Notch live coding for Ludum dare 22

http://sv.twitch.tv/notch

by hjalle • 15 years ago

184 72 15 years ago

sv.twitch.tv

hucker• 15 years ago

It's interesting to see such a prominent and talented coder do his work on (what looks like) a totally stock Eclipse install. Not that there is anything wrong with it at all, but it puts into perspective all the time "wasted" by thousands of programmers (myself included) around the world tweaking their vimrc to perfection, obsessing over tiling vs traditional window managers, and in general worrying a great deal about the "optimal" workspace.

It's rather refreshing to see someone that just does his work with tools that are sufficient to do the job.

Come to think of it, I see this phenomena quite often at the university I attend. The "average" guys have regular flamewars on what language is best or whether vim or emacs or some IDE is the ultimate tool, MacBook Pro versus Thinkpad and so on, while the actual top guys keep churning out quality code in whatever language fits the task on whatever machine available at the time with whatever OS is on that machine.

This is obviously a great simplification and a single anecdote, but I think there is some truth to it. Masters of art obsess over the artwork itself, not the tools used to create it.

sejje• 15 years ago

>>Masters of art obsess over the artwork itself, not the tools used to create it.

Gets said in photography debates all the time.

Great talent can max out available tools, though, and it can be a limitation. That usually inspires creativity, in the case of photography.

babebridou2• 15 years ago

I learned programming with Eclipse default settings and Java, on a PC with a classic AZERTY straight keyboard with 105 keys layed out in the classic way. At some point there's not debate, yeah Java is crap, yeah Eclipse is laggy, etc, but my hands, brain and code work completely in concert when all those are united and there's no question that I can get anything done much, much faster with these. I actually gave up on using a macbook after a year and a half of constant practice because it still felt far too tiring to build my android apps compared to the PC, even though it was still Java and Eclipse.

It would be the equivalent of speaking your mother language (or native tongue or first language, whatever you english-speaking people call it :P) vs speaking a language with which you're "only" fluent when you just have to express a point very fast.

I'm not saying Notch is in the same situation (or anyone else actually), just that there are reasons, beyond being able to get things done using just the available tools, to use a setup that is often seen as suboptimal.

swah2• 15 years ago

Doesn't look laggy on his PC though...

gavingmiller• 15 years ago

Used to do the same thing with my electric guitar. I kept buying new pedals thinking that I would sound great once I found the perfect combo. Never made me a better player though.

TillE• 15 years ago

It's like cooking: you want simple, quality ingredients.

You can't beat a good guitar connected directly to a good amp.

nate2• 15 years ago

There's also maybe a similar point to be made about him using Java to code his games.

Java gets a lot of bashing these days, and there's so many "hot" languages to mention during those bashing sessions. But in the end, the guy creates games people have a strong desire to play. And then he uses the technologies he's comfortable with to get whatever job done.

swah2• 15 years ago

And with Eclipse having something like "hot code reloading", the style of coding is pretty much the same as one folk programming Lisp with Emacs+Slime (edits and sees results immediately).

spacemanaki• 15 years ago

I'm a card-carrying Java-hater (haha only serious) and Lisper, I was pretty damn impressed by this the last time I watched Notch working on a LD thing. I looked it up this time and found out that Eclipse calls it "hot code replacement"

http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_What_is_hot_code_replace%3F

There are some limitations (can only change the body of an existing method) so it's not quite as dynamic as Lisp + Emacs + SLIME, but it's still pretty cool. I wish Dalvik supported it somehow because from what I can tell, you can't do this with code running on an Android emulator.

akkartik• 15 years ago

I see the same data and come to the opposite conclusion. People with 10x my brain power can deal with dumb tools, verbose languages, a malicious codebase, architecture astronauts. I'm too stupid to do what they do, so I try to pick my battles and live where it's simple.

I'm not arguing for obsessing over tools, or for flamewars. But perhaps the dumber you are the more you should pay attention to foundations.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Books on pool and billiards will teach you how to execute a proper billiards shot. Every one of them, from Willie Mosconi's book of the 1940s to the very latest, will tell you that you should stroke the cue forward and back along a straight path, as if it were running in a groove, avoiding swerves, which will be difficult to control. You should particularly avoid swerving your cue and hand during the final delivery and follow-through.

But there are a few rare and precious films of Willie Hoppe, possibly the greatest billiards player of all time, who won fifty-one world titles at a time when billiards was one of the most popular sports in America and was played in every U.S. city by every gentleman of taste. Check out Willie Hoppe's billiard stroke, starting at about 1:10 in this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQynRebhP1Y

From this evidence, it would appear that Willie Hoppe ruled the world of billiards with the worst stroke ever known to man. His cue literally skews through a ten-degree angle between the start of his delivery and the end, and his hand twists too. Wikipedia sheds some light on this:

Hoppe's peculiar style of stroke was a result of his career as a child prodigy. He barely reached the table and had to stand on a box. In [his book] Hoppe emphatically advised players not to use his way of directing the cue.

