dyselon

It's a fantastic book, for sure. Gamasutra published an excerpt of it when it came out, going over some of the section on the main game loop: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132587/book_excerpt_ga...

The most interesting part to me was that they said the NSA did internal audits of analyst queries. I hope someone leaks the results of those.

The rest of it seemed in line with the initial PRISM release, and also (kinda) what they've been saying all along: they nab everything, but only read it if they "reasonably" think you're foreign, and if they're wrong, they keep any "interesting" bits anyway.

Well, depending on your goals. I'm doing a pretty good job meeting mine with the resources I've got, so I don't mind kicking in a bit to give other people the opportunity to do the same.

Uploading sketches via wifi is a unique feature, isn't it?

Modding is a great way to get in the industry, especially into the design jobs the OP claims don't exist.

Between gameplay programming and tools, a significant portion of the programming staff of a AAA game will not be overwhelmingly mathematically inclined. That's only one of many outright lies in this article.

Interesting! When did it come out?

Aren't gorgeous looking Robotron clones kind of a dime a dozen since Geometry Wars?

It's sort of true. If you get your foot in the door (almost always test), and you don't have the relevant skills for tech or art, you're pretty much left with design and production as career paths. This leaves both those disciplines with a number of career-minded individuals who don't really have much passion for game design or product management, respectively.

Honestly, though, I don't think it's that bad. Design is kind of hard to get in, so most testers that aren't passionate about it end in production, and most designers spend their time implementing content. endianswap's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408304 mirrors my own experience in the industry.

His post-2000 career is basically just Tabula Rasa. Lineage II is Korean made. City of * is all Cryptic (and later Paragon). Garriott is only attached to those products by way of being high up in NCsoft's US division at the time.

> Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior.

To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part.

I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues.

Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums.

[EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.

This definitely does make a lot more sense than throwing out your whole app and rewriting it in many situations, but I'm always a little hinky about moving stuff into C just because it has so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. You can obviously create bugs in any language (I know I certainly have!), but Go really does hit a nice spot between safety, productivity, and speed, so I can definitely see the attraction.

Definitely not. Big band would be significantly less, however, if not for crowd funding specific costs (backer rewards, payment fees), and services a publisher generally provides (QA, first party fees). Also, the 8th character counts for way less, since most of her frames were reused from other characters.

I was a designer on the game, and while it's hard to look back and tell you exactly how much time was spent on character specific stuff vs. general features since people's time was often split awkwardly, I'd say the clear majority of resources were spent on character specific stuff. Art was by far the largest team, and worked almost exclusively on character specific stuff. Design was more evenly split, but definitely leaned towards characters. Tech was unsurprisingly mostly other features, but was a small, small team (poor Ben and Rick )= )

Just work with her to find time to do what you want. If you lay out some things that are important to you, ask her to give up some weeknights (or whatever it takes for you) with you in the code cave to help you get there, and are prepared to sacrifice the occasional inspired time when stuff that's super important to her comes up, you'll be fine. I mean, she's your wife. She wants to see you accomplish stuff that's important to you, right? Make her a partner in doing that. Like lots of stuff in marriage, its about communication and compromise. Congratulations on the marriage, by the way!

Like a lot of people that played Fez, I recently did some frequency analysis by hand, to crack the alphabet in that game. It was pretty tedious, and I messed up frequently. I wouldn't blame her for giving up after a few mistakes.

A while back I started to mess around with lua + libuv, and found it pretty easy to write "blocking" functions that would yield to its caller a function responsible for setting up the requisite events to wake itself back up.

If you want to see what this would look like, it's extremely ugly since I didn't work on it much (as it was easier to just use luvit and node-fibers), but I did put it up on github at http://github.com/dyselon/loquat, and you can see examples of it in the timer example of the readme, and the uncommented parts of examples/test.lua. Maybe it'll be of some use or inspiration to someone.

There a lot of cruft in those examples, but in practical usage, everything but your blocking calls would be hidden behind libraries. It's pretty easy to set up similar fiber-friendly wrappers for your favorite node.js libraries, too, if you're fond of the node-fibers add-on.

I'm quite fond of both games, but it's dangerous to directly compare them. GW1 is a Diablo style game that flirts with massive elements, whereas GW2 is much more of a traditional MMO. They certainly have plenty of things in common - a similar approach to/focus on PvP, similar action bar combat with a lot of attention paid to status effects - but they're not even really in the same genre, and GW2's focus on ad-hoc collaboration means that GW2 plays much differently moment-to-moment.

GW2 does some great things with quests, their PQ-ish Dynamic Events work well, and their huge raid-boss-y world dudes are a ton of fun. The way you can join multiple guilds and the way you are scaled down in level based on where you are makes it really easy to play with friends regardless of your individual progression. It's definitely worth a look.

I just use parens every time as well.

Remembering to call a function differently depending on whether it has arguments or not has been a common source of errors for me.

It's also much easier for me to parse the difference between "foo(bar(baz))" and "foo(bar, baz)" than it is for me to parse the difference between "foo bar baz" and "foo bar, baz"

I'm not really sure from this comment what your objection to counting calories is.

Is it that you can't do it accurately? That seems to be implied by the second two questions. I haven't found that accuracy actually matter that much; mostly what's important is nominal calories over time vs. weight/other health indicators over time. If the number's not technically accurate, I kind of don't care. All I know is I roughly ate so many calories, my weight changed by x amount, and I can walk x far without getting tired. Over time, I can have a pretty good guideline for the number of "back of the box" calories I should be eating to reach my targets (which addresses your first question of "what range to target")

You mention explicitly that most people won't do it over the long term, which is definitely relevant. But even doing it for a little while can give you a good baseline so you can at least make educated guesses as to what you're eating, which is especially helpful in the "food truck burger" scenario.

I guess my point is that we all agree knowing roughly how many calories you're eating is good, but the only way I know to figure that out is to, at least for a while, literally count them. There's still a huge margin for error, of course, but if I didn't keep tabs on it by looking at the back of the box, I'd have no idea at all.

I agree. Personally, the locations that I find really fascinating about the arcade revival are the ones like GC, Southtown, and Super Arcade that are primarily focused on being community centers.

MS has pretty strict size restrictions on title updates, since they have to fit in cache for users with no real hard drives. This means you're not going to deliver new content through patches anyway - you have to distribute it through DLC instead. This leads to about a million other problems, primarily when it comes to compatibility between players online who may or may not have the DLC, duplicating content since you're required to not have dependencies between your DLC, and the fact that MS frowns on free DLC.

Just genuinely curious, as I assume it's some bit of Javascript weirdness I don't know, but why the tostring rigmarole over "obj instanceof Array"

She's clearly a World of Darkness fan.

It helps quite a bit. It's really easy to write a glue layer between Lua and whatever C library you want. The downside is that you still have to actually write that glue.

It should probably be noted that Lua gets along less well with C++, so that glue is a bit harder to write for C++ libs. There are tools that will automatically generate that glue for C++, but I'm not familiar with them.

There are a variety of switches and buttons, wire, NOR gates, and a small handful of mechanical devices, the most important of which are pistons that allow you to move blocks around.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but if we don't matter to content creators, I'm baffled as to why they spend so much time bitching about us.

Just a warning to programmers implementing the first technique: Time your release of that memory carefully, and coordinate with other programmers.

Your designers and artists know about the technique and grudgingly accept it BUT having multiple different programmers independently come up having "found" some memory AFTER I spent all day cutting everything from my level instead of fixing bugs...