addie

joined 1 year ago
[–] addie 8 points 1 month ago

But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?

Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.

Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn't need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it's just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost

[–] addie 26 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Assuming that these have fairly impressive 100 MB/s sustained write speed, then it's going to take about 93 hours to write the whole contents of the disk - basically four days. That's a long time to replace a failed drive in a RAID array; you'd need to consider multiple disks of redundancy just in case another one fails while you're resilvering the first.

[–] addie 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

True. Although given how easy it is to cast void pointers to the wrong damn thing, it would be nice if you did, makes refactoring much easier. Makes me appreciate std::any all the more.

[–] addie 52 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Writing in ASM is not too bad provided that there's no operating system getting in the way. If you're on some old 8-bit microcomputer where you're free to read directly from the input buffers and write directly to the screen framebuffer, or if you're doing embedded where it's all memory-mapped IO anyway, then great. Very easy, makes a lot of sense. For games, that era basically ended with DOS, and VGA-compatible cards that you could just write bits to and have them appear on screen.

Now, you have to display things on the screen by telling the graphics driver to do it, and so a lot of your assembly is just going to be arranging all of your data according to your platform's C calling convention and then making syscalls, plus other tedious-but-essential requirements like making sure the stack is aligned whenever you make a jump. You might as well write macros to do that since you'll be doing it a lot, and if you've written macros to do it then you might as well be using C instead, since most of C's keywords and syntax map very closely to the ASM that would be generated by macros.

A shame - you do learn a lot by having to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do - but I couldn't recommend it for any non-trivial task any more. Maybe a wee bit of assembly here-and-there when you've some very specific data alignment or timing-sensitive requirement.

[–] addie 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why buttplug for tachyons?

[–] addie 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah. Doesn't take much optimising of disk writes to make things run much better on a Pi; they're quite capable machines as long as disk i/o isn't your limiting factor. Presumably the devs have been doing some tidying up.

[–] addie 2 points 1 month ago

My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy 'todo' list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It's a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you've been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can't do with the command line and ssh. But it's free, so there's no downside.

[–] addie 2 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I'd been working on.

Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it's a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, "very Github inspired" interface. Time to run some updates...

[–] addie 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Nah - Doom (DOS): and Doom Eternal are on there, as are Baldur's Gates 2 and 3.

[–] addie 1 points 1 month ago

Most common example would be a bicycle, I think - your pedals tighten on "in the same direction the wheel turns" as you look at them. So your left pedal has left-hand thread, and goes on and comes off backwards.

The effect of precession also means that you can tighten the pedals on finger tight and a good long ride will make them absolutely solid - need to bounce up and down on a spanner to loosen them.

[–] addie 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.

There's some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur's Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you've got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.

[–] addie 10 points 1 month ago

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