Ken Noland
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knoland.bsky.social
Ken Noland
@knoland.bsky.social
Founder of AI Guys - A co-dev company focussed on developing classical and generative solutions for the games industry. No AI was harmed in the process of making this message.
GDC was a lot of fun this year. Glad I went!
March 26, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Anyone know a good text layout engine? Pango feels a little heavyweight and writing my own turns out to be a nightmare if I want to support more than Latin based languages. I've been trying to roll my own with HarfBuzz and libunibreak, but dealing with all the edge cases is just annoying!
February 12, 2025 at 4:54 PM
I've been wrestling with a font layout manager for two days now. My initial thoughts were "oh, this'll be easy!"... Then I found out about the Hebrew and Arabic languages... Looks like I'll be here a while longer!
February 11, 2025 at 11:18 PM
Well, it hasn't been a great first full week back, but trying to be the optimist here, I'm hoping these are just the leftovers from 2024 and the trend will get better!
January 10, 2025 at 6:08 PM
I've been working on something new for a while now. It has taken quite a bit longer than I expected, but that's also been the fun part.

github.com/ken-noland/O...

Removed SDL, implementing custom Vulkan renderer, and restructuring the project to use ECS to manage object lifecycle for Lua.
GitHub - ken-noland/OpenXcom: Open-source clone of the original X-Com
Open-source clone of the original X-Com. Contribute to ken-noland/OpenXcom development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
January 3, 2025 at 10:23 AM
I'm fairly optimistic about 2025... The industry has been through the ringer this year and I feel as though the winds of change are only getting stronger, but, there's some amazing teams being formed out of the ashes of the former companies and I can't wait to see what happens next! #gamedev
December 18, 2024 at 11:12 PM
I'm not very good with this short form posting(bsky or x). My thoughts rarely boil down to quips and snippets. How do you express yourself with limited characters?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
December 11, 2024 at 8:16 PM
Ever get the feeling like you've been indoctrinated by the games industry into doing things a certain way, even though there might be different or better ways? I'd love to hear some good examples of this! #gamedev #gameprogramming
December 10, 2024 at 6:32 PM
@hankgreen.bsky.social 's latest video sounds a lot cynical about micro blogging than in the past. Sure, he's always pointed out the flaws, but this last one felt like he was about to throw in the towel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4gh...
Twitter (and Threads) Have Made a HUGE Mistake
YouTube video by hankschannel
www.youtube.com
November 30, 2024 at 12:30 AM
@gamedevlist.bsky.social - mind if I join?
November 20, 2024 at 9:57 AM
I always enjoy buying programming books. I rarely read through them all, but it brings back memories of when I was a kid and my father would buy stacks of reference books for all sorts of hardware(he was a robotics engineer). Flipping through the pages to find that one reference sheet was good times
November 18, 2024 at 9:44 PM
3/3 When someone says that GenAI(LLMs and Transformers in general) has no more room for growth, I fundamentally disagree. However, the next big leap is still a long way away in my opinion. I'm an AI "realist", not an evangelist.

#ai #gamedev #genai
November 17, 2024 at 10:29 PM
2/3 I started as an audio coder, writing low level mixers for audio for games. I then shifted to be a network programmer, writing more low level UDP packet handlers. I've been shifting to AI for these last few years and I'm fascinated by the low level maths involved in a multiheaded transformer net.
November 17, 2024 at 10:25 PM
1/3 Okay, I've been developing video games for 25 years now. I've had many different roles.
November 17, 2024 at 10:24 PM
I guess I should introduce myself. I'm a developer with 25 years experience in the #gamesindustry. I've worked on countless games and I'm still an active programmer.

I'm a father of two awesome boys and I am an American living in Germany, on a horse ranch, next to a gun range... and I hate guns!
November 15, 2024 at 10:54 PM