Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "fun game"
-
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).23 -
Fun fact:
In the game Civilization, Gandhi had a aggression rating of 1 which means he didn't declare war on anyone. Now whenever someone Researched Democracy their aggression rating dropped by 2. Now instead of it dropping to - 1, it caused an integer underflow and the aggression rating became the highest possible value, making Gandhi into a nuclear warlord. He nuked everyone!20 -
The year is 2025
vlcInstall.exe
"You already have videos, the trusted and safe media player for windows 10"
AtomInstaller.exe
"You already have vscode, the better and lighter editor for windows 10"
SteamInstaller.exe
"You already have Microsoft solitare, a fun, better game for windows 10"
*googles c++ tutorials*
"Try c#, safer and robust language for developers, oh and did we forget to mention use bing?"
*downloads arch iso*
"This file has been marked malicious by windows defender. Oh and we updated your bios to allow only windows bootloader. You're welcome."10 -
toxic workplace; leaving
I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.
I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.
------
On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)
Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).
I'm just.
so, so done.
I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)
Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.
But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.
So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)
I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)
With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.33 -
A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"
This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"
The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.
Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.
After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.
The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"
Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.1 -
Making a game with my friend. He drew shitty images (sprites) and I made a shitty game. We had so much fun!4
-
Just for fun I am making an RPG Maker game called "IT Quest" where you go on a 40 hour long quest just to get the security team to modify a user. The game will feature tons of mandatory side quests and a convoluted plot that requires descending into the depths of the server room to find a virgin followed by a sacrificial ritual over the broken fax machine. And ultimately the security team just closes your request without telling you why and you have to fight the final boss of the game, Zeromus who runs security. When you defeat him you get the golden CAT5 cable of time which you beat the person who closed your request with until he reopens it and does his damned job.12
-
I actually just wanted to say - what a great time it is to be a developer.
C# has stolen so many good features now that it's pretty awesome.
JavaScript and typescript are really fun to work with.
I really love angular.
Docker is great!
I can setup pipelines and deploy an angular app for free and really easily with github-pages.
I can use linux inside windows.
I can use cloud providers to do all sorts for really cheap.
I can plug my cable-free oculus quest VR headset into my laptop and build a game pretty easily with unity (thanks to all the great oculus helper prefabs).
I can use tesseract and data science technology inside my browser!!
And I can go to medium and udemy and learn all sorts of things.
Honestly...
Just saying.
I'm actually really loving being a developer right now.
And if I do have off day, I can rant on here!24 -
*me and a bored coworker
me: bored as hell dude.
him: i have a fun game in mind.
me: shoot.
him: *brings his keyboard
him: type the string you can type the fastest. we will time it. i will start.
him: *types his name
him: your turn.
me: Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
him: the fuck is wrong with you?16 -
Second semester
Java - OOP Course
We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone
Neat shit
And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.
BUT
Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.
A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.
Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.
3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.
So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.
I loaded that.
The bug is back.
But
REPRODUCIBLE.
OMG.
So I started setting up breakpoints.
And guess what the issue was.
FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS
(Basically the calculations were not as expected)
Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.
Most satisfying night yet.
Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.
Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.18 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
Random fact #0
Back in the days of SEGA Saturn, SEGA was really picky in terms of the game stability. All the games that we're about to be released had to pass a series of tests, like for instance they had to run for almost a week without any crash non stop on a real hardware, or withstand cartridge tilting. If it failed, SEGA wouldn't license it and developer had to fix the bugs and re-send it again.
To fool SEGA testers, game devs we're adding exception screens with the fake "hidden content". Like in Sonic 3D Blast, it presented a screen in the image below and then the level select screen.
So yeah, it's not a bug - it's a feature11 -
Story about an obscure bug: https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/...
"We had a ‘fun’ one on LittleBigPlanet 1: 2 weeks to gold, a Japanese QA tester started reliably crashing the game by leaving it on over night. We could not repro. Like you, days of confirmation of identical environment, os, hardware, etc; each attempt took over 24h, plus time differences, and still no repro.
"Eventually we realised they had an eye toy plugged in, and set to record audio (that took 2 days of iterating) still no joy.
"Finally we noticed the crash was always around 4am. Why? What happened only in Japan at 4am? We begged to find out.
"Eventually the answer came: cleaners arrived. They were more thorough than our cleaners! One hour of vacuuming near the eye toy- white noise- caused the in game chat audio compression to leak a few bytes of memory (only with white noise). Long enough? Crash.
"Our final repro: radios tuned to noise, turned up, and we could reliably crash the game. Fix took 5 minutes after that. Oh, gamedev...."5 -
Here's a follow-up to my New Year's resolutions rant six months ago:
( https://devrant.com/rants/1117379/... )
I've completed (or made significant strides in) 5 of my 7 resolutions:
1) Rid and keep my like free of toxic people. This includes parents.
I have had a serious conversation with everyone who made my life worse and whom I wanted to keep around, outlining my issues with them and my expectations should they want to remain in my life. I happily cut out everyone who refused to change their behavior, including my parents. My life is quieter now, and much nicer.
3) Take care of myself for a change!
I've started this, but with work, a monster, etc. it's been almost prohibitively difficult. Minimal lasting progress despite considerable effort. I will make more time for it and make it happen. (I was down 12 pounds at one point! Though this isn't just about weight.)
4) Stop putting up with things I don't have to.
If I don't like something optional, snip snip!
I no longer wait patiently (fuming) for slow-moving people. If something prevents me from being productive or going about my day, I no longer let it. Carpe diem; calcitrare culus! I have been much more productive and energetic because of this.
5) Actually enjoy things I enjoy.
Okay, this one is very difficult. Whenever I'm not working, I feel like I'm wasting my time. However, I have made a conceited effort every day to take time off and do something that sounds fun. Sometimes that's more work, but usually it's music, a game, a book, exercise, or bed. I'm still working on actually enjoying my time away from work, however, but I'm making progress!
7) Finish de-googling my life.
I no longer use a gmail account (except a work-provided account), nor do I use any of their services unless absolutely necessary (and I do so through TOR). My phone still has Google Play Services; however, I'm working on finding a replacement that I can @Root. (Suggestions welcome!)
------
The two resolutions I haven't yet addressed:
2) Find a well-paying job that isn't also toxic.
My job has gotten less toxic of late, with the boss actually listening and everyone writing up feature requests (with co-sponsors) instead of just dumping them in my lap. I perform an effort analysis on them, and everyone discusses them as a team to determine which actually deserve development time. This is tens of times better than before. I also no longer have to be at the office. In fact, I haven't been there in months -- and don't even remember the alarm codes haha. I may also be getting another developer, though I suspect this is actually a lie.
6) Finally buy a harp. I've wanted one since I was 3 ffs.
I haven't done any research yet on which harp(s) I should buy. Also, I have no idea where I would keep it, so I may defer this until we move, or just get a tiny one (lap-sized and cute!) to practice on. Probably both!
------
It's been six moths, and I'm happy with my progress. 😄9 -
Fun fact: the cape of the Batman in the arkham game series was the responsibility of one guy, and it took him 2 years to provide the perfect flexibility, fluidity and strectchibility to it for the final installment of the game arkham knight.4
-
I played a lot of Command & Conquer when I was younger, and I remember going through the files for C&C: Red Alert. I found one that had all the units names and properties, and wondered what happened if I changed a value. So I changed grenadiers attack speed to something ridiculously fast, and found that it actually changed it in the game!
The light bulb went off in my head, and I then created new units:
- Albert Einstein that shot electricity
- Attack dogs that launched missiles
Granted the animations didn't exist for these so it defaulted to playing their death animations when attacking, which was amusing.
That was the ah-ha moment for me that lead me to pursue programming. It was just so much fun!4 -
A Geologist and a developer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the developer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Developer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Developer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"
This catches the Developer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"
The Developer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.
Now, it's the developer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.
After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The developer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.
The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the developer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"
Without a word, the developer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.3 -
!rant
I've launched a small new project at https://2048.run
It will let you play 2048 (the game) over SSH or Telnet.
Connection Details
ssh play@2048.run
telnet 2048.run
Use username/password "play" to play the game.
Have fun!9 -
WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..
I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.
WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.
Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?
It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.
Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.rant stop this shit git commit messages source control keep emojis out of git emoji open-source github34 -
I just released a tiny game for iPhone!
It's basically an attempt to mix 'Heroes of Might & Magic' and mtg.
In the screenshot my terminal says 'helloworld.cpp'. That's right, this is my first c++ program and I don't care how crappy you think this game is, I'm super proud of myself!
I've always worked in data science where managers assume I know how to code because there's text on my screen and I can query and wrangle data, but I actually didn't know what a class was until like 3 years into my job.
Making this game was my attempt to really evolve myself away from just statistics / data transforms into actual programming. It took me forever but I'm really happy I did it
It was brutal at first using C++ instead of R/Python that data science people usually use, but now I start to wonder why it isn't more popular. Everything is so insanely fast. You really get a better idea of what your computer is actually doing instead of just standing on engineers' shoulders. It's great.
After the game was 90% finished (LOL) I started using Swift and Spritekit to get the visuals on the screen and working on iPhone. That was less fun. I didn't understand how to use xCode at all or how to keep writing tests, so I stopped doing TDD because I was '90% done anyway' and 'surely I'll figure out how to do basic debugging'. I'll know better next time...22 -
I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.
I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.
At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.
They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."
I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.
He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.
We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.
A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.
I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.
I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.
As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)4 -
Does anyone remember MUDs? Multi-User Dungeons — working on those in LPC was my first experience with real programming. Before that, I'd only made simple websites.
To get permission to program in one MUD, you had to prove that you knew the world, by reaching a certain level in the game. Death had consequences, with a level being lost, as well as risking loss of your items if someone looted you or your corpse was lost. This alone was hard enough to make most players give up. I played (and played wisely) to get there, being the first of my friends. It was hard work and fun.
After months of playing every day, finally, I was a wizard! Well, first, I had to convince someone else to take me as an apprentice, which was it's own challenge, because I was a 13 y/o girl. I ended up having to wait for an older male friend to get to the proper rank and get made a full wizard himself, because anyone else was reluctant (thinking that I'd just screw up or make them look bad), and no one was very happy about it. After some more weeks, I started programming my own content for the MUD, to share with others. It was a great opportunity to learn and express myself, seeing how creative programming could be.
I got called all kinds of names for asking questions and making mistakes, and I questioned why I even wanted to work with these people who hated my guts and didn't want to teach me anything, but I kept going. As I wasn't allowed to take computer classes in school, being able to do projects on my own like this was the only way to learn. I also became more stubborn, patient, and independent, which has always been necessary for this career.
Most importantly, I saw what could be done with programming, and was inspired to keep going with my own projects, no matter how much hate that I got for it. I went on to work on more games and software, often on my own. I always explore new technology, ignore the haters, and forge ahead with my own vision.4 -
Years ago, when i was a teenager (13,14 or smth) and internet at home was a very uncommon thing, there was that places where ppl can play lan games, have a beer (or coke) and have fun (spacenet internet cafe). It was like 1€ per hour to get a pc. Os was win98, if you just cancel the boot progress (reset button) to get an error boot menu, and then into the dos mode "edit c:/windows/win.ini" and remove theyr client startup setting from there, than u could use the pc for free. How much hours we spend there...
The more fun thing where the open network config, without the client running i could access all computers c drives (they was just shared i think so admin have it easy) was fun to locate the counter strike 1.6 control settings of other players. And bind the w key to "kill"... Round begins and you hear alot ppl raging. I could even acess the server settings of unreal tournament and fck up the gravity and such things. Good old time, the only game i played fair was broodwar and d3 lod5 -
When we published our first game like Portal 2 mod in Apr 2016 and had the lead (female btw) developer of the largest Portal 2 mod let's play our small mod and say "pretty good, fun to play!"
Today >1100 downloads. <35 -
Please. Hear me out.
I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.
And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.
It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.
As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.
The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).
This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.
You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.
Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.
Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.
But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.22 -
I think I may start my very own indie game dev studio... For now as a one man army... That’ll be fun.
I guess wish me luck guys!
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?11 -
Want to play some Tic Tac Toe? Letting my bot go for a good first round of public testing
Probably will break right away.. Who knows :D
For starters limiting to one simultaneous game. Have fun!36 -
Fun drinking game:
Take a shot every time the support department contacts a developer over a previously answered question.4 -
Fun drinking game.
1. Phone Indian "Tech Support"
2. Drink every time they "E for echo" or some variant of that.
3. Finally tell them your using Linux.
4. Hang up.
5 Rinse and repeat.2 -
It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).
// Sorry for the long post!
EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces8 -
Best: Finally left the video game industry for a "real" software engineering role!
