Game Development - 2020-09-25

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7:45 AM

Whats up folks

user92578

hello

I know its weird to ask this but have ever had that moment when you would say "I can't believe I did this" in one of your games

user92578

Like as in a good or a bad thing?

10:20 AM

@Chiho multiple times a year i will find older code in the products i work on at work, go "what idiot wrote this mess", look at the git blame, and find out it was me several months ago

user92578

Oh yeah in a group project I made the mistake of installing a git blame plugin to VS Code that always shows the author in the status bar... it was always me :(

well at least you know it wasn't your teammates that way lol

user92578

Started often going "Uuh, who has written... oh, nvm, it me :D"

1:12 PM

@Chiho As time goes by and one gains experience, it's the natural thing.

What? Learning? Fire immediately!

~~as you would have if it hadn't been you~~

I don't know if the following natural thing is that you're kind of proud/happy you wrote something in a way that let you update it easily.

1:41 PM

Buuuut did you ever find code you wrote that made you go: WOW ?

Expecially after you're half-through refactoring and 'improving' it you start actually understanding what it does, and it's just so beautiful and sleek that you reset your progress and simply add the comments you should've written back then

i haven't had one of those moments

Yeah me too

That happened with a co-worker who wrote something overly complicated. I deleted his code and wrote it much simpler. And then it turned out you can't actually do it that way. Eventually I ended up with pretty much the same code I deleted.

i have gone back and tried to refactor code that i thought could be nicer, only to find that the way i did it to begin with was aftrer all probably the best way to do it

But now I understood it.

1:52 PM

Hahaha

It happens all the time

if i'm rewriting or refactoring something, it's because it's broken, unworkable, or just needs to work differently, so if i've gone in to completely refactor something, it is not meeting needs.

but possibly the only need not met is "we don't understand how to use this thing" and documentation is what was missing.

@dot_Sp0T Nope; I always see the bad code, without the comment, and think I'll be able to make it better but nope. It was made ugly like this because it had to. And I never find it beautiful and sleek. Always ugly ;)

poor you :(

~~Must be using C++.~~

In my last job i had a particularly funny moment when I had to track down a bug only to find that the new coworker 'refactored' everything to be better readable. (clue, it wasn't). Took quite a lot of time too to find out he botched a few things by making them more readable

yes. it's always others, even if you mess up yourself

2:07 PM

That stupid you from the past. A very different person.

Yes.

Sometimes I refactor codes to make it cleaner

Realizing you have a stupid-you-from-the-past helps accept the fact that there are "stupid-others-from-the-past".

user92578

@Chiho What are the other reasons?

To restructure how the codes execute

2:16 PM

Not efficient enough, not suitable to accept new features.

@Chiho IMHO that's not a good reason to refactor code.

And mainly I refactor codes I forked

That's totally not a good reason to refactor code

user92578

Oh yeah extension for new stuff, I've obviously been just rewriting the same stuff in a more type safe way for too long :D

unless a profiler tells you there's a problem

It might have been a good idea 20 years ago (or even more), but it's usually not today

like all that for(i = 0; i < 10; ++i) is better than using i++ due to how it allocates memory... that's just not even a factor anymore. In fact, the compilers might be doing those the same now.

Not really a good time to be Talking about encapsulation

user92578

2:21 PM

Obviously no one uses indexed for loops anymore :)

I'm sorry why

user92578

I've actually honestly started considering indexed for loops a code smell, there is usually a better way to do things that doesn't involve an unnecessary mutable variable

@Tyyppi_77 There are cases where you can't get around it.

It is generally a codesmell, though.

user92578

Standard algorithms or ranges-v3 can usually replace those

yeah

2:23 PM

Yeah but doesn't mean its not still useful

he said "code smell"

that doesn't mean "not useful"

that means "you'd better check to be sure there's not a cleaner way"

sometimes it turns out to be

Good point

user92578

Argubaly ranges::views::iota (combined with a zip, perhaps) can eliminate all indexed for loops

@Almo That never made a difference. It only makes a difference for iterators where one requires a copy and the other doesn't. And then people made it the default for everything. I still write i++ and ++it happens very rarely and even then usually not in loop contexts.

I haven't even looked at ranges yet.

