jamesu

I was quite shocked when a potential lead revealed to me that one of their recent games barely made $1k in sales and they were deep in the red. I feel the market is REALLY tough for indies at the moment. For every remotely successful indie title one can imagine there are probably 100 complete flops.

Another example could be: in Tribes, when you pilot a vehicle your player character gets attached to a mount point and any physics calculations are ignored.

I'd imagine nintendo probably have other claims linked to this since alone it has clearly been done before.

In a project a while back we had a problem with too many potential shader variations which needed to be precompiled because there was no way of determining which variants were actually used in advance. I think it was well past the 20k mark. Through some clever sharing of feature bits and using flags in the uniform buffer we managed to get it down to 4096, though I suspect we could have gone further and just used a big uber shader since the shader logic wasn't really that complicated compared to a current gen PBR-heavy game.

And on top of that you need to add in all the other fixed function states like blending, pixel formats, etc. Unless you can make use of dynamic states.

It's definitely a mind boggling problem for sure... one which needs collaboration between the technical artists and whoever is working on the renderer (unless you are using unreal/unity/godot, in which case its all on the artist).

Is performance really going to be a deciding factor for using this? I'd guess it depends what you really want in your "scripting" language. For me I'd want some sort of runtime with an easily readable language that can tolerate bad code, so in that case I would prefer something like lua.

Must admit though, things like this really make one think... what do people even want in a "scripting" language these days?

Bit fields saved me an immense amount of pain when packing together state variables for a renderer, so I wouldn't write them off as being bad myself.

It feels like theres so many of these fancy text editing solutions out there right now, would be great if there was a good comparison of features and pros/cons vs other solutions.

I was planning on doing this, but wasn't entirely sure how much of a bottleneck the CPU would be especially in some sort of encrypted raid setup...

I would love an explanation of Tribes' skiing bug presented in the style of this video. There have been so many differing explanations of it in blog posts over the years which haven't completely sat right with me.

I played through this game the other month and was amazed at how well it still holds up. Also a good example of a game with a very complimentary sound track.

I don't think making the usernames randomjoe4587 and randomjoe4597 is going to be much of an improvement in this case. If anything, its harder to read.

One time I had to consolidate a late family members personal files spread across several types of media which ended up totalling several TBs. None of it was organized, so there were duplicates everywhere. Probably only 20% of the data was non-duplicated stuff I genuinely wanted to keep.

This kind of thing makes me wonder, could you write the prompt in a different style and still get the same results?

For a long while I just copied everything to an imap server and dumped the mailbox, but this looks like an even better solution.

Gitea actions looks neat though I'm not sure how you are meant to run windows or mac-centric workflows with it since the runtime (nektos/act) seems to require docker. If its not possible that might limit its usefulness somewhat...

I'd love something with more workflow centred around pruning and reorganizing notes. Often I'm just dumping lots of info into notes which end up not being so useful in the long-run since the signal-noise ratio is too low.

Benchmarks for fib are great and all, but unless you are making fibonacci simulator 2023 it's not really a good selling point.

What I really want to know when looking at a scripting language is: how easy is it really to embed? Does it have a good debugger? Does it make too many assumptions about how your program works? Can it scale for a larger project? Does it have any interesting features like apis for reflection?

On my current gen Windows 11 box it takes 5-6 seconds to launch and 2-3 seconds to finish opening a new window, which to me is pretty jarring.

From personal experience, it's not quite a silver bullet either.

Using a 4 as a wireless bridge. I've tried using them to host servers (mainly storing data) but been burned too many times using sd cards, and once I inevitably add in an ssd/hdd the value of using the pi vs just getting a cheap significantly more powerful x86 system starts to dwindle. Would love to come up with a project that makes good use of the GPIO pins though.

One thing that surprised me: pushing git-lfs files was around 3x faster in onedev on a ~3gb repository with about ~60k files. I don't know whats going on inside gitea to make it so much slower as they both just store data inside a folder.

Can also recommend checking out onedev. Seemed much lighter weight to me than gitlab, and it didn't choke when handling large amounts of data like gitea seems to. Not used the CI besides some basic tests, but it looks pretty capable from what I've seen.

I'm aware of several communities which seem to rely heavily on custom mods. Not sure what they are going to do, though on the plus side maybe we will see more innovation in the multiplayer VR marketplace.

Can also recommend MoneyDance. Transaction entry and reconciliation is pretty slick, plus it's just a java app so you can run it on anything.

Speaking of networking older games, I think the "TRIBES Engine Networking Model" is also an interesting read. Managing ~128 players over the internet in a single game back in the late 90's was no mean feat. A lot of these kinds of optimizations are still greatly applicable even today!

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf

Can't believe this is not better known. I had huge problems with a git-lfs setup being slow on gitea, but I tried out onedev and its implementation was a magnitude faster. Plus configuring and launching the thing was pretty simple.... easy win!

I find it somewhat insane it renames files to add tags to them by default. Though there is a "sidecar" option which stores the tags in a hidden folder at least.

Still, pales in comparison to a full-featured document management app like DevonThink which is the sort of environment where I think tagging stuff can come in handy.

"Multiple occurrences of matches" could have definitely been an issue for a friend of mine. When they took a picture, they'd often go for the "blitz the subject with the camera" approach, then never ended up deleting all the bad pictures because they had hoarding tendencies.

Font metrics are a pain. A while back I was working on trying to reliably reproduce the behaviour you get from the win32 font api using stb_truetype, but due to time constraints I just ended up having to manually tweak font sizes to match.

Would be interested to see some guide on supporting 3d acceleration. Wasn’t there some announcement last year they were sticking some d3d layer in wsl2?

I'm not surprised given mine seem to play notification sounds at FULL BLAST.