DizzyDoo

Some links for these:

• https://retream.itch.io/quod-init-exit-iio

• https://protovision.itch.io/sams-journey

• https://csdb.dk/release/?id=212190

Yes, in the past I've both rolled my own localisation system and used Unity's localization package, and the official package is really excellent. There's Google Sheets integration[0], Pseudo language generation for testing[1], and the system for templated strings/nested strings/strings that only slightly differ based on gendered words, is really deep.

[0] - https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.localization@1.0...

[1] - https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.localization@1.0...

I've been regularly devblogging the development of my spooky monster zoo management game (The Eldritch Zookeeper) for a few years now - https://www.youtube.com/@CranktrainGames/videos

The game project has gone quite the distance from everything being quickly sketched sprites + checkerboard textures, to everything being shiny & polished, and running cross-platform on PC and consoles.

I thought Adyen had a minimum payment volume threshold set? 1000 payments a month, or something similar?

I'm really just using Blender for modelling and UV unwrapping (and I've used the paint-to-texture feature once) and I think it's pretty solid, but I really haven't gone near sculpting or anything soft-surface/organic. I probably need to model another dozen things to get up to my Modo ability though.

Early in the year I made the switch from Modo (by The Foundary) to Blender 3.x, and I've been enjoying it. Since I use 3D software for my video games business it's quite daunting to switch a significant part of your workflow over, because the muscle-memory of all the shortcuts is all there, and you've learnt the Way To Do Things™ in that particular piece of software.

As much as I liked Modo, I was paying a monthly subscription, and now with Blender I don't and it's got this enormous open-source community that provides a lot of long-term confidence, which I wasn't quite getting with Modo. The UI changes going from 2.x to 3.x was pretty important in my decision to switch.

One thing I found helpful when moving 3d modelling softwares was to setup all the keyboard shortcuts to your previous software's bindings, and then you can tackle figuring out the UI, the different object modes and the Blender Way To Do Things™. There's plenty of preference files around on the web that you can plug them in and get going quite quickly

In the UK it's really easy too, perhaps even easier, the registration form is entirely online [0] and then you pay £12.

[0] - https://www.gov.uk/limited-company-formation/register-your-c...

As a counterpoint, The Atlantic ran an interesting article[0] yesterday suggesting that it's not really clear what the Octopuses' aims are when they do this, and that we do really like to anthropomorphize them.

[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/gloomy-o...

> The phenomenon of precession — in which Earth slowly wobbles on its axis by around one degree every 72 years — means that the position of the fixed stars slowly shifts in the sky. The researchers were able to use this to check when the ancient astronomer must have made his observations, and found that the coordinates fit roughly 129 bc — during the time when Hipparchus was working.

That's amazing, using the discovered results themselves to step backwards and find out when the observations were made.

> - Blending colours is just a matter of linear interpolation.

I recall there being a particularly contentious bug report for Adobe Photoshop eight or nine years ago. The original thread is here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-g... - but all the users have been replaced by "FeedbackCommunityMember", so it's a bit hard to figure out who is talking to who (perhaps someone can find a properly archived url).

In any case, an Adobe product person was unbelievably stubborn about their assumption there is just a single way colours can blend one to another, and that all the other ways couldn't possibly be desirable. It was pretty hard to read.

I think Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a fantastic documentary and recommend it also.

I came away with a different impression, in that I certainly don't admire or want to share Jiro's attitude to work, because the perfection-at-all-costs approach looked like it had a pretty devastating fallout on his wife and his two sons. It's a fascinating documentary in that you'll either come away saying "how inspirational!" or "I'm running 100 miles away from that", and that's interesting in itself.

"Having none is better"... but there are some incredibly useful assets on the Unity Asset store? Here are three off the top of my head that I've used for a while now and they're worth every penny:

Shapes - https://acegikmo.com/shapes/docs/

Easy Save 3 - https://moodkie.com/easysave/

InControl - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/input-management... (but I've also heard Rewired is excellent.)

Unity would be far poorer for missing them.

On one hand, BlitzBasic and BlitzMax represents a key moment for me, ~15 years ago, of finally 'getting' programming - I clearly remember as a teenager, in front of a Blitz IDE, when some basic concepts clicked together, and here I am many years later a full-time indie game developer.

But on the other hand, I've watched from afar enough of the post-Blitz tool development to be skeptical of anything new. Monkey 2 and Monkey X really didn't flourish and a lot of that community get badly burnt and moved on. (Have a cursory scroll of the comments of this itch.io page[0] for a fuller account by people who were closer to the action.)

So while I'm very thankful for the good ol' days of BlitzBasic and BlitzMax that did a lot for me personally, I can't see myself trusting or touching anything else coming from the same place for quite some time.

[0] - https://blitzresearch.itch.io/monkey2

Of course, he just called it a "handheld mobile telephone", that's tongue-in-cheek.

I'm really going to miss the behind-the-scenes year-end posts about Candy Japan! I've been reading them for a decade or so? I hope you'll keep blogging and sharing what you're up to, but even if not, thank you for all those fascinating glimpses into the finances and numbers behind a fun product.

