Sidney
justsid.bsky.social
Sidney
@justsid.bsky.social
Senior engine programmer at Laminar Research working on X-Plane. I’m the loser of devices.
TIL that the Discovery tab is just a feed that can be unsubscribed from. Afterwards it no longer hangs around the tab area of the Home page. Dunno about everyone else but mine was an absolute train wreck of terrible hot takes, NSFW content and AI evangelists. Bsky is a lot more peaceful without it.
October 8, 2025 at 4:00 PM
From a graphics programmer standpoint, Liquid Glass is so cool. Doing this effect in real time on a consumer phone is so cool. As a phone user though, what the actual fuck? Why are they shipping me a cool tech demo?
September 16, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Sometimes it's easy to forget how far things have come. I'm putting some screenshots of various X-Plane versions together for no particular reason and the difference between v12 and v11 is wild. The v11 to v10 difference is a lot harder to see in this view but still there.
August 21, 2025 at 2:24 AM
We have a quarterly user survey about feature requests and issues they would like to see fixed (it's always better AA and more perf), but this time around there apparently was a large enough crowd to get "AMD CrossFire support" on the board. I have extremely bad news for those users...
August 15, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Looks like I’ll be giving a talk about working on X-Plane at GPC 🥳. Covering how we went from a GL 2.1(!) codebase to a modern Vulkan/Metal one and the challenges and advantages of working on a single product for 30 years, with an eye on the unique challenges of a small studio working on flight sims
July 26, 2025 at 11:20 PM
I’ve been enjoying doing CAD work on the Surface with a pen, but the keyboard has been incredibly awkward. Figured this was a good opportunity to finally use one of the Pico Pis collecting dust and make a macro pad thingy. Quite pleased with how it turned out.
July 22, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Made the mistake of looking at the Hacker News comments on the preliminary report of the Air India crash. People who regularly rant about managers demanding features with no understanding of the problem space are now seriously saying “planes should just not allow actions that can crash it” 🙄
July 12, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Be still, my beating heart <3
June 26, 2025 at 7:56 PM
Fun quirk of first gen Maxwell GPUs: If you have a f16 render target, output to it won’t be clamped to the highest f16 value but instead overflows into INF. This gets particular fun when you turn on blending and no amount of shader side clamping can save you.
May 28, 2025 at 3:20 AM
Honestly, forget about AI tools. The trifecta of power tools for game engine development is RenderDoc, Superluminal and Live++. Hands down the most bang for your buck you can ever get and RenderDoc in particular is criminally underpriced.
April 23, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Sidney
Tired of debugging optimized code with missing variables and inlined functions?

@visualstudio.com preview now has Dynamic Debugging which automatically unoptimizes functions you step into while debugging 👀

Available in UE 5.6, or with a simple cherry pick:
devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/cpp-...
C++ Dynamic Debugging: Full Debuggability for Optimized Builds - C++ Team Blog
Over the past 5 years, we’ve had many incredible opportunities to engage with game developers. From AAA studios to indie developers, the passion for slashing iteration times is significant. Amidst all...
devblogs.microsoft.com
March 25, 2025 at 8:45 AM
Product idea: A CVS grade receipt printer for C++ template errors.
February 20, 2025 at 11:17 PM