packetpirate

And to think my team is migrating to CentOS 8 as we speak...

Flow fields are also great for reducing the amount of computation required to generate pathfinding for a large number of entities in a game world. I implemented flow fields as the pathfinding for the enemies in a game I was working on last year and it works really well.

Yes, throughout High School. At that point I had become socially disconnected and didn't have many friends. There were a few people who stood out from the usual put-downs and idiotic comments.

The problem is that even when something physical actually happened, for example, the time when someone sucker punched me in the face at my locker in front of an entire full hallway of students, everyone blamed me because of my size. I'm 6'10" (was probably 6'2" to 6'6" throughout High School) and the school administration always assumed I started it because I was the big and intimidating one.

It was to the point where one time, someone who routinely attacked and insulted me actually punched me right in front of the main office, where there were giant bay windows so the secretaries and administrators could see everything. I barely retaliated by pushing him away and the ROTC teacher broke it up, and because the one who attacked me was in ROTC, I was blamed and suspended.

There was literally never a single time I was attacked like this that the principal didn't assume I was the cause. I'll admit I was a troublemaker and did a lot of stupid shit in High School, but I never initiated any of the fights I got in or the situations I was put in.

The constant put-downs from people and the fact that my home life wasn't much better affected me academically to the point where I stayed back twice and the administration shuffled me off to an alternative school where I didn't actually learn anything of use because they didn't want to deal with me anymore.

I was in High School in the mid-2000s and should have graduated 2007, so it's not like this was in the 80s. The administration was just terrible and didn't care.

But hey, 10+ years later and I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and things have gotten a lot better. High School is a temporary, shitty time, and it won't have any bearing on your life afterwards unless you let it.

A lot of the people I saw in college who were CS majors didn't really seem to care about CS as a topic and only saw it as a lucrative career path. These same people would constantly struggle to understand the most basic concepts and not seem to care about understanding it beyond being able to finish their assignments.

It's sad because I feel like I and a handful of other people in the program were the only ones actually enjoying it. It probably also has a lot to do with older people telling so many kids as they were growing up that they're "so good with computers" because they showed them how to setup their email accounts and it gave them a false sense of skill that made them think they should do it for a living.

These teachers need to know about WolframAlpha...

This is a good point. Given the unreliability of voice recognition, an app would be preferable. But also, even a touchscreen where you can select your order would be a better idea.

I've been really looking forward to this for the last couple years, and am glad to see it finally released, but I must have missed the memo when they put a price tag on it, because I thought it was going to be freeware.

The only disappointments in how FUZE has evolved is that they don't seem to want you to actually SHARE anything you make. You can only share your made games with people on your friend's list. You can't publish them anywhere. Supposedly you can make external assets to push to the Switch, but without the ability to share games I've made, I'll be less likely to pay for it.

Only application I've used this for so far is a technique for defining and recognizing gestures. They're called "flash gestures" (or that's what the page where I read about them called them) where you find the closest of 8 directions to the gesture direction and encode each gesture as a sequence of digits 1-8 corresponding to these closest directions, then use the Levenshtein distance algorithm to find the closest matching pattern.

EDIT: Found the reference I used to implement this.

https://books.google.com/books?id=_1rSBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=P...

I love how the High School edition of Down and Out in Paris and London says it was edited by Moira Propeat...... in 2105.

I'm working on Grave Wave, a top-down zombie shooter with a dark synthwave aesthetic. I've got most of the core gameplay worked out, but am currently working on overhauling the game's graphics and migrating towards more of a level-based, story-based game instead of a wave-based shooter. The latest build can be found here:

https://packetpirate.itch.io/gravewave

Eventually I'm planning to get it onto Steam, but there's a lot more work to be done.

The songs are just placeholders during early development. I'm planning to overhaul those after the graphics.

More up-to-date gameplay can be seen on my Twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/packetpirate

As someone who has been playing games for well over 25 years and who has a Vive, I DO think that VR is the future of gaming, just not in its current state. I think the biggest barrier is the price. The most affordable VR option is the Oculus Go at $200, but if you want to play actually decent content, you're better off going with either an Oculus Quest or a Vive. Even the base Vive model is currently $500. That's a lot to drop on a headset when there's such a lack of good content out there. And it's not even that the content we have available is necessarily bad... it's just short and gimmicky.

