Game Development

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:01 AM

@Almo Hey, I like your approach: do the less work your can :P

"The best work is the work I don't have to do."

trollingchar

1:00 PM

hello

Pikalek

1:32 PM

mornin'

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Hey!

Pikalek

I'm very much out of synch with the scene up there these days - was thee any talk about whether or not your elections were being tinkered with by other countries?

trollingchar

There was another kind of talk - about my country tinkering with other countries' elections

I don't think it's true however

Pikalek

I had meant the election in Canada. But I'm also interested in knowing what the discussions of such things are like in the Russian Fed.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek Haven't heard of anything like that. I used to be able to listen to radio and news while driving, but I can no longer do that because my son talks a lot.

@trollingchar I'm not sure there is a way for you (or me) to know for sure.

I think this is really like aliens.

Pikalek

1:45 PM

I wasn't quite old enough or citizen enough to vote when I was up there & looking back I don't really recall much about what it was like at the time. A bit more civil maybe than the current state of things down here.

"like aliens" or "aliens", or "Aliens®"?

trollingchar

I remember how USA accused Russian hackers of messing with their elections

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek I don't know how it happens down there. I heard things such as the quality of the the voting devices was not the same all over the country, that the vote was scheduled in a way to advantage one party, etc.

@Pikalek Hmm?

Pikalek

@AlexandreVaillancourt multiple choice was in reply to this one.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@trollingchar Yeah, the investigation could not prove that Russians tampered the election; but the guy who lead it still though that something not right went on. I agree that it can be annoying to being accused of such a thing as a nation.

And I meant that maybe aliens exist but you'll ask anyone who knows and they'll tell you that it's all made up stories :P

Pikalek

Yes, the voting varies at least by state - possibly by county. In a certain sense the US sometimes is more akin to a collection of EU style countries. And yes, the system does get gamed in various ways.

trollingchar

1:56 PM

I personally don't think that elections are fair in my own country

But again, I can't know for sure

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@trollingchar Is it ok for you to tell such a thing? I don't know how it is to live in Russia...

trollingchar

Just like in another country - there are things that you like, and things you don't like

Pikalek

It wasn't until I lived in Canada that I really got a sense of how impossible it is to pin down a definition for the word 'fair'.

Specifically with Quebec, politics, history & budgets.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Well in some countries you cannot say that there are things that you don't like. These countries are the favourite of the Developed Countries because we can ask them to produce crap for cheap prices and this allows us to screw everyone and everything without feeling guilty about it.

@Pikalek Yeah, can't please everyone :)

(all the time)

I can't really blame those in the west that like their oil. That's is what allows them to live... for now.

Pikalek

Yes. It was the first time I really got a sense that two logical people could find equally valid truths in an idea that were fundamentally irreconcilable. Fair is a four letter word.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:06 PM

Not thinking only about your own butt is hard.

trollingchar

@AlexandreVaillancourt some people like others' oil too much

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@trollingchar Yes? ("Why do you buy that oil when we have some here?" kind-of-thing?)

trollingchar

"Why do we buy that oil that we can conquer" kind-of-thing

Pikalek

Well, as long as we're in close orbit to some favorite soap boxes of mine, less consumer plastic & more consumer mass transit would help reduce western demand which in turn would lower the stakes in "who like who's oil" game.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:36 PM

But that would hit western's economy. My retirement collective funds and such.

Life is complicated.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:27 PM

Imma soon add a feature to "skip a render" frame.

soon.

TomTsagk

Is this for the project you mentioned yesterday? I once did a "skip drawing frames if it takes too long" for an engine, but I'm not sure if it was that worth it

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yes, it's for that project.

What makes you doubt it was worth it? What did you expect, and what did you get instead?

TomTsagk

It's more like, it is needed for some games, but not for others. Your project sounds more like an engine, in which case it would be needed.

Back then I was making really small-scale games, and not really action based, so skipping drawing frames didn't really have any effect, and I spent quite some time on it

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Oh, ok!

Well I work on the software. We clone the project once it's done to start off the next project, so the engine is mixed with the software.

Pikalek

If you've already committed some time to rendering the current frame, might you not be better off finishing that frame & skipping the next?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:43 PM

Yes, that's what I intend to do. If frame N takes too long, draw it anyway, but skip the drawing of frame N+1. In any case, I'll not skip any physics frames

TomTsagk

@Pikalek The idea is, if you've just finished updating the frame, but you haven't started rendering yet, and it took too long, you can skip the rendering for a frame,

Or similarly, if the last frame took twice as long to both update and render, on the next frame you can simply only update, to give the game time to catch up

There was a game, I can't remember what its called, that it skipped physics frames as well, and if the game started lagging ,all the particles would fly randomly :P

Alexandre Vaillancourt

If physics for frame N is also too long, skip drawing N+1 too. But I'll have to figure out still how to properly throttle the frame rate (instead of allowing X s for a gfx frame, allow X+X for frame N and N+1).

