Today was all about shaders. Well basically shader optimisation. What I’ve been doing is removing ‘discard’. Now heres how it works, normally in a shader, if you find a pixel you no longer want to write you issue a ‘discard’ instruction. But on a certain console, calling discard really screws up the pipeline. But providing you are not writing depth you can get away with do a conditional branch, so instead of discard you can branch to a ‘write bugger all’, this is far quicker than a discard as it still supports early Z testing. So there was a lot of that, also reducing shadow sampling, I couldn’t really see the point in doing a smooth multisample smoke particle.

Went to Pump. Not my finest performance, chest really wasn’t happening. I then did a good session with Laverne afterwards. She said that it had been noted that due to my positioning in the Pump class and that I helped when the stereo broke down (which happens more often than not) that I must have the hots for black women. Laverne is a very very petite black lady. Pat, who stands behind me and I’ve known for years is a rather larger black lady. We always pass the time of day. But because of these perfectly harmless relationships, rumour has it that I now have the hots for both of them. Thankfully both very much know that lady parts aren’t really my thing, so we basically milk it as much as possible. Still it’s amusing all the same.

Jamie took me to the Italian, I had pizza with lots of toppings.