Game Development

user4704

5:00 PM

It's definitely an issue contributed to by overblown AAA budgets.

user4704

But at the same time, it's hard to produce the kind of (generally bleh) stuff people seem to want out of AAA without huge budgets.

DH.

Most of the cost of a AAA game is related to the graphics/art in it right?

user4704

I'm not sure if I'd say "most," but it is a huge cost.

Stephane Hockenhull

It's general organizational bloat

productivity is logarithmic

user4704

There's a ton of contributing factors, and different studios suffer from different institutionalized failures

Stephane Hockenhull

5:05 PM

Like when the designer is on an ego trip and start over-promising stuff without asking the devs if it's realistic so he can get on camera and get funding...

And hiring many naive young devs that are "cheaper"

And lots of other factors...

user4704

"not built here" syndrome

user4704

etc

Stephane Hockenhull

or the "let's use that pre-made library/module that crashes and spend more time trying to not build here" syndrome...

DH.

I always thought that graphics would be the problem because I met an artist and he showed me that a good model, with textures and animation takes him weeks, if it's complex even months to finish

user4704

Sure, but OTOH, sometimes it takes a programmer weeks or months to "finish" something.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

5:09 PM

@StephaneHockenhull That's called the "built here" syndrome :P

Stephane Hockenhull

Just saying, I've seen both cases

user4704

If it has bugs it's not finished, remember.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@StephaneHockenhull Yup, anti-patterns FTW!

Stephane Hockenhull

The worst offender of it are Arduino libraries and other device firmware libraries..

So many race conditions

The number of times I've spend more time trying to get one to not crash than rewriting the whole thing.

user4704

Or a related issue, the "we licensed this engine but we don't like how it does <core thing> so let's rewrite it so it does it slightly differently but is now subtly incompatible with the rest of the engine and we spend the rest of the project fixing bugs related to this"

Stephane Hockenhull

5:13 PM

Or some terrain library ends up being practically useless because it has so many rounding errors sections don't match.

user4704

Or "we love this middleware it's so pretty but the tech is bad and nobody internal understands it, but lets integrate anyway and waste hundreds of man-hours bugfixing"

Stephane Hockenhull

twitches

user4704

Most of these issues are fundamentally rooted in not thinking.

user4704

Which is turn is mostly a sign of the general immaturity of the industry, the desire that still exists to be viewed as "seat of the pants, cowboy developers"

user4704

Agile stuff, and the industry's misappropriation of it, hasn't helped

Stephane Hockenhull

5:15 PM

I think that has a lot to do that the people in control have no clue, are not actually devs and won't listen to experienced devs.

user4704

Picking out all the wrong things and ignoring the right ones, being overly dogmatic about some things but not others, etc

Stephane Hockenhull

Because experienced devs tell them things they don't want to hear

user4704

Yea, or are experience developers who don't keep up with new stuff and insist on "its worked this way for the last ten years, it will keep working this way"

user4704

"get off my lawn"

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I think some devs like dev too much, and don't see that the company is there to make money...

Stephane Hockenhull

5:16 PM

@AlexandreVaillancourt That too

It's why I do my own engine in my spare time at home, takes that edge off :D

So at work I'm all let's just make money :P

Alexandre Vaillancourt

"Oh yeah, that new paradigm looks nice, let's use that!" -- "oops, it' won't work; too bad we lost a year on that".

@StephaneHockenhull Not all game devs have that chance; some contracts prohibit from working on game projects at home..

DH.

I have a friend that works in the support of a publisher of games here on Brazil

Stephane Hockenhull

@JoshPetrie Conversely, I had a junior dev replace an gamepad input module that worked fine for 3 years, had record&replay for debug, key repeat, code sequence processing, network play support... with one that had none of those features and required AIs to register callbacks, TWO per buttons (one on press, one on release) and keep their own button state that way.

DH.

They aren't allowed to talk about other games that hey don't publish, even on their social media

Alexandre Vaillancourt

And some don't have the ability to realize that they're going in the wrong direction "I think I'm close to have it working" "you said that four months ago"

user4704

5:20 PM

@StephaneHockenhull Yeeeeeah.

