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kroltan

1,940 karma · joined July 5, 2017

Game developer passionate about user-generated-content games. (think Mario Maker, not NFTs!)

https://kroltan.me/

"<the initialism of the orange company> at <an email provider that only I would use>", thanks for not offering products or services, and not storing this information in mass systems.

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kroltan··on The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
Yep, I much prefer KDE's default binding of meta+LMB/RMB anywhere on a window to move and resize it, rather than ginormous title bars.

Might not be "professional" but it sure is more productive.

kroltan··on Universal domain types
If you use a symbol as the brand key, you can even stack multiple different brands!
kroltan··on Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up
At least GrapheneOS does have a built-in recording function.
kroltan··on Enhancing Factorio with SAT solvers
Bell labs => Factorio

Orbital mechanics => Kerbal Space Program

kroltan··on Web design inspiration catalog
https://www.mcmaster.com/

Loads ultra fast, comprehensive filtering and specification for every class of product, excellently categorised.

It's a website so good I wish I worked in metalworking and lived in North America, just so I could have a use for it.

kroltan··on Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling
Yes, but that would be tempting the gods of irony with the possibility of a nuclear CATastrophe.
kroltan··on Tell HN: The Turing.com hiring platform is complete nonsense
About 4 years ago I think, they were paying people to answer assessments for the sake of answering, so my guess they were collecting data to do machine validation of actual applicants.
kroltan··on A* tricks for videogame path finding
If the graph is directly modified by dynamic obstacles, store "time to available" in the busy edges. Then the unit walking in can check if by the time it gets there, the edge is still busy.

If obstacles are handled separately, you do the same thing except it ends up being a line intersection between nearby agents' routes. Find route intersections, estimate arrival times, if they conflict based on both units' movement speed, reroute.

Another approach would be to ignore unit as obstacles and rely on movement timeout: If I'm stuck for longer than X time, reroute.

kroltan··on After 34 years, someone beat Tetris [video]
Quite the contrary, actually. Some games check for inputs every frame, and computers nowadays can run modern games at up to hundreds of frames per second.

The simulation rate is often lower than the draw rate though. Minecraft is as low as 20 updates per second, while something like Counter Strike 2 handles events immediately and sends precise timestamps to the server, not discretized to any sampling rate beyond your hardware.

kroltan··on Show HN: I'm open-sourcing my game engine
Itch is not exactly a platform for IO games, sure you can put them there, but it hosts a lot of other stuff such as experimental and "extremely indie" games, software tools... It is a platform, storefront and community for things game developers make.

IO games on the other hand are usually characterised by being (sometimes only allegedly) multiplayer web browser games with super minimal friction, just open a page and play.

Put differently, I wouldn't call a supermarket a toothpaste store even though that is indeed an item supermarkets sell.

kroltan··on YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox
Get the "Enhancer for Youtube" extension, among many adjustments, it does this clicking for you.

I also had this issue, videos would frequently wobble down to like 240p or whatever, on a stable, high speed wired connection.

It's not an internet problem since I never have to buffer when using this forced setting, so it's probably YT trying to save a few bandwidth bucks when they think people aren't looking.

kroltan··on Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Pay attention to WhatsApp's wording (all privacy/security claims start with "your messages"), and their privacy policy, and you'll see that while message involving with individuals (non-Business users) are secured, your contact list is not, neither are chats with businesses or the metadata about you chatting (destinations, frequency, time)
kroltan··on Replacing HLS/Dash – Live Mass Fanout with Media over QUIC
The "Enhancer for YouTube" browser extension has a setting to force assign the resolution to whatever you choose.

I was having issues that even if my player indicated it was playing 1440p, it clearly was at most 640p or something like that, complete potatovision. Re-clicking the 1440p option would fix it, and this extension basically does that for you.

Good luck on mobile, though lol

kroltan··on Replacing HLS/Dash – Live Mass Fanout with Media over QUIC
Also doesn't help that a lot of TVs have screen tearing or uneven frame timing.

You would think that a device whose sole purpose is to divine a picture from wagging pixies in the air and make the little lamps twinkle in a convincing way would be able to do it by now.

But I have yet to find a "smart" TV that can handle it decently, even well into the mid range it's still a bit hit and miss. Get a cheap decoder and plug it into any mid range laptop and the pacing is leagues better.

Do they just use the absolutely worst SoC that still turns enough product to pay the bills, or what?

kroltan··on Dungeon KeeperFX 1.0
That it can be distributed, and that there is source available for modifications, expansions, and ports to modern systems.

Generally game assets don't depend on the external environment like code does. Sure, porting is still a lot of work (which I don't think has been done for this one), but it's less work than porting an arbitrary executable.

But most importantly, not everything has to be a product with a practical benefit for the user, if the project goal is to be able to be a drop in replacement for all the code, and it does it, and the people involved are fulfilled, that is perfectly enough.

kroltan··on A four year plan for async Rust
That list of bullet points (except the compiler one) is also applicable to the whole async ecosystem in Rust :)
kroltan··on Contraceptive pills might impair fear-regulating regions in women's brains
> Who would want to experience more fear in safe situations?

