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

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of insisting what "open source" means is that we want to ensure the freedoms that open source guarantees. If we don't insist on this definition people will start pushing licenses that forbid commercial use and other things, as this license forbids, and we'll embrace it because we think "ah, open source!" And yes, when you coin a term, you also get to say what that term means. That's the whole point of coini…

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood? A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

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.

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

#112
post #36

An interesting quote from the build instructions: " In particular, the Windows version absolutely positively must be compiled in Debug mode, with /RTC enabled. If you build in Release mode, or have /RTC disabled, the game behaves dramatically different in ways that were never fully documented (bizarre softlocks, out-of-bounds issues that don't show up in tools like Valgrind, stuff like that)." I wonder if people will…

Considering other quotes, like this one: "For example, maybe my worst programming habit is declaring temporary variables like i, j and k as members of each class, so that I didn’t have to declare them inside functions (which is annoying to do in flash for boring reasons). This led to some nasty and difficult to track down bugs, to say the least." I wish those people the best of luck :)

Cunning way to never have uninitialized variables!

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

#113
post #53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happen to know, how does haxe compare to Godot? Would you say it's simpler to draw and get a very basic game/prototype up and running?

Haxe is more like a traditional programming language, not an "engine" or whatever is the right term for Godot.

I would call Godot/Unity/GameMaker an engine-IDE.

You can have an engine like Love or pygame where the engine is literally just a shared object or dll and you need to basically supply your own tools for level design, programming, etc.

Engine-IDEs are one-stop-shops with nearly everything you could need built in (level editor, code editor, particle effect sandbox, etc.).

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of insisting what "open source" means is that we want to ensure the freedoms that open source guarantees. If we don't insist on this definition people will start pushing licenses that forbid commercial use and other things, as this license forbids, and we'll embrace it because we think "ah, open source!" And yes, when you coin a term, you also get to say what that term means. That's the whole point of coini…

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood? A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF.

Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.

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

#115
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.…

Hahaha, despite playing VVVVVV around the time of its release (it's really been 10 years, wow), I realized I could still feel my muscle memory firing up when I saw this level.

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

#116

This is really great! I wish they wouldn't call it "open source", though. It looks like a source-available license: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/LICENSE.... If Terry is reading this, please correct your article. The correct terminology is important! Open source is defined by the OSD, which this license doesn't qualify for: https://opensource.org/osd Kudos for releasing your game's source, thoug…

Thank you for doing this. Could a mod please change the HN title to match the new article title?

Sure!

p.s. I asked Drew to post another version of his comment praising Ethan, so we could move the replies to that bit to another subthread which isn't so offtopic. He did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014064.

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

#117
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do with haxe: https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/ Haxe is somewhat a flash clone. https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/

If you happen to know, how does haxe compare to Godot? Would you say it's simpler to draw and get a very basic game/prototype up and running?

Super easy. Haxe's Flixel is probably one of the most full featured and easy to use 2d engines around.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood? A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF. Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.

To be fair I see a fundamental difference between changing a words pronunciation and meaning.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood? A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

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.

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