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Search - "source engine."
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While reading through the Elasticsearch (Java search engine) source code a while ago I found this gem:
return i == -1? -1: i;
I think someone should stop drinking while coding.
Some other nice lines:
int i = 0;
return j + 1000 * i;
Are these guys high?11 -
Almost every really successfully project...is open source.
Some Examples:
- Linux
- PhP
- Node.JS
- The Chromium Engine
- All the Apache Stuff
- Unreal Engine(WAS closed source)
- nginx
and so many more
Open Source is the best way to build known, stable and useful software29 -
It's funny, whenever the subject of facebook vs privacy comes up (mostly I don't even initiate those convo's), people always start to defend facebook when I say that I THINK that facebook is build to get people addicted to it and get them to stay on facebook as long as possible.
Haha, one of facebook's early investers/ex facebook presidents said the following in an interview:
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
So even an ex president of facebook is admitting this.
I also found the folloing a good one:
The underlying thought process while creating platforms like Facebook or Instagram is something like “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
Last but not least, the part I found the most scary:
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Yes, I find this scary.
Oh yeah and for the people who are going to call bullshit on this one, I've got one source and if you search engine on the title of that article then you'll find loads of websites having that story:
https://fossbytes.com/facebook-was-...26 -
For the privacy conscious people under us, take a look at the search engine searx.me.
'but I don't believe it respects privacy when it's not open sour.... ' - it's entirely open source.
You can even install it on your own server!20 -
I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.
I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.
I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.
The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.
An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.
What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.
That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?
You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.
And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.
I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?
Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.60 -
Would you like to smile for 10 seconds? Read this short story:
*Story begins*
During World War II, numerous fighter planes were getting hit by anti-aircraft guns. Air Force officers wanted to add some protective armour/shield to the planes.
The question was "where"?
The planes could only support few more kilos of weight. Mathematicians were called for a short consulting project.
Fighter planes returning from missions were analysed for bullet holes per square foot.
They found 1.93 bullet holes/sq. foot near the tail of planes whereas only 1.11 bullet holes/sq. foot close to the engine.
The officers thought that since the tail portion had the greatest density of bullets, it would be the logical location for putting an anti-bullet shield.
A mathematician said exactly the opposite; more protection is needed where the bullet holes aren't - that is -around the engines.
His judgement surprised everyone. He said "He said We are counting the planes that returned from a mission. Planes with lots of bullet holes in the engine did not return at all".
Moral: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
Source: From the book -
"How Not To Be Wrong", by Jordan Ellenberg.4 -
--- NVIDIA announces PhysX SDK 4.0, open-sources 3.4 under modified BSD license ---
NVIDIA has announced a new version, 4.0, of PhysX, their physics simulation engine.
Its new features include:
- A "Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS)", an algorithm used in this SDK to make things such as robots, character arms, etc. more robust to move around. NVIDIA demonstrates this in the video by making their old version of PhysX, 3.4, seem like an unpredictable mess, the robot demonstrating that version smashing a game of chess.
- New filtering rules for supposedly easier scalability in scenes containing lots of both moving and static objects.
- Faster queries in scenes with actors that have a lot of shapes attached to them, improving performance.
- PhysX can now be more easily used with Cmake-based projects.
In essence, better control over scenes and actors as well as performance improvements are what's new.
Furthermore, NVIDIA has released PhysX version 3.4 under the 3-Clause-BSD-license, except for game console platforms.
As NVIDIA will release the new version on December 20th, it will also be released under the same modified BSD license as PhysX 3.4 is now.
What are your thoughts on NVIDIA making a big move towards the open-source community by releasing PhysX under the BSD license? Feel free to let us know in the comments!
Sources:
https://news.developer.nvidia.com/a...
https://developer.nvidia.com/physx-...
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/...4 -
+++ Microsoft switches to the open-source Chromium engine for the Edge browser +++
On December 6th, Microsoft announced that they will dump their own Edge engine and replace it with Chromium, an open-source browser engine developed by Google.