Worse: Left work at an exciting studio and fun projects for shorter hours and more pay, and it's incredibly boring and I actually *miss* the crunch and chaos. -
Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶
So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗
Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂
Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯
But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄
Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.21 -
So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
For a project day we had to write a game of our choice in Java.
"You should make this game using the JSwing library and make each component a JComponent"
Later I learned you can simply use a Bitmap as a canvas.
NEVER. EVER. BASE. YOUR. GAME. ON. SWING.
It inefficient to the top of my taskmanager. I had to wrap everything with something like a virtual playground where I had to manage everything myself to not roast my cpu.
I had alot more fun debugging hundred lines of C code with print statements than writing that shit2 -
Hey y'all!
So uh, I just finished my first week in the new jawb. And thought you guys would appreciate seeing the swagducky's new home!
My first week was awesome, the team is a group of interesting, skilled and clever people.
They started me off on an introductory task... I've been building an iOS game in unity! Different to the say job but damn it's been fun 😂😄5 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.
I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.
Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.
A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.
I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.
These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...
I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.
A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.
Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.
Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)
Anyways, goodnight everyone.5 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
----------------------------------------------------------------
For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
----------------------------------------------------------------
No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
Introduction to graphics
Lecturer says "this is a very practical course. In fact I think we should have a practical exam"
All students agree. He would sort out that matter.
Meanwhile he taught us how to making shapes in java, then a house, then a game...
And the exam was for us to make a building where a user can walk through the building using the arrow keys...
What fun we had. We got out marks...and everybody did well!!!!1 -
Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!4 -
Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.
I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.
It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.
Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!10 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Game dev update: I'm procrastinating the project cuz I need help with stupid background and it doesnt mix well so Im just contemplating existence
But I did this for fun8 -
>First grade
Teacher: This is a Keyboard, this is a mouse... blah blah blah
Now play Mario!
There was also some space racing game or something installed on the computers. We weren't allowed to play that game, so of course, we did what we weren't allowed to. It was always fun to sneak in a game when the teacher wasn't looking or wasn't around.
We were also taught MS Paint. I "painted" a squirrel in one of the lab sessions, the teacher loved it and showed it to everyone. Everyone applauded and then I became the MS Paint Guru (for them). Fun times..9 -
Today I played hide and seek at work, this time it was not find the missing semicolon but instead find the unknown. After 30 minutes it turned out the request URL had a capital 'i' instead of a small 'L'
==> l = I almost the same but guess my eyes are not functioning as they should
It was a fun game11 -
I once had to make a shitty canvas game as part of a marketing campaign when I worked for an agency, for fuck only knows what. You dragged a shopping trolley back and forth in an aisle, and got points for catching items that fell from the top.
The initial round of feedback had the complaint that sometimes players weren't receiving points for items. I spent a night playing this senseless game over and over, but I never failed to get the points for an item. I was pretty confident that it worked, it wasn't like the logic was complex, so I sent it over.
Second round of feedback had the same complaint. They were getting quite annoyed by it, said that it was a bad user experience. Again, I could not reproduce it at all: the game was an equally tedious waste of life on every device I tried it on.
In exasperation, I asked the sales guy whose pitch it had been to get me a video or a more detailed report. The client was quite arsey, as they saw it, at having to do bug-fixing for us, but they did agree.
Anyway, it transpired that they were angry that players were not receiving the points for the items they *failed* to catch. The way they saw it, the game wouldn't be fun if you were punished for not catching items - so they wanted the player to get ten points for every item on screen, regardless or not of whether they caught it in their trolley. Of course, I thought. Silly me.
I was actually quite impressed at how a marketing department could accidentally undermine the very notion of a game whilst seeking to make one more fun.8 -
Started off as an ok pitch. I was an advertgame developer at the time.
This company wanted a medieval styled platformer with a simple progression system that would integrate with their game store. Sounded like a fun project but when I created a planning and offer they immediately rejected it because they figured anything over 400 dollars was too much for a non AAA game...
Some people... lol2 -
I found some rum!
Specifically kahlua.
Kahlua, milk, Tito’s. Mmm. And so strong.
I tried adding creme de cacao, but I wasn’t strong enough to open the bottle. 🙁
Anyway, we played a family game that amounts to throwing a ball or other toy into a bucket from increasing distances / more difficult areas of the room. With my drunken coordination it was a great time. 😁
No work today.
Just packing and fun.
☺️7 -
Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)
So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.
Here we go!
Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.
Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.
A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.
A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.
A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.
* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*
Videogames:
Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...
A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.
Imposible/distant future projects:
History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)
Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.
I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.12 -
Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀 -
I hacked a browser game a few years ago for fun and the exploit I found and used was basically this:
<$php
$f = $_GET['f'];
$p = $_GET['p'];
$f($p);
So it was possible to pass a function and it's parameter in the URL to the server. The author used this to include() sub pages. I to highlight_file()s.2 -
My son is into playing Roblox. He asked me to help him find an auto clicker that doesn't have viruses/malware. We looked into cheatengine (which I have used in the past), but despite getting it from a legit source it is getting flagged as malware. So we started writing one with Python. I did check to see what their policy on bots is:
"Using bots that are programmed to run disruptive, large-scale tasks"
is the only text I can find about bots. It seems like they don't care if you make bots to automate tasks or play the game.
I plan on having some fun with this and including a little gui to control the bot while the game runs in the background (the goal). I had tried to get my son to have an interest in programming so this is a good intro.11 -
Fun drinking game. Get the Oxford dictionary select a random word, search it on npm. If there's a package you drink. The last one standing wins2
-
I was reading a book about D language and thought it would be fun if i write a simple snake game in D.
This is the result:
https://github.com/TheWeirdDev/...10 -
Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.
Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.
Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."
Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."
Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"
Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".
Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"
It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.3 -
getting into dev work is such a shit show. thinking back 2 years ago I decided to switch career so went on bootcamp and starting looking for junior role.
as you know full well all jobs requires 5+ years when the tech has only been around 3. Anyhow, got a junior full stack role at a start up, all good , great pace (cos of startup) and wide range of tech to learn. one minute i am doing great , next day I am not good enough and got let go (WTF?) ,also whats up with some backend devs Jesus why wouldnt you let me put a " on aws because you are the backend dev what the fuck is wrong with your ego man?
fun story number 2: after being let go of my first role due to being good dev for one day and bad the next. I went for an intern role for really low paid. well fair enough I am here to learn right guys? nope, i have experience with the main tech from my last job and I managed the take home test and despite I told them i have more experience front end they criticise my backend code , despite i was able to tell them what I have done not so well and I have found a better solution AT THE INTERVIEW. still not good enough. I was really doubting myself If I am that shit at being an fucking intern with a stack I have experience in.
fast forward another job interview I landed my current role with fantastic culture, good line manager & tech lead. nice colleague and I am being treated like a prince with the work i put in. Why is this industry so fucked?
so, folks out there trying to get into this game. dont lose hope, you can do it , you just need to get fucked a bit to know whats good out there!5 -
Just got started on my first summer project.
Drinkaloo: The Ultimate Drinking Game.
Never touched android studio before. This should be fun.7 -
Fun drinking game: work on a legacy system for a few hours. Every time you say "what the fuck?" equals 1 shot.3
-
Hello, world!
Soo.. I am half way done with Pre-Release 10!
Woohoo!
However.. The update log is already as long as the full update log for the last update.. Which was twice as long as the log for the update before..
I'm Starting to notice a pattern.. XD
This is all good and well, but I feel as if I'm overworking myself. I'm getting stressed out, and I'm not spending near as much time with my girlfriend. 3: But, I'm having fun. I'm genuinely enjoying myself, and I'm making a ton of progress in such a short amount of time. I also have a new team member!
Idk.. I haven't done anything the past two days really. Work nor spending time with my girlfriend. I'm stressed, and I'm not sure what I should do. I'm sooper modivated to keep working, but I feel that my situation will only get worse.
---
Because I'm sure some of you will be interested ('cause my game is very popular in this community <3), here is the update list so-far. Do note that this is not the final list, and things will be added, and may be removed.
As you can see below, this update is mostly focussed around API's. Specifically Modding, and the new FileSystem. On top of this, I will *try* and tinker with the official Patreon API for Java and see if I can't intergrate that into my game. I'll also work on a ModManager, but I'm not sure if either of these will make it into this release. I also have plans for new Apps and Commands for this release, as well as working and polishing up existing Apps and Commands.
---
* Closing the game with X button (and other ways) now also calls preExitTasks()
+ Added AddonLoader. It's literally a Mod-Loader. (Your welcome :3) A tutorial coming soon, but just know that it's standard Java codeing and you simply need to drop the mod.jar into the game's addons/ directory.
++ Added "API" - This is a bunch of methods that are added for the Mods to use. These Methods likely wouldn't of been added othewise.
+ Added in-game FileSystems (Folder, files..)
++ Added FileNavigator API for traversing the in-game FileSystems
* Fixed a major bug with the "debug" command where you could no longer run any commands after enabling debug mode.
+ Added GameSave creation
+ Added System creation
+ New Save + localsystem are generated on startup
++ Added WindowBuilder API for creating Apps. This makes creating Apps much, much simpler, and is intended for not only us, but use in Mods.
* We re-wrote the Console Class from scratch, and turned it into an API for creating custom Terminal Apps. (Commands are now created using the Command Class and are then passed to Console and registered as either a Local or Global command)
++ Added Command API for creating commands. These commands execute Java code, much like a JavaFX Button would, on each call. You also get everything after the first [space] of the command that was passed, as a String.
* Re-wrote ALL previously implimented Apps.
* Re-wrote ALL previously implimented Commands.
+ Added "debugtest" command to test debug mode. (This just prints a totally boring random message, and you shouldn't try it.) [Note: This "command will not exist" when debug mode is false.]
+ Added "cd" command. ("cd ~" "cd .." "cd /home/folder" "cd etc" "cd /")
+ Added "cat" command. ("cat file" "cat /folder/file")
+ Added "mkdir" command.
+ Added "rm" command.
+ Added "dir" command.
If you're new and you have no clue what I'm talking about, here's the info page: https://trello.com/b/0bH2SjQf1 -
"Some settings are managed by your organisation"
I understand the necessity for companies to be able to remotely manage their devices, but my god, I hate working on company laptops sooo much!!
Fun fact, even Chrome can be managed! The can manage everyting. It's called Microsoft Intune. It sucks!! And fucking 45 day PW change policy! And fuck you, Windows Defender Real-time protection which I can't turn off and It's high CPU consumption. Also fuck you Microsoft Teams for scanning. Every. Single. Link. I. Click. On. From. A. Chat. Before. Redirecting. Me. To. The. Actual. Website. Always takes a couple of seconds. Waste of time. Those accumulate over time you know! AND to Windows Update! You already know what is coming next: stop force-updating while I'm in the middle of fucking meeting! I have shit to do! Another fun fact: you can postpone Windows Update by turning the clock back. LIKE PLAYING AN OLD TIME-BASED STRATEGY GAME ON PC IN 1999. (12h work best.) And this fucking weak ass VPN. WHY I PAY FOR 1Gbps WHEN COMPANY VPN ONLY 10Mbps?!! What Am I? A fucking snail! Go faster!! pls!
But, thank god, we can email shit and open attachments in Outlook.9 -
I thought searching for Rust answers was slightly annoying, with that stupid survival game poisoning the search results.
But trying to find answers about C programming is definitely worse.
You can make fun of the Javascript kids with their silly flutterbutt, ultrasauce and wrinklesack library names, but at least it gives clear search results.16 -
Recently I got an E-Mail from PayPal.de with the headline "Your account gets limited". Fun Fact: I don't have a PayPal account.
This Mail got me curious though, as it couldn't be a phishing mail, since I don't have a PayPal account in the first place, so I opened the e-mail just to get greeted by pure emptiness. It was completely empty. I thought to myself "oh no, is this some sort of new trick? Did I get infected by some sort of a weird hacky backdoor trojan already?!"
Name: PayPal.de
Original E-mail Address: NULL (never seen this before)
I then realized, that Thunderbird blocked the only content from this mail: a clickable image.
This is getting even more confusing the longer I examine this unique mail. The image is showing me a domain from a site completely unrelated from PayPal, so it was obviously no phishing, but I didn't trust this clickable image, so I looked up its hidden link to find an even more confusing redirection to not a picture upload site like the image suggests, but to a game key reselling site instead, like wtf? What was the whole point of this whole e-mail? Was this a weird try to make advertisements for more than one website? It wasn't even a ref-link or something like that. It was just weird, iunno.8 -
I came first in a 48 hour 4x person gamejam with a game idea in 6 hours with 3x people.
Some info: I had an idea as soon as the topic went live, told the team this is the idea (button masher), we are going to do it in unity (at the time I was working at a studio that used UE4.x), and I'll also make a custom controller using an old keyboard to make it more fun. Ended up coming first place and won a nice bottle of champagne each, and at no point did we over stretch. Nice clean project with a good night's sleep in-between. The team was me (dev), an artist and a technical designer.
