bemmu

I'm a dev on the platform and agree that there is a lot of jank in Roblox games.

There's some indication of more polish coming, as recently many games have been rewarded (Pressure, Shovelware's Brain Game etc.) from having more polished animations. Devs respond quickly to seeing other games succeed and take notes. The tools are also getting better. It's gradually getting less nightmarish to try to import a working skeletal animation from Blender to Roblox Studio.

Could Roblox games benefit from more polish? Absolutely, but it's less important than having quick access to a high variety of games with consistency in how you play them.

Perhaps the most massive benefit of jank-tolerance is that it lets devs "gradient descent" towards a game players want. If you released a janky proto on Steam, you'd miss your shot, get an "overall negative" review and be done. On Roblox you can release a janky proto, see its metrics, improve over time until you have something people want.

I'm a full-time developer of Roblox games.

It's wild that Apple or Google make as much from my games as I do. Obviously it still works out well enough since I'm not abandoning the platform, but strange anyway.

With generative AI for text, images, and now even video, it must be harder than ever to know if you are even talking to a real person.

OpenAI used this when they launched ChatGPT. I recall answering these questions.

I have to agree $100k/day seems close to unbelievably high, so I had to do some napkin math. In short, it seems it may be possible.

If the avg player dies 10 times, and the ads shown had $.5 CPM, then to make a dollar you'd need only 200 players. So to make $100k/day you'd need 20M daily actives, which is very high but it was really popular around those days.

Is 20M daily actives possible? Yes, because if the average play session is 15 minutes, with that many players you'd have ~200k concurrent players. There's currently a game on Steam called "banana" where you just click on bananas, and that one has 292k concurrents. There are also several Roblox games with that many concurrents, so it checks out.

It’s my understanding that Infinite Craft alone is probably so popular that those ads actually bring in decent revenue.

For comparison, at one point slither.io, which is another browser game (not his project) was bringing in $100k/day from one ad unit showed each time the player dies https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-slither-io-goes-viral-games-...

There was also a scene in the movie Strange Days, which has the plot that in the future memories can be recorded and then replayed (even by other people) like movies. In the scene someone gets their brain fried by having a short loop of pleasure played for hours on end.

The melody thing I assume I have not suddenly become a master composer, rather the part of my mind capable of judging whether the music is any good has become impaired.

This seems to assume everyone drinks every cup of coffee in a cafe every time?

3,700,000,000,000 jpy to usd = $23B USD

Roblox client does as much as possible in Lua(u). It's somewhat well known that Luau is the language Roblox games are scripted in, but even before you enter a game, for the sake of portability everything is written as much as possible in Luau.

Avatar selection screens, groups, settings etc. all make for a huge number of different screens, so I'm assuming they want React to better coordinate making all that GUI between the huge number of internal devs they must have.

Just my guess, I've personally never used React and am not 100% on whether the Roblox app uses React-lua internally or not.

My first encounter with an Atari ST was when I visited a recording studio as a kid. They were in the middle of a recording session, and I asked if I can play with the Atari while they were doing that. "No, you see, we are running the whole recording session with this Atari..."

I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words.

Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok maybe if I focus these concepts can have some form to them, so yeah I'm actually totally seeing things (wow he has mental imagery).

So if you made 100 clones of me take a questionnaire, you might see 50% reporting aphantasia and 50% saying they have mental images, even though they're actually the same.

Fixed it.

Fair enough. I hadn't personally encountered knapsack/bin packing problems before, so it wasn't immediately obvious this fell into such a category. Just thought I'd blog my practical encounter with the problem as I was exploring it.

I assume AI detectors are like online IQ tests. It doesn't matter for their popularity whether they are correct or not.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Everyone has watched a TV show where a case is slowly being solved, but who actually considers that oh yeah, I could actually become the person who searches for a random missing person case, instead of watching it on Netflix?

And the amount of McGyvering involved! How many people would have given up at one of the steps? Oh it requires coding in C++ for Arduino, sure, I'll just do that. Oh, it requires me to contact manufacturers to manufacture something, which I have never done, and I don't even know how to use a 3D modeling program. Sure, I'll just learn how to do that and then actually have it made. Pretty sure the give-up rate there would be very high!

If this were TV, people would hardly consider it plausible. And they did it, for real. And all out of just pure curiosity!

I have a list of things I'd like to learn, which I sort periodically based on my priorities, then ignore it and follow the nearest shiny object.

I also live in Japan. Here people bathe in the evening, while I'm finding it hard to shake my habit of taking a morning shower (spend the whole day dirty? ick).

This means if it's raining, we'll have clothes drying in the bathroom, which I'll then need to move out to take a shower. Whether it makes sense to then put them back in to the now wet bathroom with the dryer running I'm not sure.

One of my tasks at my first job at 17 was writing some visual basic involving train track tilt formulas for a national railway. I dearly hope no-one is actually using it anywhere, and has never used it anywhere.

The only problem is that it also replays the part which caused the universe to crash.

It’s ok, when it crashes it reboots and runs the same way from the beginning, so it would be like nothing even happened.

Perhaps to give a metric to include in the announcement when (if) such a new model is released.

Promoting App Lab apps was the most exciting part of this announcement.

I had been put off porting anything to Quest since I'd need to get official Meta blessing to actually get store presence to have enough users to pay for such an effort, but now if you can publish in App Lab and actually get some in-store promotion, it starts to sound way more compelling.

I do agree with their initial approach to keep the perceived quality of the first apps high. But reality is that people want to play what they find fun/funny, even if less polished, and this change might open up some store promotion for such apps that solo devs like me are more likely to be able to make.

The first look-up table effect that really impressed me was to use them for making a textured tunnel.

You have a look-up table such that for each pixel on the screen, you know its angle and distance from the center of the screen. With this you can pick which texel to put at each pixel location.

It looks as if you are moving in a tunnel with 3D geometry, but it's so cheap you can even do it on pico: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=63818

At first I thought the game Stardust must have used this effect, but reading up on it just now they actually just play a repeating 6 frame animation for the background! https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/stardust/

This is the current culture, but culture can change.

There may come a time when a new way of thinking will spread, causing this trend to reverse.

You would also enjoy "American Factory" (2019). It's a documentary about a Chinese company taking over an old General Motors factory and hiring Americans to work there.

Personally want “photopea for audio”. Basically Audacity on the web as sleek as Photopea, for the times when I just want to trim some audio and do other basic edits.

What would be “minimal viable vehicle physics”?

I’ve been prototyping an f-zero type game and so far have:

- pressing forward increases thrust

- thrust makes vehicle accelerate forward

- friction is higher for the component of velocity perpendicular to tires

- vehicle turns faster when it is moving faster (I don’t actually simulate tire direction)

- as a hack to make it feel a bit like drifting, make the vehicle visually turn more than it is actually turning

Any simple thing I should add?

Going forward, it will be able to remember you did not pay your previous tips.