This way they are promising the ~2% of global internet users who prefer Edge over other browsers to experience a better web experience.
The about 2% of market share is one of the reasons Microsoft decided to stop developing their own engine. It's just not worth it.
Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, said they also want to bring Edge to other platforms, like macOS, to target more audiences.
Web-Developers, like myself, will most likely have the most to gain. Less browsers to target means less incompatibility issues.
There are a lot of HTML5 features that the Edge engine doesn't support...
The new Edge won't be a UWP app, in order to make it usable outside of Windows 10. Instead, it will be build in accordance with the Win32 API, so we can even expect support for older Windows versions, like Windows 7 and 8. A preview release is planned for early 2019.
Because they are switching to Chromium and the Win32 API, Microsoft is hiring new developers! So if you always wanted to work at Microsoft, now is your chance!
That's it!
Thanks for reading!
Source: https://theregister.co.uk/2018/12/...11 -
Finally getting some upgrades for our office workstations!!
My work-pc still rocks 3rd gen core i7 with -40% performance loss because of spectre/meltdown patches and 1600 mhz ram. Its been a huge pain in the ass. Building unreal engine from source literally takes a day, while on my home Ryzen 5 it takes an our.
Ryzen 7/9 babyyy!!!
(I might even be able to talk them into a threadripper, wish me luck 😀)4 -
That moment when you tell the head of IT that he 'bought' licenses for a deprecated version of an open source engine for 300K 🤣10
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Fu*king Windows!!!
Integrating Linux kernel into their new build.
Microsoft Edge insiders experimenting with Chromium engine.
Microsoft has now bowed down to the open source community...
All hail Linus Torvalds!!!!
All hail Linux!!!
All hail Open Source!!!
WE WON24 -
Okay, here we go...
I need a new Programming language.
Coming from a Python background, so go easy on me. x.x
C# can do what I need, but it's quite complex for me. I'd rather something simplier is possible.
Brief summery:
So, I've come to realize that I wont be able to make my Python game(ExitCode) as powerful and fancy as I'd like. And I decided that I should just start from scratch before I go any farther. (Though, I might go ahead and stabilize the current versions on GitHub)
Here's what I need:
Powerful UI support;
* I am re-creating an OS as my game. I will need to drag and position windows and icons in-game, as you would in a real OS.
* Needs to support Ads, Animations, Images, Videos, Sound, and any other media I might need?
* Preferably can render HTML & CSS (Though, this is just a preference)
Support for reading JSON and/or XML files SAFELY (XML had major vulnerabilities in Python)
Supports Windows, but I would prefer cross-platform-ability
Easy to compile
I am not really looking for a game ENGINE. I am looking for a language to create a game in from scratch, that has powerful UI libraries.
In the end, the game will be Free, and Open Source. (Always!~)undefined yeah python was a bad idea shouldn't have trusted a snake let the personal biases roll in come at me bro we will take over the world! maybe.. thats great but can it run crisis? programming languages47 -
So I finally got my senior project approved by my school's assistant principal (the one who deals with every student's project) and he said that the three forms of evidence I suggested were not enough. A quick summary of my project: I'm supposed to make a game engine in Java before April of 2017. Every student needs 3 forms of evidence that they did the project so I suggested screenshots of my work, the finished source code, and pictures of me actually working on it. In addition to all of that I would have a ton of documentation and sample projects to test different features of the engine. Well, he doesn't really understand that for a high school student, that's already enough work for a couple of years and thinks I need more evidence. So what does he do?
He requires me to find at least 5 people to test the engine and complete a survey about it. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except I'm a high school student and don't know more than 2 people who are fluent enough in Java to work on a game. And, I have to finish the project before January now to give the people enough time to work with it.
Long story short, I'm not even out of high school and I'm already experiencing the struggles of dealing with non-technical people.10 -
I feel like Unreal Engine for Linux is obsessed with compiling stuff:
Want to get Unreal Engine? Here's the source code, go compile it yourself.