That was my first start to finish use of unity and C#, and now I exclusively use unity and make games for Xbox One and Steam.3 -
TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.
so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.
me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.
he wasn't expecting much
M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*
I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...
M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...
that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.
M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*
after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!
M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*
I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).
sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.
if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!9 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.
I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.
For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.
However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!
Anyway, I am having fun.15 -
A lot of online games (mainstream) tend to make me kind of angry or stressed. Lots of either blatantly stupid or negative players kill the fun.
A few days ago I've startet to see videos about "Among Us". It's on a big hype right now and their machmaking servers must be glowing.
Well, this game is fucking awesome and it makes me really happy! 😊
Nothing beats a 30 minute game of lying, betrayal, teamwork and good old 30'000 IQ big-brain detective work.
I think it's a great execise for remembering stuff.
You remember colors, who's said what and who faked or did which task. And the hardest part is, even if you fucking saw the killer, you have to present the facts in a way that people believe you.
Each round is unique and full of riddles.
Yeah, I just wanted to say: Fucking great game 😄2 -
I started out learning Python. And before you "tsk, kids these days", it was before Python became the go to starter language for a lot of universities. No, I started learning around age 12.
My dad (a programmer himself), bought "Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner" and we went through it together. He started out holding my hand as I went through the exercises, but pretty quick I was getting through them mostly on my own.
It was really fun, and I'm absolutely going to do the same if/when I have children of my own. The books exercises were all games, which made it really fun. Instead of "hello world", the first program printed "game over". I was super proud of the hangman game I eventually wrote.
It gave me a leg up when I started taking actual classes, and really instilled a love of coding and puzzle solving in me that propelled me through two degrees.2 -
"Graphics don't matter."
I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.
I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)
So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.
Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.
And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.
And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.
"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."
What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.
People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.
It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.
Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.
Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.
(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)
If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.
People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.
How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".
That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.
The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.
I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.
So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.
You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.
I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.7 -
well, i guess ill make some new years resolutions…
- finish dogecrypt. ive barely done squat and i dont even remember the name of the guy i was working with
- finish https://translationiteration.com (ITS UGLY!!!) if anyone wants to collab on some css, im open
- make an android game that’s FUN. something that’s addictive too.
- make something PROFITABLE. i want money.8 -
I have been playing skyrim on my switch. The reason is simple, family watches movies or whatever, and I get to sit comfortably in my little screen shooting mofockas with my bow(i made an archer build)
Its my first time playing the game after all these years and I love it, far better than I expected. The story is great and the side quests are fun instead of boring, it does not take much to learn how to craft, enchant etc and I dig the simplicity.
But it has got to be one of the buggiest glitchiest majorly famous game I had ever played. Literally, and I have it for both the ps4 and the switch and it still is so fucking buggy its unbelievable.5 -
Best: Got into game modding and had tons of fun! Learned a lot about Unity engine and became very comfortable with C#.
Worst: Abandoned my social life as a result of my new obsession. Need to find the balance.1 -
Everytime im coding with a friend for our Android game. It's a lot of laughter and fun.
And awesome feeling if the first finished project is successful and people actually like it. :)2 -
This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.
A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.
The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.
I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'
$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"
He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.
He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.
$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.
In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.
A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.
Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.1 -
There are many, but in in particular,
EA!!!
There could many reasons, overpriced games, micro-transactions...
All of them can be described as "just business"
But one stands out and makes it personal, the reason I wouldn't just shoot the game-designer but stab him and watch him drown in his own blood.
MASSEFFECT ANDROMEDA!!!!!
It felt like they took all the mistakes the third game made, and continued to add some more.
1. The PS4-Version had so many performance-issues, it was pretty much unplayable
2. Instead of a good story, interesting characters and fun battles, we got an open-world.
3. Facial animations and voice-acting from hell.10 -
Me: "Today I'm going to study real hard for that logic exam I have next week. I am already late."
Brain: "Remember tekkit classic, that game you used to play? It would be totally fun to play that again."
Progress after two days of gaming, two days of studying: page 94 of 400 😭😭😭1 -
So I promised myself some down time this weekend since I usually end up working all night and in a blink my weekend is over. I also declined going out for better 'relaxation'. Here's how it's going so far...
>Gets home. Hmmm what should I do I can do anything! *thinking*
>Pours a stiff whiskey
>Trys watching something as well as playing a game, gets bored of each and abandons them.
>Opens a dev newsletter
>*blinks*
>Realizes I'm elbow deep in some repo... starting to feel inspired.
>Decides to code something "fun"
>Uses "Well as long as I'm not *working*" to justify his addiction.
I'm really not sure what I did for fun before I started coding. It ruined things by being so damn enjoyable and ultimatley many other things became well... less fun.
This is what addiction looks like.2 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
Have an idea for a fun little side project coding a game. Install Unity and read up some samples.
Remember I'm awful at any kind of creative design work.
Get sad and go back to Overwatch.5 -
I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...rant wine compile all the things glue together your own printer driver open source stuff breaks ubuntu os duckduckgo vm gnu/linux games24
-
Second intro to programming class we remade tetris, it was incredible
I probably spent more time making graphics than coding, but I also coded a mini graphics framework for the game
We additionally made incrediblly addictive modifications to the game, it's still super fun to play
We also barely had the knowledge we needed to code it, but I'm still super proud of it5 -
Was at a party the other day and was talking to some randoms and they asked me about programming and said it must be fun and fast paced to do it on your own...
All I did was smile and told them I have spent 10 days trying to decide on 16 colour codes for a part of the software the average consumer will never even see...
Game development everybody!2 -
I worked on a game jam last year, and for the first time I managed to finish a full software project that wasn't for a job or university. It was really fun to work on, and seeing my vision come to life, even if compromises had to be made, as well as applying all the programming and project management knowledge I'd picked up until then was an experience unlike anything I'd had before.
The community aspect was great too, everybody shared and discussed each other's games and were super friendly and encouraging. -
this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.
2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.
The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:
1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck
3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/
4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it" -
I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.4 -
It has always pissed me off that people will judge a game because it doesn’t have good/traditional graphics, or an incredible story, or other stuff like that.
So when people judge video games like Dwarf Fortress & NetHack, I get pissed because the devs that made those games put so much effort in creating really complex amazing games that are really detailed and fun (if you take the time to learn)
And those games can be so complex because they are ascii based and I personally don’t see that as a bad thing because that means they can just focus on gameplay and it’s fucking awesome and to me it’s inspiring.
Idk if anyone else agrees but it’s always just pissed me off to hear “That’s stupid it has no graphics” or “this isn’t a game it’s just text” or other stupid shit.11 -
Crazy... Hm, that could qualify for a *lot*.
Craziest. Probably misusage or rather "brain damaged" knowledge about HTTP.
I've seen a lot of wild things when devs start poking standards, but the tip of the iceberg was someone trying to use UTF-8 in headers...
You might have guessed it - German umlauts. :(
Coz yeah. Fucktard loved writing everything in german, so why not write custom header names in german.
The fun thing is: It *can* work, though the usual sane thing is to keep it in ASCII range for the obvious reason that using UTF-8 (or ISO-8859-1, which is *not* ASCII) is a gamble you gonna loose.
The fun game was that after putting in a much needed load balancer between services for monitoring / scaling etc suddenly *something* seemed off.
It took me 2 days and a lot of Wireshark hoola hooping to find out why, cause the header was used for device detection aka wether it's a bot or not. Or in the german term the dev used: "Geräte-Art".
As the fallback was to assume a bot, but only rate limit based on IP, only few managed to achieve the necessary rate limit to get blocked.
So when I say *something* seemed off, I really mean a spooky kind of "sometimes IP blocked for seemingly no reason at all".
Fun stuff. The dev btw germanized everything. Untangling the code base was a lot of non fun. -.-6 -
I want to rant.
Can we just have a "CUT THE BULLSHIT" mode in racing games for people with jobs? Like fuck this shit, just give me all the Lamborghinis, McLarens and Bentleys and let me play the game god damn it.
I barely get time to play this game, now why the fuck do I have think about putting in extra effort to get rewards. And I'm the one paying you in the first place.
I just paid you 60 bucks for the game now why do I have to grind out the game with shitty ass cars to get a decent car where the game actually starts to be fun.11 -
So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.
We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.
The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.
All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.
I just can't even right now.5 -
So.... a while ago my non tech friends asked me to help with their game... As all of the devs out there who wish to make a game or work in HW company I decided to say YES....
Basicly the game was a 2D infinite runner and when I looked at it it seemed like it was allmost ready, but it was not :D
The codebase was horrible.... Non of those two knew how to write scripts properly.... Half of the time I spent trying to teach both of them how to code properly and make the code readable for other coders..... After that most of the time went in troubleshooting 3rd-party plugins regarding google play services and fixing anoying performance issues.....
And last friday we launched it for Android https://goo.gl/MZpjf9
I'm really proud of my non tech friends because they withstood my complaining about the sourcecode and learned a lot of new thing these past months!!! It was a pleasure making this with them..... I know that the game is simple and it could have been done in much shorter time, but part of the expirience is fun and making things happen with your friends!!!1 -
Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.
It's not.
Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?
Nope. Nothing.
Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.
"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."
*sigh*
So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.
Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!7 -
Video game graphics have peaked. It absolutely has. It's gotten to a stage where 500% extra effort would result in 5% improvement which is not worth it imo.
We have games that were released in 2010's which still hold up to today's standards.
If every game company could fucking stop with the graphics improvements and actually work on building bangers to play and have fun with, that'd be great.14 -
So today is going to be fun, need to do some work on my game and book with a hangover... Why do I do this to myself!4
-
Not gonna lie. I’m in the mood to make a game and I’m gonna try it. I think it’ll be fun. Wish me luck!
For anyone curious I’m gonna be using Godot because it’s not bad and It’s not nearly as fat as Unreal and Unity. They’re not bad just not what I want rn.6 -
Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.
I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.
Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.
Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.
Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!
Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?
Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.
tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.13 -
So, I'm heading back down the rabbit hole. I did some web dev (backend) on the side years ago, but I've been out of the game since. I want to change up careers at this late date and I had forgotten how cathartic manipulating raw code could be. So now I'm relearning and learning all kinds of good stuff via the internets and was excited to find this community. Not much of a ranter but this should be fun.3
-
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
Somebody programmed a programming game using a programming game. Why I can't have time enough to make fun stuff like this? https://youtu.be/yMnOEgbm2fE
-
one of my guys decided to start learning c++ for the fun and fuck of it. We do not use c++ for shit (we web developers in this bitch) and he asked me if in the event of him getting completely fucking stuck he could come to me for guidance, I said sure. I do use c++ for personal game projects....it is mostly very bad C until I need c++, it is horrible seriously, I ain't no expert.
He decides to go with the LLVM. Creates a simple hello world app. Runs clang++ main.cpp -o main.
**QUICK PAUSE**
Done, the CLI returns the prompt back to him. He comes and asks me wtf is going on. I check on my machine(Linux based) and do the exact same thing. Executable comes out.
I check back on his windows machine, try typing the same shit. Nada. It does not throw errors or warnings, and the syntax is fucking fine, can't really fuck up c-outing hello fucking world. FUCKING NADA
I couldn't sit down to troubleshoot since it was still working hours, but this shit is haunting me and I am going ballsack crazy knowing that I won't be able to jump at it until tomorrow.
This just makes me dislike c++, i usually never have issues like that, but then again, I use the microsoft compiler (bitch at me all you want, most game developer tutorials etc use that shit, so does the Cherno, its all i know OK????)
I am going to go crazy sdjkfhasdkjlfghlajkhrfvluidefjbhfksjadhjksdsdsjksdjkl11 -
This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.
1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.
2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.
//Fun part coming
3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People
Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people
Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.
Easy peasy, right?
Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3
Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.
Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.
4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.
When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.
But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.
If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.
5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).
There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.
SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.
6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.
So TL;DR
Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)
And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?
If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!2 -
More of a rave than a rant.
My Dad was having some trouble with a game disconnecting on the PS4 and he read somewhere that it might be a problem with our home router. I didn't think it would be, as every other game works fine. But there was no talking him out of it. And to be fair the current router WAS kind of old.
So I have a look at the one he's decided to buy and it's some massive triple-antenna beast for well over a hundred pounds. I felt like such a weapon might be overkill for 2 people in a house, but did say that it would definitely help with connection issues in some rooms and I kind of wanted to play with it.
So he got it and oh am I glad he did. It has so many fun toys, including a built in VPN. Right now I live abroad so there's a few services I used at home that I can't access, I was literally just considering buying a vpn the other day. I found this while setting up port-fortwarding for my Raspberry Pi to run a discord bot I'm building. I had condisered putting a VPN server on the Pi but this works too!
