danbolt

If you’re being objective about a programming language, its strengths and weaknesses are always going to a reflection of the game you’re trying to make. Python’s ecosystem will get you very far making web services, but less so with cert on consoles.

C# and GDScript are no different. They both have made design decisions for particular reasons.

You’re a skilled developer in real languages, so I’d encourage you to explore why other developers might prefer a DSL for their needs!

My philosophy has always been “ergonomic scripting or drop to C++”, so I’m quite okay with it.

C# has always felt a bit clunky to me. It’s nice to have alternatives.

I tried the 7DFPS Game Jam this month, trying to learn a little more 3D modelling, as well as Godot. It was my first time using the engine to produce a HTML5 build.

https://danbolt.itch.io/7dfps-2025

Within the scope of a game’s production, the programmer time spent dogfooding the new audio format can be used towards something else that improves the value of the end product.

The uncompressed audio for latency-sensitive one-shots usually isn’t taking up the bulk of memory either.

The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.

A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.

The Nintendo 64 has a z-buffer, but the slow fillrate means that depth-checking can hamper your frame time. World Driver Championship sorted their polygons PS1-style with unique microcode, and got a very nice framerate.

I sometimes wonder what the Nintendo 64’s library would have been like if they had sorted polygons on the CPU like other consoles of the era.

I don’t know if I could list something that matches say Cuphead or Silksong, but I do think that Godot is currently on a Clayton Christiansen-style worse-is-better ascent right now.

When my parents had a house built in the early 2000s, my father was adamant that Ethernet should be wired to every room. It seemed like a good way to future-proof the building for the 21st century at the time. The year we moved in, tweenage me asked about connecting my Nintendo DS to the internet in order to play Animal Crossing online.

I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going to become so common.

I’ve lived in places where they’ll add the bike path during scheduled road work, as it’s cheaper to get it done while there’s a crew already onsite. It can be a bit stochastic at first like you mention, but over a while I’ve seen the corridor eventually fill out, making the most of a shoestring budget.

Perhaps something similar where you live?

One of the screens on the Vancouver SkyTrain platform crashed once and displayed the xfce logo, which made me feel a bit of excitement in wondering how it was implemented.

Sometimes we do our own laundry, sometimes we pump our own gas, and sometimes we prepare our own meals. Not having a servant to do those things for us doesn’t make us destitute; it makes us human.

I promise I’m not that whiggish when it comes to automation, but there was a time when a good portion of human labour was washing clothing, and now that’s become much less of a thing for much of the world.

Perhaps food service and in-person retail will start to go that way too. It’s my hope we can navigate that and still make a place where it won’t be so bad.

I really like the UI’s use of screen real estate on mobile!

For studying N5 and N4, I’ve found Bunpro’s lesson grouping by JLPT levels a really nice format. It’s been encouraging seeing a progress bar for each step of the journey. I’d suggest looking for inspo there too if that interests you.

Depends how many guys one has dated before.

I embedded it at a game studio for PC and game consoles a few years ago. We opted for JavaScript over Lua for reasons I can’t disclose, but runtime performance was sufficient for our needs. I liked having reference counting since the determinism gave our tech lead a bit of confidence before cert.

We had some performance issues with marshalling and unmarshalling, but that was mostly due to API design and how our codebase was structured. As per usual, optimizing scripts was the best bang for buck.

I think you’re in your right to close your account, but itch has a public history[1] of generally being in agreement with you. Leafo talked about feeling a responsibility to host the unique and diverse content the platform holds. [2] This is further exemplified by deindexing/demonetizing adult content rather than swiftly deleting everything in a crass, cover-your-ass, manner.

It strikes me that they had a gun held to their head by a mobster. If itch didn’t comply, they’d lose all their revenue, and we’d lose the website in its entirety, which is much more than just smut.

Pushing back against the payment processors, rather than itch under duress, would have made money talk in the right direction. The difficulty in doing so is reflected in the discussion here.

[1] https://x.com/itchio/status/1478123227394150400 [2] https://youtu.be/9v4ppSSpb0I

After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.

> You might look at the HDR representations of this game and think “Wait, the game appears more colorful” and this is because of the Hunt Effect. The Hunt Effect describes how we think a brighter color is more saturated, but in reality, it’s just an optical illusion.

Sounds like an incredibly cost-effective optical illusion!

> It has a terrible scripting language

Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games.

Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific features such as `$` and `@export` that are idiomatic to the engine’s architecture.

Super Mario Strikers seems to have a fixed timestep with interpolated presentation, which was somewhat more uncommon back in 2002. It looks like doing so benefitted its Wii sequel, where they needed synchronized online play.

It’s interesting to see emulator devs and rom hackers leverage this for high-framerate displays in 2025.

They weren’t, but they were zoned and organized a lot differently compared to our post-war world of today.

I haven’t used Deno, but I can imagine it can be a bit like finding a C library that doesn’t malloc under the hood. You end up having to search through a hidden subset of the broader ecosystem.

I appreciate you voicing your feelings here. My previous employer requested we try AI tooling for productivity purposes, and I was finding myself in similar scenarios to what you mention. The parts that would have benefitted from a productivity gain weren’t seeing any improvement, while the areas that saw a speedup weren’t terribly mission-critical.

The one thing I really appreciated though was the AI’s ability to do a “fuzzy” search in occasional moments of need. Or, for example, sometimes the colloquial term for a feature didn’t match naming conventions in source code. The AI could find associations in commit messages and review information to save me time rummaging through git-blame. Like I said though, that sort of problem wasn’t necessarily a bottleneck and could often be solved much more cheaply by asking around coworker on Slack.

I’ll be the first to defend the greybeards I’ve befriended and learned from in AAA, but having seen codebases of that age and earlier, the “meta” around game development was different back then. I think the internet really changed things for the better.

Your average hire for the time might have been self-taught with the occasional C89 tutorial book and two years of Digipen. Today’s graduates going into games have fallen asleep to YouTube lectures of Scott Meyers and memorized all the literature on a fixed timestep.

Watching two people who know how to play Puyo Puyo Tsuu and when to reflect or cancel out the garbage blocks is incredibly dynamic.

It’s a bit of a shame Sega/Nintendo chose to localize the first game in the series rather than the sequel with the updated rules.

I found the aforementioned elements of Blue Velvet to be very uncomfortable to watch, but I also don’t think it was necessarily a work of obscenity on Lynch’s part. It always struck me that the film’s violence was intentionally framed in suburban noir. Or, that way the audience might wonder about the darker parts of 20th century Americana around them, much like Lynch did as a child.

That said, I’m on the fence if whether or not the violence in the movie felt earned to me or not.

So for a while I briefly worked the same company as Aaron Kambietz. During my time there, I asked him how the developers came to the conclusion to use a vertex-coloured skybox like they did in the article.

If my memory serves, he said the primary reason was wanting to hit a particular memory budget for the appropriate minspec at the time. Or, they felt any memory dedicated to textures was better spent on the spaceships. The vertex data was hand-authored by the artists tracing over original artwork (I think on a Wacom-style tablet). He stressed that it was arduous work and took a few weeks!

I’m not a big PG stan, but gosh darn the submarine isn’t submerged here. It’s up in the air!

Semiconductors are a magical thing, and I’ve always felt like their quick obsolescence is a bit sad.

It’s really lovely to see that we can keep making them useful and relevant.

I feel like there’s an opportunity to revisit this with those "You wouldn't download a car." jokes.