Notch is coding live again | Hacker News Reader

Notch is coding live again

twitch.tv

123 pointsZolomon45 comments

I'm happy to see him using Paint.NET to edit the graphics. I've yet to see a free image editor that remotely compares in usability and power; I just wish it were available for Mac and/or Linux.

Not affiliated with it or anything.

GIMP?

I tried it on Ubuntu a while ago, and it was the most inhumanly difficult program I've ever used. It always seemed none of the tools looked anything like what I wanted to do. It probably exceeds Paint.NET in its capabilities but would take far longer to learn.

I agree with fferen, GIMP may be more powerful, but it is far less usable, in my experience.

I cannot believe how addictive this is to watch. Really makes me feel like I am wasting my time though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

RealITy television.

Something about 9000 people watching a guy write code amazes me. I understand reading the source and all that, but is this something commonly done now? Watching others code live? I am somewhat amazed by how fast he seems to be moving, I find I have to sit and think about things a lot more most of the time.

With his real time try fail cycles I can see why he can get away with spending less time thinking.

I've had this on in the background and checked in periodically, whole thing is fascinating to watch.

He'd probably have to stop and think more often if he hadn't built a dozen or more similar games before.

This is a perfect example of how to attain 'flow'. He's done the same (or very similar) thing before, so there is no distress or despair. The 48 hour window provides the necessary, low-key stress stimulus necessary.

MCN (an unusual motorcycle magazine) had a series on this. To attain flow, you need some stress, but too much stress will stop flow. This is probably why we find many parts of coding to be fun, but debugging and navigating poorly documented APIs to be painful.

At one point, I saw a huge switch statement comparing the value of "col" to a list of twenty or thirty long hexadecimal numbers and returning objects like "LockedDoor". Is that kind of thing common in game development? It looks like a nightmare to maintain, but maybe that doesn't matter in a 48 hour competition?

Also, what is the engine that's rendering the maze for him? Is it a publically available library?

Its how he loads level data from image file using RGB values

I noticed a snippet fairly recently (last hour or so) using alpha values as an ID for switches and the things they're connected to (doors, etc).

So technically, it's RGBA values :)

I think that's the map loader. Rather than writing a special map format, it reads the map from a standard image, with each colour defining a different type of block.

This makes it easier to make a map in a short space of time (great for contests), although as you said it makes it's not really maintainable in the long run.

Seems maintainable to me.

All you'd really need in addition is a 'palette' image of the different colours and their meanings for other people to create maps using this format.

Exactly. Seems perfect.

That's plausible, and actually a pretty nice design. Thanks.

I don't know if this is part of the rules, but it appears he's using a minimum of existing libraries. For example, he hand drew the font earlier, and spent a great deal of time at the beginning getting the basic 3d system to work.

Hexadecimal numbers are a common way to represent colours, he can probably copy paste the colour numbers back and forth between code and an image editor. Using an existing image editor as a level editor must save time. It would get more complicated when you want to reference a specific thing on the map, eg particular behaviour for this locked door.

> Is that kind of thing common in game development?

No. But I wouldn't see notch as a prototype game developer.

There's a pretty big difference between making something playable and making something scale-able. When you've got 48 hours to make something playable scaling gets thrown out the window.

The huge switch statement is probably because that's the easiest thing to do with a simple 48 hour game. There is no point in wasting time writing clean maintainable systems with a lot of glue code when you're writing a simple game in 48 hours that you are the only developer of and will probably never look at again after the compo. Even in a larger commercial game it wouldn't be too hard to maintain that stuff (maybe clean it up by defining constants). I've written similar code for LD48 map loaders.

There is a good chance that the "engine" that's rendering the maze for him is something he wrote during the competition. Its not too hard to write a simple maze renderer using OpenGL or even an oldschool raycast software renderer like wolfenstein's pretty quickly. All final LD48 entries must submit source as well, so once Notch is done you could take a look at what he's doing. Probably not anything you can easily turn into a library or reuse :).

One thing I've noticed is that he tends to put a little extra energy into the quality of everything - say 20% more than the minimum. And I mean Everything - from consistent naming and semantics to the visual touches (like the color of the cloud over the moon). This fractional boost to the quality of so many components really adds up.

Also, the switch statement is easy to add incrementally and change. Every so often, he'll go back to it and add some new values and a couple of lines of code.

The engine he is using, he wrote yesterday. It should be available after the game is finished.

Playable game: ( with source code )

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview...

I wish I could see what music he's listening to.

Commenter on twitch.tv: http://www.di.fm/ Electro House station

Pretty cool, any reason why he is doing this? Also would be awesome if someone recorded this from the start.

It's for Ludum Dare (http://www.ludumdare.com/), a 48-hour game competition. It's quite common for entrants to record their development sessions and release a video at the end, so I'm sure Notch will do something similar.

Sounds pretty awesome, had never heard of it, shall definitely check it out.

Sadly because he had to switch streaming providers, the actual recording is split between livestream and justin.tv/twitch.tv. However, you can definitely go back and replay it all if you know where to look. Markus is also taking screenshots ever x seconds (sorry, no idea how big x is) which he'll use to make a video for his entry. That should give you a 10,000ft view of the process he went through to develop his game.

I believe that he permanently deleted his livestream account due to huge charges that were racked up due to the high traffic of the broadcast (something along the lines of $4,000 I want to say?), so the recorded video is no longer available at livestream last time I checked.

More like $17,000 I believe.

I recall seeing stop-motion videos from either previous Ludum Dare competitions or something similar, compiled from a whole bunch of screenshots like you say.

I'd be more interested in seeing how the actual code evolves - maybe setting something to check it into a VCS every time you save would work.

Figuring out a decent visualisation would be hard though.

Is there a reason to draw in-game font except for fun factor?

if your basic/permitted libraries don't include a way to render orthographic text, I suppose. I didn't see the beginning, but in comments in the previous threads, he's written the whole of the 3D FPS system to a fairly low level as well.

Yup, he did everything from scratch. The first 4 hours were scary. And beautiful.

What others say about the competition is true, but you can also tell from how he's doing the end titles that he's into custom lo-fi typography.

Why doesn't anyone tell me about these 48 hour game coding competitions? I'd definitely like to join. Been a while!

"Ludum Dare Events are held every 4 months; Every April, August, and December. Dates are announced 1-2 months before the start time. The best way to stay informed is via the mailing list. Alternatively, you can follow ludumdare on twitter."

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/rules/

All game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview

If you like Python, there's one called PyWeek (http://www.pyweek.org/) that starts on September 11. Registration is open now.

As others have stated, the one Notch is participating in right now is called Ludum Dare (http://ludumdare.com/).

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