It also has built in DDNS from ASUS, which IS cool, but our IP hasn't changed in years so I'm not sure we'll need it. I set it up anyway just in case though!4 -
So recently I had an argument with gamers on memory required in a graphics card. The guy suggested 8GB model of.. idk I forgot the model of GPU already, some Nvidia crap.
I argued on that, well why does memory size matter so much? I know that it takes bandwidth to generate and store a frame, and I know how much size and bandwidth that is. It's a fairly simple calculation - you take your horizontal and vertical resolution (e.g. 2560x1080 which I'll go with for the rest of the rant) times the amount of subpixels (so red, green and blue) times the amount of bit depth (i.e. the amount of values you can set the subpixel/color brightness to, usually 8 bits i.e. 0-255).
The calculation would thus look like this.
2560*1080*3*8 = the resulting size in bits. You can omit the last 8 to get the size in bytes, but only for an 8-bit display.
The resulting number you get is exactly 8100 KiB or roughly 8MB to store a frame. There is no more to storing a frame than that. Your GPU renders the frame (might need some memory for that but not 1000x the amount of the frame itself, that's ridiculous), stores it into a memory area known as a framebuffer, for the display to eventually actually take it to put it on the screen.
Assuming that the refresh rate for the display is 60Hz, and that you didn't overbuild your graphics card to display a bazillion lost frames for that, you need to display 60 frames a second at 8MB each. Now that is significant. You need 8x60MB/s for that, which is 480MB/s. For higher framerate (that's hopefully coupled with a display capable of driving that) you need higher bandwidth, and for higher resolution and/or higher bit depth, you'd need more memory to fit your frame. But it's not a lot, certainly not 8GB of video memory.
Question time for gamers: suppose you run your fancy game from an iGPU in a laptop or whatever, with 8GB of memory in that system you're resorting to running off the filthy iGPU from. Are you actually using all that shared general-purpose RAM for frames and "there's more to it" juicy game data? Where does the rest of the operating system's memory fit in such a case? Ahhh.. yeah it doesn't. The iGPU magically doesn't use all that 8GB memory you've just told me that the dGPU totally needs.
I compared it to displaying regular frames, yes. After all that's what a game mostly is, a lot of potentially rapidly changing frames. I took the entire bandwidth and size of any unique frame into account, whereas the display of regular system tasks *could* potentially get away with less, since most of the frame is unchanging most of the time. I did not make that assumption. And rapidly changing frames is also why the bitrate on e.g. screen recordings matters so much. Lower bitrate means that you will be compromising quality in rapidly changing scenes. I've been bit by that before. For those cases it's better to have a huge source file recorded at a bitrate that allows for all these rapidly changing frames, then reduce the final size in post-processing.
I've even proven that driving a 2560x1080 display doesn't take oodles of memory because I actually set the timings for such a display in order for a Raspberry Pi to be able to drive it at that resolution. Conveniently the memory split for the overall system and the GPU respectively is also tunable, and the total shared memory is a relatively meager 1GB. I used to set it at 256MB because just like the aforementioned gamers, I thought that a display would require that much memory. After running into issues that were driver-related (seems like the VideoCore driver in Raspbian buster is kinda fuckulated atm, while it works fine in stretch) I ended up tweaking that a bit, to see what ended up working. 64MB memory to drive a 2560x1080 display? You got it! Because a single frame is only 8MB in size, and 64MB of video memory can easily fit that and a few spares just in case.
I must've sucked all that data out of my ass though, I've only seen people build GPU's out of discrete components and went down to the realms of manually setting display timings.
Interesting build log / documentary style video on building a GPU on your own: https://youtube.com/watch/...
Have fun!20 -
Been working on a rust game framework that im really proud of, but the part I’m most proud of is the renderer, 3D graphics from scratch is really fun11
-
So me and my friend started doing a video game project. To be honest I was expecting it to be nothing but pain and suffer.
But it turned out to be really fun experience for both of us (plus I’m learning Unity) 😁 -
Making a Snake game. Let me explain.. I had just "finished"(We all know there is no finishing side projects) my first big, at least for me, project. An io game called torpedoed.fun [http://torpedoed.fun]. And yes, it is a desktop only, and also yes, it is not that fun of a game. Torpedoed.fun taught me a lot about developing such as how to debug effectively, backend communication, how to host a website, planning, and much more. After learning all this from torpedoed.fun, I decided to start a new project, a simple clone of the classic Snake game. I, to my surprise, was able to immediately think of several ways of implementing various parts of the game. I developed the entire game in the span of a few hours with hardly any problems! This experience of developing without constantly debugging every line of code felt amazing. If I wasn't addicted to programming before that Snake game, I was afterwards!
-
Fun drinking game: Every time the solution to a coding issue is the one you refrained from trying, take a shot5
-
Fun game: find a random tech meme/joke and search it in google with "site:devrant.com". If you find it - you drink4
-
You all like WoW? I developed a MUD (Multi User Dungeon, the first real mmorpg's) server from scratch using telnet and nodejs.
You can create accounts and characters with different classes/races and dive into a world full of quests, monsters and lots of loot :)5 -
When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)
I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)2 -
I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.
Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)
As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )
I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.
About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.
So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.
I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.
So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).
Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.
I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.
For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!
Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.
So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.2 -
GAME
The nickname of a person above your comment will be the name of your next project, tell us what it's about (be creative)20 -
Sometime in the mid to late 1980's my brother and I cut our teeth on a Commodore 64 with Basic. We had the tape drive, 1541 Disk Drives, and the main unit and a lot of C64 centric magazines my dad subscribed to. Each one of the magazines had a snippet of code in a series so that once you had 6 volumes of the magazine, you had a full free game that you got to write by yourself. We decided to write a Hangman game. Since we were the programmers, we already knew all the possible words stored in the wordlist, so it got old quick. One thing that hasn't changed is that my brother had the tenacity and mettle for the intensive logic based parts of the code and I was in it for the colors and graphics. Although we went through some awkward years and many different styles and trends, both of us graduated with computer science degrees at Arkansas State University. Funny thing is, I kept making graphics, CSS, UI, front end, and pretty stuff, and he's still the guy behind the scenes on the heavy lifting and logical stuff. Not that either of us are slacks on the opposite ends of our skilsets, but it's fun to have someone that compliments your work with a deeper understanding. I guess for me it was 2009 when I turned on the full time DEV switch after we published our first website together. It's been through many iterations and is unfortunately a Wordpress site now, but we've been selling BBQ sauce online since 2009 at http://jimquessenberry.com. This wasn't my first website, but it's the first one that's seen moderate success that someone else didn't pay the bill for. I guess you could say that our Commodore 64 Hangman game, and our VBASIC game The Big Giant Head for 386 finally ended up as a polished website for selling our Dad's world class products.1
-
*leaning back in the story chair*
One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.
Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.
One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...
I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.
Error: incorrect password.
I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.
WTF? Did I change my password or what?...
Fuck.
Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.
I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.
---
Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?
I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.
Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk. -
First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.
Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.
Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS
Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS
From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.2 -
Making a game, 8bit action adventure loot based dungeon based fun! I'm new at programming as well if you could help me I'd help you! So hmu! 🙂6
-
This weekend I was working on a fun hobby project with a friend of mine. While he was modeling items for the game I started with a dungeon generator.
This morning I got stuck at a bug which took me more than 12 hours and 4 developers to fix. In the end I found the issue. I was checking
If y > arraySize && somethingElse
DoSomething();
It had to be:
If y < arraySize && somethingElse
DoSomething();
After I changed that everything worked without issues... Day well spent... -
Any other Screeps players here?
for the people running into a "Screeps is not defined":
Screeps is a MMO RTS where you code your "army" to do stuff in Javascript (a la NodeJS).
Code how your harvesters should behave, how your soldiers should behave, how your builders should behave etc. etc.
So far, it is quite a fun game, tho my (Intel Nehalem based) laptop has issues handling it (thanks to a awfully slow GPU...) so it's difficult to play for me at the moment (I'm on holiday, my home PC is a LOT faster).
It costs about 15 euro on steam, and if you're into this stuff, it's well worth it.
Just make sure you finish the tutorial first... I didn't and I regretted it when I bought the game (it's a huge pain in the buttocks to get started if you don't understand the API and such).
Currently just playing on my own localhosted private server to discover how the game works and such, but will be setting up a public server later down the road to play with others.
Tho it would be nice if Screeps would allow for "team-based" gameplay as well so it'll be slightly harder for early players to bully the newer ones.2 -
I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!
BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!1 -
As of late I'm creating private game servers on my local network in my free time for fun / relaxing
I've already running:
a World of Warcraft vanilla;
Travian version 3;
And I am currently working on a conquer online private server, but getting the right client for it is the hard part...4 -
So I have a date tomorrow. First meeting in person. I’ve got a little time to kill before hand, and need to learn Dart anyway....so I thought it would be fun to code her up something interactive. Kinda like that game Mr and Mrs. Only in the terminal, and for nerds.
Features, ladies and gentleman?9 -
Hi, I and my dev are finishing our First Game, it's an application because u know, everyone have a smartphone... but this's not the point. I'm an IT student but I didn't graduate yet (maybe next year 🙊) but my dev did a year ago, (yup is older than me), but the fun fact is that I didn't write a single line of code (for this game) because my dev chose me only for my drawing skills 😎 (OK as a future dev I feel a little noob and scared, but no problem I love drawing, even more than programming, less frustrating😉.. sometimes) BTW, this project took 1 year of cooperation and before this an other year (to my dev to learn C# and unity), now we are so close and proud of our creation. As soon as possible I will show you everything 😁 a concept art of our zombie's face just to prove something
p.s. this app an this community it's so funny and, well, kind :)2 -
I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).
I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.
Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.13 -
!rant
Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)
Glad I decided to go and try it out.
Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.
So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.2 -
Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.
The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's
Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?
Is there reading material I should read?
I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.5 -
When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.
Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.
It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.
Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.
Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.
My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.
So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.
Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.2 -
I don't know my problem is. I lost my motivation to code, my enthusiasm and excitement to read a code and solve a problem. My love of my life for 6 years whom I thought she's the one, gave up on us. It was a long journey, lots of ups and downs, but really worth the time and sacrifice. Now, she's doing good, very happy on her life judging from her social media. Can't believe she just moved for 2 months. To be honest, i want her to be happy but quite bitter that she just moved on quite fast. And I don't if this is the reason why I lost my motivation and enthusiasm to code. Or maybe I just don't like the project we're working on. Well, I really don't like it since it's a mobile game, I really want to build webapp or mobile app but it's too late to change the project.
I'm not like this, I used to code until morning without noticing the time, excited to solve a problem that stuck on me for quite a while. I really became a lazy person right now. I feel the pressure to finish the project but I don't see myself working on it, I don't feel interested reading a code. I just play computer games instead of working on my project during my free time. I don't know if I'm depressed. I socialized with people, have fun, happy when I'm with them, but when I'm alone, sadness starts to creep in. I feel like there's an empty void in myself. I don't know, i just want the motivation and energy to work on my project. Im tired, lazy, and feeling burnt out. If you read until this very last sentence, thank you and I'm sorry for reading this nonsense.5 -
That moment you're coworkers are going to continue at home after because the project is fun, and you're like.. I'm going to game tonight and feel a bit ashamed because you like to do something else than work4
-
I am working on a boring project. At the beginning, I wanna create some fun on it, so I decided to write a simple game.........And some time later, I found myself on devrant instead.
-
One elementary school teacher of mine once said:
"In a football (soccer) game, the goalkeeper can be a very good player. He can make some incredible saves during the match. If he concedes a howler, people will remember him by that.
The forward can do everything wrong during the match. If he manages to score one goal, this is sufficient to justify why he was playing."
A team without a forward will have a harder time trying to win, but it is possible. A team without a goalkeeper will certainly lose. If you think into it, it's possible to conclude that the goalkeeper is more important than the forward. But football isn't rational; it isn't about fairness or importance. It is about emotions: forwards get all the visibility and fame because they get to do the "fun" part of the job.
Why people subject themselves to be goalkeepers then? Well, not every one is the same. In this game, if you, for any reason, aren't good playing with your foot, and still want to play, there is only one position you can take.
I think about this all the time because feel that in our work environment, managers are forwards and devs/scientists/technicians are goalkeepers.8 -
There is a drawing competition for my currently most played game.
I'm on vacation and the deadline is when I get back. So what did I do?
I made an inspiration cluster with the character and drawings having this arrogant face (laptop, gimp).
I sketched on my phone and put it on my laptop (the sketch). I have no desk here so I'm drawing on my bed. I have no drawing pad so I'm drawing with my mouse. Then I draw it in gimp with colors and everything (the stroke in another program on my gfs laptop), put each layer in inkscape to svg-ify them and to hq-render them back in Gimp. Corrected a few things in Gimp. Added more detail, effects (glow, gradient instead of flat color ...).
