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Comment by chadgpt3 | Hacker News Reader

Jonathan Blow found it convenient to represent all assets in a large number of text files, to enable merging. For instance he'd have one text file per entity on a map. The game and editor could read either this or the compiled binary version.

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Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.

He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."

I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base.

He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it.

I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.

I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.

Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.

In fairness, AAA games are practically over. They have grown too bloated, take too long to develop, and, with the culture wars raging in the background, almost every AAA game steps on at least one landmine and loses a large fraction of its audience before it is even released. Sad, really.

I don't think saying they stepped on landmines is entirely accurate. They jumped into the culture wars headfirst, and simply landed on concrete, as is the typical outcome. Why they chose to do that is an interesting question though, because if they just asked basically any 'normal' person the impact it would have on their sales - the answers would not be ambiguous.

There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day.

His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games.

This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465

Jonathan Blow:

> It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks

I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.

Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.

Maybe he's right on gamedev and wrong on some other things

The interesting thing to consider is that it seems fairly obvious from the outside that big game studios are killing themselves. But somehow, on the inside, there are people, of extensive qualification given the nature of our society, who think they're doing the right thing, and that "we" are wrong.

So it leads to the issue of perspective. Somebody has to be right, and everybody thinks that person is themselves, or they obviously wouldn't think what they do think. So in this case he could well be right on both things, or perhaps neither.

That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.

I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.

I have only seen Casey's writing in the whole "why is the terminal so slow" debacle, but he was a massive jerk in that. He was right! But still a jerk.

I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things".

Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.

And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend".

Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.

To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point.

1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/

I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.

Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers.

Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous.

They're good at demos, I give them that.

There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"

C++ is the same way and is why while everyone hates 95% of it, no one can agree on a strictly superior language.

Originated (or maybe just popularized) by Joel Spolsky, I think?

Casey was right, though. The windows terminal was (is, it's still there even if you use the new Terminal) atrocious. The performance is so bad, due to going through all the layers it does, which Casey exposed. And it's not even packed with features, pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that. The support for colors was also bad, the very limited options for font configuration, and it renders fonts as if it was Win2k... Thankfully, the Windows Terminal solves most of those, and includes tabs and other useful features. Too late for me as I already jumped ship to Linux.

> pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that.

I'm wondering if you're confusing Windows terminal with cmd.exe?

Windows terminal is not the shell. It's a terminal emulator. You run a shell inside of the terminal, for example you can run... Powershell.

Command history is a feature of the shell.

Imagine if he had approached it like, e.g. Bruce Dawson though, instead of coming off like an edgelord off his meds.

He did approach it correctly, and then his questions were dismissed because "it needs PhD-level research". If anything, it was clueless and incompetent Microsoft "engineers" who acted as edgelords.

IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in.

I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.

Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?

He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)

That's fine for database-like meta-data (e.g. game entity properties), but not for images, videos or audio files. Just writing those as hex dumps into text files doesn't make them any easier to merge.

You really can't merge binary data, such as textures, meshes, audio, etc. It doesn't matter if you base64 encode the data and stuff it in a text file: it's a jumble of data (assuming this is the implication of what Blow did).

Tools that support non-destructive editing workflows could in theory provide limited diff and merge capabilities on their internal graphs pf non-destructive operations. E.g. Photoshop could in theory merge two files where unrelated layers have changed. But nobody is actually implementing this because it would be lots and lots of work.

Yeah, it's a cool idea, but for proprietary formats, it's much harder for outsiders to do, and the original companies just don't see it as something they should take care of. My gut says there's too many changes that couldn't be cleanly merged anyway, so they think it's not worth the bother. (And they might be right.)

At least for code, I know people have attempted format-aware, structural diffing for a while. The Lisp communities tried a few times, because s-exps are trivial to turn into trees. None became the standard diff tool, though. However, modern tools like difftastic used tree-sitter to bring a lot of language-aware diffing to the masses.

- https://docs.racket-lang.org/sexp-diff/index.html

- https://github.com/michaelw/mw-diff-sexp

- https://github.com/lambdaisland/deep-diff2

- https://fazzone.github.io/autochrome.html

- https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

He uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.

How do you merge changes to a texture, mesh, audio file, etc?

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