Pip Turner

The software testing community here on LinkedIn is appearing like the rest of social media lately. It has mostly binary opinions, and lacks empathy and respect for the context - with many saying one way is the only way. It's a shame more people are not open to being challenged across all areas of work and life. I remember a time when students were open to listen to talks that directly challenged their beliefs, now many won't accept it, so colleges and universities shy away from it. Free speech is important, as long as it doesn't violate someone else's rights (free speech doesn't allow for inciting hatred for example). Back to testing...I'm not suggesting people stop with their opinions on testing, yet it would be more effective if their binary argueing stopped, and an open conversation with various views were shared. Then we can all learn and make informed decisions. Just saying... It would be nice across all areas of life I think. Sadly social media appears to make people feel safe to do otherwise. I hope you're open to different opinions and are able to debate instead of force an argument based on a binary belief you have. #softwaretesting #softwaredevelopment #technology #whatinspiresme

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Sadly, this week, AR pioneer Archiact had to close its doors after 11 years. Another independent studio in London — Payload Studios had to lay off 25% of its workforce. Both the studios informed this on LinkedIn. I looked for impacted individuals and found 7 immensely talented professionals who were impacted by Archiact and Payload's layoffs. I am sending this post in support of them and humbly request my 50K community members to repost it. 🙏 Your single repost might take this post to a recruiter’s feed! Let’s do our bit :) Alana Ah Tani — Studio administrator or more of a generalist for Payload Studios who takes care of recruitment, human resource policies, various projects, events and various studio initiatives. Matthew Guest — A talented community manager for Payload Studios who has also worked for big studios like Bioware, Electronic Arts, and Sony Interactive Entertainment EU. You would definitely want someone like him to lead your community initiative. Julia Canfora — Archiact’s director of human resources who worked with the studios for over 4 years. Julia managed a growing team of 100+ professionals in Archiact. Other than games, she has also worked in the movie and film industry. Neil Marshall — The lead technical artist who was directing the technical art department at Archiact on their title Journey to Foundation. Neil has also worked on the games Slugterra VR and Bogey Ogres Experience. Overall, he has a decade plus experience as a technical artist and has worked for Gameloft too. Manuel Silva — A 3d artist, lighting artist, and VFX artist with a boatload of talent and experience. Other than Journey to Foundation, Manuel has worked on Captain America Winter Soldier (2011), Ghost Recon and Crash Bandicoot. Check out his portfolio here: [https://www.silvs.ca](https://www.silvs.ca/) Rafael Vazquez — Founder of Chupacabra Game Studios who was the creative director and product owner for Archiact. Rafael has worked on titles like Meta’s Horizon Worlds, Marvel Dimension of Heroes and many more. Thomas Edmunds — Principal software engineer who started as a software engineer at Archiact and spent over 7 years with them. During that time, he worked on titles like Evasion, Freediver, and Journey to Foundation. *** If you are an impacted game artist, designer, producer, or tester, I am offering you a 100% scholarship if you wish to learn game programming from programmers of renowned game studios. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gn-_Bdib *** #layoffsupport #gamedev #gamingindustry

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A small letter to Ubisoft. Ubi has said "𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘦, 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴, 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳-𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘤 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘢 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘭 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴." Come on UBI, we all want you to win, stop being such a silly goose. These two things are at odds with each other and this is why they are struggling, whilst you can marry up a "player-centric approach" whilst providing value to your shareholders, it's the fact these things even exist on an even playing field that they are struggling. Everytime, at least I can think of, that the shareholders pockets are considered as important as the game itself, the game does not do well, or at the very least it does poorly and has to be saved later by ripping all of that stuff that was put in to "make shareholders happy" out of it. Games make significantly more money when people actually want to play them, it's not complicated. So Ubi, as the creator of some of my favorite games, as the place I dreamed to work at as a kid, as a megalith of our industry, please go back to basics. go back and look at what truly made far cry 2 amazing, what made half the planet fall in love with roof jumping assassins and what ultimately led to your gargantuan success, because it's not pleasing shareholders, it's simply making games we all want to play. I know it's nowhere near this simple but for the love of god, we could all be playing the best pirate game ever made if you had focused more on the fun and less on the 1. All the best, your once biggest fan. P.S bin off live service outside of siege, you're clearly not cut out for it.

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My second #GDC2024 talk is now on the Vault. Emma Varjo and I discuss 'deceptive design' in video games: how interface and system design can influence player behaviour toward unexpected and unwanted outcomes. And what does it mean for a game to be 'deceptive' anyway? Link to the talk (requires Vault access): https://lnkd.in/dt38hGiZ #gamesUR #UX #gamedev

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Unreal has had VDB support for a little while, but you need to keep the resolution quite low.  I saw some of the people working at ZibraAI post some impressive examples of a plugin they're working on that would let you push the quality of volumes in Unreal really high, so I reached out and asked for a license. It's impressive.  I cached out a few pyro sims from EmberGen that totaled about 30 gigs of data.  I ran that through the ZibraVDB plugin they have for Unreal and it crunched them down to about 1 gig in size. 30 times less!  I loaded the sims into Unreal and yep, they played back in real-time.  Crazy.  The pace of advancements these days is just nuts, you can't even keep up with it. If I have any criticism (and keep in mind that it's an alpha) it's that the fire shading is very basic.  I'm used to having some sort of scattering from the emissive values into the smoke and not having it really hurts the final look. The flame and temperature fields don't give off any emissive values, so I had to fake the indirect light with actual lights.  It also doesn't appear to cast any shadows (at least with my raytracing settings).  Also, for cinematics I render with Temporal samples, and I wasn't sure how to incorporate that with this setup, so no motion blur for me yet. Still, I mean, I'm being a jerk picking at this.  What they've done so far is honestly, amazing. It's great that they're doing this for Unreal, but they should do this for Maya and Houdini too!  Just saving this much time on the I/O and network speeds would be worth it. If you always wanted real volumes in Unreal at high quality, it's worth checking out for sure.

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