If the current pathological behaviour of content feed algorithms is to be believed, the vast majority of people.

kroltan··on Ertdfgcvb
Yes, but it requires support to WebHelices which is on the experimentation phases. There is a shim using WebWings 5.0 but it only works on Chrome Canary, because foxes have legs instead.
kroltan··on My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions
Roughly around when the oligoculture started, and browsers stopped being "user agents", what a coincidence!

We need more browsers that focus on user features, not website features. The web is basically beyond feature-complete already, but the tools we use to interact with it are so basic. Like riding a horse on an interstate!

kroltan··on Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
Maybe I do! Many Windows custom uninstallers have an option to remove "settings" while uninstalling.

I sure have lots of junk in ~/.config I don't use anymore and probably never will.

kroltan··on iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus
Proper cables, yes, but generally a proper cable works with improper stuff attached to it. You can charge your iPhone and the dubious ebay air freshener or whatever with a proper cable.

If you have two different connectors you invariably need at least two proper cables.

kroltan··on Chrome: Heap buffer overflow in WebP
As someone who shared a good deal of Spore creations over the internet, I disagree.

(The game would generate a "card" with a visual preview, but would stuff the XML encoding of the creation into some PNG metadata field so the image could be dragged onto someone else's game.)

kroltan··on RetroAchievements: Adding achievements to retro games
I agree, but some people also like that kind of thing to prove how far they got in a challenging game. So for that I think some retro games would really benefit from that kind of achievement. Like the famously difficult games such as Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, etc.

Also, some of these "pointless" achievements can be used as a negative proof. For example, the lack of a "weapon used" achievement with the presence of a "last boss defeated" achievement proves you beat the game without using that weapon. This allows players to contrive challenges not foreseen by the explicit implementation of an achievement.

Now, one issue is that on basically every platform, achievements are tracked per ownership of the game, so you can't scope down the achievements like that unless you only ever play the game with that challenge in mind. But in RA specifically, whose accounts are not tied to ownership, you could potentially make an account just to track a specific challenge, and have a public record of _your_ achievement.

kroltan··on Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
Because it was not JS, it was UnityScript which is what happens when someone read "JavaScript: The Good Parts", and thought the title was "... The Bad Parts" and threw all those away and kept only the actual bad parts.

It was just about fine if you were doing very small projects but quickly got very hairy, and their compiler was full of bugs.

kroltan··on Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
The new versions of C# can compile ahead-of-time, and have expanding support for value types and pointer-like semantics, so you're not stuck with the Java-y OOP For Everything paradigm if it doesn't fit your requirements.

The standard libraries are still an allocation party, of course, but that can be supplemented in an engine context.

kroltan··on Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
Load time tolerance is proportional to session length and focus required. People put up with GTA V Online taking tens of minutes to load the "micro"transaction store contents [1] because when they sit down to play online they are going to spend a couple hours in near 100% focus.

Compare with a mobile game, even a 3D one, where sessions are usually in the tens of minutes themselves, a lot more effort is spent optimising load times and it can be a competitive advantage.

[1]: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

kroltan··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Tangent:

A common reasoning for asking for a structured name is to build visually consistent interfaces, such as identifying everyone by their given name.

But that is disrespectful to people with "complicated" names, as well as social conventions. Some people would rather be called by their family name, others their given name, and I guarantee you none of them says "but think about the pretty, homogenous UI we will be leaving behind!".

For users, your brand aesthetics are at best very far down on their list of things to care about, even lower than thinking about what specific dish they will make for lunch in 3 weeks.

kroltan··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Don't even need to go as far as Asia, even european-descended cultures have different naming conventions.

Here in Brazil, it is very common to have "compound names" which are just... two given names you have to use together, for example "Ana Maria", AND it is also common to have "middle names" which are neither family names, nor given. My name, for example, is Leonardo Giovanni Scur, but "Leonardo" is my given name that I respond and expect people to call me by, and "Scur" is the family name. "Giovanni" only exists in documents, basically.

So, the first question is, what are you using their names for? If you are a paid service that identifies users to other users by name, ask for a "billing name" for your legal/policy needs, and a "display name" for identification, don't attribute any structure to it. If you don't need a legally identifying name, just ask for the "display name", and let people name themselves "Sir Bearington of Nunya Biznis".

kroltan··on Bad Apple Font
I like "the Half-Life HUD font", which is some variant of something specified by the German DIN technical standards, from what I understand.

I have used the font "Alte DIN 1451 Mittelschrift" before, and it fits your requirements pretty well.

https://www.1001fonts.com/alte-din-1451-mittelschrift-font.h...

kroltan··on Windows 11 system components use the default browser to open links in Europe
In Windows, default applications are registered either by URL scheme (so ftp, http, https, gopher...) or file extension (.txt, .html, .pdf, .mp4...). As far as I know there is no special registration for "browsers" specifically, you just register your application as a handler for whatever protocols and file formats you want.

So if you want to make your random executable be "a browser", my guess is you should register it as a handler for http, https, and .html, at least.

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