The moral of this story is that grandmasters will take lousy tools and build amazing things, because they are grandmasters. We, on the other hand, are probably not grandmasters, may not want to invest tens of thousands of hours before we get some decent results, and will not actually be harmed if, at the start of our quest for grandmastery, we do ourselves a favor and get the best tools we can afford.

---

(Having said all that: I may not personally like Java or Eclipse, but I can't believe they rank as bad tools. Tens of thousands of people are productive in them, many voluntarily. And consider that people used to write great games for the Atari 2600, for god's sake; Java on modern hardware is a dream come true by comparison.)

rhizome2• 15 years ago

Eclipse:Java::Textmate:Rails

rufibarbatus• 15 years ago

I heard that, once asked about which guitar model was his favourite, Keith Richards said "give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same." [1]

[1] Couldn't verify that he was saying this in answer to the question, but here's an attributed citation of the same quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Keith_Richards...

littledude• 15 years ago

The same theory applies for pro PC gamers, an unusually high amount use $10 microsoft optical mice. Then there's the majority of casual players arguing over the details of the latest $90+ mice with bells and whistles.

Scaevolus• 15 years ago

Watching other programmers code is a great way to learn new things about your tools.

From his LD21 stream I learned that Eclipse can do hot code reloading-- Notch uses this extensively to iterate with cycles measured in seconds.

pantaloons• 15 years ago

You say "iterate" but from what I observed it was mostly used for shotgun debugging -- not necessarily a bad idea when doing graphics programming on a strict time limit.

ericb• 15 years ago

I'm curious--how is he able to make coding fast enough to be interesting to watch? It seems almost sped-up. I spend so much more time thinking than typing. Yet somehow he seems to be coding at a speed which would preclude a lot of think-time. I am confused, and a bit in awe.

And where is the part where strange crap happens that surprises you, and you spend 10 minutes staring at something and debugging it?

scottostler• 15 years ago

I don't disagree, but when I watched for about 15 seconds he was inserting printlns, trying to debug something related to sprite collisions. So I'd guess he still does some of that.

But the better answer is probably that he's been making games for two decades, according to wikipedia. Presumably he's long since worked through much of what you or I would need to think about when putting together a 2d tile game.

PaulJoslin2• 15 years ago

You have to realise that quite a lot of the ground work he is doing at this point is probably very familiar code. The fundamental code which scrolls the screen about, renders the sprites and moves the objects around the screen will be something he's written so many times it's instinctive.

Tichy• 15 years ago

I am so envious - if what you say is the case, how does he still manage to do it? I find it extremely hard to do routine tasks that I have done loads of times before. It is an extreme struggle for me to get enough motivation together.

ANH• 15 years ago

In fairness to you, I'd guess you, too, would code like a demon with such a short and hard deadline. I've watched previous of his codestreams and strange crap does happen, but instead of sitting and thinking for ten minutes, he codes and re-codes for ten minutes. Sort of thinking out loud.

reledi• 15 years ago

I've noticed that a lot in this current stream. Instead of stopping to think and plan out how to do something, he keeps reiterating until he's satisfied.

He's satisficing. He's producing something quickly, rather than some optimal solution that takes much longer.

w1ntermute2• 15 years ago

I don't know the exact rules of Ludum Dare, but if possible, I would have sketched out on paper (and if no prepared materials are allowed, memorized the important points) the general structure of the game, so that all I'd be doing during the 48 hours would be the actual programming.

horser4dish• 15 years ago

Actually, he didn't do this. Part of the LD is that the theme/topic for the Dare isn't revealed until the game starts. He actually spent about twenty minutes staring at a 5-line text file labelled "ideas," just thinking out loud while he tried to come up with a game type.

emehrkay• 15 years ago

I too am amazed by this. I watched him program NoiseMap (which I assume is a random map generator, all trial and error. he went from double = double * double; to double = double * double * double * double;) and now he is applying it to the actual game world. Pretty amazing.

I should be coding

skore2• 15 years ago

I think what notch does really well is keeping the task at hand interesting to himself. Even looking at videos of him programming minecraft, you see that he does it to entertain himself. If a certain amount of time passes where he isn't liking what he's doing, he probably switches over to something interesting and keep the hard stuff in small bites for later.

It's a very good concept to work by, keeping things flowing and neither bore yourself to death nor skip on the hard things.

zandor2• 15 years ago

There are a few "Oh..." moments here and there, but he seems to get them pretty fast.

PaulJoslin2• 15 years ago

I think what I enjoyed the most watching this was the fact that he clearly has a lot of artistic talent, as well as the ability to code.

Many programmers have been unable to produce masterpieces, due to the lack of ability to produce any of the required graphics / sprites.