Stephane Hockenhull

Cue crashes due to people forgetting to unregister callbacks, no network support, no debugging replay, no key repeat, and a whole 2 days of entire dev team lost while they switch to the new input system.

on 3 projects

And that wasn't on his task list

But he heard that callbacks are good and gasp globals are bad at school

user4704

OTOH, who was mentoring him?

user4704

Certainly juniors (and even seniors new to a codebase) are going to be guilty of looking at code and saying "this sucks, I rewrite"

user4704

Everybody loves to write new cool stuff anyway, and historical context about why decisions were made don't usually show well in code.

Stephane Hockenhull

Nobody, because mgmt think it's a waste of expensive senior time.

user4704

5:23 PM

But especially for juniors, yeah. That

user4704

Nobody wants to set up a process to train newbies because it might distract seniors too much

Stephane Hockenhull

And mgmt also said let's not revert because we already spent so much time switching

user4704

(and to be fair not everybody is going to be good at teaching)

Stephane Hockenhull

because revert takes so long .. .right.

user4704

But it can contribute to problems

jgallant

5:24 PM

i like to do that.

Stephane Hockenhull

@JoshPetrie It was the classic case of middle management was slowly purging all the senior devs that didn't tell them what they wanted to hear in favor of newbs they could push around.

So they could blame the newbs for every missed milestones

while overpromising things on timelines

jgallant

The best leaders are the ones that have no understanding of what they are leading.

Stephane Hockenhull

and please upper managment that way

They couldn't do that with the senior devs because we'd tell them when it was unrealistic and keep track of communications.

jgallant

Steve Job explained it pretty eloquently .. at some point a company becomes very marketing heavy and loses track of the innovation that created them

And the marketing / management type people end up making decisions

Stephane Hockenhull

yep

@AlexandreVaillancourt I know, but that's a personal choice if they choose to bend over and sign that contract or not...

Alexandre Vaillancourt

5:30 PM

@StephaneHockenhull Yep. But I guess that working for some of these companies, you don't even have time to do that, crunch mode all the time.

Stephane Hockenhull

Besides, those contracts clauses are rarely enforced. Just take Fez for example...

jgallant

Fez got a grant from the canadian government

hired 1 programmer

treated him like shit

Stephane Hockenhull

The thing is if your game is popular a large studio trying to beat down on you is not going to look good. You got them between a rock and a hard place.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@StephaneHockenhull Because they're not enforceable, from what I understand. Their only option is to find a reason to lay you off.

Stephane Hockenhull

And if your game is making it big, what do you have to care? :D

No big studio want to be seen legally beating down a small dev who hasn't stolen anything. (last part important)

It would hurt their sales much more than what they would recoup from a lawsuit.

jgallant

5:37 PM

Nintendo claims indie developer's house

"We took over his life because he used pokemon characters in a fan game"

fuck that guy!

Did you know this guy staged some sort of personal strike because Nintendo did not let him put his game on the Gameboy Advanced?

Stephane Hockenhull

I think I remember that guy/story

jgallant

"bob's game" - Teaser Trailer

►

Stephane Hockenhull

riiiiiiiiiiiight yes :D

jgallant

this game looks like a really cool world with nothing in it

"I cannot leave this viridian room. The door is locked and barricaded from the outside. I am sleeping behind the camera, and yes- I've got a shower. Food is delivered once a week by a friend...This is my 100 day protest to Nintendo!"

he livestreamed this.

Stephane Hockenhull

I remember

Such a tantrum over nothing.

jgallant

5:41 PM

github.com/bobsgame/bobsgame

here is the source code

a passion project.

user4704

Organization :|

user4704

That means "NO FORKS"

user4704

I want to fork it Just Because now.

jgallant

lol

user4704

Somebody didn't read their GitHub license agreement!

Stephane Hockenhull

5:43 PM

He had so many other options but WAAAH! I WANT TO PUT IT ON GAMEBOY ADVANCE!
He could have even made his own unlicensed GBA carts, but nooooooo. let's throw a fit.

jgallant

hehe

he released it

and no one liked it.

and that, was the end of the story.

I'm glad nintendo didn't make throwing a tantrum the new standard for submitting a game.

