This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation.
I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:
Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).
I'm reminded of that scene from A Beautiful Mind where someone asks him if he still has his hallucinations. He looks over and sees the fake people still there, and says "Oh no, they're not gone. Maybe they'll never be." And they still would drag him into things again, but he has learned to ignore them and not get pulled in.
So it is with internal demons sometimes, I find. You learn to recognize them, rather than expunge them.
Sometimes they help recognize what's important. Upon identifying them, I get angry my brain is talking to me that way, and find the will to get shit done.
It's kind of incredible how the sub-concious finds ways to help you out sometimes. It sucks one needs to first learn how much it likes to use dirty tactics though.
Pretty cool. I haven't dived into the details of this post, but it's a problem I've been wrangling with from time to time in my game.
Below is a series of writings on this topic that I enjoyed, by James Blinn, of "Blinn-Phong reflection" fame (and more). Not state-of-the-art, but an interesting read. It's just for cubics, which is what you need to solve the distance formula for quadratic bezier curves (my particular case), rather than the harder cubic curves of the linked article.
From the name, I thought it was going to be about fractal dimensions[1] (:
So on that tangent ... you can measure that value for ordinary objects using the "box counting" method[2], to get a notion of objects being "1.3 D" and such.
This seems fairly culture-dependent, from my experience.
For instance, I've noticed a distinct difference in how sarcasm is received in the Northeast US vs the West Coast. What you described feels more Northeast-y to me (I'm sure it varies by other segments and sub-sub-cultures, too).
There's the saying: "If an Irish person calls you 'asshole,' it means they think you're a friend. If they call you 'friend' it means they think you're an asshole."
Ha that's funny. I'm from the Midwest and found my dry/sarcastic humor tended to confuse people on the West Coast. A lot of people tended to take me completely seriously when I was obviously joking.
I always chalked that up to being around people that were new to the country and hadn't yet wrapped their head around the latest fashionable American cynicism. Generally takes a few decades to kick in, but when it does it's usually worth the wait (see Kumail Ali Nanjiani).
As an aside, this "robot tentacle" paper was referenced in a recent HN story: "SpiRobs: Logarithmic Spiral-shaped Robots for Versatile Grasping Across Scales"[1]
Seems like a pretty high bang-for-the-buck for versatility and capability with only a few cables controlling it.
Speaking as someone who has made their own game engine for their indie game: it really depends on the game, and on the developer's personality and goals. I think you're probably right for the majority of cases, since the majority of games people want to make are reasonably well-served by general-purpose game engines.
But part of the thing that attracted me to the game I'm making is that it would be hard to make in a standard cookie-cutter way. The novelty of the systems involved is part of the appeal, both to me and (ideally) to my customers. If/when I get some of those (:
Just tossing in my own recommendation: I use Lyrion Music Server (previously Logitech Media Server (previously Slim Devices/Squeezebox))[1]
It's open-source, self-hosted, has various good plugins (eg: I have some Pandora stations I listen to, as well as my own music collection).
You can synchronize music across multiple devices in your home (I just have 2).
Even though the physical devices (Squeezebox Touch, etc) are no longer sold, it's pretty easy to build one yourself with a raspberry pi.
It's one of those cases where a company created something great, and strongly-open-sourced it enough that the project can't die even though the new owners are not giving it the love it deserves.
So, I hope to keep using it for the rest of my days (:
> But I wonder how common the knowledge is these days ...
In one sense, it is less common, as you imply (though perhaps it's more that the number of high-level programmers have ballooned, rather than that the low-level ones have shrunk).
In another sense, it's more accessible than ever, with tools like godbolt[1][2], VMs, cool profilers that show you a heatmap overlaid on assembly instructions, etc.
And embedded development, where those details matter more, is still going strong, with IoT devices and so forth.
I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:
Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).
[1]
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-1/
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-2/
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-3/
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