bjfar

So I switched to a low-profile angled keyboard basically identical to this: https://www.amazon.com.au/Perixx-PERIBOARD-805-Wireless-Ergonomic-Bluetooth/dp/B08KJ8JW9Q/ref=asc_df_B08KJ8JW9Q/?tag=googleshopmob-22&linkCode=df0&hvadid=463603004336&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15645889703857693714&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9071296&hvtargid=pla-1017854421494&psc=1

It's been quite a few years now, and my RSI type issues have reduced a lot in that time, but I'm not sure it's really cutting it anymore. Starting to get wrist pains again. So I think it's time to up my keyboard game, but things get expensive going to the next level and the choices are kind of overwhelming. So I'm just hoping for some recommendations really.

I'm a programmer so that's an important factor, I don't want some weird key layout that's good for typing English but rubbish for programming. But I also don't really want to spend loads of time fully customising it. But I'm happy to learn a new layout if research or whatever supports it being better.

Well anyway, any thoughts welcome!

I'm just looking for a good review of modern large-scale terrain rendering techniques. I've been reading about a few individually, various quadtree stuff, GPU clipmaps, continuous methods, but I don't have a good grasp of the state of the art, performance comparisons between methods, what I should invest my time learning better etc. A well-written review article would help a lot. But I can't find much, at least not from the last few years. If there isn't a good academic article maybe someone wrote a great blog post or something? I get a lot of hits searching around but they are mostly zillions of different people implementing this or that algorithm for demo projects, it's harder to find systematically put together information giving an overview of the field and techniques.

So I'm looking for advice on external GPUs. I want to try out Godot, but I don't have a GPU. I don't think I've ever had a GPU in fact. I'm a software developer actually, python mostly, but I've never done GPU stuff in my work, and my PC gaming days were mostly prior to the existence of GPUs. So I'm way out of touch with them.

I do have a reasonable laptop that I've been using for dev stuff, a Dell XPS 9370 (build number from Dell is CNX37014), but it has no GPU, so I guess it won't be great for trying out 3D stuff in Godot. It does have thunderbolt ports though, so I think I can plug an external GPU into those? Anyone tried that kind of thing out? I'd rather fork out for an external GPU if that will work decently rather than try to build a whole new PC or something. I actually have no idea if there is a performance hit for the GPU being external, just heard they were a thing and trying to figure out if they are a viable option.

So I dunno where to ask advice about this nowadays, but I'm getting into Lemmy and here seemed as good as anywhere :).

Anyone here have advice for a total noob game dev, but pretty experienced programmer, on what engine they should learn first? I'm not looking to do anything too serious, just want to try my hands at making some stuff for fun in my spare time. These days I mainly write Python code but I wrote C++ for ten years.

So I guess I'm looking at Unity and Unreal, seems like Unreal is C++ and Unity is C#, so I guess that biases me to Unreal, but then it seems that Unity is quite a bit more popular among smaller devs? People praise iteration times and simpler usage etc? Does that shift the scales even though I never wrote a line of C# in my life? I'm sure I can learn it just fine but just trying to minimise effort.

I did however see people saying that Unreal scales better, handles larger worlds better etc. Which might be a factor because the first thing I want to experiment with is some kind of blend of lowish-res whole Earth map data with some procedural generation of the fine details (not exactly trying to recreate Earth accurately, I just think real terrain data would be a good starting point for interesting terrain). So maybe Unreal might handle that sort of thing better? I have no idea though really :).

Any thoughts or advice much appreciated :).

Don't mind me, I'm mostly just testing out Lemmy :). Hope you enjoy my test pic!