@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

kojack

@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place

22 years as a games programming lecturer.
Oculus community moderator.
Languages: primarily C++, lot of C#, plus Lua and Ruby. But used MANY over the last 38 years.

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sinbad, to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I finally got my mining setup to work in Elite Dangerous (by buying a better refinery with more bins, and learning not to direct collector drones but just let them get on with it) and immediately made about 1.6 million credits in 2 runs, which compared to the 30k or so I was making at a time before via trading was very exciting.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad Rule one: Never log out of the game while in an asteroid field if you have cargo.
It's pretty much 100% chance when you log in that if you are in an asteroid field a pirate ship will spawn near you and scan your cargo.

I've logged in, found my control mappings messed up and almost lost my Anaconda to a pirate before I rebound enough to either fight back or run away.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad I'd sometimes get lazy when my inventory was half full but I was tired of mining, so just log out in the field. Pirates within seconds every time I come back, even if I'm not near a hotspot or resource zone. If my controls aren't messed up (damn you ED) my first instinct when logging in is deploy hardpoints and watch the scanner. :)

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Have they put AI in guns yet

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Many years ago in the G.O.D. Inc series of books there were AI guns that could take over the muscles in your arm to auto aim and fire at anything that moved in front of you.

Probably not far off from that now, sadly.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko Or do you mean ChatGPT? :)
How long before people jail break it by telling it it is a prop gun in a movie if it refuses to shoot at someone non-threatening?

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I'm helping a friend diagnose some strange behavior with her new gaming rig, and I can't help but wonder how many low hit rate post launch mystery crashes are just defective memory or overclocked hardware. She's got gigabyte GPU that's overclocked out of the box, random stuff is crashing when its at load, and it seems to also be interfering with bluetooth lol.

edit for the curious: de-overclocking her GPU fixed the problem

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva It's working now, so not needed, but one other cause of bluetooth problems can be usb flash drives. USB 3 flash drives can to emit interference at around 2.4GHz, which will mess with bluetooth, most proprietary wireless dongles and some wifi networks.

My favorite though is that the cushions in office chairs can make an electrostatic discharge when you start or stop sitting on them that can cause monitors to flicker. The ESD Association published a paper on it. :)

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

My son got a 3d printer for his bday. The wall plug was bad so I am using my bench power supply. The print is going well so far though!

image/jpeg

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@demofox Have it in the car and make it print 3d maps of where you are using GPS and OpenStreetMap data.
Maybe a bit inconvenient for real time navigation. :)

kojack, to random
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Going through some of my old project screenshots...

Someone on the Ogre3D forum asked how to render a large city map with lots of street lights.
I made a shader that could do a huge number of lights for the cost of 9 lights, under certain constraints. Street lights tend to be spread apart, not a lot of overlap.

Pic1: test mesh with 64 random lights
Pic2: 4096 dynamic lights at 918fps
Pic3: car with headlights (a moving street light) driving on the map

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

sinbad, to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Looking up guides on Elite Dangerous and constantly getting advice that says “the minimum you need to be effective is insert equipment with a price tag of 10 million credits” which is not that useful 🙄

Reminds me of the “you could buy a house if you stopped eating avocado toast” line of financial advice

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad Yeah, the refinery and drones are annoying.
I tend to only mine for void opals and low temperature diamonds (using core mining), the other stuff clutters up my inventory and isn't work much.

Ah, the classic Cobra Mk III. I grew up with Elite (C64) and Elite Plus (Amiga).
Although in Elite II I mainly used an Imperial Courier, then a Panther Clipper. (And I didn't play Elite III much)

sinbad, to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

In my quest to reevaluate games I bounced off before, I’ve now moved on to Elite Dangerous, which I last played in 2019. As a bonus I now have a Thrustmaster Airbus edition flight stick (a friend found a job lot in charity shop and kindly gave me one) which improves the experience. I had to re-learn a lot and keep remapping the controls as I went so I didn’t get that far, but I didn’t hate it? I got bored really quickly last time but I’m kinda enjoying the chill space ship management. We’ll see

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad I only use docking computers on my largest ships that barely fit the mail slot. Not for my Python (favorite ship).

