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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I was once a fool like you :)

    Mike McShaffry’s book “Game Coding Complete” is a good guide to the practical side of using a game engine IRL to get things done.

    It’ll give you a good idea of how things should be shaped in order to be useful, and some things you can “skip ahead” to. Off-the-shelf engines have to be extremely general in order to be flexible enough to be useful to many customers, so game devs have to put in the effort to make them more specific. You’ll have to start off by being specific, if you have any chance of actually finishing something.

    Eberly’s book “3D Game Engine Architecture” deals with the nuts and bolts, the rigorous academic engineering stuff. It’s pretty solid, but it’s aimed at making a general-purpose engine, which is beyond the scope of a one-person project.

    Backing up though… You don’t have any language or library opinions? You might need 5-10 years of experience doing general programming (or game dev) before you can sustainably tackle this, or else you’re likely to paint yourself into a corner.

    Edit: Probably the biggest PITA with game engine dev is testing. If you’re not already an expert in setting up test harnesses at multiple levels of detail, you’re gonna find it impossible to keep moving after a few months.

    Good luck!



  • I like the way Ted Chiang puts it:

    Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

    There’s nothing magical or mystical about writing, but it involves more than placing an existing document on an unreliable photocopier and pressing the Print button.

    I think our materialist culture forgets that minds exist. The output from writing something is not just “the thing you wrote”, but also your thoughts about the thing you wrote.



  • “If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

    That is wild.

    The vending company factors this into the prices they charge for the items, the amount they spend on the machine to ensure accuracy, and the amount they pay the people who stock the machines to do it properly.

    If you take it upon yourself to unilaterally re-balance the equation, you’re not being noble, you’re just a fool.



  • Not to be confused with SOLID, SolidJS, or Solidity.

    It’s a neat idea. Because of the need to operate on data close to web servers and backend services for potentially long timeframes, I think we’ll need a widely-adopted CRDT solution in order for something like Solid to really take off from a technical standpoint.

    And from a business standpoint, there’s really no upside. Sure, you delegate some cost for storage, but compute tends to be the more expensive aspect, and if you’re spending more time to interact with these external data stores, it may be more expensive in the end.





  • Gamehub Lite is pretty wild. It does take some fiddling, but it’s amazing how well (and relatively easily) you can get x86 Windows games to run on a $200 ARM Android device.

    I’m 12/13 so far on getting games to work at an acceptable level.

    Inexplicably, Vampire Survivors causes the entire device to crash. I guess they pull some pretty silly memory tricks to keep that game responsive with potentially hundreds of thousands of projectiles, so maybe it’s not so surprising.