Live data from Hacker News

VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

distractionware.com

141–150 of 232 posts

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not really out of the ordinary for successful, released, real games Well said. A lot of people will nitpick and talk big about how they would use proper abstraction and write very clean code, but probably none of those people have ever had a successful indie game out.

To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack, who has put out a few games. What I’ve seen is that it’s hard for someone who’s not released a game before and supported it post-release to know where and how you can sacrifice code quality for a faster development time.

Yeah but carmack style quality isn't as SOLID as people want to. Game devs have always also factor in performance, that's what other dev communities have lost. Apart from embedded devs.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is different for technical terms. It's perfectly fine if I told a novice mathematician, "no, wait, that's wrong, a Riemannian manifold is..." We have a precise, technical definition of open source precisely so we can judge when a license satisfies the legal freedoms that open source demands.

Perhaps, but "open source" isn't a technical term, and anyway there are lots of vaguely technical terms that have a subtly different layman's definition anyway. Categorizing certain phrases as "technical terms" to which different rules apply is just another form of linguistic prescriptivism, after all.

"Open source" is very much a technical term with a very precise definition.

Microsoft knew this when they wanted to jump on the bandwagon and named their own license "Shared Source Initiative" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative). It wasn't open source, it was "Shared Source", because it didn't comply with the definition of open source.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#143
post #121
post #72

Oh gods. VVVVVV's core mechanic is that you don't so much "jump" as you just flip gravity, and you only get to do so when your feet are firmly on the floor. This leads to some very interesting designs. The stage "Veni Vidi Vici (Doing Things The Hard Way)" is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game. Just a tiny little block, trivial to jump over, but the lack of a jump button means you have to.…

> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste . Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative). The Celeste Chapter 9 gol…

[deleted]

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#144

It’s always great to be able to study the source code for successful, released, real games. I will note that this is actually the source code of the C++ rewrite! The original game was written in Flash, and this version was apparently written by Simon Roth. My impressions: The source code is a bit of a tangle here. There are magic numbers ( https://wiki.c2.com/?MagicNumber ) all over the place, plenty of god classes (…

> The original game was written in Flash, and this version was apparently written by Simon Roth

Thanks, I did not know that at all - I know VVVVVV (Linux version) and Roth rang a bell - it's the same guy that wrote (writes? the game has a very long development story) Maia - a space colony simulation/game.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#145
post #121
post #72

Oh gods. VVVVVV's core mechanic is that you don't so much "jump" as you just flip gravity, and you only get to do so when your feet are firmly on the floor. This leads to some very interesting designs. The stage "Veni Vidi Vici (Doing Things The Hard Way)" is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game. Just a tiny little block, trivial to jump over, but the lack of a jump button means you have to.…

> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste . Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative). The Celeste Chapter 9 gol…

only 4 hours? Im impressed. I took 8h to 12h with 5k deaths!

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#146
post #62
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ You may not alter or redistribute this software in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. ” This kind of stuff is generally regarded as non-Open Source.

Why? The source is open to the public?

The source is being shown to the public.

It's not open for them to use.

To argue otherwise is to confuse a window with a door.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#147

I always love when something closed source goes open. While I never played this game in particular (looks like I've missed something!), I love to study code. It's always interesting to see how other devs tackled a problem or just structured their code. Thanks a lot!

This isn't open.

Studying this code then making anything too much like it might be a problem.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#148
post #146
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The source is open to the public?

The source is being shown to the public. It's not open for them to use. To argue otherwise is to confuse a window with a door.

The analogy doesn’t really hold. Is a bathroom door at a grocery store called a “window” rather than a “door” if they prohibit you from bringing unpaid groceries through it?

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#149
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was awesome and it's can't be overstated how much it empowered the indie game community in the aughts. Seems like people crap on it not because of the tool itself but because Adobe dropped the ball and let it become a crashy, resource-hogging mess, aligning powerful people (like Steve Jobs) against it.

I feel like Google simply didn't like users having such control over extending their browsers' functionality in ways that are harder to track, so they started the anti-flash bandwagon by abusing their browser's market share to kill it along with all other add-ons (a continuation of their death grip on what extensions are allowed and making unapproved extensions not available to the average user either), leaving a vas…

I think Steve Jobs was more responsible for Flash's death than Google. YouTube only stopped serving Flash as the default less than 5 years ago while hubs like Newgrounds were seeing significant declines well before then.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but the golden age of Flash content was certainly over before HTML5 hit in a big way.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#150
post #121
post #72

Oh gods. VVVVVV's core mechanic is that you don't so much "jump" as you just flip gravity, and you only get to do so when your feet are firmly on the floor. This leads to some very interesting designs. The stage "Veni Vidi Vici (Doing Things The Hard Way)" is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game. Just a tiny little block, trivial to jump over, but the lack of a jump button means you have to.…

> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste . Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative). The Celeste Chapter 9 gol…

I stopped playing celeste when it was no longer fun for me. I made it about half way through the b-sides before throwing in the towel.
Post reply on HN