Rip my employability.

user92578

lol

2:31 PM

We use ++i because it's in our code standard...

user92578

I think the standard views ended up lacking a bunch of necessary stuff like zipping to make them really usable

Exactly

I did attempt making a zip iterator once. It turns out it's impossible with the current definition of iterators.

It can be fixed. Maybe they will at some point.

Guess things changed

user92578

Yeah I'm not sure what prevented it from getting into the standard lib since it does work fine (all though it's a view, maybe different from pure iterators) in ranges-v3

user92578

2:34 PM

With vcpkg I've sort of become sceptic about pushing anything into the standard library, it's so easy to integrate stuff I want, and they're not fixed to whatever version they manage to cram into the next release of the language

user92578

fmtlib and ranges-v3 are miles ahead of the versions that got into the std

It does help familiarizing the average C++ programmer with the topic though.

Unless they learn it's terrible and never use anything like it again.

Easy way to scare someone from c++

user92578

"Oh this is the library they based the terrible standard library version off from, ugh"

I vaguely remember the issue was that *it had to return a T& and zip iterators cannot do that. They'd have to return a std::tuple<T1&, T2&> and that makes it not an iterator.

user92578

2:36 PM

But yeah the familiarizing is a great point, very true

Agreed

Then again std::vector<bool> has iterators just fine, so it must be something else. I forgot. Time for the weekend.

So folks does any one know the history of game dev

@Tyyppi_77 really depends on the language you write. obv in cpp there's no good argument to not use iterators

user92578

Well even raw mutable iterators are pretty meh and scary since they invalidate so easily

2:44 PM

@Chiho you mean Pong and Zork?

Who are those

Some of the first, wider-known and -played, games

@dot_Sp0T I was talking more of how game dev started

Me too

Like who was the first game developer

2:48 PM

A nerd with a beard.

or very likely a woman

user92578

Hatsune Miku, the first game created of course being Minecraft

but honestly, the people doing sth first are seldomly the important ones. it's those that improve something and make it viable and attainable for the wider mass

Sometimes first developers are widely known. Take Edison for example

What did Edison do first?

2:52 PM

Oh that was just an example . he invented light bulbs

no, he made them practicable for the mass market

user92578

Yeah Edison is literally the example of what dot_Sp0T was saying

Not really the history I read

Incandescent light bulb

An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a bulb to protect the filament from oxidation. Current is supplied to the filament by terminals or wires embedded in the glass. A bulb socket provides mechanical support and electrical connections. Incandescent bulbs are manufactured in a wide range of sizes, light output, and voltage ratings, from 1.5 volts to about 300 volts. They require no external regulating equipment, have low manufacturing costs, and work equally well on either...

Then someone invented the planned obsolescence.

2:53 PM

usually quoting wikipedia is a bad move, but they got a nice small histoire

Okay let's say Faraday

And also Carl Benz

Did they do game dev?

Pple remember their works but no one knows the persons inventing the cool new cars we use

user92578

Most modern engineering is not the achievement of a single person that can be named

2

I understand you're going about Faraday as the father of electromagnetism? Yet it was Maxwell that really made it usable for stuff like radio

Carl Benz made the first 'practical automobile' but it was very likely Verbiest that built the first car

2:57 PM

I'm just saying first devs are mostly recognized than the latter

What Tyyppi says

Valve is quite recognized for their paper on Signed Distance Fields

Those folks had the chance to be the 20% of the 80%, back in the day. And being white males with money.

My point still stands

Ok what if they were 20% they are still known

Take lady Ada Lovelace as an instance

Sure. There was "lots to discover" and it was the "easy part".

There is still a lot to discover now.

If time machines were real is likely that pple won't even care who invented it rather all the credit goes to the organisation

3:07 PM

Yes, but every easy gain has been discovered, what's left is harder.

Yeah that makes sense

(And I don't believe in time machines. If it existed, the world would not be like it is now :P)

Its physics isnt possible . But that was just an instance

user92578

I don't think that's true. The early discoveries are easier to grasp nowadays to the layman, but I'd say that the top of the science chain is equally hard now as it was back then

user92578

It's just that the discoveries are usually more granular as the fields are larger

3:13 PM

Let's build the time machine and ask Marie Curie, Ada de Lovelace and Leonardo Da Vinci!