~6 hours over two days. That was fun. And fucking unprofessional.7 -
Playing ATM8 Minecraft modpack. I don't know if I have burnout, but I just want to play and zone out after work. On my breaks I look up ways to do things in the game. The game is like this huge lego set to play with tons of different takes on modded minecraft. I can solve the same problem a hundred different ways. Some of those ways will cause lag, some are slow, some are just fast. I can solve things in game using programming languages as well. It all comes down to creativity and experimentation. You can also blow up shit. That is always fun.2
-
I was just begged to play 30 minutes of monopoly with my family
With all those versions of monopoly I'll have to be more precice, it's the worst of them all
It's monopoly fucking zapped, you need an ios device to play it, it's been developed for the iPhone 4 and maybe a tablet because they didn't even update it for current phones, not even iPhone 5
The credit cards are a fucking joke, they work by touching certain parts of the touchscreen and don't work 85% of the time you try to use them, 5% of the time just choosing the wrong person
At least your relieved when 10% chance kicks in where it works for once
Instead they could developed for Android and used nfc tags making it reliable and fun, no it has to be shitty, cheap and frustrating
Like seriously, they could've also used qr codes instead, or just have fucking buttons on the screen because you need the fucking ios app anyway
The minigames are at least a bit of thought, but don't really make sense either
Money doesn't seem to matter, sometimes paying another player when it shouldve been pay to the bank (yeah, not only the credit cards are fucked, the whole money system is shit)
It's a fucking abomination of a game
Halfway through I searched for the company name on the board...
...
....
ITS FUCKING HASBRO, OF COURSE IT'S FUCKING HASBRO THAT FUCKING PEACE OF SHIT FUCKING COMPANY THAT DESERVES TO ROT IN HELL HAVING CREDIT CARDS STUFFED UP THEIR FUCKING ASSESundefined never again fuck them all to death bullshit hatred fucked up devil profanity i fucking hate hasbro hasbro7 -
I was looking for alternatives of MC that are atleast usable, and found a thing called Minetest. This apparently is a Voxel Engine/Scriptable game, where you create games, that consist of mods/modules and other resources.
The cool part of it is, that mods and games etc. get handled by the game itself in a package manager type fashion, so the only thing you as a user have to do is selecting them in the ui, and putting them into your world.
It's this easy because the content is managed by a content database. This engine is built with multiplayer support by default.
Now comes the interesting part: apparently a few devs sat together and made a whole MC clone in this engine, and have called it Mineclone 2. I was testing it recently on a server and have to say, that it doesn't appear to be some low effort clone, but to my surprise is an actual playable and nicely looking game. So far i'm having fun with playing and even modding it.
Since the core is written in C++ and the mods and games content is written in LUA, you can easily writte new stuff for it, and even look at other mods stuff, to find out how to make it compatible or how to do certain things. The licenses usually allows to reuse and redistribute.
If you're looking for something like that, give Minetest + Mineclone2 a spin.6 -
!rant
Just spent the last few days learning about unity's custom editor stuff.
Gotta say it's really fun making tools that help setup stuff a lot easier
The thing I made has a bunch of actions and you randomize the action thats picked. You give each action a % chance and even have a % decrease when the action is used.
I ended up adding in a simulator in the inspector so you can test without even running the game :D pretty happy with the result! -
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance. Although this might sound stupid, keep in mind that someone requested the following:
Someone on discord asked me to make an aim assist program for a game. I thought it might be a fun way to introduce myself to memory writing and binary trees. I accepted the request and started researching. I'm using C++ and I have some options if I need to switch programming languages. Honestly I don't know where to start, but I thought finding a color on the screen using ML or something then moving the mouse position might work. This is also one of my close friends so he wouldn't be too sad/mad if I failed the request.13 -
!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.
This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.
So it was time for a change. And I made a change.
It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.
I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.
Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.
So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.
So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.
Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.
This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.
Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.3 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"9 -
I'm addicted to world of warships right now😫
Which game you guys plays a lot ?
Used to play cs 1.6 a lot too 😝
Yeah I know 1600 BC Game but it's still really fun😄17 -
Used to think I was a hot shit programmer. Self taught (mostly) and could make all sorts of shit happen. Then I started reading other people's codebases. I got a huge dose of humility. Learned a lot from other codebases in the process. Eventually after a lot of languages and lot of practice I got a programming only job. Started reading through the codebase. Holy shit there are way worse programmers than me. There is some really good code in there too, but 20 year old wtf code too. I assume my perspective comes from seeing what good code can be. I still have a lot to learn though. That is the fun part. You can spend a week on a minute detail of one language or one concept.
So here are a few fun questions:
1. What is the worst code, codebase, or programmer you ever met?
2. What it the best code, codebase, or programmer you ever met?
I have seen a few codebases on github that just told me to walk away. Some of the best code I have found has been in game engines. Probably because I look at a lot of game engine code (sampling bias).
The coolest library I have used has been Construct (Python lib). It is a reversible protocol library. It can deconstruct or construct a data stream.
Leaving the off by 1 or more error in my post.45 -
Been thinking about if I want voice acting in my games. Potentially it would be really expensive. So I wondered if there was AI libraries for training your own voices. There are a few and some even are trying to do it realtime. Or at least fast enough for web site use.
I find this library:
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
Looks interesting, but I need training data. I found that you can license a limited number of words from voice actors. The licensing doesn't seem to care if how you use the data as long as it stays inside your production (video, game, etc). There are even some free ones out there. I think it might be kinda fun to learn how to do this.
Yes, there are a bunch of AI websites, but the voices almost always seem conversational. Not voices in a game setting. Most of those are stupid subscription bullshit. I also looked at text to speech and most of those are subscription. I really really hate the SaaS business model. I avoid companies that use it as much as I can.9 -
I need help!
This is gonna be a long question/story.
I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.
I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.
Here's a summary:
My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.
He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.
He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).
The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".
This was a month and a half ago.
He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.
After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.
Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.
His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.
So basically he has close to no options.
Now to where I come into all of this:
I want to help him.
I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.
If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.
I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.
Now to my request:
how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)
Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?
Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?
If you've read all this... Thank you :)17 -
Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.
We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!
Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'
And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.
Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].
Please, please, one vote per customer!
* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).
* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts
* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!
* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.
* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.
* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )
* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.
* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity
* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.
* Did we mention javascript rants?
* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.
* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.
* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?
* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.
Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!
Clickbait, now in technicolor!8 -
Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.
What is a game?
I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.
both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).
a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.
theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.
now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.
Now what is a toy?
There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.
An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.
"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.
Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.
But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?
Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.
Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.
Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.
This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.
But what makes a good game?
A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.
In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.11 -
Indie game devs: I have a couple of questions for you guys, sorry for my naivity and the subjectivity of some of the questions.
Is it as fun as it sounds?
Do you work as a team?
What tech/language do you use?
What platform/os do you produce games for?
Is your primary income from making games?
Im asking because I would like to get into it, but want to get a realistic view of what it's like.
Thanks guys. Please also take this chance to post your work.4 -
Best: I started a little game project with a coworker for our "8 hours a month" research/fun time.
Worst: I can't get used to be "just a soldier" on my actual team.3 -
Been thinking about game design for a while now. I have been thinking about how the game can affect the player emotionally. I pay attention to off comments people make in game forums. I didn't fully realize the impact of some NPCs until someone pointed it out.
For instance, in Skryim a character would say something like "Your parents should be very proud of you. I am too." People have expressed how profoundly this impacted them. So I put this in my notes of "things to include" in any given game. I also saw a meme where there are people where their only positive interaction with the world could be a video game. I don't know what kind of dark existence that would be so it makes it hard for me to relate. Which is probably why I didn't understand the impact of such a statement. I realized that regardless of the medium, you will have an impact on someone.
I have also been thinking about how people get older they become more of a casual player. But as a casual myself I want to a more detailed system of interaction with the game. Despite the shitty graphics (all text map), the "Mines of Moria" is one of my all time favorite games. It is based upon the Rogue I think. I remember being able to do almost anything that made logical sense with anything. For instance, you could dip arrows in any potion. The affect was not always significant, but you could to that. I want to recreate that in my games. I am going to start with shitty graphics and build a system of interaction that is more detailed than any RPG I have played. Maybe a lot of players will gloss over this, but for those that want that it will be there. I think the biggest issue is often the types of exploits this would allow. So I guess I will have to get good at simulating the player interactions to test things out. I am always a bit frustrated with games that have mages, but all their spells are wrote. I feel like skill trees for all types of play should be expansive and exclusionary. That way a new play through doesn't end up with the same god character every time.
I have been watching One Piece. I now want piracy and ships in my game. Including ship battles with a working crew. It seems like this could make an RPG a lot of fun. Who doesn't want mages casting fireballs at opposing ships?9 -
Aye i made a 'game' to test out a library i made and it is moderately fun so i made an app from it. Here if anyone cares to try it.
https://1drv.ms/u/...
(the back button is pretty buggy, just use home button to exit)14 -
Starting to feel burnt out. Past 2 days have been a struggle to be productive. And it's been a week since I've bothered turning on my 3d printers to try and make anything fun or even just tinker
Once my manager is back I'm gonna request a week off for the soonest he'll approve. Hopefully that'll help. Probably will just video game and read that week lol -
I don't know exactly what year my dad bought the PC with a hard drive of 4GB, but it was not in the year 2000 and following. I'm not sure if it was running win98 or win95. Probably win95. Aaah those were golden times.
I remember having no internet, but still having fun drawing images on ms paint.
Oh and there was a game named sesame street for that os. Sometimes I miss those times.3 -
The most fun I've ever had coding was creating a hidden object game in school (with Flash/ActionScript3). I even had a dude do voiceovers, it was dope! I would love to learn more gaming development but no time. :(
-
Osmo coding kit for kids. This iOS program teaches young kids the building blocks of coding by using a fun game with a super cute monster mascot.
imgur.com/YwvTdFd -
Well life of a game developer it meant to be all fun until you start rigging a character on a potato system I call a laptop3
-
I decided I am going to get full into Minecraft modding. It will be an opportunity to learn Java and Kotlin. I want to explore some game ideas in a well defined sandbox.
Some things I want to explore.
1. AI that helps you build and survive. This fascinates me and seems like it could be a good challenge. I like the idea of learning how to separate structures into chunks. I think I will learn a bit about tree data structures here. Maybe learn something about BSP trees (if applicable).
2. The idea of an RPG quest system tacked onto a sandbox. I want to spawn structures and create non-repetitive story lines. Minecraft can be really desolate if you are not playing on a server. Worlds tend to be empty and devoid of story.
3. Maybe try a hand at terrain gen. This could be fun to explore entropy math. It is fun to draw things with math.
I am sure I will come up with other fun things to explore here.9 -
One evening I put on my Quest2 and have some fun with the Climb2. I fell off the cliff a few times. Next morning my 5yo wakes up with shitty mood and tells me he had a dream how he was on a hill and fell off. It wasva bad dream.
A few days later I was watching The Troll on Netflix. I like this king of genre so I was enjoying it. Next morning my kiddo wakes up all excited with 'daddy daddy, I've had a dream of a mountain!'. 'Did you fall off this one too' - I rush to ask. He says: 'no, but the mountain stood up and it was like a man!'
he's been asleep both times. I was with my headphones during the movie and on 1bar of volume during the climb. He's never seen neither the game nor the movie [or any troll, for that matter]. And I'm not making this up.
How... How the hell did he do that. Do we after all float in some wibbly-wobbly ether we can communicate through?4 -
I once wanted to make easy money by becoming a professional poker player. I did this by programming a poker simulator and calculate chances with certain cards and stuff. To assure you have 6.**% winning (mathematical chance calculated) of a hand takes around 3k simulations to cancel out the luck. So don't trust to much on your math.
That went well, but that wasn't all that there was to learn, you could even consider a small start. Long story short, I became quite a good player and won a lot with Appeak Poker (Great app! No adverts!). Now, I opened a while ago an account at the Holland Casino to make some money. But they were playing on such low wages that it was just not interesting and I quitted. Today I realized I had still an account with money on it and thought "let's get over wit it" so i did aggressive betting on red (1:st 40% all in, lost, 2nd 100% all in won) in a roulette game. In the end I had a few euro profit so the gambling adventure never costed me money.
Another reason the poker carreer ended is because I realized it's not a quick way to make money at all and the gambling factor was too high. I expected poker a bit to be more strategy.
I even consider the best poker spelers maybe to just be lucky bastards in some cases. Poker stars is fun to see on youtube tough, they're bullshitting a lot.
I consider gambling for losers. Poker, you can become really good in it, but still some luck is required. Not bad luck at least. You can lose with a multiple of quite good hands.
