larrry

For me, asking “what else can I see?” has been useful. Some of my favorite works of art show me new things every time I look. Garry Winogrand’s 1964 is my favorite book of all time, I’ve gone through it dozens of times and always find a new photo to appreciate.

I also find it helpful to avoid labeling art as “bad” and instead say “I do not yet understand this work, but someday I might”. I didn’t get that Winogrand book at first, had I written it off I would have missed out. I still don’t get Cy Twombly, but I hope to figure his paintings out someday.

The more art you look at, the better you get at looking at art!

Maybe Nintendo engaged in more back and forth with the ratings board to negotiate a low rating for Zelda, and the indie dev just accepted what they got?

Genuinely puzzling for sure

An example of modern ratings being oddly strict: Öoo is rated T by the ESRB[1]. It’s laughable that a nonviolent puzzle platformer about a caterpillar is less age appropriate than Breath of the Wild, which is rated E10+[2] despite also having bombs and a lot more violence.

If Öoo is rated T, should games staring Donald Duck be rated 18+ because he doesn’t wear pants and would be showing his crotch to children?

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/ooo-switch/

[2] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/the-legend-of-zel...

Some engines nicely support Mac out of the box. I’m making a party fighter in LOVE2D and am having a good time developing and playing on Mac (cross platform online play is working well too, my friends are all Windows).

Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!

I would love to see all of these come to LuaJIT (and love2d to support the new version too). It’s nice that Lua is simple, the syntax changes should hopefully make Lua code even simpler to read too

Hi! A few years back I quit the industry and moved out of NYC. My goal is to live a humble life of subsistence. I’ve been told repeatedly by pretty much everyone in my life that I don’t actually want this, but the more active steps I take toward living alone in the woods, the happier I feel. I don’t deny extreme tradeoffs are required, but I grow more convinced that those tradeoffs are personally correct for me.

Perhaps not a common perspective (especially among NYC residents, city life offers a very different tradeoff), but just wanted to share that a real person does wish to be a “farmer” of sorts.

A goofy skater’s head faces right, over their shoulder, and body faces left, relative to their forward movement.

Orientations are so confusing, I thought the parent was describing regular too

What modifications did you make to help with gamedev?

Valve and Panic should be models for software companies

I’ve found that sometimes p2p connections will have large lag spikes when communicating across the country (and on WiFi networks, that’s likely the true culprit).

I would see rare bursts of packet delay for ~1 second, that would quickly resolve. In a rollback game where inputs are predicted well, often times this would be unnoticeable.

I send up to 2s worth of input history every frame to handle these lag spikes. I also confirm inputs received, so in practice usually players are only sending a handful of recent unconfirmed inputs (with the 2s buffer available if unconfirmed inputs pile up due to lag).

My guess is their 2s window is for similar reasons, as buffer for rare connection issues. Even if lag spikes are incredibly rare, they need to be handled for a reliable player experience

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Panic, they make good quality software, made the Playdate (which hopefully has turned a profit, “spiritually” it seems like a huge win), and publish really cool games. It would make me happy to see more software companies follow that lead

I am working on a game myself, maybe I should reach out to see if it’s something Panic might be interested in publishing…

Replays are very common in fighting games as well, rollback netcode gets you most of the way to a replay system already (replaying game state from inputs is a core requirement for online play)

Some environments only expose float as the number type, love2d being one I know. Fortunately love is built on LuaJIT, which does support integer math through the built-in ‘ffi’ library.

My multiplayer arena game rounds reasonably-sized floats and compares them in the presentation layer, but uses fixed point integer math in the core rollback simulation

(I believe JS is a similar story, its number can be either int or float with no way to guarantee integer-only math. I never needed to consider the difference outside of currency for webdev, so I’m less sure)

The core of my multiplayer arena game is in fixed point

I wanted absolute certainty that the rollback netcode would result in identical simulations on any platform, and integer math provides that. With set of wrapper functions and look up tables for trig it’s not that much worse than using regular floats

I am still uncertain if I actually would have been fine with floats, being diligent to round frequently and staying within true integer representable range… but now at least I’m far less afraid of game desyncs and it wasn’t that much work

Cross platform, cross USA games have been stable and fun to play, no fixed point complaints here

I played with mine for a couple months, put it down for a year, and played it for a couple more months recently. There are some good games and the device just oozes fun, I haven’t regretted it

I have an Ergodox EZ setup with a layer switch under my left thumb to a code-symbols layer on my right hand, formatted kinda like numpad but for brackets and boolean math. It’s been a good way for me to eliminate a lot of pinky use

Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)

A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.

I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.

When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.

Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).

Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.

Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.

I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.

I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?

I too am a Charles Addams fan! The best ink painter in cartoons (IMO), and definitely plenty of grin worthy gags.

Peter Arno is also another good ink painting cartoonist, although his subject matter has generally aged much more poorly…

Have you ever laughed out loud at a cartoon? I don’t think I have, and I would say I enjoy cartoons quite a bit. A grin is about the best reaction I can give to one myself

Panic’s Playdate has been easy to pass around to friends to try. The device intro is a lot of fun and shows the main interactions, and then the games a snappy and easy to jump into.

Definitely would recommend playing with one if you get the chance. Buying one… it depends on how much the device appeals to you, mine got active use for a couple months and then has fallen off

I have had bad cubital tunnel in the past, enough so that I was learning to become ambidextrous to stop using my left hand. A surgery helped tremendously in my case, but I’m still prone to flare ups if I overuse my pinky.

An Ergodox EZ has been a lifesaver, I’ve reprogrammed it so I don’t need to use my left pinky anything other than letter keys (goodbye left shift, you’ve pained me for too long). I fully agree with the articles advice; pair a good programmable keyboard with physical activity to keep the hands working long term.

Be warned though: the more customized your keyboard the harder it is type when using a laptop or friends keyboard.

I’m curious, why? My takeaway was that if you’re struggling with a problem, thinking on it more is going to be more helpful than trying to implement a half baked solution.

Those games sell themselves on name alone, are they playable anywhere?

I’ve been building up animations for a main character sprite. I’m hoping one day AI can help me make small changes quickly (apply different hairstyles mainly). So far I haven’t seen anything promising either.

Otherwise I have to touch up a hundred or so images manually for each different character style… probably not worth it

I understand not liking Pollock, and he’s often the butt of “my kid could do that”. But do you really think most people dislike it?

In person they are compelling, and there is more skill at play than at first glance. I like them at least