HN user
http://danbolt.itch.io/
I send around 20 a year. Checking the mail is relatively monotonous for people, so receiving one is like a lucky gacha pull in today’s world.
Since they’re so memorable, it’s usually an easy way to make someone’s day without much time, money or effort. There’s also very little scrutiny in what you write, so even an in-depth episode about sun glare at the bus stop goes a long way.
I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.
Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.
You’re certainly right, especially for the AAA games coming off the presses, but it’s not always true with certain indie games, especially if they’re doing a physical print run long after publishing.
You can occasionally get one where a very final version copies straight off a PS5 disc.
If that were the case, I think we would have already seen a turbocharged AI fork of Godot by now.
Or, if the machine-generated programming is that good, it shouldn’t be prohibitively difficult to surpass the handwritten version.
In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games
I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.
In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.
I don’t have a horse in the race and I’m speaking from ignorance, but I noticed that Valve’s offering only requires 300W of power. That sounds very appealing for the sort of games I play.
Would it be difficult to make a PC with a similar power/performance profile?
This is often win-win as the junior ends up with a robust list of resume bullets that help push their career forward.
Reconciling is my least favourite part. It always feels like everyone’s checkout is a unique blend of local files and permissions you have to fix up now and then. It can be hard to keep track of how much one’s deviated.
I can understand how git isn’t always appropriate for less technical workflows and large file sizes, but p4 pain is its own character.
I remember the Wii U browser’s MP4 playback being surprisingly helpful. Running the `http-server` npm package, I was able to get video from my laptop to the TV in a pinch.
Adding in Handbrake, it wasn’t that bad of a setup!
I’ve seen bounties for re-adding C# to web exports to Godot 4. [1] It’s something that’s had some technical roadblocks for the engine’s developers, and looks like it might take a bit of time. [2]
There tend to be a lot of drive-by AI PRs attempt to “re-add” the feature, often not quite addressing the situation comprehensively. It seems like a bit of a local minima trap for the bots. [3]
[1] https://app.opire.dev/issues/01J8YJ06HPSY7ZAMAW08T83YBD
[2] https://godotengine.org/article/live-from-godotcon-boston-we...
I don’t have diabetes, but I’ve heard from people with T1 that Welch’s work well for the reasons you mentioned.
When I browse the candy aisle at the store, I often wonder if certain treats tend to be better than others for administering glucose. In your experience, are there ever certain properties of candies that are more useful than others?
I’ve noticed something similar with vibecoded game rendering logic submitted by peers. Sometimes it will be peppered with extraneous checks for nullptr, or early returns on textures that have zero size.
I often wonder if it’s the statistical nature of the LLM mixed with a request in the prompt.
Please elaborate, poopmonster! What sort of skills are required to expertly use an LLM?
Yeah, I’m quite surprised at this comment. Commercial video games are mass-produced products, and as much as I dislike designers being bogged down in technical minutiae, having a sense of industrial design for the thing you’re making is an incredible boon.
Fumito Ueda was notably quite concerned with the technical/production feasibility of his designs for Shadow of the Colossus. [1] Doom was an exercise in both creativity and expertise.
[1] https://www.designroom.site/shadow-of-the-colossus-oral-hist...
I’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]
Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “organized criminals”? I hope you’re not poisoning the well!
I ask this as someone who has no love or support for the Liberals.
I’ve only seen that movie on an old MacBook about a decade ago, but I can certainly believe it’d be a treat seeing it the way you mention.
Funny enough, I want to see a version of Chungking Express that feels processed to look like an early-2000s digital camera.
My unfounded hunch for the computing bit is that home computers became more and more commonplace in the home as we approached the 21st century.
A Commodore 64 was a cool gadget, but “the family computer” became a device that commoditized the productivity. The opportunity cost of applying a computer to try something new went to near zero.
It might have been harder for someone to improve the productivity of an old factory in Shreveport, Louisiana with a computer than it was for the upstarts at id to make Doom.
Super Mario 64 is a video game that’s had a lot of rereleases, both official and unofficial. I sometimes wonder if the most people who have experienced it did in a way that wasn’t like the original Nintendo 64. The Switch version sold almost as many copies. As a kid, I beat it with arrow keys on an emulator in 2001.
When I read the responses to this document, I wonder if Dragon Ball is the same, where the collective nostalgia is actually quite diverse.
Can you elaborate on the “partially correct” bit? I’d like to understand the programming of the ROM better.
I think the source code in the GitHub repo generates the ROM in the corresponding screenshots, but it seems quite barebones.
It feels very much like it’s cobbled together from the libdragon examples directory. Or, they use hardware acceleration for the 2D sprites, but then write fixed-width text to the frambuffer with software rendering.
What’s the game? Genuinely curious!
My first job out of school was on one of the HD expansions at SkyBox Labs. It was mostly grunt feature work and desync fixes, but I remember that some of the handcoded ASM from the legacy pathfinding had been one-to-one translated to C++.
I always wondered if that contributed to the pathfinding regressions that were talked about online. Or, you learn about compiler-induced accidental UB in school, and part of me wondered if something was happening there.
If you’re being objective about a programming language, its strengths and weaknesses are always going to a reflection of the game you’re trying to make. Python’s ecosystem will get you very far making web services, but less so with cert on consoles.
C# and GDScript are no different. They both have made design decisions for particular reasons.
You’re a skilled developer in real languages, so I’d encourage you to explore why other developers might prefer a DSL for their needs!
My philosophy has always been “ergonomic scripting or drop to C++”, so I’m quite okay with it.
C# has always felt a bit clunky to me. It’s nice to have alternatives.
I tried the 7DFPS Game Jam this month, trying to learn a little more 3D modelling, as well as Godot. It was my first time using the engine to produce a HTML5 build.
Within the scope of a game’s production, the programmer time spent dogfooding the new audio format can be used towards something else that improves the value of the end product.
The uncompressed audio for latency-sensitive one-shots usually isn’t taking up the bulk of memory either.
The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.
A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.
The Nintendo 64 has a z-buffer, but the slow fillrate means that depth-checking can hamper your frame time. World Driver Championship sorted their polygons PS1-style with unique microcode, and got a very nice framerate.
I sometimes wonder what the Nintendo 64’s library would have been like if they had sorted polygons on the CPU like other consoles of the era.
I don’t know if I could list something that matches say Cuphead or Silksong, but I do think that Godot is currently on a Clayton Christiansen-style worse-is-better ascent right now.