Fact: one of the best poker players is actually a software developer17 -
Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D
-
Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?
I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!
Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos
That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!
Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger
Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!2 -
Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?
A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.
If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.
But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?
And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.
In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.
By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.
In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.
For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?
One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.
Mechanics might include
1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.
2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.
3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.
4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.
And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.
Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.
If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.
How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.
The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.
And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.1 -
It not Christmas until you program a game you have be working on for the last few months. I've been gifted with two bugs today. Oh, what fun it is to fix bugs on a one horse powered laptop!2
-
I started building a voxel engine with openGL and Clojure during December, so my goal is to make a game out of it. Long way to go but seems fun.1
-
Coding an Augmented Reality with custom implementation.
Coding a 2d UFO game with Unity.
I'm between those two as "most fun coding" -
We had one group project where we made game. We had like 3 developers, one guy to do some artwork and one to do most of the project management. And at that point in the project I had done most of the work so far (but not because the others didnt do anything, I just had fun coding).
One day said artwork guy managed to accidentily revert 100 of my commits without even opening a single code file. He didn't know git and issued random commands. I wouldn't know how to fuck up a repository like that even if I wanted to. Usually I am rather calm but at that point I was a little bit pissed.4 -
In a real-time multiplayer competitive game where you control a vehicle, is it feasible to simulate the whole thing on server side, such that the client only sends controls and receives sensor results? I mean like the client doesn't even know its own precise rotation, just the readings of a gyroscope and an accelerometer which are both susceptible to errors, and deduces the "down" direction from those two and approximate control forces. This would both solve hacking (writing a good robot is just as challenging) and lead to fun results like an attitude indicator going crazy from a gust of wind.14
-
This aint a rant but can you guys recommend me a game to pass time?
Id like to have a
Strategy game
Realistic, but not europa universalis realistic
Fun to play
Around 30min/match or ability to save
Windows is ok
Not neccessarily multiplayer, i travel quite often3 -
!dev
Well, it's time for a personal thing today, because I was hit with some shit today that I'm still kinda shook about.
So, as a bit of introduction (I've mentioned these in previous posts before but whatever, not everybody sees everything): I'm currently a senior in high school and I'm in the school's band (neither are too related, but a bit of setup for this story). I've been talking to a girl lately and I think I like her. She's fun to be around, kinda silly, and just great overall. She makes me happy and I like it. Her name is Grace, her sister's name is Taylor (just to avoid confusion later)
In the school's band, we play at home football and basketball games. Today was a basketball game. Normally when there's a game I just stay after school because I don't want to go home and come back a couple hours later, plus I like to hang out with some of the other people who do the same thing.
Grace was staying after for the game too. I was talking to her in the band room, kinda flirting a bit (on an unrelated side note, she's ticklish). Someone comes in the band room because he wanted to practice a bit, to get ready for the game. She's going back and forth between the band room and somewhere else (not too sure where she was). At one point I left to get a drink, come back, she's sitting next to him, just talking. I join the conversation, and her sister (Taylor) comes in, to get ready herself.
I go over to talk to Taylor for a minute. She looks at Grace and the other guy, then looks at me and just says "separate them". To which I said "...what? why? how?"
Me and her go outside the band room and she tells me that basically the guy has been cheating on his girlfriend with Grace, and it's just hurting everyone involved, except him basically. His girlfriend doesn't seem to fucking care, and he's done it before with someone else. (The other person actually like vaguely mentioned it to me a long time ago, but I didn't really know what she was talking about until now)
So basically, dude's cheating on his girlfriend with Grace. And I like Grace. Honestly don't know what the fuck to do. I want to do something because whenever something's going on with Grace, her sister always trusts me to make sure shit goes right. Some times when Grace wouldn't eat, her sister would always talk to me and ask me to make sure she actually eats.
Fuck guys. This stuff has been on my mind for the past ~4 hours and I don't know what to do, or if I even can do anything about it. I just needed to get this shit off my chest.
Sorry for the long personal story. Some parts I didn't really articulate very well. Honestly it was more of me just getting everything into words.4 -
For reasons I won't disclose, I am just switching off reality in a pretty hardcore way.
Hours, and I mean almost half the fucking day, spent soloing my own TTRPG. It's actually the most fun I've had in years, I think I'm becoming slightly addicted. Dude, I have an abyss of grimdark lore, it's fucking crazy. I'm just bending the space-time continuum with my sorcerous ways, turns out the piece of shit $2 mechanics I designed are so flexible the game simply takes no effort to enjoy.
Anyway, I don't feel bad for this specifically. I do my daily work hours so I'm at peace, and allow myself to just do what I want to do.
Everything else is what gets me down. Fucking shit, man. I'd be ashamed of complaning, as I have it very good. I like my job and I like my game too. No problems there.
But the fact that I cannot go anywhere beyond those two things does raise little bit of an alarm, buried somewhere deep beneath the hundred tomes of forbidden spells I'm collecting on the alcove, down by my quarters on the cursed tower.
Tomorrow night, I'm going on more mystical adventures together with my vampire homegirl. She's a total boss. I was at 1 HP with both my fucking legs broken and no mana, just sitting on the sidelines trying not to die, while she fended off an inquisitor two times her level, all by herself. I know she's a fictional character but I said thank you for real a couple times, just to be nice, as she totally saved my arcane ass.
Now, you get me, right? It's escapism, and I'm great at it, a little bit too much. Honestly, once I'm done with my responsibilities for the day, I just don't feel like doing much of anything else, and I'm not crazy enough (yet) to not notice the downside, that being, no fucking life outside of working and locking myself up inside dark fantasy wonderland.
I suppose this is my roundabout way to say this better than sex, but I don't know if you would understand the sentiment.
Anyway, shutting off reality again in twelve or so hours, can't fucking wait.3 -
The taboo of not finishing.
(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)
It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.
But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.
But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?
Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.
But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.
In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.
Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.
But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.
But, let's go back to programming.
Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.
That is understandable.
But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?
What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?
Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).
Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?
First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.
What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.
I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.
And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.
If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.
In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.
Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.
And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.2 -
Coding gameserver emulators. It's always fun to code for a game which you don't have to do any of the artistic side and all of the functionality side.
Also network packet sniffing and trying to figure out what each this is is pretty fun. Love it.2 -
You people might like to make fun of the engineer who put an entire game in VRAM and then played it from there, but I had the idea to preinstall game assets to VRAM years ago, and once GPUs gain persistent RAM, it is a no brainer
Not everything that sounds silly is useless, damn it. Sometimes it is progress in the making.7 -
After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.
For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.
I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.
Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.
Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!
But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.1 -
Data wrangling is messy
I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.
And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."
yeah, no.
(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)
Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.
So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.
Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.
But for now, flora.
For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:
* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.
For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)
Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.
The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).
Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.
As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.
Data wrangling is fun.1 -
I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.
I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.
All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.
The story goes like this:
I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.
The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.
I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.
Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.
We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.
We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!
Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.
I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.
Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.
I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.3 -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
My friend makes fun of me for liking Java, php and the fact i like coding OpenGL instead of using game engines.
Where would holy devrant stand ?4 -
does anyone here still play pokemon go?
I downloaded it again recently and the game really developed and it is a lot more fun than it was two years ago11 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
Just startet game developing (unity) on the side ! A time sink, but holy cow is it fun ! Any game devs out there?
How long did it take to master and how did you get startet ? -
God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.
Examples and predicted responses:
-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.
-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.
-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...
-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...
-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)
-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.
-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.
-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.
-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...
-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.
Now, a harder one:
-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.
-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.
-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.
Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.
If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.14 -
I was always somewhere in the range of not athletic enough to be a jock and not smart enough to be a geek during high school so it left me in a fun little purgatory between social groups. Ever since I was a kid though I saw my cousin make flash games for fun and thats where my interest in programming started but I never really did anything with it.
It wasn’t until I broke a bone during a football game and couldn’t play or workout for 8 months that I started jumping head first into programming and IT WENT DEEP. After tearing through and intro to java book I started reading and watching courses about data structures and learning how to make mediocre apps and games. It was terrible as any beginner usually is but god was it fun.
Then college came around and I decided to major in computer science, got myself a nice starting job at a typical big tech company with an actually decent team to work with and I still have the same love for it all since I started with it. -
!dev !rant
A couple weeks ago, my friend bought Risk of Rain 2 and got a free copy to gift to a friend, so he gave it to me. That game is so fucking addicting. I don't know the term for it, but it's one of those games where every round, you start with basically nothing, and you get items that buff you up, and so on. If you die, you have to start a new round. Then it just keeps going and going.
..That's it. I just wanted to recommend a really fun game to anyone who hasn't heard of it. For our Linux users, it runs in Proton and the first game has a native Linux port, so I believe the second one will have a port at some point (it's early access, so stuff is still being added).2 -
My first introductions to programming was in Garry's mod.
There'e a mod called wiremod, which added logic gates, buttons, and other entities that manipulated the game with input/output. And on top of that a little scripting language they called Expression 2.
Me and some friends would code stupid things in Expression all day to use in the game.
I wasn't too good at it, but I had fun. Shortly after I started going to a high school with a computer science focus, and had 2 years of proper education in C#. -
Fun story
tl;dr; analog FTW!
so we've just had a nice game. A few teams internationally gathered together in the aws gameDay. We had aws accounts set up [one per team] and our goal was to maintain our t2.Micros to deal with incoming load. The higher the latency - the less points we get, the more 5xx - the more points we lose. The more infra we have, the more points we pay for it.
So we are quite new in aws, most of us know aws only in theory. And that's the best part!
So at first we had some steady, mild load incoming. But then bursts came up and we went offline. It's obvious we needed an lb w/ autoscaling. Lb was allright, we did set it up and got back online. We also created an autoscaling group and set it up.
Now what we couldn't figure out is how the f* do we make that group scale automatically, as a response to traffic! So we did what every sane person would do - we monitored LB's stats and changed autoscaling group's config manually 😁
needless to say we won the game w/ 23k points. 2nd place had 9k.
That was fun!3 -
So i was putting finishing touches on an android game i was building in Unity3D as a fun side project - implementing google play leaderboards and google ads.
Luckily google is nice enough to include 2 unity plugins for ads and leaderboards/achievements however, THE FUCKING PLUGINS AREN'T COMPATIBLE. TWO PIECES OF SOFTWARE THAT ARE LITERALLY MEANT TO WORK TOGETHER HAVE COLLIDING .JAR FILES PREVENTING ME FROM BUILDING THE APK.
i had to spend fucking days trying to figure out how to unpack the jar files and what to remove from them so they would stop colliding.
WTF GOOGLE?3 -
Why do you not like cheating in games? Isn't it better to skip all the grinding and just get to the good stuff?
I just realized how much time I've wasted on Legos Unboxed... playing it the right way...
Prolly 2 months...
Finally realized yesterday so found the modded version. TLDR god mode.
So either the fun keeps going, I get banned, or I "finish" the game.
Would've saved me a lot of time...21 -
In my school we had a CS lab and we were supposed to do lab assignments.
I had a book which gave a basic introduction on event driven programming, and introduced me to two new functions which I couldn't have ever known(I got internet in 2013) if I had gone with just the curriculum, kbhit() and gotoxy(). With this new knowledge I created my first 2d game. And that feeling of creating something no one expects and something fun, which also gets you attention of the whole room(Nothing like that was ever created in that lab, it was a shitty school), made me realize that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. 😃 -
I’d either advise a small break where you just focus on other hobbies for a few and let yourself relax,
or I would say learn something new like a new programming language, or a new area of programming (like game development or web development) and just try to make your own projects and stuff that you find fun or new,
or maybe focus on something different in tech, like try IT, Networking, Security, etc.
I suppose it would depend on the person/circumstance.2 -
YouTube... for video creation.
Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.3 -
So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.
It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.
Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.
This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.
The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one. -
Incoming rant.
I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?
I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.
I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.
Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.
I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.
I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.
I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.
I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.
This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.1 -
if(!rant)
{
cout<<"Anyone here ever play the game Screeps? If not, you should really consider checking it out! The point of the game is to write scripts to automate the tasks carried out by your "creeps". Scripts are all in Javascript. Its fun!"<<endl;
}
else
{
cout<<"I hate mondays."<<endl;
}4 -
So I recently purchased Ark and I gotta say I can totally recommend single player/ local multi.
It's not exactly stable. And non-dedicated private servers are pretty limited. But it's fun nonetheless. The animals are neat, the landscape is gorgeous, and the base building is interesting and intuitive.
One of the things I don't exactly love about Minecraft is that your shelter doesn't matter much. Build some walls to keep the mobs out and you're good. But Ark is much more hostile. You need to avoid cold, and rain, and heat, and big Dino's that want to bite you and stomp you. So your shelter actually protects you.
