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Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

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

#41

Post by pgeorgi »

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #34
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

So, uhm... how many blockbuster games have you shipped, just out of curiosity? Not an ad hominem attack. Just, curious, because someone with such confident opinions as yours about notch's abilities must surely have shipped a few.

I wouldn't call Britney Spears the pinnacle of contemporary arts. But she certainly shipped.

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

#42

Post by derefr »

ddevault wrote: post #29
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 c…

I might say that Notch is the best kind of coder, for what his goals are. Notch is, really, a game designer. The goal of a game designer is to iterate a set of rules and mechanics until something fun is tracked down ("fun" is sort of the "product-market fit" of game development.) in the process, they may create prototypes that allow them, or others, to play-test the rules/mechanics, but that prototype is not the output product of the game-designer's work, the ruleset itself is.

Now, frequently, a game-designer may also be a game-developer (someone who takes a ruleset that's already known to be fun, and builds a solid game engine to enshrine its behaviors), and a game UX designer besides. But this doesn't have to be the case. Miyamoto doesn't code or do UX. Will Wright doesn't code or do UX. And Notch should be in roughly the same category.

Obviously, there might be some dysfunction at Mojang that results in prototypes getting shipped instead of developed—but that's a separate issue.

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

#43

Post by willismichael »

ddevault wrote: post #29
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 c…

> He is a terrible, terrible coder.

I've had an idea brewing in my head for quite some time, and while I still don't quite have the words to express it completely, it more or less boils down to this:

There isn't necessarily a correlation between being a good programmer and shipping a successful product.

Now of course we can argue over the definition of "good programmer" and "successful product".

I started as a hobby programmer in my childhood and teens, then went to college, and since then have written code for various companies. For several of the earlier years (including college), I had this wide-eyed fantasy of the brilliant, beautiful code that I would work on once I became a "Real Programmer" (whatever that means).

My hopes and ambitions shattered once I got into the workplace and discovered some of the slop that I had to maintain. Then for a few years I was on a crusade to banish all ugly code from whatever project I happened to be working on at the time.

Lately I've realized that having pristine, elegant code is NOT the goal. The goal is to ship software that people actually use. I don't really know much about the internals of minecraft, but I do know that nearly half of the teenagers in my neighbourhood spend hours and hours playing minecraft.

I have to admit that I'm still an idealist at heart, and of course the best situation would be to have a project that is both externally successful and well-designed (making it simple to fix bugs and add new features and such), but I'm constantly having to remind myself to stop trying to get everything perfect and just write code.

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

#44

Post by skizm »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #38
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, uhm... how many blockbuster games have you shipped, just out of curiosity? Not an ad hominem attack. Just, curious, because someone with such confident opinions as yours about notch's abilities must surely have shipped a few.

None. I didn't say Notch can't ship a blockbuster game (and he can ship exactly one). I said he can't code worth a damn, and should not be idolized for his prowess.

Notch's code is worth $150 million dollars. What's the going rate for "a damn" these days?

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

#45

Post by jaytheham »

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. :)

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ That's an excellent resource for modern OpenGL, I have links for a few others at home that I can't recall off the top of my head.

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

#46

Post by exit »

ddevault wrote: post #29
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 c…

can you elaborate on what's so terrible about his coding style?

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

#47

Post by MrZongle2 »

ddevault wrote: post #29
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 c…

Sir_Cmpwn's assessment of Notch was harsh, but not wrong.

Notch isn't in the same league as a John Carmack, for example. The most recent release of Minecraft saw massive changes to the underbelly of the game, all of which is being done by Mojang staff other than Notch. The game does have a ton of warts, especially where modding is involved, which can be traced to some of Notch's technical decisions.

Does that mean that Notch is a bad person? A fool? No, neither. Notch had a vision for Minecraft, followed it, and because of that work is now a very rich man who can afford to play with whatever technology he wishes. I wish I was like Notch.

Let's not shoot the messenger here.

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

#48

Post by pearjuice »

ddevault wrote: post #29
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 c…

Couldn't agree more. Notch his success has nothing to do with being good at programming. It's about being creative and able to create good game play.

Because he programmed game play routines a lot and dealt with everything involved (i.e graphic rendering and such) more than the average Joe it looks like he is a good programmer because he just shakes it out live on some streaming website. Those concepts are language-agnostic and you can remember them.

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

#49

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

skizm wrote: post #44
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. I didn't say Notch can't ship a blockbuster game (and he can ship exactly one). I said he can't code worth a damn, and should not be idolized for his prowess.

Notch's code is worth $150 million dollars. What's the going rate for "a damn" these days?

As amusing as your wordplay might be, the point being made is that Notch's coding skill should not be idolized or used as a reference for writing good code. A tangible consequence of his inability is that Minecraft takes up far more resources than it reasonably should and is very difficult to maintain, which has been echoed by several Mojang devs who have since picked it up.

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

#50

Post by exDM69 »

habith wrote: post #30
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…

Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways.

This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more.

The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff done with shaders but it pays off in the end.

If you're looking to write a game (and not an engine) it may be a good idea to get an engine and not write "raw" OpenGL at all.

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