Installed that, let's launch it. Compiles more stuff.
Now you're on the project selection screen, good job! Imma compile these shaders though.
Want to make a project with C++? That means I'll have to compile some more stuff...
If only my CPU wasn't a potato it wouldn't be so bad.1 -
I love good advertisement but I hate bad products with "good" ads!
It's so difficult to find a reliable and up-to-date source for what's a good and bad game engine at the time. Every engine says it's the best. Every browser says it's the fastest. Every anti-virus app says it's the safest. God damn, come of with creative way and don't say your product is the best! *tilted*4 -
Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code
Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.
History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.
Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.
New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.
But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....
Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"
And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed. -
Client: How long will it take you to build this?
Me: Maximum of 7days
Day 1 to Day 5, To myself: I have so much time, lemme build a Js engine in Rust and open-source it. It shouldn't take that long.
Day 6, After many failed attempts at debugging RegExp:
Starts working on the client's product, scraps off sleeping hour (why do I sleep in the first place)
Day 7: At 23:59...calls clients, he doesn't answer, probably sleeping... Sends message "Product ready to be tested at your call, I've not slept in 7 straight days because I like you"4 -
Playing Portal 2
Not only has this game a need for understanding highly complex problems - but it also was the first game besides Minecraft I started to mod and really had something valuable come out!3 -
Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.6 -
been a couple of years since I was last active here.
Source Engine still has its claws on me today - but Nii broke free and properly got into other engines and made some cool projects! We both study different stuff now.
I tried to get into Unity a couple of times now, even made a small VR grappling hook prototype once (def not nauseating). But it's hell. It's kinda sad that modern engines don't understand the needs of level designers as well as Source's Hammer. Even though Source is outdated af.
Thing is, I am more and more starting to doubt that this is what I wanna do in life. Game industry sucks. Ad industry sucks even more. I might just become a tree and produce oxygen.2 -
Browser rant:
I just want to get this off my chest, IE isn't a bad browser. It's highly outdated but it was good back when the alternatives weren't there. And today it's new "browser update" Edge isn't bad either. Edge really is a neat freaking piece of software. Microsoft tries their best to make a browser for their operating system (and a browser engine for their new app format!) that means it has couple of features the alternatives don't (or only with plugins) - oh and plugins, they're coming too. And still it's not slow either. From my own experience (I say this because every user says their browser is the fastest) it's way faster than Quantum. Yet Quantum is still a very good browser because it's faster than the old firefox, I guess it's open source(?) and still a privacy focused browser. Chrome (my personal favorite) on the other hand is really the fastest thing you can get - if you allow it to use all your ram - (if people like linuxxx say firefox is faster for them, I'll just smile) but for everyone worrying about ram usage and "spying", well - you know what I mean. And still I can understand people trying opera or FF/Chrome/Edge mods, I myself love "Monument". Just stop saying a browser is bad because it doesn't have what you like/does have what you don't like. The only bad browser is Midori, okay? 😘
Tl;dr
IE isn't bad but old. Edge isn't bad today. Every high end browser (edge, quantum, chrome) has their perks and none of them is "bad".
Q/A:
What's your favorite Browser? Comment below9 -
I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.
So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.
Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.
Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.
BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.
Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"
I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"
And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?9 -
I think that would be config tool for F1 Challenge ‘99-‘02 game which was called VMT Engine. It introduced me to modding community, the VMT Engine project taught me A LOT about software development.
The origin of this tool was I posted on F1 2014 VMT development forum thread “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tool that let you change tires type?”, so the VMT leader said “Why don’t you do it?”...So I did it 😐
I’m actually still updating the source code to this day1 -
Bloody fucking Crystal. Lame fucking excuse for a reporting engine product.
Can’t change data source from API for a report containing List of Values at runtime.
What the actual fuck! A reporting system where I can’t change the data source.
Die in hell you Fucking blood sucking leeches. Die of malaria!2 -
Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D
1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?
2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?
3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?
4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?
5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.
6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).
7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?