Not only that but materials are so easy to get in Minecraft. You can have a full house by the end of your first day, easily. But Ark makes resource collecting difficult. You need some dino companions to hold your stuff because it becomes too heavy for you alone. And it takes days, maybe even in-game weeks to build a suitable house. And you can spend much, much longer making it more than just a wooden box.
Cool game! Definitely in my top 3 right now.6 -
Nintendo...and their sins are trivial compared to the human QoL exploitations by big apps.
Take your pick:
https://youtube.com/results/...
Grew up as a total Miyamoto fanboy, RIP sweet prince. I'm not even complaining about the copy-paste mentality with their games (because they're still fun and polished)
I'm honestly confounded by their petty attempts to knick the pennies of youtube content creators; it's seemingly blind, principal-based pride. In a utilitarian sense, their behaviors are contrary to the big picture. So I just shake my head and game on desktop. GG. -
Thread topic: religion, philosophy, matrix
Summary: skip if you don't like these topics, stay if you want to find out why the conclusion has relevance to programming
.
.
.
Ok.
Let me get this straight:
There are 4 founders of the BAYC NFTs.
1 has a fasist/nazi pseudo name
1 has a racist pseudo name
1 has a satanic pseudo name
1 has a pedophile pseudo name
Their logo is a copy of Nazi Waffen Totenkopf emblem, which was the German division force of the Nazi concentration camps
And they became billionaires.
Ok
.
.
.
Sam bankman the founder of FTX crypto shit robbed people for 32 BILLION dollars. And hes not in jail because he donated most of that money to democratic political party, leaving himself 1 billion dollars as allowance. Now that he bought political power, politicians protect him. So he's having fun in the bahamas and penthauses, having generational wealth and enriching his fraud parents.
Ok
.
.
.
Balenciaga. They posted photos of female children holding fluffy toys with BDSM sexual bondage. Books on the table, with excerpt of Michael Borremans, who draws "art" of naked children covered in blood and being sacrificed in rituals. Then a book of "The Cremaster Cycle", which is a demented image that symbolizes "the murder and resurrection of Abiff". Hiram Abiff was the central character during Masonic initiation rituals as the culmination of a three-part process. Etc
Balenciaga is a multi million dollar "brand".
Ok.
.
.
.
What i learned through all my years of existing on this planet is, being good and doing good, does not pay off. I still live in the matrix. I am still a slave. I am still playing the game of earn to survive. Even while doing software engineering. And I don't know 1 single wealthy person who has obtained all that wealth by doing something good.
This has further lead me to realization: God doesn't help you get rich or wealthy. God doesn't give a fuck if you're rich or poor. He aint gonna help you. But do you know who will? That's right - evil forces will help you get wealthy. Funny how that works?
Because I am christian and believe in God, pray to God and did good all my life - I haven't received anything good in return, my life has not improved, in fact it has devolved and became worse.
Therefore, I came to a conclusion: I will switch teams. I'll let the evil demonic forces take over and guide me to wealth. I'm ready to scam, defraud, develop ponzis and step on corpses and people to get out of the matrix. Perhaps this is how and why good people turn into villains?
Now you understand.
I dont ask to be on the top. I just want to Not play the Matrix game. Which is the game where you have to earn to survive. I want to get into any store and buy whatever i want, without worrying how much does it cost or asking for a discount. People dumber than me do it. But i cant? That means there has to be a loophole in the matrix. An escape plan is possible. I tried escaping since 2018 and failed. For 4, almost 5 years. Because i was trying to escape through good forces. I'll now try to escape using demonic forces and perhaps I'll end up like BAYC founders, FTX founder, Balenciaga brand and many others similar to them. Ending up even half of their success or a fraction - I'll be more than happy. I am not happy living in poverty. Im getting sick of it. I'm getting sick to be underpaid $600/month for doing a job as hard as software engineering, even with a CS degree. Life is not meant to be slaved away till 65+ years old. I can't even afford to buy a car with this slave salary.
So forgive me God. Im just tired of life. Im tired of being a slave. Im tired of watching my parents become older, weaker and still working. I'll shut down all of my morals and I am ready to rob people in Web3 using all of my programming knowledge that has been undervalued.
"A little boy asked God for a new bike for his birthday, but he knows God doesn't work that way. So he stole a bike and prayed to God for forgiveness"21 -
Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.
I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.
WHAT DO I DO?1 -
Well i got my motivation back.
So i decided to make a game in unity.
It is going to be simple FTL like game. It is going to be much simpler than that mamoth of a game in 3D that i planned. I want to learn and have some fun designing the game from scrach. Yup and creating all of the assets.
If I manage to create a decent game im planning to sell it for like 5$. It might boost my funds a bit if i manage to finish it.
I have few great ideas how to develop that game. Mechanics, community support and others. Of course first i have to make a boilerplate. I cant start on those ideas if i dont have anything to work with! I hope it will be fun! Wish me luck! (And i wish everybody else luck too!)2 -
It was game dev.
Just googled how to make games on my own, thats how it began. Yoyo games game maker, Oracle's greenfoot(this was some cool shit),stencyl then using some random game engines, pygame,lua etc. Had fun. Still having fun. Will try game dev again in future.2 -
I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".
I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.
I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.
I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.
I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.
I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.
I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.
I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO. -
Well I used to play games at my Father’s computer, it was an old FPS online game really fun, I played it like everyday when I was 6 yo. Two years later the computer broke and we had to buy a new one, so my father insisted that we buy two computers, one for him to work and one for my own computer and assembled it myself. I thought myself to do it by a book and took me like 2 weeks to figure it out and assemble the whole thing. I love every minute of it.1
-
GWBasic on a Tandy 1000. I wrote a guessing game then a super super shitty implementation of blackjack. Ahh the fun of numbering you own lines.1
-
I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.
It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.
Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.
They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.
They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.
Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.
How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!
The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!
Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.
The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!
AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!
Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.
Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.11 -
I have an idea for a fun little web game... A small little learning project.
So of course the first thing I do is write a CLI database change management tool. -
Been playing a Skyrim modlist (Living Skyrim 4) with a ton of mods in the game. I have only small idea of what mods are in there. My first quest from the Companions was to beat up a pot grower outside Whiterun. Then later on I ran into Jarl Marx. All he did was criticize me so I killed him and enchanted his clothes with Fortify Barter.
https://reddit.com/r/skyrim/...
This modlist has been a lot of fun.1 -
I was using the one and only Google to look up fun games to play. I found a game on this website called "scratch", which was actually a site that taught people how to code. I liked games, and I wanted to make them. So I did. The rest is history.
-
I've never been diagnosed but I'm certain I have ADHD, I get distracted extremely easily with absolutely "whatever" and it completely destroys my performance, I bet people think I'm dumb when in fact when I'm finally able to concentrate I can do things. It fucking sucks, feels like a curse. I realized I failed college because of this. Now I fear losing my job.
Right now I'm about to embark upon a great night of trying to catch up with shit I should have done earlier, which I *might* be able to focus on. I have no fun in life because I don't allow myself to, I somehow attained a relationship with someone and now that too is going to shambles because I spend so much time *trying* to do things and can't bring myself to doing them, and that time is stolen from that which I should spend with people I love and just enjoying life. I fucking hate this. I fucking hate it.
Also, I have this feature which I'm supposed to implement, and they tell me it's just an MVP which we'll use to test waters to see if people will use the functionality, it just has to work... which it does by now, but then they keep adding things before ever releasing. I feel so anxious about this and I didn't even take the job for good pay because I was desperate to leave another job which wasn't even in development. I don't want to fail this, I want to prosper as a developer. I actually wanted to do systems programming and game development, but here I am doing web shit.
Oh well. I shall throw myself unto thee.5 -
Why you should use sketchware and not use it at the same time regarding: encryption
sketchware the app is known to build apps by dragging elements to the screen then coding them with blocks or even write your code with the built in ide but there is one thing every developer fears. ah yes. the reverse engineers (or modders)
random guy [rates: X]: sketchware encryption is trash! are you serious?! string fog?! class rename?! i decrypted this whole app with the software i made >:D
sketchware dev wrote back to random guy: string fog isn't working because you decrypted sir! there is nothing we can do sir but email to our email and we will get back to you in a few and fix the problem
i have to say this is why i stick to android studio too many skids decrypt the C++ files or the mod menu just to edit stuff :) i also build some games im learning android studio game development but at the time lets have fun and mod other peoples games1 -
One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,
Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.1 -
Vent-rant. Fuck Wordpress and PHP and overly limiting css frameworks in their greasy unstable fucking assholes. I find embedded and / or game-dev C++ waaaaay more fun and pleasant, and logical than this fucking pile of cuntfuckery. I think I'm gonna switch my job, hopefully there's some C/C++ companies in my area.1
-
To build a company to develop products designed to improve people's lives. I have interests in video games, mind plasticity, and rpgs. I am not sure if those interests would intersect well, but I hope to make something fun and useful to people. Instead of sucking someone's life away it would be awesome to give it back to them in some fashion.
I think a good example of this is modded minecraft. People have learned programming, and learned some basic problem solving skills playing the game. Stuff that is useful outside the game.1 -
Anyone wanna start a project of some kind?
I'm a noob but I'm willing to help and learn along the way. I just wanna get as much experience as possible.
Doesn't have to be big but something cool and fun. I'd really like to make a game for Android and IOS10 -
First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.
-
Aww... The End
Only took a few hours for them to catch but this game wasted basically an entire week so guess this is for the better.
Honestly turned out to be like any other mobile free to play... And I couldn't figure out what was so fun about it.. Probably just the small rewards that keep u coming back but eventually the lvls are pretty impossible... Only a whale can get there... Or sometime really dedicated to the game
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Back to Poker...3 -
I could go programming drones to kill my own people for money, like at least then I'd have a connection to my job
also programming drones sounds kind of fun
I used to really like pvp games. I also love unconventional RTS games. who wouldn't wanna make a real-world pvp RTS game interface, or automate an army of autonomous drones that could act on their own like it's a game of screeps
literally just so fun
if I was @ostream and an accelerationist...
either case if I go work somewhere and build them something great I have weird confusing PTSD emotions about it. to be honest making war machines somehow makes me less anxious about the idea. isn't it strange. I can't figure it out
you help people but they fuck you. at least if you're fucking people you'd accept being fucked in the process so you don't end up feeling anxious? I don't know why I feel like I do
you'd expect if you help people they would help you back. then when they don't it ruins everything, it ruins your core. you also can't know if who you are committing to will help you back or not. so you can only lose. if you help you'll get fucked. so why help?
in which case just doing something you love like optimizing pwn machines is what I'm built for. is that all I got? how does that make sense? it just doesn't to me. you'd think it would be clear but something is fighting -
Hello, I'm new to programming and I need to write a website that allow some people to bet for sports match scores (without any money, just for fun). I want it to have leaderboard, personal statistics, easy way to add and remove teams from database (last one for administrator). My question is what programming language/maybe framework will be the best for that? I'm interested only in this bet system because rest is almost done. Thanks for help4
-
In the morning to afternoon i do coding, debugging and sometimes deploying. In the night i just already start to play PUBG. I dont know why i am interested to play this game at the time.
But what i’ve learned while playing it is like looting the weapon and amno, find the easiest enemiest first (bot is still existed in the real game) , make some rotation, call the teammate if i am being knockdown and unluckly we landed then dead without weapon (too-soon) and fight for getting Winner Winner Chicken Dinner !!
Its like what i am doing every single day tobe better as developer, find some literature or articel, try to solve an easiest task, deploy it and boom its getting error and suddenly need to hotfix after it’s work with return 200 expected and no error logs on my APM😅
If you guys play too, share me your pubg id on the comment below.
Lets make some fun party ✌️👍 -
I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.
I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.
Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...2 -
Job interviews finished! I just kept one at Rouen (embedded systems) , and now I'm waiting the answer for Nice (Cry Engine).
Gosh I want to live in Nice and be a game developer, that looks really fun. I mean I enjoyed the test x)
Let me hope a bit guys :p -
What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...
I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.
- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)
Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)
But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.
As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...2 -
Today's blocker to solve. Launch game with spec. headset. Notice that once you reach main menu you are unable to navigate. Turns out that this specific headset is treated as a controller on some consoles and generates data on "buttons pressed" when querying OS about controller state... (all other devices that are not controllers can be queried by asking for devices, controllers are supposed to be only for controllers...)
Note from QA: This only occurs on some consoles out of 10 tested systems this happened on 3.
Fun day ahead of me...1 -
The favorite thing that I am working on now is the conversion of a game I made in flash (is already quite a few years ago) in canvas. So much fun too see what we did back then and how shitty the graphics are
-
I think i was like 7 or 8 yo. When school vacation started, my mom joined me in this computer centre near her workplace.
I belive it was a Windows 95 system powered probably by Pentium 2 and i remember playing Aladdin, mario and a fun racing car game.
