Don Williamson

@Donzanoid
279 Followers
95 Following
211 Posts
Irish gamedev, living in the UK, working in the US. Currently Head of Rendering @ PL&H. Founder @Celtoys. Past: Fable, Splinter Cell, Total War, Dauntless, No Mans Sky, etc. Lionhead/Microsoft, Ubisoft, Google/DeepMind, SEGA, etc.
Bloghttps://donw.io/
Personal Githubhttps://dwilliamson.github.io/
Company Githubhttps://github.com/Celtoys
Don WilliamsonNov 26
Simon CarterNov 26

Hurrah! The Nintendo Switch port I’ve been working on is finally done - Moonring is out today!

#gamdev #moonring

https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Moonring-DX-2963719.html

Moonring DX

Travel, trade, sneak, fight and sail the world of Caldera in this retro-inspired open-world, turn-based RPG, featuring a mix of hand-crafted world and procedural dungeons.

Nintendo of Europe SE
Don WilliamsonNov 19
“Look at me, I can write one line of code that looks like punctuation soup.” is my new favourite LLM quote of the day.
Don WilliamsonNov 3

I have mostly released myself from caffeine dependency for two very specific reasons:

1) I feel amazing each morning (sleep/apnoea dependent) and not a growling husk, without coffee.

2) Indulging the odd caffeine boost feels like a performance-enhancing super power.

Still love coffee. Still regularly drink water-processed decaf. Still have all the expensive gear and still part of The Club!

Don WilliamsonOct 22
"Put all language improvements in the library," they said. "It's the future," they said.
Don WilliamsonOct 18
“We used to play down there before they built the highway.”
Don WilliamsonOct 16
Show threadRune Skovbo JohansenOct 16
I found some characters on the Asset Store and tried changing the hair material to use my shader. Luckily they all already had hair aligned vertically in the UV map, although not 100% for wavy/curly hair, which compromises my shader slightly.
(This asset: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/humans/npc-casual-set-00-326131)
Don WilliamsonOct 16

I love games, I truly do. Games be like:

CVE! Oh noes! "What is it?" Oh, the game has a "-hackmyshit" CLI argument that you can use! "Who'd have thought!?" Yeah, I know, right?

Meanwhile, in the real engineering world: https://blog.quarkslab.com/nvidia_gpu_kernel_vmalloc_exploit.html

Oops! It's a kernel stack use-after-free: Exploiting NVIDIA's GPU Linux drivers - Quarkslab's blog

This article details two bugs discovered in the NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules and demonstrates how they can be exploited. The bugs can be triggered by an attacker controlling a local unprivileged process. Their security implications were confirmed via a proof of concept that achieves kernel read and write primitives.

Don WilliamsonOct 13
It suddenly dawned on me what LinkedIn reminds me of! It's the old MCV magazine that you'd find lying around in gamedev offices that nobody other than the CEO would read.
Show threadDon WilliamsonOct 2, 2025
Wow, even better... it was preventing the PC from going to sleep. When the display turned off and the user logged out the machine would also spin up all 8 fans to max and sound like a jet engine until I logged in again. Chefs kiss!
Don WilliamsonOct 2, 2025
lol, one of the "Clean Code Krew" apps constantly hogging 2% of a 32 core threadripper, even when idle in the background. Totally gels with their seductive mix of arrogance and lack of self awareness.