8) Any other advice you can give :P ?12 -
Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...
This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:
- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.
- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.
- There's no single source of truth.
- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?
- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!
- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?
- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?
Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.
What I would like to see:
A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.
Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.
Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.
There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.
Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.
In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.
What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.
Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.
In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.
Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.
I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.
Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.12 -
We have 100% access to Unreal Engine 4 Code, but it is not Open Source. so is it legal if we fork it, heavily modify it and re-brand it ?6
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This project is gonna drive me insane. I'm moving a custom-scripted WordPress ecommerce site to WooCommerce. The basis of the source site was WooCommerce but with the advantages stripped away and with a LOT of hard coded stuff added to it to make it seem like a unique, custom ecommerce engine.
Now I have to strip all that away and standardize it back into the WooCommerce way so it's all easier to maintain.
It's like I've been handed a jigsaw puzzle of a bunch of clowns and now I need to take it apart and put it together again but make it look like George Washington instead.1 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
Hey fellow devRanters,
I'm sure some of you have read about the newest vulnerabilities in Intels Management Engine (ME). I feel like ME and similar "features" are unacceptable backdoors into our systems. Unfortunately Intel and AMD do not offer their customers the option to acquire CPUs that lack these backdoors and make disabling them rather impossible 😒
Thus my question: Do you guys know of any 64-bit "open-source" CPU on the market that is production-ready and suitable for high-traffic web applications? Please note that I don't consider FPGAs to be viable options, since I don't trust Xilinx and Altera either.15 -
I lost my ability to enjoy computer games.
I really want to revisit my favorite ones (Unreal Tournament, everything made with Source Engine, also Life is Strange, Gish, some other indie games), but every time I try, I feel like alien. I feel like I don’t belong here. Every time there is nothing but sadness.
I even sold my gaming pc upon realizing that after completing Doom 2016 I haven’t played anything at all.
What do I do now?10 -
Imagine an intelligent platform where creators are rewarded for launching and completing open source projects and groups of people teaming up to set up open source factories , implementing top level optimizations . There will ofcourse be judges who can earn a basic income from the platform as well . I don't want to go into too much details.
The platform could offer products as well with a modular backend . So for example this platform could have an mobile OS with a maps app on it . What the platform should do is adopt the best map algorithm to the application at certain intervals .
Product stays constant , open source power behind it changes and promotes competition .
Factories, products , space tech, open source labs which require certain reputation to get in ......
It's very ambitious but sounds like the way the future should take off . Companies and politics would be off picture down the line and maybe even terrorism will take a break . After all it's everyone together .
Oh and ofcourse it would have a search engine for sure.2 -
Why the hell is Unity so bad at Linux, I just created a new project and it crashed everytime. Now I’m using Godot Engine, good things open source and stable.7
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[linux distro stuff]
Hey guys!
Im considerig switching to linux because:
My macbook does not support mojave and the new ones are expensive af.
Windows 10 is bloated and not a great user experience(removing stuff from the control panel and adding it to the very stripped down settings app, privacy etc..).
I love open source software
However i did not used linux for a long time, back then i used ubuntu and SUSE.
My considerations:
Debian - because .deb on them haters
OpenSUSE - because i used it in the past and it seemed very stable and fast
Arch - i heard from a lot of sources that it’s “da best”
My use case is game development and 3D modeling. I use gimp, blender vscode and unity (the game engine) at work i sometimes use autodesk stuff (motionbuilder, 3ds max) because of fbx.
For audio stuff i use audacity
So overall i’m looking for a distro that is fast, lightweight, i can develop on it (mostly 3D stuff) and occasionally play some games
Anyone has experience with the mentioned distros? What distro would you use for this?6 -
So much has happened, I've been learning things, I got robbed, I discovered I love test driven development, my laptop fell downstairs and is now screenless, I'm still on this project and still have not gotten the source or gone live, side work exists though so I get to make some more money, car engine needs to be overhauled, project extended still not in production. Send Help.
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Microsoft is always at it.
Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.
So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.