I remember i liked a lady teacher there and being scared of the male teacher from whom I learned about basic computer peripheral terms like CPU, floppy disc drive etc. -
My vision is to work part time as a dev and part time as a writer about mobile app development! I only started recently to write one article each week about interesting topics or my current side projects. Previously I never thought that it would be so much fun to write about what I am doing, but I really enjoy planing and writing these articles 🥳 Maybe some day I will try my luck and apply as an iOS author at raywenderlich.
PS: I would be very glad, if you could give me feedback to my new article! 😁 Help me to achieve my vision 😜 Here is my new article about music and sound effects in a SpriteKit game for iOS:
https://medium.com/@HeyDaveTheDev/... -
i can see a very thin line between me remaining the same good natured person as i am right now, and me turning into completely chaotic no remorse psychopath , in upcoming future.
the universe follows the rules. planets revolve in a pre defined manner, day and night comes as expected. however being a human for last 24 years, i have come to experience 2 different phenomenons : being rule bounded and being random.
randomness is fun. randomness is guilt free, randomness is a wonderful feeling for someone . but at the same time its worse for everyone else. try slapping a random kid in park or eating food at a restaurant amd running away, assuming there will be no consequences against you whatsoever. such a nice evil feeling
at the same time, rules are boring , unrewarding, guilt filled words of hope.
- "do not eat pizzas or you will get fat" :boring + guilt
- "go to gym, you will become appealing and get a good sex " : boring + hope
- "if you perform well, you will get appraisal and you will earn enough to afford your family a home" : hope + guilt
see how these rules are full of hope/guilt/boredom for you while being good+rewarding for others? that's how you are categorised as being civil , as being part of a society of semi evolved apes.
and as if those rules weren't enough , there came this unnecessary concept of faith, religion and spirituality.l, with its own set of rules and hopes.
and it seems like such a great capitalist idea , since the hopes provided via these are not even realistic : keep on doing good stuff, following the rules and you will get a better afterlive/next birth!
i have tried being a good person for my whole life. my parents are religious and i try to be one, I don't drink , smoke, eat other animals, or randomly start slapping kids in the park. i have been a boring personality, i studied , ran in various races od educational life, failed most of them, landed in a decent paying job , and now trying to even gain back a decent body to look respectful and worthy of a future family. feels like i did so much for so many hopes and am still doing it. we all do , no?
but i have seen companies laying off people and leaving them in turmoil, marriages getting ruined, and some person never getting the love, respect and rewards they deserve for all these shitty rules they kept up with
my life book is somewhat even-steven. i did get a few rewards and respect for some of my hard work, but my overall portfolio is negetive : a lot of investment on just the hopes of a better return
let's see if i can keep up with my sanity for next 50-60 years before i am dust again.
=====
ps : try playing bitlife : life simulator mobile game ( download the cracked version from the web though, original one is full of ads) . it just have a single big button and shows text about how an imaginary child(you) os growing every year on click. so far i tried to play the life of kid like a criminal, a heavily educated person, a politician and a job worker. almost all of them recieved "miserable" and "unsuccessful" as the final result. very fun game to play without being evil1 -
I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.
Okay, great, so what?
The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.
I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.3 -
Been looking into some of my old code (an OBSE plugin). Wanted to know how something worked I made over 10 years ago. I look through the code and some of it makes sense, some of it looks really messy compared to what I write now. I want to remake some of this code to work on a different game now.
I have some code for threading that I have no idea where it came from:
https://github.com/Demolishun/...
It allows transferring data between different threads using mutexes. It is really really simple. I searched github to see if it came from there. There is stuff with similar names, but the code is way way different in those. I honestly don't see whey this code needs to be any more complicated than it is. I wonder if it is because I don't know something or I just like simpler solutions. Maybe there are use cases the other coding solutions have that solve particular problems?
Anyway, I plan to pound out an SKSE version of this plugin. I have been wanting to make this for some time now. I don't necessarily have a need other than the fun factor. My lack of providing good directions for use on the OBSE version kept people from using it. I will try and do better on this version.2 -
Anyone fondled with PlayCanvas yet? Its an incredibly powerful game engine ran on the cloud which allows you to develop webGL games, I am currently learning it and its a fun experience so far.
-
Engaging in Connections game is a fun and challenging experience. After deciding on four terms, you may see whether they belong in a group called a "category." Categories may be anything from a collection of sluggish creatures to enigmas such as "kayak" and "radar." You will have to use every bit of your brains to succeed.
-
So my current company held a dev showcase last week. It was an event to show the different projects/tech stacks that different teams are working on/with. There's about 12-14 teams in our company. My team lead and I were brainstorming ideas on what to show on our booth. And I told him, I have an Intel RealSense developer kit that we can use. Anyway, fast forward to the day before the event, I was still developing our app/game for the booth. Just an emotion detector and you have to trick the app with your facial expressions. (Weird and fun, I know). The head honcho walked past the team lead and I and looked over the demo that I was playing around and he said that: "That's not work. You're wasting time again."
We were both irritated by his comments because he's one of the top dogs in the company and he surely knows about the event. Also, it's our way of showing to him that we're flexible in doing fun stuff instead of just enterprise and internal systems!
What a fucking kill joy! -
Been working on redoing my desktop lately. Currently the specs are:
-FX-8350
-Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P motherboard with a broken USB 3.0 header lmao
-GTX 660 (Gonna upgrade to an RX 580 at some point, I don't do any hardcore gaming so I know I don't need a top of the line GPU)
-Crucial BX500 240gb SSD
-WD 500gb HDD (gonna upgrade to a bigger one eventually)
-Some like $60 Dynex PSU I bought a while ago, waiting on my Corsair RM650x to come in
At this very moment, it's running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Once I get to a point where I'm happier with the build, I'll switch it over to Linux and start ricing. It has Windows right now cause I'm just using it for some games and when I last fucked with the hardware, it was the middle of the night so I didn't want to spend too much time setting up a Linux distro the way I want it and everything right then, just putting that off for later (especially cause I use Arch btw)
I have been playing some Half Life 2 lately. I forgot how fucking fun that game is.
Aside from my PC, my birthday was technically yesterday (it's about 2:30AM as of writing this, and I've been up for a while, so I still consider it today). Now I'm 2 years away from being able to legally drink (and smoke since the law change, although I still do both anyways).
I'm gonna stop rambling. Life is fairly decent right now. Not too much to "rant" about except for shit with my roommates, but I won't bore everyone with that1 -
I am working on partitioning my life and getting my tech stuff and online life organized. Partially fun, partially dread. Still one of the better things I'm dealing with right now.
Tech stuff mainly includes desktop PC (Qubes OS), network (to be driven by openwrt) and smartphone (already running Lineage OS, but I want to build my own LOS). This is the fun part. I want to add a NAS, but I'm too cheap for a proper one (at least for my >20TB media).
Furthermore offline stuff: Remove clutter, get analog documents properly organized (with a sustainable system) and possibly digitalized. I already have maybe half of the things I own in boxes each with a specific purpose (e.g. audio cables, network cables and game controllers each have their own box). Can be tiresome, but it's easy to see a progress and that makes it quite okay.
Online life: That's a big one. A large chunk is email and the hundreds of website accounts. I have them in a keepass file, but all running under the same address. Unfortunately I need to have a Facebook account for some purposes, but I'd like to start over with a new one. Not so easy when you have to transfer group admin privileges though, when I tried the last time I tripped some system and the new account was banned. Annoying. -
hey uh, this is a rant about phantom forces, if you don't know what it is, look it up, anyways, that's really it.
so, i've been playing this game very actively called phantom forces and its a good game but its been ruined and the fun has pretty much been taken away. the community is dead and terrible, the developers don't care and the game is just falling off.
what i consider community is the youtube scene, and now as of january 1st, 2022, there's nothing left that's actually interesting besides godstatus and moons fps studio. honestly, its so dry and i'm sick of it.
i'm tired of seeing shitty best setup videos and gun reviews. i hate somesteven and strider and then, there's nothing to actually watch so i just watch brain-numbing shitty videos about stuff.
and then theres the developers, stylis studios is a great development team, i'll give you that but the sheer ignorance of their team is so fucking much.
its kinda obvious they don't really care about adding new features or anything new that isn't guns and its fucking sickening. just to see the same old updates, every fucking month man, its annoying and tiring.
i'm fucking tired of just seeing ape shit guns that are too high for regular players to actually unlock. like i know they're trying to please the growing number of 200+ rank users but its terrible, they haven't done a gun below rank 200 or 100 in forever. the last time they did it was like 6 months ago or something.
we've been asking for shit for years and they haven't given it to us and its fucking tiring. asking for daily quests, new features, more grips, vehicles and shit like that is obviously never gonna happen and thats the fucking problem. they don't care about their community.
but anyways, thats really all i want to say, might make a follow up post later. if you want to add your 2 cents down in the comments, you can do that. bye2 -
Fun Game: Type "[any word] js" into the google and there will be fucking JavaScript framework for that name.1
-
Way to go ruin a collaboration. I wanted to have fun some making a game with one of my friends, but turns out being friends doesn't correlate to making a good team. Some of you probably know this, but I've never had such an experience, not even to almost strangers
Some tips on how to kill off any motivation to work with you:
* Casually insult other peoples ideas
* Don't consider other people's point of view
* Try to talk people out of prototyping/experimenting with their OWN ideas on their OWN time
* Completely undermine their skill even though you have no basis to go on
* Never worked with this person before
* less experienced
* don't have to give estimates on a daily basis
* don't consider the fact that there are libraries that can be used to speed up things)
* Victimize yourself, because someone is "forcing you" to become the bad guy
I don't know if that person is on here and I don't care if they happen to read this. I tried to treat you with the most respect, but if you don't do the same then just fuck off.
Anyways, there goes the idea of a "no stress, no problems" game dev project, because I wanted to see if isometric view would work better than top down.
My idea to have another person to work on a project with, to keep the motivation up backfired a by lot.
Someone within european timezones up for some hobby game dev?3 -
!Dev
Fuck people using trace rifles in momentum control. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone who kills me in two rounds and also fires at 1000 rounds per minute. I was trying to get the catalyst aka upgrade for the seasonal weapon which is pretty bad and the upgrade makes it usable but I am getting ripped apart after my first kill because someone can kill me with 2 bullets wherever he shot me.
Yes momentum control is supposed to be a gunfight mode and it comes around rarely but that does not mean a broken weapon can roam around killing anybody in sight before they even know you fired a shot at them from some lane. Shotguns do the same but you need to get close. Shotguns are still a problem but at least you can dodge or counter with a shotgun since your radar tells you someone is nearby and snipers need a headshot. These weapons can fire at your toe and you are dead. Oh the devs knew that such fast firing weapons wil be op and needed their damage and made them use the same ammo as shotguns, sniper and non heavy grenade launchers. However the game mode gives all weapons a damage buff which is enough for trace rifles to be broken. Yes you can use other primaries but what are you gonna do when a auto rifles kills you with two shots to the toe. And since they burn ammo quickly and take more rounds to kill then their counterparts like shotguns which use he same ammo as them they spawn in with 50 in the mag and anybody who is using shotguns snipers or grenade launchers give them ammo and they only need two rounds to kill. Also after I kill 50 PvP opponents I need to kill a few hundred opponents in PVE or PVP to actually apply the upgrade and who you kill does not matter.
Seriously and the second weapon I want to upgrade which is able has tracking but you need to aim down sights after hipfiring the tracking shots
which dl negligible damage so they explode or aim down sights and shoot which deals more damage but I am probably not going to have enough time before some random kills me again.
And this is just the first game. From what I heard it was supposed to be a fun game mode which focused on gunfights with your primary not the infamous laser tag show of Prometheus lens which happened a few years ago but now all trace rifles can do that. Oh and I still need to get 50 kills there for a seasonal challenge so I can get the free version of the premium currency and I can only skip one challenge and I have already skipped one challenge since it requires a dlc K don't own.
Seriously why cant some actual good game come up to challenge this. All the competition seems to be third person shooters. Also most of the guns don't feel good and lore is pretty lacking but lore is not top priority. The only competition is Warframe which is not my style, Titanfall 2 but I get insane pings from here so no multiplayer so after the story nothing to do unless I want to do airtstrafing which is useless since I can't play multiplayer. Granted Titanfall 2 is not a looter shooter but the guns feel good and the movement is too good and Halo 1 - 3 since I heard 4 and 5 are pretty bad and I have only played halo 1. I might complain about jackal snipers in halo 2 but at least they have fixed spawns.
Maybe I am overreacting since it is my first game of momentum control -
Incredibox is an online music game and mobile app where you can create your music by dragging and dropping audio icons onto fun animated beatboxer characters.1
-
I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.
In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.
Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.
I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.
I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.
I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.
I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.