dazzawazza

> While it’s far from perfect, writing it taught me more about UI systems than I ever would have learned by sticking to established solutions alone.

This is a great attitude to have. Keep up the great work.

That's a great story. Thank you. I hope you've had the opportunity to give someone else a leg up.

Accepting that people change, and that people are inherently full of contradictions, is part of growing up... and changing.

Alas my work will not allow me to mount a random NFS share but I take your point, simplicity is a virtue.

Nice. I self host using Navidrome, FreeBSD and Wireguard. I have a decent Fibre connection to my house and a static IP so it's "free" to serve.

I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.

Indeed we are. I wish we interacted with the other industries more. There is a lot to learn from video game development where we are driven by soft real-time constraints.

Alas the standards committee is always asking for people like us to join but few of our billion dollar companies will pony up any money. This is despite many of them having custom forks of clang that they maintain.

I'm really enjoying some of the innovation in the BSD space at the moment.

I recently migrated one of my FreeBSD servers to hetzner and it was a breeze. The only wrinkle was that, until you've completed a billing cycle, you can't host an email server as the required ports are blocked.

For me this was fine and I understand why they do this but it wasn't clear to me at the start.

I suspect it's just getting hammered: https://web.archive.org/web/20250923203108/https://tide.org/...

yep, it's the permanent nature of the recording put in to the public sphere that is the game changer for me.

I accept I am visible in public to all who share a space but I do not accept that the ephemeral nature of my existence in that space should be violated.

I agree with you but somethings are missing from the BP experience.

I've implemented many VPLs in video games and I've used Blueprints extensively. I've probably made all the classic "mistakes" designing VPLs, many of which are mentioned in this article. I don't think I am very good at designing VPLs despite having done it on and off for 30 years.

I think BPs are the best example of a VPL out there at the moment. Certainly in video games. However it still falls short of the ideals of VPLs.

Essentially BPs trick people in to being programmers. They still have to understand the "ways" of programming (for loops, if then, etc). With a little context switch and training they would probably be more productive with a text based interface. So the abstraction BPs provide is very limited.

BPs are a general programming tool used for materials, game play logic, animation trees etc. Because of this there are few, if any, high level abstractions that relieve the user of the burden of programming. Don't get me wrong, this is hard, very hard, so I am not calling anyone out. It requires sitting down with a non-technical person and really understanding how they think and what they need. Turning that in to something that isn't node + wire is hard. The fact that the industry has created technical artists to fill the void says to me that BPs are failing to a certain extent (and TAs can just use text based programming and do in many studios).

Overall I agree that the field of VPLs is stuck at a local minima and the 10x productivity improvement for non programmers is still illusive.

I think you are correct. I work in game dev. Almost all code is in C/C++ (with some in Python and C#).

LLMs are nothing more than rubber ducking in game dev. The code they generate is often useful as a starting point or to lighten the mood because it's so bad you get a laugh. Beyond that it's broadly useless.

I put this down to the relatively small number of people who work in game dev resulting in relatively small number of blogs from which to "learn" game dev.

Game Dev is a conservative industry with a lot of magic sauce hidden inside companies for VERY good reasons.

yep, in London it's pretty normal to be driving at 30 and be overtaken by a teenager on a scooter with no insurance, no protective equipment and not a care in the world. They can kill themselves for all I care but they can easily kill a pedestrian or cyclist which doesn't seem reasonable to me.

There is the old adage that every bit of friction increases the chance something won't be done.

Swarm feels like a minimal effort to me and just isn't as frictionless as GitHub. Id rather have Swarm than not, but it's not great.

I mean it might work but you'll still get pull time-outs constantly with LFS. It's expensive to wait two or three days before you can start working on a project. Go way for two weeks, it will be a day before you can "pulled" up to date.

I hope this "new" system works but I think Perforce is safe for now.

> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.

A lot of people don't seem to realise this. I work in game dev and SVN or Perforce are far far better than Git for source control in this space.

In AA game dev a checkout (not the complete history, not the source art files) can easily get to 300GB of binary data. This is really pushing Subversion to it's limits.

In AAA gamedev you are looking at a full checkout of the latest assets (not the complete history, not the source art files) of at least 1TB and 2TB is becoming more and more common. The whole repo can easily come in at 100 TB. At this scale Perforce is really the only game in town (and they know this and charge through the nose for it).

In the movie industry you can multiply AAA gamedev by ~10.

Git has no hope of working at this scale as much as I'd like it to.

