Sebastian Schöner

programming! - previously: Epic Games, Unity, Paradox Development Studios, Chasing Carrots. / Stockholm

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npub1vtkfx4exj5zwj6lq70m4pzw3nxhsvl0nr9flltvrm5h5suhcd58q7s3t3u

NIP-05 Address

sschoener@mastodon-gamedev-place.mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqsx9myn2unf2p8fd0s08a6s38gentcx0he3j5ll4kpa6t6gwtux6rspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7sd774

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-11-02 13:51:08 UTC

I feel equal parts disgusted and amazed that I have 437GB of *.cpp files on my disk.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/117/547/154/859/369/102/original/22ba0adcc75ffb21.png

2026-10-09 06:29:33 UTC

The opposite of "double income, no kids" (DINK) is "single in-come, kids" (SICK).

2026-08-17 06:40:15 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e I do, but I fear I that giving them to you would make you il-advised

2026-08-17 06:18:44 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e I've heard that one doesn't just do mono but even stereo!

2026-08-16 10:46:37 UTC

What do you call C# compiler engineers? il-literate. (Sorry.)

2026-07-16 11:14:36 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e I often forget what absolutely breathtaking views exist on our small continent. And then there's the landscape as well!

2026-06-26 06:05:46 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e not me, clearly! We just visited Joachim and his girlfriend, and they apparently are the first people to pass her filter. Not a bad choice, I have to say.

2026-06-25 20:46:11 UTC

Proud father moment: my 5yo (who is only allowed to watch TV in English) started to spontaneously speak English pretty fluently after finally encountering an adult she considers worthy.

2026-06-13 17:27:02 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e on your plane of existence, maybe!

2026-06-13 17:24:07 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e you are really crossing a line with your posts lately

2026-03-31 08:32:20 UTC

I have spent some time on a little project to improve codegen for Unity's Mono runtime, which is used in the editor and is even what some games ship on: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2026-03-31-better-mono/

2026-03-27 10:42:06 UTC

How trying out Zig made me miss header files
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2026-03-27-headers/

2026-02-12 13:16:06 UTC

That's from someone working with the gui library I made for one day :) This is why I make tools.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/057/836/925/745/739/original/05a773dbb4130d7c.png

2026-02-04 09:07:03 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e yes, I am not disputing the funniness :D Maybe calll it tragicomic and color it "Congo Pink." Iy
There's more by the way. I am always amazed by how much Unity's text system uses, for example. Just don't look too deeply into il2cpp codegen, it might cost you a bit of your sanity :)

2026-02-04 08:13:46 UTC

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@nprofile…5x8e win64/win32 binaries for Unity builds are criminally bad (il2cpp builds on win64/win32 can easily have 30% smaller binaries; cpp2better gets pretty great results on that platform). Other platforms are slightly better. Also, are you running with aggressive stripping?

2025-12-19 10:41:24 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd I think it really depends on the context and the tooling. I am using claude code in codebases that grew up on people using them with AI tooling, so naturally the codebases might also be biased towards it :).
But yes, I think you should totally write that up. If it's a public project, I might even try porting it with LLM assistance and see whether I fare any better!

2025-12-19 10:17:14 UTC

An early good bye to 2025: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-12-19-year-2025/

2025-11-04 14:13:18 UTC

Do you want to improve the performance of your il2cpp Unity projects, without changing your code or your assets? My il2cpp build processor cpp2better is now officially available (on request). Reach out to me if your company wants to try it and explore licensing options.
More information: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-11-04-cpp2better-release/

2025-10-11 14:44:41 UTC

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@nprofile…ymy6 @nprofile…gvnm @nprofile…2key because it turns it into ragebait that goes to all your followers. It's a feature.

2025-05-23 08:08:11 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm @nprofile…4s4u can we have the equivalent of deleting parts of prefabs? Or even entire use- assets?

2025-05-23 07:26:26 UTC

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@nprofile…4s4u @nprofile…gvnm ...I can unpin posts, for everyone..? UNLIMITED POWER! Or maybe I'm also too old for this, I just assumed discourse was some sort of forum with bad UI. But sounds like that's the wrong mental model: in a forum, just mods would be able to pin and unpin posts. Sounds like fun to give that power to everyone though!

2025-04-07 11:10:06 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm Thanks! I have reshaped reality to no longer have this contradiction. I just need someone to restart Earth or something for the fix to apply.

