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Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

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Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#53
post #51

Has anyone tried the game? It's almost completely unplayable. I get about ~1 FPS. (OSX 10.6, Chrome) EDIT: appears to work fine in FF

Works very smooth for me (Win 7, Firefox 3.6.8).

  
As a sidenote, this difference of experience highlights a big problem with rich web applications.

You get so high variance in performance depending on a particular combination of hardware, OS and browser that you are virtually predestined to fail hard for some non-negligible part of your userbase (unless your application is so trivial that even on the worst possible platform it would still work ok).

I know, this problem existed with classical games all the time. But there, gamers pretty much came to terms with "hardware requirements" (needed to play the game at all).

With web, expectations are for some reason different. It used to be quite expected and acceptable to buy new GPU/CPU/RAM to play a particular desktop game, yet it seems like too much work just to fire a different browser and copy & paste URL. I know I'm guilty of this myself, despite being developer and regularly working simultaneously with multiple browsers.

And it's just going to get worse as performance spread will widen, both on low-end (more people accessing web through mobile devices) and on high-end (as HW acceleration slowly comes to new generation of browsers).

  

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#54
I seem to miss such contests most of the time and only hear about them when they ended. I would love to attend to some, just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win).

Where would be a good source for such competitions?

Another fun competition I read about was the Super Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8

The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already.

Another fun competition I have heard about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading this is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to have clean, elegant and intelligent code, as less obfuscated as possible. :))

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#56
post #6

I think that watching a five minute video like this of my day before I went home would be more motivating than reviewing my Rescue Time statistics.

How about watching this with a rescuetime output on it (so, watching what you are doing and a scoreboard of rescue time for that snapshot of time)?

That would really lead to me kicking my own ass more for productivity

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#57
post #45
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse has autocomplete and documentation built in as well, right?

Autocomplete is there. Also you have the ability to create your own micros that you can use to build skeletons (like a function, or a loop). I'm not sure about itegrated docs. You'll probably get a brief pop-up (hit-or-miss), but nothing like XCode's inline docs.

FYI: Docs are fully integrated and appear for example together when moving through the list of autocomplete suggestions. Very similar to XCode's inline docs. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl and every function call, class definition and so on becomes a link to the source code defintion of that function or class, respectively. Such are manifold possibilies for tool support in statically typed languages.

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#58
post #53
post #51

Has anyone tried the game? It's almost completely unplayable. I get about ~1 FPS. (OSX 10.6, Chrome) EDIT: appears to work fine in FF

Works very smooth for me (Win 7, Firefox 3.6.8). As a sidenote, this difference of experience highlights a big problem with rich web applications. You get so high variance in performance depending on a particular combination of hardware, OS and browser that you are virtually predestined to fail hard for some non-negligible part of your userbase (unless your application is so trivial that even on the worst possible pl…

Except that this isn't a rich web application--this is a java applet.

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#59
post #51

Has anyone tried the game? It's almost completely unplayable. I get about ~1 FPS. (OSX 10.6, Chrome) EDIT: appears to work fine in FF

Exactly the same here.

It's a chrome bug. Or a Chrome/Java/OSX combo bug. The game plays fine in Safari or FF.

Re: Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer

#60

He really did that all without a search engine or looking at any API docs?? Maybe it's just cause I'm not a games programmer, but that's insane. How does he know what he's programming to?

As someone else pointed out, the programmer is Notch, the guy behind Minecraft, which is also written in Java, so I assume he has been neck-deep in the Java graphics APIs long enough to have enough of it memorized.
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