Windows 10 users, do this:
Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....
How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?
I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.
Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?
But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)
So needless to say she needs help. All the time.
So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.
I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.
Wanna know why?
Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:
- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer
Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe
And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.
So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!
So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.
I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.
I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!
However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.20 -
I don't think anyone said it yet so I'll have to choose osu!. It's a rhythm game and now it is being remade as open source. It also uses a open source game engine dedicated to rythm games. The osu staff is great and the main dev (peppy) streams on twitch while making the game sometimes.
It's a great project and I hope I can contribute some day.6 -
It's been a while since i stopped programming.....
It's been so busy with all the school work/assignments/ and the most important part is that school ends at 10pm, arrive home at 11pm, prepare for tomorrow school stuff, sleep at 2am, wake up at 7am next morning, and again ends at 10pm 5 days a week...
It is exhausting, but I am getting used to this routine.
Studying my own programming skills or working on a side project? Not sure when to do it... The only way to continue studying is at breaks at school, or sleep less and study....
But it is impossible....
I have some great projects that are waiting to go out to the world, to list a few:
- cloud gaming
- cloud storage with live streaming
- complete school schedule management
- home automation framework in dotnet
- deepfakes and ai image generation algorithm (~18 months of training till now)
- game cheat engine (20GB total omfg ^^)
- and more
and I don't have time to finish it. lol
I think it will see the bright world after 3 years of high school... By then, my projects will be ancient, probably....
TIme is really short.
24 hours equally, but feels like 8 hours a day....
Should I abandon the project rn and focus on studying? (probably should)
or should i sell the project or open source it?
Also, how do you manage your time between work(study) and side projects (especially big ones)?4 -
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 -
Alright got an idea I have for my game engine that I'd love some input on...
So the engine has emphasis on user made content and openness to that content (EG. open source dev tools and no licencing of art) but I also want to try and build a basic ecosystem with the engine and one way I'm doing it is with cross game mods (Take a mod from one game and drop it in another and it just works... Famous last words) but something I want to try is a companion app for the engine itself...
So it'll have a custom written save system baked in engine to make progress saving and the like simpler for the end user, thinking about building an app for smart watches and phones that would connect to the engine and actually back up and sync local saves to the app and vice versa as long as they have a connection (Hotspot your phone, bluetooth or wifi) but allow you to manage some data within the app by building a basic API to let devs show the user information about the save and the game by adding description, thumbnails to distinguish games and the like...
Just want opinions if it may be a good idea to invest some time into and if anyone has idea's that could make it better.6 -
Godot Engine - great open source alternative to Unity, powerful with basically anything you need for game dev and with great community,
VS Community and VS Code for more serious things, because they're pretty pretty powerful and extendable.
Oh and Krita is kinda cool, but I'm not much of an art guy -
Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...3 -
Just curious on whether or not to open source something or not...
As some would have seen I'm working on a game engine/framework and putting a lot of effort into the development terminal (lumber camp) and had a fair few people show interest in it so thought I might chuck it on GitHub as I go but I don't want to allow for merging until the main component is at version 1 and stable...
Should I release as I go and not do merging or wait till it is at version 1?4 -
In 2011,when i was 12, i was playing Garry's Mod with a couple of friends, and i don't remember the circunstance, but one of my friends said: "I wonder how games i made". I have no idea why i was never curious about this subject before,since i played A LOT of videogames, but this question did stick to my mind, so i decided that i would search about it. Searching, i discovered that Garry's Mod used the Source engine, and that it was made in LUA. Tried LUA. Understood very little. Lost my interest. And then, i would only attempt to program again back in 2015, where i learned C++ in high school. Then i learned SQL, and now learning Java. I also discovered that i LOVE programming, and now i have plans to graduate on CS.
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Anybody know about a good open source speech to text engine?
I googled but there are tons of them and I don't have much time right now to try each them of out
What I actually want is just to convert the audio (in English) to text and would also want to note the time those sentences were spoke in the audio like a subtitle file.7 -
Isn’t it delightful when you come in to a large project to discover that they have a large underlying core that no one wants to touch but everyone relies on.