When I was in my 20s I realized I had lost the thirst signal. I never felt thirsty. I guessed this was because I lived a comfortable life and I had lost this signal in the noise of modern life.

So I set about deliberately retraining myself. I stopped drinking everything but water (and beer, because life) I'd exercise (and sweat) and then drink water. I retrained my body/mind to savour the pleasantness of drinking water when dehydrated and after a year of conscious effort I more or less recovered the sense of "thirst" and would pre-emptively desire drinking water.

We are pretty simple machines.

Other languages internalise that complexity. C leaves it bare, human scale and understandable.

The speed at which you can write great C code often far outstrips other languages which are applicable to the problem domain.

All languages are a compromise, there are no silver bullets.

Within game development it's Dear ImGui. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support.

Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#.

Forgive me. I've banged my head a few times.

I've come off two motorbikes in the UK. On the first occasion I wore a leather jacket, on the second I had a synthetic jacket on (because it was more comfortable in hot weather).

Both were completely safe. On both occasions I slid along the tarmac for about 10-15 meters, I was travelling at around 30-40 mph. I still wear the same leather jacket 30 years later (not for riding) but the synthetic jacket was a right-off.

On both occasions I really smacked my head: don't mess about with sub-standard crash helmets.

So even though leather is better, we're not racing the TT, we're just going from A-B and if you want to wear synthetic you'll be fine at normal speeds. So if you can't wear leather, for whatever reason, don't let that stop you.

These are strong points and I think the methodology behind Carbon is the correct one. The elephant in the room is that once Google decide to drop Carbon my existing code base will be dependant on a dead technology and then I am screwed.

I find it hard to trust Google to maintain any software nor to write software that is maintainable by a community. They write software for themselves and themselves alone.

> ... and while LLVM is not my favorite compiler, we can thank them for spurring GCC team into action for improving their game.

Exactly. I think people have forgotten just how poor GCC was 15 years ago. Both teams are doing excellent work. Even M$ has been upping it's game with it's compiler!

I agree with you but it irks me more that the search doesn't find the content I'm looking for. Apple Mail search feels much more useful.

There are usually two types of flags. Whole-game and level specific.

For most games I've worked on the most senior game designer will control the game specific flags and then levels will be "owned" by individual designers and they will control the level flags.

Someone, usually the most senior game designer, decides how many flags the game gets and thus the max number of flags each level can have.

If this seems a bit uncontrolled to you.. then yeah it is and yes that's why a lot of games are full of bugs :)

This has become less of an issue as runtime memory has expanded and save games can be HUGE. In the N64 days the constraints were more real and a bloated save game could double the cost cartridge manufacturing and destroy any profit the game made (Nintendo charged a lot more for cartridges with larger battery backed memory).

No. This might seem useless to non game coders but it's a very common pattern in videogames. The state of the world is frequently 1000s of yes/no data points.

It's not rocket science but this seems like a decent enough implementation of it. The number of data points rarely goes beyond thousands so compression doesn't have much value.

Where as in London, where there is at least one house every 8 meters, they were in and out of my street in two days and now we have constant door to door sales people offering deals.

Smells like they "installed" fibre in York to meet a contract/regulation but they really focus on Urban density. Makes sense for them but not for the rest of us.

There is a long running conversation within the medical profession about the usefulness of marginal diagnosis. When everyone has ADHD how do doctors help the people who really NEED help with ADHD. Who 'really' needs help is of course subjective.

I think we can all agree that we are in a period of over medicalisation and we've combined that with a misconception that doctors/drugs/science can cure, and even should cure, everything.

I've used jemalloc in every game engine I've written for years. It's just the thing to do. WAY faster on win32 than the default allocator. It's also nice to have the same allocator across all platforms.

I learned of it from it's integration in FreeBSD and never looked back.

jemalloc has help entertained a lot of people :)

I agree with everything you say except git-lfs works. For modern game dev (where a full checkout is around 1TB of data) git-lfs is too slow, too error prone and too wasteful of disk space.

Perforce is a complete PITA to work with, too expensive and is outdated/flawed for modern dev BUT for binary files it's really the only game in town (closely followed by svn but people have forgotten how good svn was and only remember how bad it was at tracking branch merging).

I use FreeBSD for all my (and my companies) infrastructure. I only use hardware with Intel NICs because they are 100% reliable on FreeBSD. Anything with Realtek seem to crap out under load despite the hard work of the FreeBSD engineers who maintain the drivers (I'm not complaining and I respect their efforts).

It's a small price to pay and it stops me having to install less stable operating systems.