1. Familiarity with all GL APIs, but deep focus on 1 or 2.

If you want to work with Windows, probably DirectX.

2. Make awesome shaders. Check this out: https://fragcoord.xyz

I would say being a long-time user of Photoshop and Blender helps a lot. It's not a main tool, but supplemental. Maybe AI will take over some of this though.

Hell, maybe that other stuff too, hahaha!

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SirHackalot 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Why outsource my learning to Al? The whole point is the joy of the process. I could easily take a photo of a scene (since the inception of photography) instead of learning to paint it, but I would gain no skills through that. People still paint. I'm just tired, boss... I yearn for a past when we didn't have to end every conversation with a disclaimer about Al taking over.

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playorizaya 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah depends what/why you wanna do.

As a kid I wanted to make games when I got older, I always saw learning to program as a means to that end.

It wasn’t until I was deep into my career that I started developing all these preferences and ego and suddenly caring about the craft of the craft - specializing in work I never imagined spending so much time and energy on, career aspects I never meant to work into my personal identity.

Part of me feels a huge sense of relief with LLMs and image gen - because finally I don’t have to be the maniac anymore! The machine can be the machine again, I don’t have to sit at an IDE for 13 hours grinding out tedium.

Now I can make games, now I can do art.

In that sense it’s a lot like the early arts and literature movements - a renaissance - where the printing press, canvas, international finance, and the enabling of the rapid production of ideas paid off tremendously in the following decades and centuries.

We’ll get great films, games, stories, and research because of this stuff. And then great innovation - stuff we could not do without it at unimaginable scales.

	▲	jplusequalt 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>We’ll get great films, games, stories, and research because of this stuff. If you were the kind of person who could create great art, then you would have found a way to make that art happen before LLMs were made. Sorry if that comes off as harsh, but it's true. Too many people are convinced that an AI is suddenly going to skyrocket them from the ground floor to the ceiling of a craft. It won't. Accept that there are no shortcuts to mastery. Accept that ideas are cheap, and execution is what matters. Accept that a large portion of people find it repugnant to engage with generative art.