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Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

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Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#21

Post by sologrrl »

discreteevent wrote: post #18
klrr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you claim he learnt a language and a new technology quickly, solely because he uses an IDE? I doubt so... The Norvig quote sounds more reasonable.

Not at all. What I am saying is that it clearly doesn't matter. Some people are productive in vim. Some people are productive in eclipse and java (even though they are incredibly un-hip and won't score you any points at conferences (with your dell laptop running windows!). But like the article says really productive people tend to be focused on the product.

Yes, people tend to focus more on the tools rather than the product. As long as you don't do things like using LOLCODE for a huge enterprise app, the language and environment you know are more important in making something rather than things like text editors and IDEs.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#22

Post by discreteevent »

riwsky wrote: post #15
discreteevent wrote: post #7

I don't want to criticise the blub essay too much because there were some valid points in there. But in fairness as soon as I read it I thought of John Carmack. He uses C++. Given that the perspective of the essay is Lisp then if C++ isn't a blub I don't know what is. But John Carmack is really productive. Also he doesn't use vi or emacs. He uses an IDE! He used it even before it had any bells or whistles at all. (He…

For John Carmack's take on the matter, see: John Carmack: "Thoughts on Haskell" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6278047

I know he tried Haskell. I agree with him on a lot of points he made there. But:

1. He investigated it long after he had already been successful using something more mainstream. If you are starting something up then I think it would be good advice to use what you know and get on with it. If that's Haskell then good for you. If its not then don't waste your time. Get on with the product.

2. Even then he didn't finish rebuilding his game because he was drawn back to his day to day work. The guy is just product focused.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#24

Post by krapp »

>Don't build an engine that you will someday build a game on top of, because you will never get past step one.

I have several still-unfinished Game Maker apps which more or less died because I got so bogged down on the "engine". So yeah.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#25

Post by barrkel »

This is less a matter of only writing what's needed, than having written the same thing in lots of different variations, until you know the essence of the problem, and which are the most elegant paths to take.

A beginner in any discipline can't accomplish so much with so little effort. And it's wrong for a beginner to start out trying to do so, IMO; it's too easy to get discouraged if you think from the start that you should be able to do it with so little effort.

Writing your first game loop is a bit clunky, trying to fit it in with whatever framework / language / API is hosting you, and the sequencing / setup of everything. The tenth time, you know exactly what you want from an API, and have a good idea of what bits you need to build to get the effect you need. The hundredth time, you can look at a new API / framework and see the what it enables you to build most efficiently, and you can let that inform the design of what you create. Then, very little effort is needed. But that's only because you've already done the "really complicated system for loading meshes and shaders" or some equivalent in the past.

It's hard to get really efficient without having done things the inefficient way to begin with, if not earlier in the current project, then in previous projects.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#26

Post by ahoge »

melling wrote: post #16
discreteevent wrote: post #7

I don't want to criticise the blub essay too much because there were some valid points in there. But in fairness as soon as I read it I thought of John Carmack. He uses C++. Given that the perspective of the essay is Lisp then if C++ isn't a blub I don't know what is. But John Carmack is really productive. Also he doesn't use vi or emacs. He uses an IDE! He used it even before it had any bells or whistles at all. (He…

So, why do you think he went with Dart? You're kind of telling us that what he chose didn't matter, but he must have had his reasons for jumping into a new technology. We probably can't infer much from Notch's use of Dart beyond the fact that the technology is baked enough for real world use. I guess someone could always ask Notch for his opinion on Dart, after he's used it for a few more weeks.

> why do you think he went with Dart?

I'd guess because it offers more structure than JavaScript. You have classes, packages, and you can just `import` things. You also get proper tooling. You can also overload operators, which is kinda nice for games (vector math).

He wrote a lot of Java and AS3. Dart is very similar. Just a bit terser and a bit "scriptier".

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#28

Post by AYBABTME »

melling wrote: post #16
discreteevent wrote: post #7

I don't want to criticise the blub essay too much because there were some valid points in there. But in fairness as soon as I read it I thought of John Carmack. He uses C++. Given that the perspective of the essay is Lisp then if C++ isn't a blub I don't know what is. But John Carmack is really productive. Also he doesn't use vi or emacs. He uses an IDE! He used it even before it had any bells or whistles at all. (He…

So, why do you think he went with Dart? You're kind of telling us that what he chose didn't matter, but he must have had his reasons for jumping into a new technology. We probably can't infer much from Notch's use of Dart beyond the fact that the technology is baked enough for real world use. I guess someone could always ask Notch for his opinion on Dart, after he's used it for a few more weeks.

Maybe he just did it in Dart for fun.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#29

Post by ddevault »

kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits.

He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed.

I say this as someone who has spent a considerable amount of my life [1][2][3] figuring out this terrible crap and working around it. Notch is a very bad programmer, and people only revere him because he made Minecraft.

To reply to you all at once: regardless of his ability to create or ship a game, which is not in question, his ability to write good code should not be idolized. His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself.

[1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net

[2] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Tomato

[3] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/organic

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#30

Post by habith »

missing_cipher wrote: post #23

Where would a noob to this kind of stuff start? I'd like to draw a rectangle to the screen. :)

I found NeHe's tutorials to be easy to follow especially since code that's ready to compile is provided at the end of each lesson: http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Most of them focus on OpenGL for windows.

I just searched and found this WebGL tutorial which says it's based on NeHe's so it's hopefully good: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=28

Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer and I barely dabble in the 3D world, so take my links with a huge grain of salt :)

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