If VR is to be the future of gaming, some serious strides need to be made in making it easier to put together a VR experience that isn't just a 30-minute demo. I can name on one hand the number of VR titles I've played that have more than a couple hours of original, worthwhile content.

Another argument to be made is that Oculus is the more well-known VR headset among the general gaming market because it was the first, and being that Facebook owns it, and with all the recently scandals... why would you want to own a device managed by Facebook? Maybe it's just me, but it's bad enough having a profile -- I don't want hardware made by them anywhere near my apartment.

If we can knock down the price of VR and get some better games, I absolutely believe it would explode in popularity.

If SCP-3137 is viewed, the subject shall be immediately taken into custody and then fed to SCP-682.

Here are a few recommendations based on things I've read this year and last:

- Infinite by Jeremy Robinson

- The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (this series is a rabbit hole)

- Scythe by Neal Shusterman

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

- Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Why the hell would you even use a "virtual" card? With the rate at which personal data is being stolen day after day and companies as large as Equifax being breached, why would you trust your money with an all-virtual bank? Especially one that is so new? It's just asking for trouble. I've had the same bank since I was 17 and they have literally never let me down, and the couple of times I had a fraudulent transaction occur, they automatically flagged it and called me to ask if it was legitimate.

When I first went to college for my Associate's Degree, we learned C++ and had the option to choose between Java and Visual Basic. I chose Java, obviously, because who the hell wants to know Visual Basic?

I really liked Java back then because C++ had always been a struggle, not because of pointers or anything like that... but because I always found project management, figuring out how to link libraries, and build my projects, to be overly complicated. With Java, I only had to import a library, and that was it. I didn't need to link external libraries because Java's standard library was large enough that it had most of what I needed at the time, and adding external libraries wasn't nearly as difficult as C++.

However, over the years, I feel like I've kind of grown apart from it and have started to want to migrate back towards C++ and Python. I still use Java because it's the language I know best and it's the language I'm writing my game in, but after I finish my game, I think I'll be using it significantly less. The bulkiness of the code, the complications from the JVM, and the lack of good options for deploying executable code is just getting more and more frustrating.

Also, as I was working on my Bachelor's Degree, filling in the gaps of knowledge left by a "meh" education at my previous school, I could see that Java is just not good for writing good, fast code.

That said, Java 8 did make me like Java a lot more when it came out, but they're starting to deploy new versions so frequently now I feel like 8 is the last version I will bother learning.

You could bring in a Raspberry Pi and show them how they can modify Minecraft on the fly with Python.

I don't take any medication for it, but music can help, and over the years, I've gotten better at focusing by simply willing myself to do it. There are definitely a lot of days when I'll end up blankly staring at my screen for an hour while my mind runs through a bunch of unrelated information, but I'm stubborn and have been able to push through this the majority of the time.

I also try to always write down a task so I don't forget it later. For my own personal projects, I like to use Trello to organize my tasks and plan out what I need to work on for the next release.

I can definitely understand the difficulty to focus on something you're not interested in. Maybe you could try listening to a podcast or something about something you ARE interested in while working? Depends on how bad the ADD is, because for me, I would end up completely focusing on that and tuning out my actual work.

Also, if you're seriously trying to work on something and it's usually an issue for you, put your phone somewhere where you won't be constantly reaching for it.

For that matter, it would be cool to see a breakdown of how even earlier games like Elite for the NES achieved their pseudo-3D using wire mesh graphics and how they packed so much content into such a small cartridge.

I see in the comments that he has been working on a Quake Black Book, but I hope he plans to eventually do books on other types of games as well, instead of just Carmack/Romero-centric, raycasted first-person games. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Commander Keen Black Book, but I'd also love to see a Morrowind Black Book or a Secret of Mana Black Book. The series could be really cool if he delved into other game engines and game mechanics.

Something isn't "coding" just because it involves following a set of instructions... you could argue that a knitting pattern is an algorithm of sorts, but that doesn't make it coding.