Stephane Hockenhull

LOL OMFG can you imaging if Nintendo rewarded that ?

jgallant

there used to be this website called "makemeking.com" where a challenge was put up and you had to video yourself doing it

The most popular ones of course took it to the extreme

Stephane Hockenhull

A quarter of tje RPG Maker community streaming tantrums?

jgallant

beat yourself up -- you had guys hitting themselves in the face as hard as they could for example.

bloodied themselves up

You win!

Stephane Hockenhull

5:48 PM

sigh Humanity is still a while away from adjusting to youtube / internet...

jgallant

World Record Progression: Super Mario Bros

►

i watched this entire video the other night - it was very interesting lol

PaulD

is there any git gurus there?

jgallant

nothing good can come of a question like that :)

Stephane Hockenhull

LOL

@PaulD No, I just google the few commands I need to clean up when I mess up.

jgallant

yeah when i screw up i try to reverse it

Stephane Hockenhull

5:53 PM

exactly

jgallant

if I can't reverse it I try to fix it

if I can't fix it, i just delete the entire thing

reupload it fresh

lol

In most cases, you can just revert to a previous check in state.

but ask your question.

Stephane Hockenhull

I got 4 repo clones/backups on 4 machines. the worst case I just wiped and copied back one of the older repo

and then resubmitted my changes after fixing the files

Git is like a nuclear reactor. If you mess up, just abort and run :)

I hate how git will let you accidentally pull from a completely unrelated repo.

git repo after accidents like that :P

@AlexandreVaillancourt I blame those [no home projects] contracts in part for forcing me to deal with jrs who decide to experiment on in-production projects...

jgallant

what do you think of the hand of god?

i'm going to make them more aware of it as well

DH.

6:10 PM

Looking good

Remembers me of the cursor from FF

Stephane Hockenhull

I can't really tell if its a thumb or an index. finger might need to be a bit longer.

user92578

Yeah looks great

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@StephaneHockenhull I blame it to the fact that they have too much free time and don't need money enough when they're in school :P

Stephane Hockenhull

Looks great otherwise

jgallant

thanks guys

actually does anyone here have a touch based windows pc?

i guess i'll just add an option to hide the cursor.

DH.

6:13 PM

I don't, but I could hijack into the university to be able to test it kek

user92578

I have one but I kinda gave it to my brother

Stephane Hockenhull

Hands are so hard to do. I messed up the ones on my character

jgallant

when i was going to university people were stealing the projectors

back then projectors where very expensive.

you would go to class and the projector was gone and the teacher had to resort to draconian measures such as a whiteboard

Stephane Hockenhull

jgallant: I do.

"Gorb" is it?

jgallant

OK, you are my official tester

yeah i'll send you a steam key

Stephane Hockenhull

6:15 PM

It's a GPD Win with an Intel integrated...

jgallant

perfect

this should run on a dozen potatoes

Stephane Hockenhull

I bought it in part to use as a windows test machine. it's pretty cheap considering all the weirdness it has. I'd need $3K of regular PC hardware to have similar testing hardware :P

If something runs on it it'll probably run on anything more sane :P

@jgallant I have to leave to go pick up the rental car in about 20mins. Will be back later.

jgallant

i didn't mean now

Stephane Hockenhull

kk

jgallant

soon enough though, i still have some stuff to do

yahoo5000

6:30 PM

first day after two years in gym feeling exhausted :/

jgallant

6:45 PM

So I wrote this nifty little mousecursor script for unity

it just persists across all scenes and manages itself, its pretty nice

auto sizes based on the zoom level of the camera as well

Stephane Hockenhull

neat

Hjorthenify

@JoshPetrie You around?

If you are do you know how to pass a compile-time value to a function template or similar?
So that the function will work using that constant value

user4704

You mean like: template<int V> int F() { return V; } ?

Hjorthenify

Yes

user4704

std::cout << F<32>(); // prints 32

Hjorthenify

6:52 PM

Exactly that

Read IBM's article on veradic templates, but it didn't seem like what I needed

27

Q: C++ Template Specialization with Constant Value

Is there a straightforward way for defining a partial specialization of a C++ template class given a numerical constant for one of the template parameters? I'm trying to create special constructors for only certain kinds of template combinations: template <typename A, size_t B> class Example { ...

Trying that atm, but not sure if works for functions

user4704

What is it you are trying to do?