But you may be right about this.

No problem we could back in time through history. At least that's a good time machine

Yes. I'll make sure to make myself rich when we come back.

3:41 PM

Coming back to your question, Chiho: what are you hoping to glean from discussing early gamedev history here?

There are lots of good articles that come up with a quick search for "history of video games" - is there something missing from those resources that we can help you with?

1 hour later…

4:56 PM

"my" rotation code is working :D

5:07 PM

Nice work!

now i only need to get it to rotate around the correct coordinates. why is textrendering such a pain

how are your students after 2 weeks @DMGregory ?

Well, I can't hear their screams from here, but working from home is probably a factor in that...

group assignments are a pain right now

Yeah. Started them off easy with individual journals, and a paired assignment for a design pitch - hopefully fewer cooks in the kitchen reduces the pain points a bit.

user92578

I much prefer working on group assignments from home, everyone scruntched up on small laptop screens somewhere uncomfortable doesn't seem like a nice way to work anymore

5:13 PM

oh yeah the work you do individually obviously, or in pairs sometimes. But the whole social aspect of it, discussing strategies, deciding on what to do, distributing the work, keeping to a schedule, whatnot. That stuff is so much easier / more naturally coming when you see the other(s) at least once a week on campus

user92578

I don't see how any of that benefits from physical presence?

You wouldn't if you didn't make the experience that it helps vastly over doing everything from home. I think this might be a very individual and somewhat cultural thing.

You get reminded that you work with humans...

that too

At least that's how I see it.

5:16 PM

Also that you work with others, and you're somewhat responsible to them.

But I suppose that depends on a bunch of things.

For me, working from home means I get to keep more money for myself, I can work in my PJs, etc. But I liked to go downtown, see people there and my colleagues.

I have found from working in multiple different studios with external contractors/partners, it's always easier to blame and villify the folks who aren't there on-site with you. :(

Oh yeah, in a job-situ working from home or part-time can be a pain. Took the IT-department at my last job almost 2 years to realize, understand and actually believe that YES, I was their actual coworker and NO, I was not subcontracted from an external company... Was always fun to have to run to them every 6months to get them to expand access privileges

6:15 PM

Welp. I thought I needed to set up our vendors to have a dedicated sniper rifle slot, as the offer rotation wasn't turning up sniper rifles enough for players to find them when they wanted one...

...turns out the vendors just weren't selling any sniper rifles beyond the default one the player practically starts with. :(

OOps

1 hour later…

7:43 PM

Funny how metal bands can have their own twists that make them sound different from the other metal bands...

8:06 PM

same for every genre of music

most people might think all dub techno sounds the same, but it doesn't. :)

(not to be confused with dubstep... very different)

yep!

:D

But all rap music sounds the same.

hahah no way

lemme get examples

😂

8:14 PM

Eric B. & Rakim - Follow The Leader

That was a joke :P

I'm sure someone believes it

Still get antoher example :)

Gang Starr - The Planet

both really good, but Guru in the second has a way more laid-back style

Though Rakim is clam, there's more intensity.

Yep

And yes, a lot of people believe it.

Like all Metal music talk about Satan.

Some metal music is not about Satan.

hahaha

8:31 PM

@DMGregory Congrats on you 90k!

It's too much. 😨

At this rate, folks will get the impression that I might know something. 😱

Bring this up during your next discussion with your boss about a salary increase. "Hey look, I have lots of internet points!"

"Ah... so this is where you spend all your time."

Hahaha. Yeah, maybe I don't want to bring that to their attention...

Yeah ;)

...but maybe they know already.

:D

9:39 PM

whelp the rotation doesn't work at all -.-

user image

it seems the rotation somehow pulls the bottom cords to the left instead of pushing them to the right; maybe it's just my coordinate system

whelp, the issue was that, me being lazy, I do texture flipping by multiplying the respective axis in the transformationmatrix with -1...

1 hour later…

11:11 PM

@DMGregory do you work on FC6?

@Vaillancourt I do indeed. :)

11:57 PM

@DMGregory I just read that the game will be released in February; this smells like "well we wanted to have it for the holidays, but some parts are not finished enough" :P

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