Yeah, except that if they were to start failing and needed a bailout, you can bet that would fall on the farmers, because they have enough of a stranglehold on the business that it would be their only option.

I can definitely relate to his feelings of not being taken seriously in school and being put in the spotlight without oversight. I frequently did dumb things when I was in middle school, and it became a self-actualizing thing as I became increasingly frustrated that I had been pegged as some kind of criminal for doing mostly average rebellious teenage things. But what really got me was when I was increasingly blamed for things I DIDN'T do, and the frustration of it all led me to lash out because I had a difficult time refuting baseless claims against me.

School administrators don't give a damn about the majority of their students. They mostly care about their image and the top 5% of students who make them look good. If you're even remotely troubled, the school system chews you up and spits you out.

I think the worst example of this from my own experiences is during High School when I was put in "alternative education" because they just didn't want to deal with me anymore. Nobody thought "maybe it isn't that he can't do the work, maybe there's problems he's dealing with that nobody cares to ask about" or that the increasing frustration of being a social pariah and someone who can't find the words to express his issues was the problem; they just didn't care, so they just threw me out.

Fortunately, I did finally get my act together and get through college... but I sincerely hope that what I experienced doesn't become common-place just because school administrators would rather "throw out the trash" than deal with the root of the problem.

I can't imagine anyone is surprised by this. I've been hearing horror stories about PayPal since the mid 2000s. They're a garbage company, and the only reason people don't use something else is because they're a veritable monopoly.

I've spent the past two years remaking my first game from 2013. I know that even though it has come a LONG way since the original, it probably won't sell, but I do it anyway simply because the original was a pile of hot garbage with a terrible engine and I wanted to do better.

Sure, bringing in some extra cash would be nice, but at the end of the day, I get precious few hours to myself at night and on the weekends, so if I didn't take some joy in my hobbies, I'm not sure how I'd stay sane.

What a load of crap... "why do schools focus on unmarketable skills?" Gee, I don't know? Maybe because we shouldn't be teaching kids that they only exist to learn about a trade so they can be another cog in the machine? Because there are things worth learning beyond just what's valuable to the job market and every person should be given the opportunity to branch out and be diverse in their studies?

Colleges give you all those supplemental classes so that you'll be well-rounded. Sure, you'd graduate faster and spend less money if you only took the classes that were immediately relevant to your career, but math proofs and math in general aren't always practical... it's about training your brain to solve problems, and the more abstract you can think about and approach a problem, the more creative you can get with your solutions.

And it's not even just about skills... college is a whole different ball game than High School in terms of meeting new people. High School is all about cliques and for a lot of people (myself included) was fucking miserable. College allows you to meet a diverse set of new people who may or may not share common interests and for me, at least, allowed me to grow as a person in ways that don't necessarily translate to anything "marketable".

Sure, not everyone is meant to go to college and the mentality that our parents had when we were younger, that "you have to go to college or you'll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life" is toxic, but those of us who do want to pursue a career that requires a higher education shouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives in debt just to do so.

Fucking black magic obfuscation. Is it possible to learn this power?

I want to see someone try to rewrite C++'s entire syntax in the form of another language (I just have to assume it has already been done.)

Because doing the same thing every day for decades is incredibly dull and some people want to do something new and exciting? Maybe someone started off in a high-pressure environment, but now wants to focus on their personal life and wants more freedom to actually... live their life?

I feel bad for the guy because my dad goes through the same thing, being in IT and being 66, it's hard for him to find anything.

But stop blaming everything on millennials, damn it. We didn't create age bias and blaming millennials for everything is such a cop-out that ignores real issues. Latching onto this idea that millennials are out to get you "because millennials" is extremely toxic and is the reason why there's such a generational divide.

Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.

Did you just drop off the planet between 1995 - 2005? Poor Myspace... everybody just forgot it ever existed. And AIM... ICQ... MSN... Yahoo... not to mention the endless forums on every single conceivable subject. Nobody I knew in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't using AIM or some other comparable program. It wasn't hard to keep in touch with people.

Facebook didn't invent social networking. All it did was give people a platform to vomit out their every thought for all their friends to see at once.

Damn! My work machine is cut off from outside networks and restricted to the versions of packages on their repo. Guess I can't use it. :/