Notch was just adhoc drawing animated sprites and they looked great.

127• 15 years ago

Drawing is mostly a trained skill. People highly over-estimate the actual innate talent needed. They just need to work for it to get results. Of course if you don't enjoy it, you will not most likely be able to learn. The trick is to enjoy it.

I couldn't find the link but there was this middle-aged guy who was only able to draw stick figures and then got some training and now has an art studio and is a renowned painter.

Bootvis2• 15 years ago

Feynman springs to mind. A Nobel winning physicist with some success after a lot of practicing.

helium• 15 years ago

Anywhere I can watch this on a iPad?

ronnier• 15 years ago

Download the free twitch.tv app

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

Great fun to watch! He just posted a "work in progress" version: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html

atambo• 15 years ago

Go to https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html to play the game (he updates it periodically as he's working on it).

aw3c22• 15 years ago

I unsuccessfully tried to watch (and record) this with rtmpdump. Does anyone have success with it? This is as far as I got:

rtmpdump -r "rtmp://199.9.255.233/app" -a "app" -f "WIN 11,0,1,152" -W "http://www-cdn.justin.tv/widgets/live_site_player.re2cb52468... -p "http://sv.twitch.tv/notch --live -y "jtv_NkzwEXgKbSnzmSP_"

It is a shame that things like this are encumbered and tightly controlled.

gue5t• 15 years ago

I've gotten further with this: http://pronou.net/code/jtvdump

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Why would you when justin.tv release the videos as soon as the stream ends?

aw3c22• 15 years ago

I checked some random videos on justin.tv and could not find an option to download the files. Is that indeed possible?

langsamer• 15 years ago

Is that the music he is listening to or is that just ambiance music added by twitch.tv?

zandor2• 15 years ago

Yeah it's him. Just heard him say it. Last hour or so has been Röyksopp in case you wondered.

Edit: Must admit that I've had less entertaining nights out than this. Getting inspired and learning a few small tricks here and there is rather fun!

nvictor• 15 years ago

digitally imported or something...

54mf• 15 years ago

di.fm. Electro House, if I'm not mistaken. Superb programming music, in my opinion.

hpaavola• 15 years ago

He seems to use a lot of "magic numbers" at first, but later on replacing those with proper variables. Is that common? I can't keep track of the meaning of such numbers while programming, so I tend to use variables straight away.

HalibetLector• 15 years ago

I noticed that he switches between the keyboard and mouse so fast it seems like he always has one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. How is he so fast at switching? For me, touching the mouse is the slowing thing I do in a text editor.

Bootvis2• 15 years ago

The trick I use is to set the mouse sensitivity low and throw grab the mouse in the general direction I need the pointer to go. Then a switch costs me the time to my hand 20 centimeters.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

I don't know the technique in this case, but personally I use a ThinkPad with a mouse on home row and buttons right next to the spacebar. I can go from typing to mousing almost instantly, though I still prefer to do everything possible with the keyboard unless I truly need an analog input device.

bobthedino• 15 years ago

Anyone know what third party Java libraries he's making use of (if any)?

deniszgonjanin• 15 years ago

Go watch him code and then decide for yourself if there is such a think as a 100x programmer

sontek• 15 years ago

I have to open up documentation all the time when I'm working, hes just hacking away... its beautiful.

theon144• 15 years ago

Dammit, I found about it just now, does anybody know if there's going to be a recording of the stream on youtube or elsewhere?

tsigo2• 15 years ago

Historically, he's posted a timelapse version on YouTube, but you can't really see anything specific he's doing.

justin.tv, and by extension TwitchTV, which he's using to stream, archives everything, so you should be able to view it from this same link once he's done.

tsigo2• 15 years ago

Just to follow up, here's the archived version of the very start of the stream: http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/302823358

jebblue• 15 years ago

I watched this for several hours today, cool stuff watching him. His reactions when the code misbehaves are funny. How he remembers which sections of code do what and is not afraid to cut out whole sections to achieve the effect he wants is cool.

sidmitra• 15 years ago

I've been working on a dribbble for the Game Dev community, http://www.metroia.com, hoping to launch Jan 1.

resnamen2• 15 years ago

Wow, it's cool to see him modifying classes on the fly. He's tweaking RGB value constants and seeing the result instantaneously.

jiggy2011• 15 years ago

Has anybody here had any experience entering Lundum dare?

For many years I have thought about the idea of building a game from scratch and even have a few half (or probably quarter at best) finished engines/demos. Of course it is easy to become a perfectionist and compare your work to the best AAA titles which means you will never finish.

Perhaps a strict 48 hour deadline is what is needed to really force me to get something completed. Although since I haven't done any games programming for years I would just end up spending all the time reading the docs and correcting simple mistakes.

Notch live coding for Ludum dare 22

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