201–210 of 232 posts
I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…
I don't know what it is about game development that really brings out the yak shaving in people. One time, about 8 years ago, I backed a game called Nowhere[1] by a very talented programmer. The original premise was an alien life simulator. Well, it's been eight years, and development is still going strong! The developer is currently working on the String implementation for the programming language he invented[2], wh…
Hi, this is the yak shaving developer in question speaking. I was worried we'd get grilled hard over our slow progress, but I'm relieved to read that most of you understand how perilous and long-winded gamedev can be. Our backers are also very patient with us, and I don't want to destroy this relationship, but keep being as open and forthright as I can with our progress.
I don't mind the jokes (after all, yes, the whole undertaking is a bit ridiculous), but just want to make sure the facts are understood as they really are:
* Yes, the premise of Nowhere continues to be that it's an alien life simulator (as in: simulating the everyday life of an alien).
* The game is being developed by not just one, but two people: My wife Sylvia Ritter[1] is responsible for the concept art that drives the procedural design (she has given me a lot of work), and I am responsible for programming and direction. We both have a hand in the game design.
* Yes, development is still going strong, and will continue to do so, until the game is done or I keel over, whichever comes first ;-)
* Yes, I am absolutely yak shaving, and there's definitely some sunken cost thing going on here, but there is still no project I'd rather work on than this one. When we launched the crowdfunding, I had a hunch that this would end up taking us 10 years. Now we are on the far side of it and I had to start cutting features and workflow improvement ideas in order to have a chance at making it in time.
* Yes, I developed a programming language for the game, because the art is procedurally driven, and that requires both fast turnaround in prototyping (close to Scheme or Python) while providing C level performance at the same time. There simply was at the time that I started, and still is, no adequate solution available. Originally, I didn't want to do it, but we rationalized that innovation of technique requires innovation of tooling, and hence worth the effort, provided we'd open source everything we made in pursuit of our goal.
* No, Scopes' string implementation is complete for several years already, the recent commits are all touch-ups, augmentations and small fixes for the userbase that has grown around the language, which were quick to do and cost me no significant time. We have in fact other, much larger, support problems that I can not adequately cover because the game is main priority, and the language exists to service the game.
* Yes, I developed a pure functional reactive language on top of Scopes for our game engine that I wrote a few examples with, in the intent of finally merging the CPU and GPU models so we save 90% of pointless and repetitive boilerplate code for CPU/GPU resource management. It's a fantastic idea that is going to go places, but after realizing how much more I'd have to write to get it all the way to its final, visual programming oriented form, I aborted the prototype and focused back on the game.
* What else have I spent my time on? I spent most of those years writing a bunch of prototype shadertoys to explore possible technology used for the game and also teach mathematical concepts to other developers, and they're all released here[2]
* What's going on right now? After streamlining package management[3] for both Scopes and Nowhere, I am presently working on our sculptable terrain engine. There is a by now somewhat outdated video demo[4] of one of its earliest incarnations. The LOD stitching has been fixed, and we have occlusion culling now, but I still have to rewrite parts of it to get a rock solid sub 10ms per frame performance. It would have been more fun to do all that with FRP instead, but tooling is never quite where you want it.
Thanks for reading all that,
Leonard
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> People get into game development because they want to have fun programming Totally agree. I think the only real issue here is expectations. If the project mentioned was crowdfunded specifically and only with the goal to deliver a game, then I think people would be right to be a little bit irked that the developer is instead tinkering with their own programming language rather than the game, after eight full years.…
I don't know about other backers, but I'm happy with how this has turned out myself. I think backing anything comes with a level of risk, and the fact that they're working on something publicly, eight years later, is more than a lot of campaigns manage.
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I don't know about other backers, but I'm happy with how this has turned out myself. I think backing anything comes with a level of risk, and the fact that they're working on something publicly, eight years later, is more than a lot of campaigns manage.
Thank you. It's not a grift (or is that what a grifter would say - oh god I hope it isn't). I didn't want us to overpromise and become the next No Man's Sky (which has by now fully redeemed itself) so I never spent much time on advertising and trailers. As a result, we didn't get much money. People were skeptical from the beginning, which was expected. What we got in support largely came from a handful of friends who…
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Hey, all I want to do is shave yaks, and now you want a coat? That will involve sorting, carding/combing, spinning, weaving/knitting, and all sorts of other stuff that doesn’t involve razor blades and yaks.
I never thought about the implication that shaving a yak is the most fun thing you want to do all day. It's so great you would rather shun all your other responsibilities to shave some yaks. I guess I'd better try it.
I guess the trick is to fall in love with a species of yak that everyone else needs but wants to avoid, so they'll pay you to shave your favorite yaks.
I don’t get why are programmers so obsessed with the tools they use for the job? More than any profession
As much as I think the other replies to this question hit the nail on the head, I think there’s more to it than just tool obsession. Software developers are in the fairly unique position where most of our tools are software defined. We are experts in the discipline required to improve our own day to day work lives. How many other professions have this liberty? Woodworking does to an extent, carpenters regularly make…
Plus its just very easy to work on a tool, I don't need to go buy a bunch of materials or anything
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I think part of it might be learning how to ask good questions. I wrote a terrible terrible C compiler for a class. But I learned so much about the choices between doing things the slow but probably correct way, vs the cool but hard way, or even the jaunt into esoteric decisions. This more than anything else in my career taught me how to evaluate random software. As a professional, or even serious hobbyist, I think i…
This comment speaks to me. I hate modern web development but I always want to build user interfaces so one day, I thought to myself "Why don't I start from scratch and make my own protocol and write a browser but only for the terminal?" So that's what I've been doing and it's been a lot of fun. A lot of the time I'm pulling concepts from HTTP but what's great is that I can be very picky. Maybe I'll end up just rewrit…
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That many react apps look like that is not a react thing but a design thing. You can make a react app that looks like HN. Or like a game!
You can make a React app that's wildly different to all the others, but if you follow "best practises", and you learned from the same tutorials, and you're using the same component libraries as other React devs your app will probably drift towards looking and working like other React apps unless you make a conscious choice to stop that happening.
I assume this is also true for jquery/angular/vue and other library tutorials.
Maybe just for fun they should use alternative frameworks!
Then on the job, well unless you are a designery company it will be devs who do design and will happily delegate that thinking to a framework. Again not a react thing but a general dev thing.
I have seen this too in desktop apps of 90s. Just use MFC or some popular toolkit.
That just seems like poor discipline. But not like creating a typesetting system to use to write your book. It seems like it is shaping up to a pretty nice language. But writing the compiler in itself is very 20th-century. Just add a parser to LLVM or Gcc and call it good. But don't make the mistake C, C++, and Rust did, using a prefix dereference operator. Pascal got that one right. BTW: "get" in a pure function nam…
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This comment speaks to me. I hate modern web development but I always want to build user interfaces so one day, I thought to myself "Why don't I start from scratch and make my own protocol and write a browser but only for the terminal?" So that's what I've been doing and it's been a lot of fun. A lot of the time I'm pulling concepts from HTTP but what's great is that I can be very picky. Maybe I'll end up just rewrit…
If you want to build user interfaces, I'd recommend learning Cocoa or Qt, which are both well-designed UI libraries. (Java/Swing is okay, but Win32 has a limiting design, and MFC is crap. Was pretty unimpressed with Android's UI, but haven't really used it enough to have a quality opinion.) HTML was designed for documents and its model is unsuited for UI. If you're going to learn for research first, then in my opinio…