2025-04-07 09:39:49 UTC

A mini-announcement about Unity games, performance, and IL2CPP codegen:
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-04-07-cpp2better/

2025-03-26 08:00:50 UTC

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@nprofile…t3wn oh yes. Part of my goal of writing blog posts like this is to undo the years of confusion that Unity DOTS brought about. "No, not everyone is going to understand this. Yes, it would be nice if they did. No, educating people and changing their behaviors is orders of magnitude harder than building technology." I think Burst/DOTS is a full success when measured against the right metrics, it's just that the wrong ones were chosen initially...

2025-03-26 07:43:56 UTC

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@nprofile…t3wn just old or custom? I am familiar with a lot of this, so if you ever want a second pair of eyes, I am happy to take the time and look at it.

2025-03-26 07:30:43 UTC

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@nprofile…t3wn oh hey YOU are of course the expert user this was made for, haha :) just for completeness: are you aware of intrinsics for checking for compile time constants, and for asserting aliasing? Burst has a few handy tools if you *really* now what you are doing.
I have never seen Burst fail silently, it always fails with an error for me. If you have such a case, you should most definitely file a bug report to Unity.

2025-03-25 12:06:32 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm try it. You can literally dial the optimization up to 11 and beyond. Doesn't help beyond O3, but it works!

2025-03-25 11:19:33 UTC

Nobody cares about vectorization
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-03-25-vectorization/

2025-03-21 13:30:58 UTC

Should Unity be making games? A blog post with no clear answers. https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-03-21-engine-make-games/

2025-03-13 12:42:30 UTC

I have been waiting for Visual Studio 2022 to unfreeze for the last 30min, and now you get to read about it. In blog form here: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-03-13-yet-another-vs-freeze/
Curiously, this freeze has appeared more or less spontaneously after I opened a solution, then attempted to search for a thing in the codebase.
Here is what we're waiting for. For a moment I considered turning one of my monitors by 90° to capture the entire callstack, but I opted for some screenshot surgery instead (screenshot @nprofile…7pp9):
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/114/155/174/628/574/733/original/5f191211250f5ce0.png

2025-02-23 16:47:28 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm well at least all your upper bits are zeroed out, as it should be.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/114/054/216/612/979/115/original/42c4267b50a3a3a2.jpg

2025-02-23 14:19:07 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm i didn't realize you were such a big number, but at least some bits of you look aligned.

2025-02-17 10:17:57 UTC

Someone asked me: "Why did you leave Epic, is it really such a terrible place?" TL;DR: no, not a terrible place at all! Find the full response here: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-02-17-leaving-epic-games/

2025-02-15 12:29:52 UTC

Unity has updated their DOTS Samples repository with two new documents: "Misconceptions about DOTS and Entities" and a performance checklist.
They are both really good and should be pinned because they are a fantastic step towards undoing a lot of confusion that Unity's communication has caused in the past.
Find them linked in the ReadMe here:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EntityComponentSystemSamples?tab=readme-ov-file

2025-02-10 09:51:08 UTC

One more tale about avoiding micro-benchmarks
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-02-10-micro-benchmarks/

2025-02-05 18:11:28 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm c'mon, Draw_Heckerboard was right there for you to pick and you passed on it!!

2025-02-03 10:40:26 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm yeah, I didn't expect this either. I expected this to be "I am doing the right thing and it's going to be hard". But it turned out to be surprisingly comfortable.
For DX12, it helps that I barely ever touch that code. Maybe it would be different if I were to do alot of graphics programming! But then again I rarely mind typing out the details :)

2025-02-03 10:04:10 UTC

Programming without friction, and putting my money where my mouth is:
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-02-03-programming-friction/

2025-01-31 11:23:45 UTC

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@nprofile…gvnm @nprofile…cumc I just opted to do that exact thing whenever I find it. There is no blog-post that is too short or too obscure to be written and shared!

2025-01-29 11:03:05 UTC

How and why I wrote a build system, even though everyone tells you not to.
https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-01-29-build-systems/

2025-01-18 10:54:40 UTC

Unity Burst and zero-cost: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2025-01-18-burst-zero-init/

2024-11-17 15:48:46 UTC

A tech artist came to me and said "whenever we touch anything in a Unity shader graph, the editor stalls. It's painfully annoying." And yes, any meaningful change to the graph stalls the editor. Sometimes a bit, sometimes long. Let's dig in.
This is a long thread. You can find it in text form on my blog: https://blog.s-schoener.com/2024-11-17-unity-shader-graph-perf/