raytopia

Mid 90s sites have a nice look to them. Honestly in some ways they're easier to read then a lot of websites of today.

Is there a reason why designers moved away from that - I'm not sure what to call it - magazine look?

I've been working a lot of some games in Python and Panda3D. I want to make somethingusing the joy cons as motion controls. Also been looking into stackless Python for a text based multiplayer game I'm working on.

I need to update my website at some point its been a while.

Unity is still a pretty good tool overall but just like the author states they are going in too many directions at once and it's hurting usability. And of course there's the problem with Unity Technologies not making enough income to be sustainable long term and trying to capture more value from its users.

I know a lot of people are very excited about Godot replacing Unity but I honestly hope that the 3D engine market becomes more diverse. I'd argue a lot of engine tech and ways of creating games hasn't innovated as much as it could have if there was more competition in the space.

There's a lot of awesome 3D frameworks and engines out there and they should get some attention too.

On home consoles smoothed pixels were common due to CRTs but for the handheld world sharp pixels were the reality. So if you played any 3D DS or GBA games the output would look similar to the results in the article just with a larger color palette.

You could do things the old way. Just accept cash or checks (probably via the mail) and then either mail the product back to the address on the envelope or just send back a piece of paper with a key on it.

There is nothing wrong with making your own engine in fact it can be a good choice if you're able to stay focused on your goal.

A lot of people who want to make games get caught up on the engine aspect and never end up making a game because they look at what other engines have and assume that they need those features.

Instead of asking what features their game needs.

So if you're making a game and want to use a custom engine then make sure you only build what your need and not what you want.

From the article:

"This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says."

Still not sure if that means it's significant or not. Cool none the less though.

For handhelds I'd say the Playdate [0] does this pretty well. Lots of fun and very experimental indie games.

For home consoles I hope a single board computer flls this role one day. In fact I've been experimenting with the raspberry pi to try and turn it into a console for new games but just haven't spent enough time on the project yet.

[0] https://play.date/

Unity has way more tutorials whuch can shorten the learning curve a lot. Another thing to keep in mind is that once you learn one engine it's easy to learn another.

Here is a list [0] of them but should give you a good idea even if it's old. It claims that Javascript is production ready but I can't find much info on Java. So Java probably has 0 support.

I know a lot of people say GDScript is close to both Javascript and Python but it's not close enough for me personally. So if you want to use Python just use one of the Python game enignes (such as Panda3D, Pygame, Arcade, Ursina) instead. Javascript and Java also has a lot of good engines too so don't feel like you have to use Godot.

[0] https://github.com/Godot-Languages-Support/godot-lang-suppor...

It is used for some of the RPG Maker engines [0]. There's also DragonRuby [1] which I believe is made by someone heavily involved in SDL.

I'm sure a lot of people will say it's too slow, etc. but the truth is that great games come from a very wide range of tools and if Ruby fits your needs then you should use it.

[0] https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/

[1] https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

I was hoping this had to do with Sales Tax and VAT remittance because that's the hardest part.

I haven't used React so I'm not sure but you could check their discourse. Someone may have created one.

I believe using intervals and async tasks/events you could do something similar to Manim.

Panda3D [0] (which is what Ursina uses under the hood) and Pygame can both run on the web due to PygBag [1].

Truth be told you can build a game on any tool, obviously the tool you choose will help shape the game you make - but it's more about keeping at it then the underlying technology.

Personally I really like Panda3D and feel like it doesn't get enough attention. It's scene graph [3] is interesting because it splits it into nodes and nodepaths. A node is what gets stored in the graph but you manipulate them using the nodepaths which simplifies programming.

It also has a really amazing aync task manager [2] which makes game programming no problem. You can just pause in a task (or even a event) which sounds simple but you'd be suprised by who many engines won't let you do that.

It also has a multiplayer solution [6] that was battle tested for 2 mmos.

Finally I really like it's interval [4] system which is like Unreal or Unity's timeline but code based.

It's also on pypi [5] so super easy to install.

[0] http://panda3d.org/

[1] https://pypi.org/project/pygbag/

[2] https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/python/programming/tasks-and-e...

[3] https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/python/more-resources/cheat-sh...

[4] https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/python/programming/intervals/i...

[5] https://pypi.org/project/Panda3D/

[6] https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/python/programming/networking/...

Unless the topology is good it may not be worth it.

Seeing that AI is being subsidized by investors I wonder how long it'll take for said investors to want a return on their investments and if AI is too expensive for anyone to actually want to use it. Because I don't think a lot of people would pay the actual cost it takes to run AI.

I like how it feels unique and themes itself around the content it contains. Instead of just being yet another website with a flat simple design. We need more websites like this.

How much is this going to mess up the ability for the federal government to operate?

I can't find a link right now but Salman Khan (the founder of Khan Academy) is a believer that the future of education is 1 teacher for 1 student so it makes sense why they'd be investing so heavily in AI tutors.

Interesting platform because it's open source does thay mean one could easily move off the platform for any reason.

I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.

Has anyone ever figured out if there's a way to design the internet so gatekeepers and centralized platforms don't come to dominate everything? Or are we just doomed to see this happen time and time again.

I love how many python to native/gpu code projects there are now. It's nice to see a lot of competition in the space. An alternative to this one could be Taichi Lang [0] it can use your gpu through Vulkan so you don't have to own Nvidia hardware. Numba [1] is another alternative that's very popular. I'm still waiting on a Python project that compiles to pure C (unlike Cython [2] which is hard to port) so you can write homebrew games or other embedded applications.

[0] https://www.taichi-lang.org/

[1] http://numba.pydata.org/

[2] https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

A little tangential but does anyone know if there are any modern web directories?

I'm wondering because it seems like due to the amount of spam on the web there needs to be more human curation as opposed to algrothims deciding what websites are valuable or not.

Because design trends ebb and flow I'm sure at some point color will be all the rage again as people get tired of minimalism and neutral colors.

Personally I'm hoping it's sooner then later because I want to see more color in design.

That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link! I'll check it out.

I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.

A couple random thoughts.

20 years is a long time makes me wonder what the next 20 years of blogging/websites will look like.

As beginner in web development I'm jealous of the simplicity of web development described at the beginning of the post.

Finally I've held off on putting comments/a guestbook on my website for the same reasons. I don't think I have even close to enough traffic for it to be a issue but if it ends up being one I don't want to deal with it.

I wonder if web directories become more popular again if it would help any of these issues. They seem a lot better for surfing the internet (thus naturally finding new websites) as opposed to searching it.

Lapis is the framework that itch.io uses. [1] It also uses MoonScript [2] as the programming language which was also written by the creator of itch.io/Lapis.

1. https://leafo.net/posts/introducing_itchio.html

2. https://moonscript.org/

It's probably because they're chasing after metrics.