A collection of blogs and spotlighted insights from the industry.
A GPU texture supercompression method for BC7/ASTC weight grids: use neighboring already-coded blocks to predict the current block's weights, then 2D DCT/DST-code the residual. 17 predictors; 20-35% reduction in AC coefficients vs. absolute DCT. JPEG-like to WebP-like.
Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc and Casey Muratori walk through random-choice algorithms for the "pick one from an unknown-size stream" problem common in game dev, from worst to best. Ends with a construction more intuitive than classic reservoir sampling. 38 min.
Tantan's Rust+Bevy voxel engine: 20M → 500M voxels/sec (25x). Four techniques: automated extremity bound checking, noise up-sampling, noise caching, and RLE-based chunk data. RLE fits data in L1 cache, enables 32x256x32 chunk sizes, and makes file I/O nearly instant with no compression needed. 17 min.
Catlantean 3D: 90s-style FPS built from scratch. 320x240, 256 colors, hand-rolled raycaster. Colormap = O(1) palette distance fog, same trick as Doom. Enemy sprites are Blender models rendered via Python and palette-quantized. Gibs use Voronoi decomposition and BFS wound bleeding.
Andrew Kelley on where Zig is in 2026: 8 years in, it powers Ghostty, TigerBeetle, and Uber's cross-compilation. Top 5 most admired on Stack Overflow. Why there's still no 1.0, the $670K foundation, no-AI training policy, and moving off GitHub. JetBrains, 1:13.
saalty's from-scratch compiler in C++, no external libraries, emitting x86 assembly for Linux. The language is basically C: no struct keyword for non-typedef instances, a write keyword for single-char stdout. Floats via SSE (non-packed). Working printf shown in Compiler Explorer.
WB Games Boston on Game of Thrones: Dragonfire's mobile pipeline: bundles capped at 8 MB, binary patching to send diffs instead of full asset downloads, Protobuf over JSON for design data, and streaming a 2000x4000 map -- loading it whole crashed lower-end devices.
Godot 4.7 RC 1: features locked, no critical regressions -- production can start integrating. HDR output, Asset Store, drawable textures. 16 contributors, 16 fixes since beta 5: ResourceLoader + CanvasRenderRD deadlocks, Metal residency to Apple6+ only, OpenGL EYE_OFFSET fix.
Crossfire (That's No Moon) replaces signposted cover with 'adaptive cover' -- characters physically adapt their posture to organic terrain. Game director Jacob Minkoff credits phase function neural networks (motion matching) combined with UE5 Nanite environments for making it possible.
Casey Muratori joins ThePrimeagen to pick apart CPU optimization myths -- which common rules of thumb hold up on modern out-of-order hardware, and which don't. 28 min.