I got into asteroid cracking, that was one of the most fun activities. Just cruising through a field in my Anaconda, calmly zig zagging between asteroids with the pulse scanner going off, looking for the right colour result. Then the whole bomb placement thing and picking up the pieces.
Much more fun than the old mining.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad If you ever need a bodyguard who yells "ramming speed!" way too often, let me know. :)

sinbad, to random
@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I wish it was normal for PC cases to come with this kind of power switch. So satisfying.

Plus, cats wouldn’t be able to flip these like they can so easily with push power buttons

Metal lever toggle switch on an espresso machine

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@sinbad I've spent way too long just flipping the toggle switches on my HOTAS Warthog throttle. Really good solid thunk sound/feel.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

torn between making a sandboxy ultima 6 like game or making a sci-fi version of a sandboxy ultima 6 like game

not that i have the time or energy to make either but i like to daydream, its just im torn about which to daydream about

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@eniko I've never played Ultima 6.
My dream is to make an Ultima 7 style AI sandbox, I just love how the cities felt alive with NPC actions.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

The Leaving Rust Gamedev article resonates with most of the frustrations I've had working on the internals of Tangerine (C++) since I converted it from being largely single threaded spaghetti to aggressively concurrent spaghetti, and that's making me think maybe I'd have a better time if I picked a different language for the hot paths, because necessary non-compulsory refactoring also kills iteration time.

I just don't know what though, because nothing ever seems to fit the bill of what I need.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva If I was going to move away from C++, my next choice would be D. I haven't played with its concurrency stuff yet, but almost everything else I've done in it I liked. Garbage collection, but its optional. C and C++ interfacing. Inline assembler. Compile time function evaluation. Looks mostly like C++.
It's the only language I've found that can match the features of my freaky C++
vector maths library (and do it easier). :)

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva I have to use C# for work, and the thing that drives me crazy is the limited generics (nowhere near C++ templates). Oh, and putting the new keyword everywhere! Otherwise an ok language.

(D can do wasm, but I won't keep going on about it) :)

kojack, to random
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

WTF? Every time I open the Lua operators doc website Vivaldi crashes.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

do you think there's regular spooders in the zelda games or does link sometimes find a skulltula in the shower

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @TomF I'd gladly let one of the water dragons lounge around on top of my head. They don't like getting that close though, and their claws look sharp.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

WTF is an "AI-capable chip". It's either Turing-Compatible or it's not. Everything else is just a question of performance.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva @TomF @Farbs From what I remember of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the AI The Chinese Room put in there wasn't particularly noticeable.
The 1980's Chinese Room thought experiment however...
:)

kojack, to random
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

So... Horizon Forbidden West.
The steam forums have people complaining about performance. Like 20fps on a 4090.
I'm on a 2080ti. No idea what the fps is, it feels fine to me.

But this is another game that every 10min or so my gfx card resets both monitor outputs. The game screen goes black and I have to alt-tab out/in of the game to restore it.

Dragon's Dogma 1 does it every couple of minutes, so I wonder if DD2 will as well?

Only some games do it, most don't.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

math fact:

the dual of an octopus is eight more octopuses

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva I thought I understood it, but then a few days ago I read the algorithm again and realised I was thinking of something else.

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

have you ever held on to an old computer because you wanted to use it to "build a beowulf cluster"?

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Been a long time since I've seen megatokyo mentioned anywhere. :)

If Beowulf ran on them, I probably have enough Arduinos to almost match a single Raspberry Pi 1. :)
(Although I could just use my Raspberry Pi 1 instead)

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Oh. I always thought it was a specific software framework, since I only ever heard people mention it around Linux/Unix systems.

I guess I had one when I made my distributed network 3D rendering system at college (I'd take over a whole classroom to do network renders). :)

kojack, to random
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I heard a noise from outside of my bedroom.
"I wonder if that's the possum coming back?"

Nope. 8+ feet long python going for a wander. :(

I'm now watching it while waiting for a snake wrangler to arrive.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Lots of drunks though. LOTS of drunks. (Kind of an australian passtime)

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva That it is.

Oh, and I'd LOVE to have squirrels here. And raccoons. I'd befriend them.
Australia has no rabies, so relatively safe to be around stuff.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva The possum came back.

kojack,
@kojack@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva Thermal cameras do tend to make things look a bit creepier. :)
But that's what I had on me (I'd heard a noise and went out to check if it was another snake).

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