Hjorthenify

Creating a wrapper around a method call in a library I'm using

Where most of the values are constant, but I dont want to just copy the function

Oh so that works... Was far easier than I'd hoped for. Don't even need C++11

(unless g++ defaults to that?)

user4704

Dunno, but it's definitely not a C++11 feature.

Hjorthenify

Nope, thanks though :)

Stephane Hockenhull

8:19 PM

The weird thing is that C++ refuses floats as template parameters. You can use ints, long ints, you can even hand-encode the float into an integer. But letting you use the float directly?

NOPE.

You can even use a pointer/reference

But not a float.

Because reasons.

Chris McFarland

if it's floating, just catch it

Stephane Hockenhull

ew, I'd rather flush again and hope it goes.

Chris McFarland

lol

DH.

It remembers me the problem I had in the past that dynamic arrays can't be used as parameters in Pascal, but if you make a type that is a dynamic array and nothing more, it works

No idea why tho

Chris McFarland

:|

I feel like I'm spoiled when using C#

Stephane Hockenhull

8:25 PM

In my case it was to pass an epsilon value to a templated function. Had to resort to passing it on the stack.

Which is disappointing, most of the time the default epsilon value is just fine and could be "hardcoded" into the compiled code, saving cycles and reducing code size.

Also wanted to do it for the Clamp() function but that's less of an issue as that one always gets inlined so it comes down to the same thing.

Chris McFarland

aye, hardcoding and saving time is all good

Stephane Hockenhull

They still haven't added C99's hex floats to C++ have they?

oh wait! they did in C++17

DH.

0x1.fp3 = (1 + 15/16)^3

Wtf, it's just making stuff harder, why would you use that?

Stephane Hockenhull

0x1.fp3 = (1 + 15/16)<<3

Because it's exact

Almo

99

A: Why can't I use float value as a template parameter?

THE SIMPLE ANSWER The standard doesn't allow floating points as non-type template-arguments, which can be read about in the following section of the C++11 standard; 14.3.2/1 Template non-type arguments [temp.arg.nontype] A template-argument for a non-type, non-template templat...

good reason for not letting you do this

Stephane Hockenhull

8:38 PM

no it's not. Might as well ban floats altogether

Also, the example is wrong. 1/3.f and 2/6.f are supposed to give the exact same result according to IEEE standard

And since C++ says that the same file compiled by two different compilers don't need to be compatible at all, the argument against float template parameters is pretty weak.

If the floating point result is different, then the template will be a different template. I don't see an issue there.

That would be the whole point

If different CPUs give different results that's like trying to prevent a C++ compiler from giving different object files when compiled on a machine with defective RAM.

Someone can turn that floating point into a fixed point and the C++ compiler will accept it even tho you may hit the same issue with rounding errors.

Almo

ok

I recommend telling the answerer that though. :)

Stephane Hockenhull

It's on the same level of not supporting the % operator for floating point but every compiler has fmod() as dictated by the standard.

Hjorthenify

I ran into the problem.. Ended up using int TOP, int BOTTOM
float ratio = static_cast<float>(TOP) / BOTTOM

DH.

There's a comment on another answer that says part of what he said

Stephane Hockenhull

8:54 PM

I bet you it's because someone on the C++ committee is like "But what about muh PDP-11?!"

Almo

hahah

user4704

Pretty sure the reason is a lot more pedestrian.

Stephane Hockenhull

Oh noes, we wont be able to support C++17 on the IBM 7070, my gawd the world will end!!

user4704

open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers find me the paper where somebody even cared to propose it

Stephane Hockenhull

the % operator?

Hjorthenify

8:58 PM

I don't think the maintainer of that website knows that google exists

user4704

Most of those papers originate on mailing lists, because Old School.

Stephane Hockenhull

I remember Bjarne whats-his-name mention something about the % operator and floats... IIRC it boiled down to they had more important things to argue over.

user4704

But it really would be nice if somebody would dump them all into something searchable.

user4704

It's a pain right now

user4704

I'd agree there are more important things to argue about adding to C++ than % for floats.

user4704

9:00 PM

But if you don't, you can write the paper :)

Stephane Hockenhull

But man is that a pain in the butt when creating templates.

user4704

(Having followed the process of many of these papers, that sounds like way more work than I'd ever care to take on)

Stephane Hockenhull

Everyone is fixing it by creating a Modulo<TypeA, TypeB>() template...

that maps to either % operator or fmod

@JoshPetrie exactly.

