198 karma · joined July 4, 2023
Imagine a late-game added lightspell, that is expected to behave like a ball lightning walking ahead of the player. The temptation to reuse the pathfinding, collission and other systems that controll figures will be enormous. But this behaviour needs a sort of CBipedal class to inherit all the behaviours. Voila - enter the hack.
Of course the clean solution would be something like a thrown stone on a lake, it exists as running code only when it changes (certain frames or events). It holds a composition of behaviours without the other ballast (datastructuress for aiming, inventory) etc. and also does not need a pool allocation to the monster/npc pool. (Basically you either have many peasants or many lightballs in the hypothetical as tradeoff).
Cause it aint a object, its a entity with a collection of behaviours, with a minimal data container bound to each behaviour seperatly, that may evaporate at a moments notice, should the player look away or its time run out.
Just not a comfortable or pleasant one.
Free is a temporary attack vector, but with open source its a permanent attack vector.
Insurrance is.
The bad teeth everyone has in the family?
Uninsurable for all your descendants. The mental problems some developed? No coverage of that in life-insurrance - forever for all descendants carrying the genes. More then average aggression as a teenager? Presume your kids on some invisible watchlist.
You are already living in a invisible Gattaca.
There is a lot of research on people not taking possible disasters serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
Its understandable, but in the end also just noise for those who do and want to discuss mitigiation strategies or statistics. The urge to conjur up security by repeating doubt mighte be huge, but like all prayer, should be kept to oneself.