Quickly perusing the code you realize that the base was clearly created by someone who found their first tutorials for Java, but were previously a c developer.
It’s funny cause this code is of course from ~20 years ago and in different sections you can tell they were a C developer, a business admin, a Db admin, a junior conforming to pressures from others.
I recently looked at the deep rooted abuses of Java beans, and this entire internally created state management engine that serves no purpose but to create contrived complexity.
The use of propriety tools, that they paid lots for that perform incredibly simple tasks that have long since been solved by the open source community. Many of which are long defunct.
And the constant focus is on monkey patching the engine to solve small issues, which bloat the time to deal with issues. Since everything needs to be tested by their methodologies.
The inability to understand that the underlying structure is the issue and that tackling that, rather than just shifting the entire solution to new languages will suddenly solve the problems(or other underlying systems).
It’s just sad.1 -
A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.
So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)
First question was: What to build first?
The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.
We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.
By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.
Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.
Next step: Choosing a datastore
The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.
Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.
We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.
Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use
The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.
What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:
- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON
- Transform JSON to a desired output
- Respond with the transformed JSON
Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.
Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.
To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.
The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.
The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.
Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.
Many more headaches to come later this year ;)3 -
We are legion, the legion of galley slaves inside the hold of the bit machinery, who insult themselves as code monkeys as if we were hitting our keyboards until we get Shakespeare or something compilable, while it is us, the anonymous mass of developers that shift the bits such that the Gates and gatekeepers on deck can present the working code or content monstrosity, while we in the engine room looking at the source don't understand how anything could be working.2
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If you're in for a good read this thread is comedy gold: https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/...
(the second page is where it starts getting amazing)2 -
A tycoon game with a FOSS engine. The game would be proprietary but the underlying engine would be free and open source for others to use
-
Ok so I got a few PC games, the graphics are stunning but I want cheats...
I see there are lots of trainer apps and mods and also Cheat Engine but the exes look sketchy, not sure what a good source would be. And Cheat Engine is detected as a virus.
I haven't played PC games in many years, this being one of the reasons (other one being hardware).
So what do you do these days? Yeah I probably shouldn't be playing games but but... The graphics look so good (Ultra setting) and still runs smoothly without overheating....16 -
Hey guys, I am getting into game engine development and I wanted to start off with a simple 2D engine. But I don't know which source is the best to stick with.
So if anyone who has any experience in this field could tell me what course/tutorial they feel is the best to begin with, it would be really helpful.
My programming knowledge is strongest in C++.
I would also like to know as to how long would it take for a normal C++ dev to come up with a half decent game engine?4 -
There is a new Java library very useful for building frameworks and in this library there is a particular classpath scan engine that deserves attention as it is original and powerful.
The peculiarity of this engine is the possibility to search classes over a path or the runtime classpath by concatenable and nestable criteria by exploiting the power of the lambda expressions on the native Java reflection elements such Class, Field, Method, Constructor, Module, Package, Annotation, etc ... thus giving the possibility therefore to carry out searches without limits and for any criterion that can be immaginated: this library is called Burningwave Core, it is open source and on the official wiki on github there are a lot of examples.5 -
I really can't find a good and light open source ecommerce solution that doesn't require Wordpress or any other bloated framework.
I got a small company which I just work as a microelectronics/programming teacher and I want an automated solution where people can order and pay for preconfigured kits.
I usually use Nginx with Nodejs. I had a look at Reaction Commerce however it requires 1.5GB RAM as of now (I got a 512mb RAM server). And I don't see how a few visitors should mitigate the use of such an overpowered solution.
How do other developers do ecommerce solutions without using bloaty software? As of now I'm considering to just create a solution myself with a template engine and an API.2 -
What do we all think about Microsoft’s strategy regarding vs code ? Are they actually incorporating their intellisense engine into the open source ??? Are they scrapping vs ? Seems uncharacteristic of their previous models.