Hjorthenify

@JoshPetrie google.dk/…

That works? :D

Stephane Hockenhull

It's not as bad as trying to submit a patch to an FOSS project, but it's pretty darn close

user4704

9:02 PM

I dunno.

user4704

I submitted a patch to LLVM

user4704

It was pretty painless. I was surprised.

Stephane Hockenhull

"I was surprised" LOL and why may I ask? :D

LLVM may be the exception. I haven't been that lucky.

Hjorthenify

You can overload %?

en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operators

Stephane Hockenhull

Yes, but not on floats

or any other basic types

unless you put another custom type in the mix

I also have a template to do shift left and shift right on floats...

(conceptually speaking)

user4704

9:08 PM

struct float_proxy{ float v; operator float() { return v; } };

Stephane Hockenhull

So that if it's a fixed point it does the bit shift, if it's a float it multiplies

user4704

overload float % float_proxy. Profit.

Stephane Hockenhull

but you have to wrap one side of the % into that class/struct, which eliminates the convenience.

user4704

That's what the implicit conversions are for

Stephane Hockenhull

no, the compiler will catch it and error before.

because it's an existing overload of %, but one that causes an error.

and the compiler has to take the most direct route

user4704

9:13 PM

yeah, true, but you could probably knock something up using the <cross> hack or custom literal extensions to eliminate the "float_proxy(1.0f)" bit

Stephane Hockenhull

or rather, if one direct route exists it takes it, if there's no direct and more than one indirect it throws a fit about ambiguity

oh, yeah for literals but that wouldn't work inside a template with two float variables.

user4704

Mm, probably not.

user4704

I've never used them at all.

Stephane Hockenhull

I mix a lot of fixed point and floating point math, I keep hitting those compiler annoyances.

user4704

There was some talk about fixed point stuff in the SG14 group a while back.

user4704

9:20 PM

I think..

Stephane Hockenhull

that must have been dismissed very quickly...

user4704

Not really.

user4704

I think they're just more interested in working on container and allocator improvements.

user4704

Or maybe they just moved the discussion to one of the other study groups where they could get more traction

Stephane Hockenhull

and constraints. those would be really good.

user4704

9:23 PM

groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/sg14/…$20‌point%7Csort:relevance

Stephane Hockenhull

But I understand why constraints would take forever to settle on.

user4704

EWG is doing constraints I think

user4704

or at least, that would be their domain

user4704

You're talking about en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/constraints right?

Stephane Hockenhull

yes

The thing to make template errors make more sense to whoever causes them

heck, even my own template errors confuse me when it's 4 template classes down, caused by accidentally converting a vec3 to a (const float *) or something silly like that...

or the compiler chose to use (const &float *) rather than (float *) version for whatever reason that's beyond me :P

They're still working on constraints, there's lots of odd cases and interactions that they're trying to mesh together in a consistent way. Now, that I understand why they'd take their time with it.

Hjorthenify

9:33 PM

struct float_proxy{
  float v;
  float operator %(float other){
    return fmod(v, other);
  }
};

float_proxy operator ""_f(long double f){
  float_proxy tmp;
  tmp.v = f;
  return tmp;
}

int main(int argc, char ** args){
  cout << 2.0_f%2.0f << endl;
  return 0;
}

Some of this new C++ stuff is interesting :P The literal MUST be long double(can't be double, nor float)

Stephane Hockenhull

oh, now I remember the big issue I keep hitting with my vec template. It has a operator bool() that the compiler sometimes decides to use.

Hjorthenify

Why does it have that

Stephane Hockenhull

so you can do StrLen() on an array of 3d vectors.

(or 2d vectors)

Hjorthenify

strlen on vectors?

Stephane Hockenhull

yeah. if you change "null-terminated" to "false-terminated" then an StrLen() template applied to anything makes sense.

I can do StrLen(array_of_pointers) and it gives me the length to the null (false) pointer

or if I have an array of anything that will cast to bool and return false for the termination.

Like, a zero-terminated array of normals.

I don't use it a lot but sometimes it's nice to have it.

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