13-02

I've been procrastinating

I'm planning on getting more active on the project again.

Sidequesting Neovim

I spent the last few weeks sidequesting Neovim. Well, Neovim, but also workflow stuff in general. I was already running Neovim before, but I just spent much more time really configuring everything, and I must say: I probably cannot live without it anymore. By that I mean, it's so effortless to find, edit, and view files now that everything else feels cumbersome.
I've also added plugins that probably even stretch my Neovim outside the realm of a text editor and make it somewhat of an operating system. And Vim, by design, is so satisfying. Of course it's really hard in the beginning, but it is like a game. At first you suck. You fuck around and find out. Every day you wonder, "Well it works like this, but it's cumbersome..." then you google (or ask your favorite gaslight-intelligence) and then it clicks: "ohhhh!! of course that's so smart".
Maybe I'll publish a more Neovim-focused text in the future that extends the basic overview of my experience with it so far.

Terminal workflow

Part of that workflow rabbit hole was also my terminal situation. I went from kitty to Ghostty since it's newer and more focused on a specific featureset, instead of being a jack of all trades like kitty. I tried Alacritty too, but it was too stripped down for me. Ghostty feels like it's right in the middle. Plus I also feel like fonts look just better in Ghostty. I don't know if that's placebo, but something is different.
And then I also got into tmux. I used it before, but the keybinds were weird af. Now I'm looking at it in a different light and must say that I do quite like it now. Having the ability to detach/attach to persistent terminal sessions is just plain nice.

Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux: the performance rabbit hole

Besides that, the last few days were spent figuring out a weird issue I have when playing Cyberpunk 2077. I played through it multiple times but wanted to give it another go since I've found some cool lighting mods that change the complete visuals of the game, and I wanted to check out how it runs on Linux.
Well, the first hours were mostly fine until I noticed that my 16GB VRAM budget was fully utilized, leading to slowdowns. So I've removed some texture mods. Now the VRAM had some breathing room, but the slowdowns still persisted, or came back after a while to be more precise.
And that's how I got down another hurtful rabbit hole. I still don't understand it. I probably understand less than when I started, but the issue is that after X amount of time (or if some action in-game happens, like pulling an axe out), the CPU for some fucking reason spends a lot of time waiting for something, which is why my GPU is starving. The result is that CPU and GPU usage go down. The amount that these are going down usually scales with time, indicating some sort of memory leak but... there is none.
I'm really, really frustrated and hope it's just a VKD3D (translation layer for DX12 games) or driver issue that may be resolved in the future. I'm really bad at just letting that go and moving on... but I know I should.

At least 30 hours were spent diagnosing this issue, and whenever I think I've found the issue or at least some sort of workaround, it happens again.