I'm really enjoying Factorio Through the Ages so far

So far, I like how it has added complexity without adding confusion

@NathanMerrill freecodecamp.org/news/…

Figured you might find this interesting.

@MartinEnder huh, it's interesting he ran into build issues

I was pleasantly surprised the first time I ran the build that it worked successfully

like, typically when you have a cross-platform build, there are lots of little tweaks you have to make, but for Windows there's exactly 1 thing you need: Visual Studio C++ redistributable. It sounds like he had the wrong version, which is unfortunate.

I definitely agree with their assessment that the way Unity handles 2D is quite clunky.

oh, you need python too.

To be fair, in Unity you switch platforms and hit build. (I suppose it gets trickier for more complicated projects, but so far it has always just worked.)

oh...I just realized, I have no idea how to actually build my game

I was referring to building the entire engine from source

Haha

but people don't actually have to do that.

ok...after looking it up, the exporting process is...interesting. You actually have to download a separate executable designed for exporting, but it comes with all of the default platforms (phone/web/desktop), and you export to all of them in one go.

That does seem a little awkward. Can you disable the ones you don't care about?

oh yeah. And each export has tons of settings (like APK details and such)

Also, the exporting package doesn't hit as many platform is you are using C#

for obvious reasons

Anyways...I definitely think article brings up an interesting point: Game engines that support 3D have less support for 2D

Which I definitely have found with Godot. I mean, there are plenty of people that use Godot for 2D platformers and such, but 3D definitely has more support. Like, right now, they are focusing on switching to Vulkan for graphics rendering, which basically have 0 impact on 2D games

It's not like the 2 are incompatible, but simply a fact of resource management. Most features don't work on both 3D and 2D, and so you have to pick and choose which features to work on

@NathanMerrill is it that obvious with Mono and .NET Core?

Mono allows linux and Mac OS. As far as I can tell, there are still compat issues for phone/web platforms

I think to take advantage with .NET Core, they'd have to enforce it (or build a different exporter for it)

@NathanMerrill phone is xamarin, which I'm pretty sure you need to license. Web is blazor/wasm which is only now with .NET Core 3 starting to become somewhat usable

Although that might have changed since Microsoft bought xamarin IDK

The architecture for how C# on android works is actually kinda interesting because it JIT compiles .NET into JVM before that JVM is JIT compiled into native code

yeah, that sounds rough, as C# is used as a scripting language, while Godot is native. So you'd have to make sure the bindings survives both of the compilations.

On an unrelated note, I'm writing some C++ code. I'm trying to initialize a vector of object pointers. I was told by a teacher to avoid using new, but as far as I can tell, this feels like the ideal solution

C# and Java actually interop pretty well together. You can call Java from C# with a bit of work and it'll just work and preserve all the things like type structure and whatnot.