I believe it's this one: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/07/31

One feature that audio editing software really needs, if you're working with voice over or podcast audio, is a decent range of basic compression filters to apply. Whether it's just one person's voice or multiple people's, you need to shift the dynamic range of all the inputs into a sensible range, and with a sensible average loudness - just your basic management of levels. This is the first thing I look for, does teapodo have this?

Adobe Audition (not free) and Davinci Resolve's Fairlight (free, but obviously packaged with the rest of Resolve) have a bunch of filters, effects and even some helpful presets that make this straightforward.

Yeah, I've done some useful things with pygame. My game business almost entirely uses Unity, but I do find that Python is helpful for tool development as, like you, I know the language well. Often it's a lot speedier to write a quick visual tool in Python that generates a bunch of json data that gets loaded in as a text asset and parsed, than it is to write the same thing as an editor plugin (at least for me!) Using Python + pygame or Python + PySDL2[0] gets you rendering stuff on the screen and receiving input, fast.

I've also used the Twisted Matrix[1] for some online TCP-based game server work, and that was pretty positive, though the library is quite daunting to figure out. That was 8 years ago though, perhaps there are better libraries nowadays.

Writing an entire game in Python might be an uphill struggle though. The interpreter is really slow, so a JIT alternative like Pypy[2] is very necessary. On my game server project I remember having to use a combination of Pypy and writing the tightest inner-most parts of my simulation loop in Cython to get the server tick to the target. As much as I love Python, if you're comfortable with Godot, it's probably a better long term investment with fewer headaches along the way.

[0] - https://pypi.org/project/PySDL2/

[1] - https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/

[2] - https://www.pypy.org/

GPU prices have been dropping steadily since January[0], which is nice to see. Still plenty of demand, but I hope my poor GeForce 960 can hang in there another 6 months before I have to upgrade.

[0] - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index

A slight correction here, the download of the exe does take place over https. As does buying the software, and signing up to the forums. But everything else doesn't?

The software itself is some of the smoothest and most stable I've ever used. And when there's an update within the software that, as far as I'm aware, takes place over https too.

But the rest of the site and forums, even when signed in, is http, and I don't really know why.

There's a piece of animation software that I use in my game development called Spine, and it's truly fantastic and the developers and staff are great... but the PHPBB forums don't have https enabled. I've brought it up on these same forums[0] but I don't think they get why https is an important thing to turn on, even in 2022.

Turning on https mode in my browser brings up, as it should, a large error message saying that the site is insecure. I can't imagine that's a terribly good first impression, even though, again, Spine is one of the best animation packages out there.

[0] - http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/HTTPS-for-EsotericSoftware...

The sort of things I have had running on a schedule (using Celery[0] or something like it) are sending a set of emails at a certain time, running a report or generating the data for reports, even running a backup of some data.

[0] - https://docs.celeryq.dev/en/stable/userguide/periodic-tasks....

I think we'd all probably welcome that... except Apple, because I just did a quick Google and it does look like Apple have successfully patented (Patent 7,932,897) the clicky wheel input. So I don't think a US based company like Analogue could get away with that!

I imagine that Apple would never bring back an iPod in the future with the clicky wheel because it could be perceived as 'backwards looking' and cuts against their desired image as 'innovators' who bring out the 'next thing'. Bit sad, because my memory of the later generations of the Nano is that it was an excellent device.

It's probably true that most people just get their music and podcasts through streaming services on their phones though, so perhaps they don't care to keep a niche product around.

Your camera-based solution would be trivial to cheat at though; simply have two cubes where one is in the solved state. So, incredibly time consuming to implement while also not really helping much aside from security theater.

John Cleese had a joke about the Baseball World Series where he would quip "I notice you didn't invite Belgium this year."

I think you may have gotten mixed up between Shopify and Spotify - this is an announcement by the latter, not the former. They're spelled so similarly so it's an easy mistake to make.

One quite interesting use of Ruby outside of Rails was its inclusion as the scripting language in various versions of RPG Maker, a popular piece of game creation software. The developers of the software are Japanese, like Yukihiro Matsumoto, and I gather Ruby is used in broader situations in Japan than Rails.

A naive grid-lock would not quite be good enough for Factorio. Yes, there is a grid, but there's also a grid within that grid, if you mine a rock for instance there will be four pieces of rock lying within that one grid cell, and perhaps you want to pick up just one of them. Then there's combat which doesn't take place on the grid, sometimes you want to shoot a shell or a rocket between a few biters which don't neatly fit in any one cell, and they're moving quite quickly that you need a mouse pointer's freedom you shoot where you want.

It's an interesting problem, I'm looking forward to how they approach the proper controller support later in the year. I suspect Keyboard + Mouse will always be the most comfortable way to play though.

> America has blacklisted big Russian financial institutions, preventing its own banks from dealing with them, and imposed strict export controls. These measures are much narrower in scope than disconnecting Russia from SWIFT, but they cut more deeply.

Is that true? It sounds counter-intuitive to me, someone who uses SWIFT payments a lot but isn't at all an economist or super into foreign policy, that the US blacklisting a few big Russian banking institutions would cut deeper than the immediate and total removal from the larger payment network. But if that is indeed the case, why not both? The answer the article gives for that is "it would hurt the West's investments/position with respect to China" which, yes, makes sense, but is that pain worth it? A few decades of land wars across the European continent would do that too, right?