@TomTsagk That's a bad idea :P

Pikalek

Yeah, it sounds like we're all talking about the same idea. & I agree about skipping the physics frames. Depends on context I guess. When I did simulation software the graphics were expendable, physics was not.

TomTsagk

This is kinda the logic, if you skip a render frame, combine the time of the current and next frame

I'm not sure if there should be a hard limit though, like its normal for a lagging game to skip multiple frames, but probably not too many

Pikalek

In a game, eh depends on how it tests?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:47 PM

@Pikalek Yeah, that's where I am ATM :)

TomTsagk

I guess if the game is not physics based, you can skip some physics frames, but never really tried it :P

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I remember playing deadspace with VSync on.

Pikalek

Have you profiled it to get a sense of what's likely to trigger a too long frame?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Bad idea :P

@Pikalek I have a way to have it lag, yes. Not by profiling but I encountered a situation where it lagged.

Pikalek

I'm wondering if skipping before it took to long might be worth looking into.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:49 PM

I don't know how I'd do that.

You think about profiling: getting the data that can be associated with lag, then use that data to determine if I should draw or skip?

TomTsagk

You can't really detect if a future frame is going to take too long, right?

Almo

I would expect not

Pikalek

Not perfectly, no. And it might not be any different than taking too long & skipping the next. But sometimes good enough prediction is, good enough :)

Almo

I think DbD's adaptive detail level kicks in if a number of frames are slow. after adjusting down, however, after enough smooth frames it kicks it back up :(

TomTsagk

Is the prediction like "Scene X takes twice as long per frame than Scene Y, so if Scene Y takes more than half of the time than it should, it's expected that Scene X will lag" ?

Pikalek

3:54 PM

I was thinking more like the current frame will almost certainly take too long to draw - skip it & add the time budget for it to the next frame & move on.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@TomTsagk Not for us. I had situations where I placed the camera in a certain position/orientation, there was some major GFX lag, but if I turned it a little bit on the lift, or on the right, the lag went away. We haven't been able to figure out why it did that.

Pikalek

By virtue of poly count or something. You'd need some sort of metric to trigger it.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

..Or transparent polygons...

Pikalek

Which is why try fail fix might be better than guess fix repeat.

TomTsagk

@Pikalek That's kinda what @AlexandreVaillancourt is trying to do, but you can do this after the frame took too long to render, its still the same

Alexandre Vaillancourt

3:56 PM

Yep :)

TomTsagk

Is this the custom engine ? I know OpenGL is trying to skip drawing anything outside the view, but not sure if that would be causing it

Pikalek

@TomTsagk Sure. I kinda figured doing it as I suggested was more complicated & not any better in terms of outcome. Sometimes I need to say it out loud to realize an idea is not very good.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@TomTsagk We use OpenSceneGraph. Built over OpengGL. It does the culling and all the fancy stuff :)

Pikalek

looks similar in some ways to the VTK.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

VTK?

Pikalek

4:03 PM

VTK

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization.VTK is distributed under the OSI-approved BSD 3-clause License. == Functionality == VTK consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Kitware, whose team created and continues to extend the toolkit, offers professional support and consulting services for VTK. VTK supports a wide variety of visualization algorithms including: scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling...

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Ah!

Pikalek

It's what I used in my first college graphics course.

originally used for science / visualization stuff. It was scene graph based. Not sure about what it's all about these days though.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah, it doesn't look like it's used in "games" though.

Pikalek

Probably not.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Do you have an idea about why it isn't?

Pikalek

4:11 PM

At the time, I don't think it would have been fast enough. I recall it being more focused on accuracy (of representation) than speed.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Oh, ok, makes sense, in a way.

Pikalek

I think it had support for stuff like 4D textures for things like MRI scans & the like. Back in the 90s I'm not sure how that could be performant on desktop machines anyway.

My take was they opted to lean into that side of things with the minimal dev team they had.

And it was out of a research lab. Serious games wasn't a thing yet, so it would have been tough to get funding for support games oriented features.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah; if you target a science market, these don't have the same needs as for other kinds of markets.

