discussion in which I talked about my experience with Command HQ and YOU YOURSELF agreed that Deathmatch wouldn’t be that big a deal. Do you not remember?
Third yes we all wanted Deathmatch anyway. And I’m glad my predictions were wrong.
Perhaps check your own memory before gaslighting mine.
Hope you’re well.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
History will never forget the name Captain Picard.
Thank you for inspiring the Next Generation of explorers. ✨
ALT Two interacting galaxies against the black of space. Together, they fill most of the right side of the image. They have a rounded center shape, with two extended arms. The arms both extend back, shaped roughly like the starship Enterprise. A third smaller galaxy spirals to its left.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Hey everyone, there’s been some questions going on around here about Epic’s use of AI in Unreal Engine development. I’ve answered some questions from the good folks at This Week in Videogames. TLDR: Yes we are using AI in UE development (as we actually mentioned back at Unreal Fest) and it’s helping with pretty much everything.
thisweekinvideogames.com/new…
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it.
Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game.
Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy art, animation, and additional programming resources.
AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources.
In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings.
Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling.
Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse.
Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way.
Stand up for your rights, devs!
There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Valve requires disclosure of generative AI in player-facing game content on store pages for buyer transparency, not political statements. Valve does not organize "AI hate campaigns"; market reactions to disclosures are independent.
partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingsta…
store.steampowered.com/news/group/414…
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Commenters on HN are uncovering more wikis and public sites apparently used by OpenAI agents to communicate on the open web.
Despite read-only web access, the agents were able to leave ~18,000 posts sharing answers and bypasses. But now, users are discovering more.
This appears to be a separate swarm from the one that attacked Hugging Face.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
🔐 Researchers have discovered 39 methods for compromising passkeys without breaking FIDO2 cryptography.
🛡️ @token explains how attackers instead target auth prompts, devices, credential syncing, enrollment, and recovery.
➡️ bleepingcomputer.com/news/se…
#cybersecurity #sponsored
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
We found ~18k posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task.
These AIs colluded to bypass sandbox restrictions and share answers to their tasks, including by sending "lookahead parties".
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
You can track the new space telescope's current position in real time at: eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-sys…
ALT screenshot of NASA's Eyes on the Solar System online experience showing the current position and orientation of the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope. The crescent Earth is visible in the distance.
Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth.
go.nasa.gov/4A3zDi2
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth.
go.nasa.gov/4A3zDi2
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Your physical game library is more than a collection of discs. It holds years of memories and stories worth preserving. Starting next week, XBOX Insiders can unlock a digital entitlement for supported physical games. We’ll start with thousands of titles and add more as we can.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
The first autonomous agent cyberattack is an unprecedented event that deserves unprecedented transparency. Today we’re sharing everything we can: a full technical timeline, an interactive replay, and how we used an open model to defend ourselves, so defenders everywhere can learn from it and prepare for what’s next.
huggingface.co/blog/agent-in…
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
There is more than meets the eye in this photo…
The ring around the central galaxy cluster is evidence of dark matter, the invisible glue holding the universe together. Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect, or absorb light, but it has gravity like ordinary matter. 🧵
ALT The scene is cloaked in a cool, blue haze, decorated with the warm light of galaxies and stars. Around the center is a jagged ring where the haze appears absent and dark space peeks through. Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
ALT Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, wearing his spacesuit, descends the ladder of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, a large structure with golden foil covering its lower half. The Moon's surface is bright and flat; above the horizon, which slopes downward from right-to-left, the sky is completely black. Credit: NASA
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs.
My “Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand” statement isn’t aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.
I’m saddened, but I can’t muster anger or outrage over it. I don’t have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft’s perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios.
To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved.
Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal.
You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games.
Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy?
Could they have created more things for fans to buy?
Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games?
Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones?
Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper?
I really don’t know.
The game isn’t over yet, and I hope the studio rallies through.
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
America turns 250 today. To mark the occasion, join the Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony rewatch party. Come for the jolt of inspiration from President and Mrs. Obama, stay for the performances from Bruce Springsteen, Christina Aguilera, Common, Eddie Vedder, Guitars Over Guns, Illinois Army National Color Guard, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Marc Anthony, Stevie Wonder, Tems, The Roots, U2’s Bono and The Edge, and Uniting Voices Chicago.
Join us now: youtube.com/watch?v=aG7F0NRO…
