joeyjojo

I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference.

I feel like I am doing the right thing by buying fruit and vegetables instead of processed food. Do I now need to make further consideration and question the impact of my choices because I am ignoring the ugly apples? Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

This resonates with me as I have a similar thoughts on consciousness. The way I try to express my thoughts on this is to imagine that consciousness is a fabric that permeates the entire universe, but there exist these kind of extremely dense pockets of consciousness (ie, within us and our brains) where the fabric is tightly bound. Every kind of system that exists within the universe naturally lends itself to being conscious. The more complex the system the greater the density of consciousness it yields. Perhaps we cannot perceive consciousness in most (simpler) systems because it is minuscule compared to the density of consciousness within our brains, although we do tend to get these spooky kinds of insights and intuitions into the higher-order consciousness that emerges from many brains combined, such as collective consciousness, gaia, mass hysteria, etc.

I have been using Haxe for side projects for around 5 years now, and continue to be impressed at its power, despite syntactically being quite a simple language. It's refreshing for me to go back to a Haxe codebase after looking at Typescript or Swift code, and it highlights how bloated other programming languages are becoming. A spread operator would be nice though :)

I am learning music production through a course on monthly.com, by Andrew Huang. I'm learning a lot of cool tricks and have made a lot of progress in my music production skills so far.

It is challenging though as I am creating my music on a Synthstrom Deluge instead of a typical DAW. Most of the concepts so far (1 week in) are still applicable although it requires a bit of creativity to apply certain concepts.

Any chance you could share your recipes?

It is available on Github:

https://github.com/jackwlee01/Easy-ECS

It is an AS3 library that I use for my Adobe Air games.

I spent quite a lot of time exploring ECS before building my own ECS library for developing 2D games. I have found that with my (minuscule) ECS library it greatly alleviates just about all of the issues I was facing with normal OOP. Everything scales extremely well, the code is almost crystal clear, and it makes code structure very simple. I'm not sure how you could effectively apply ECS outside of simulation style applications but I'm interested to see what influence it has in other domains such as UI.

Adobe should do it because lots of people still use Adobe Air and Animate CC (previously called Flash Professional) to build games. If they could make the vector animation capabilities fast with WebAssembly it would bring back a set of extremely fast and flexible workflows for building games. There presently seem to be a lack of viable workflows for building games with vector animations, which is where Flash's strengths have always been.

Most of new games built with Flash are using Stage3D which runs on the GPU. These games however don't really rely much on the vector capabilities and animation timeline, which still uses the CPU. Adobe could probably make a vector renderer run on the GPU though. Some people have made vector animation renderers as a proof of concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgRiMhP4q4

I should have elaborated a bit more on this point, and I mistakenly used the wrong terminology. I was thinking specifically of Typescript type definitions when I wrote about externs, and was meaning to refer more so to the concept in a general sense (across all transpilers). That said I do use a number of high quality externs with Haxe (the Pixi.JS one is excellent).

I agree with what you say about writing your own externs with a subset of the functionality, and I think it is often a better approach than relying on potentially flakey externs. Still I think this sort of workflow is only suited to particular types of projects and especially in a team environment it makes more sense to avoid niche ecosystems.

I have successfully used Haxe in isolated cases to build games for WebGL and Canvas. I think transpilers are most useful when you rarely want to reach outside of your own code, or you only need to rely on a few key libraries that are known to be well supported within the ecosystem of your transpiler language. I also struggle without a static compiler, so for my case it makes sense to use a transpiler, even with all of its pitfalls.

If there is one thing however that I have learned from using transpilers it is that externs as a whole are a huge waste of time, as it can be difficult to determine their quality upfront. If you are building a Node backend or SPA, you are going to need to rely heavily on existing libraries and will probably find yourself constantly hitting walls while you try to swim against the current of the ecosystem if you try to use a transpiler.

As a designer I think the design is really bad. It may work pretty well from a functional point of view, but the readability could be improved dramatically with just a few typographical adjustments. If you gave this page to a designer and said, change nothing but the font, font size, colour, padding, and margins you could keep the functionally the same but it make much more comfortable on the eyes and easier to decipher.

A similar animation tool that I use regularly is Flump, which exports nested Flash animations as texture atlases and XML. It is a fantastic tool if you are an ex-Flash developer looking for a fast workflow with great animation performance.

I have just released a runtime that supports canvas/webgl through PixiJS. It is currently available for Haxe developers but I will be releasing a bower package soon.

https://github.com/tconkling/flump

https://github.com/jackwlee01/pixi-flump-runtime