Pikalek

Spoils you though. Sometimes I'm still like "what'da ya mean this fancy new 3D API doesn't support boolean geometry! what a bunch of garabage!"

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Lol yeah

GDSE Meta

5:49 PM

0

Q: Do we need the [crash] tag?

Just ran into the crash tag here. There's only 4 questions using it right now. Related reading: Do we really need a [bug] tag? Do we need the [error-management] tag?

discussion

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@GDSEMeta Nope. Burn it. Burn it all.

Shotgun Ninja

yo

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Hey!

Almo

6:17 PM

@ShotgunNinja hay man!

Shotgun Ninja

6:35 PM

heyo

I'm super bored at work rn

Almo

heh

Shotgun Ninja

I just started at this place, it's a HUGE (Fortune 500 company HQ) office, and my mentor is off on vacation for the week

I've got two tasks, both app dev, and both are coded and unit-tested, and waiting on the garbage process for requesting DB credentials so I can actually run them in-place

Why do I have to fill out a form, wait on manager and business approval, and then have a team take a week to respond just to get creds for a test environment DB?

I'm pretty sure the guy who used to handle these requests got laid off, and now there's no one actually watching on the other end for this request

This is hell

Almo

haha sounds unpleasant

I've heard about this kind of DB permission thing before

JG has this problem where he works

Shotgun Ninja

6:50 PM

It's like, why did you make a form if it's not automated down to a checkbox that someone hits?

I'm going to either lose my mind working here, or just start making shit up as I go

Almo

hahah

Shotgun Ninja

I can code around the problem at my normal speed, but I don't have the communication architecture I need to navigate the arcane bullshit that is our internal access request tools

"Oh, just submit this form, it'll get taken care of in a few business days."
"I did that, a week ago"

Almo

yeah

Shotgun Ninja

"Oh, uh, just email this team address"
(5 days later): ...

Almo

hahah

sounds like hell

Shotgun Ninja

6:56 PM

It's so frustrating

Ugh, I wish it was just that one thing, but that's the biggest blocker

I've been here a few weeks and rebuilt an application from the ground up, and built out a new tool for accessing data in another part of our system, and neither app can be deployed

Alexandre Vaillancourt

May I ask what made you decide to work there?

Shotgun Ninja

Cash

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah, ok, sounds reasonable :)

Shotgun Ninja

I got fired from my last job for having a bad mental health day and I needed a job because my credit cards were maxing out

Fuck at-will employment

Fuck employer-provided health insurance, as well

Bout to just say fuck it and move to Montreal with @Almo

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Ooooh Montreal :P

I think I'd also have trouble working in a rigid structure like that.

It kills creativity.

Shotgun Ninja

7:07 PM

It's not even so much the rigid structure

It's the arbitrary red tape required to do anything

Like, we work with financial information and life insurance, so we're (necessarily) regulated pretty heavily, but having a multiple-week lag time to get a fucking DB user created is completely unnecessary

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah, I agree.

Shotgun Ninja

The request is approved, too; someone's asleep at their desk and I don't know who to go yell at

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Little kings in their own kingdoms. "I can have you wait. So I will."

Pikalek

@ShotgunNinja How many weeks in are you to the new gig?

Shotgun Ninja

I started on Sept 30

Pikalek

7:21 PM

My default solution would be to guess / figure out who the missing request handler reported to & attempt to escalate. Or escalate to whom ever you report to. That fresh in I'd play some flavor of the "I'm new & just wanted to double check things" card.Probably mint flavored. Do big faceless corps like mint? Seems logical to me that they would.

Shotgun Ninja

I read through the request and found two names; a quick lookup of their names in the Exchange GAB and I sent them a corporatically-correct nastygram asking what caused the delay

CC'd my manager

Pikalek

That's where I'd have differed. Few people like nastygrams. Golden grahams sure. Mint flavored tastygrams are even better. Corporatically-correct nastygrams taste like regulation flavored hand sanitizer.

Edited. No need to pick on cilantro. It's not it's fault - this time.

Shotgun Ninja

7:37 PM

I mean, I basically just said "Nothing's been done on this for a week; is there anything that I need to do? If not, what's preventing completion of this request?"

Pikalek

Oh, that's not so bad then. Would be nice if they had an Acknowledged, Confirmed, Denied system though so that you knew if it had even been seen yet.

Shotgun Ninja

Yeah... this is a century-old Fortune 500 company

They move slow

And all of these are systems slapped together by the teams that use them, or at least the versions of those teams from 5-10 years ago

Almo

8:05 PM

work-based health insurance can fuck off, seriously.

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