211–220 of 478 posts
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Community can go a long way towards compensating for worse technology, yeah.
Community is the entire goal. The technology just has to meet some minimum threshold. You know any 13 year olds playing Minetest?
It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.
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It's much less appealing because it's much harder to mod.
less appealing to who? Lots of 13 year olds learned to code by writing minecraft mods so it can't be that hard. You also get the benefit & satisfaction of it actually being in Minecraft—yes, they are both very similar games where you explore and place blocks in a procedurally generated world, but it really does matter. I can't really explain why if you don't get it but it's evident people do care even when they know…
That said, I never had any interest in playing on a server that was populated by anyone but my small circle of friends.
Now my kids are growing up doing the same which I find great because I know exactly with whom they are interacting and have no worries about it.
The motive behind this is probably due to them finding out people can not get their mods/server software updated in-time (due to extra work required) and this leading people being really reluctant to update their versions.
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You could write crappy code in any language. I don't think it's specific for Java. Overall I think java is pretty good, especially for big code bases.
You gotta admit, though, that a language which strongarms you into writing classes with hidden state and then extending and composing them endlessly is kinda pushing you in that direction. It’s certainly possible to write good code in Java but it does still lend itself to abuse by the kind of person that treated Design Patterns as a Bible.
I have a vague idea of what the Bible says, but I have my favorite parts that I sometimes get loud about. Specifically, please think really hard before making a Singleton, and then don't do it.
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The music and sounds play a large part into the experience though, and are much harder to replace than the textures.
The sounds maybe, but the music? If there's one game whose music I always turn off instantly it's Minecraft. Touhou Youyoumu Minecraft ain't.
Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone. I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal ex…
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First time I have heard of object-oriented obfuscation. I get it, but in general I don't get the OO hate. It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping. Unfortunately, people often use crap examples for OO. The worst is probably employee, where employee and contractor are subtypes of worker, or some other chicanery like that. Of course in th…
Tried to modify one boolean in a codebase a few weeks ago and I had to go thru like 12 levels of indirection to find "the code that actually runs".
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You could write crappy code in any language. I don't think it's specific for Java. Overall I think java is pretty good, especially for big code bases.
But there's a real difference how easy it is to write crappy code in a language. In regards to java that'd be, for example, nullability, or mutability. Kotlin, in comparison, makes those explicit and eliminates some pain points. You'd have to go out of your way and make your code actively worse for it to be on the same level as the same java code. And then there's a reason they're teaching the "functional core, imper…