my first surprise (shock?) when i got into the professional game industry spaces was that the higher up the chain of command you go (leadership) the more rare it was to find people that actually played, made, or really cared about games. still think about it sometimes.
@alienmelon 100%, and then on top of that, you get to the impact of decisions being made by people who're missing that first hand experience/perspective
Folks, I know… I use Duck Duck Go also but remember they have venture capital. Enjoy it while it lasts (or let’s fund and build alternatives differently that aren’t temporary businesses with profit motives and exits but commons-owned institutions working for the common good).
@aral Aral, are you familiar with Stract (a search engine that is F/OSS)? It seems neat and has interesting features, but I haven't had time to investigate if it is what it appears to be https://stract.com.about
@aral In particular, the "10k short" optic (found in Settings->Manage Optics), which removes the 10,000 most popular sites seems like a cool way of surfacing stuff that wouldn't normally be visible
@peacememories@aral Do you have a link to where I can read more about Stract's use of AI/ML? It's not something I've been able to find more information on.
@noodlejetski@aral If accepting a lower bar is the cost of moving past other dominant platforms, that's an easy decision for me to make, personally. My concerns are more about the organisational philosophies behind the project and its implementation.
I also recognise that I can probably live without a generic search engine entirely if I have to, so maybe I'm in a different space to many others.
Inconsequential thing that bugs me about Star Wars:
In Empire Strikes Back, getting frozen in carbonite was about the most traumatic and melodramatic thing that could possibly happen to a person, and they played it up like it was the end of the world. And then in ROTJ it required a long recovery.
Since then, in the comics and even the Mandalorian, they’ve done it casually to dozens of people, and the effects are no worse than taking a nap.
@ja2ke@SasquatcherGeneral The "Jedi all wear desert hobo robes now" thing has bugged me since the shot of Qui Gon running from a droid army transport in first trailer for Episode 1 >_<
> This is the latest version of the Descent 3 source code. This includes the '1.5' patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago. At the time, it worked for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
@Doomed_Daniel Glad to see the licence situation resolved! I always get nervous when I see people saying "Oh, there's no licence right now, but we don't need to let that stop us contributing"
@unormal While working on Day of the Tentacle Remastered, I came across a bug in iMUSE (cool dynamic music system) that was manifesting reliably on Linux (other platforms too, but less consistently). Turns undefined behaviour was involved in tracking note duration. A note/sequence might be meant to last for a quarter second, but oh no, we're not always reading from the right place in memory. 8 years later, I still feel a moment of rising panic when the bird coughing sample plays in the intro.
"If you make your own engine you'll never ship a game"
I'm here to tell you this is BS. Kitsune Tails uses a custom engine built on a custom framework all made from the ground up by yours truly. Neither of these were even remotely the bottleneck for development duration. Turns out that the thing that takes the most time when you're developing a game is all the stuff that is hyper specific to that game and can't be generalized anyway
Not to mention all the, you know, actual content that sits on top of the engine. I can write a json parser and serializer from the ground up in a day or two, but all the cutscenes I had to script for KT took many weeks
Then there's the fact that if I'd used an out of the box physics solution for Kitsune Tails I'm fairly certain I'd never have been able to nail the game feel it has, which is the most core thing to the whole experience
You don't have to make an engine but quit pretending doing it is the hard part of making a game. It fucking ain't
@eniko I spent over a decade and a half feeling that if I made my own tech, I'd never have time to make games. I decided to try drawing some triangles with OpenGL during a game jam in 2014, and it was super empowering.
I've since worked on multiple released projects that sit on top of frameworks like SDL and SFML, and it's been more than doable.
I still use engines from time to time, but wish past-me hadn't shied away from seeing rolling a custom stack as viable for so long.
For the past couple months, I've been working on developing Bonesweeper into a bigger game, with the support of a grant from Screen Tasmania! I want to share as much of the process as I can. Keep an eye to this thread in the weeks and months to come! :) #gamedev#indiedeveloper
While working on a visualisation of the new non-square dig site generation stuff for the upcoming dev log video, this shape came up and made me think of a steg. It was nice to take a break and draw this little friend for fun #PaleoArt#PixelArt