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What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

tomaszs2.medium.com

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Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#21

Post by echelon_musk »

WJW wrote: post #15

Doing anything repetitive with a large amount of data by virtue of knowing about for-loops. There have been so many times where people wanted something done to a million users/objects/whatever and were surprised that I got back in 5 minutes. One of them even muttered the words "I thought that would take you all day", when actually 3 of the 5 minutes were spent getting a cup of coffee.

I had a colleague at a previous workplace who had studied game design at university unaware of what a for loop was when I showed him. It boggled my mind!

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#23

Post by [deleted] »

waynesonfire wrote: post #14
danielvaughn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries. I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better t…

> it's so much better than the vast majority of other options out there. The journey towards enlightenment or personal growth is highly individualized and subjective, making comparisons with others is not only unhelpful but also irrelevant.

[deleted]

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#25

Post by jon_adler »

WJW wrote: post #15

Doing anything repetitive with a large amount of data by virtue of knowing about for-loops. There have been so many times where people wanted something done to a million users/objects/whatever and were surprised that I got back in 5 minutes. One of them even muttered the words "I thought that would take you all day", when actually 3 of the 5 minutes were spent getting a cup of coffee.

My brother was given lines to write as a punishment in the early 80s. He wrote a for loop in basic and printed the result. The teacher didn’t know any better and was happy to accept the printout. Assuming he’d typed it all from scratch.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#26

Post by sublinear »

kvdveer wrote: post #11
tomaszs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in early games it was a metod to save RAM too, for a short time but it did. Because you didn't have to store all mip map parts in the RAM

How does storing more copies of the same texture save ram? Of course one can drop the higher resolution textures, but AFAIK that technique came long after mipmapping, as it requires high cpu-to-gpu bandwidth, which wasn't there in the earlier days.

Some implementations of mipmapping store a single medium-resolution image and either sample fewer pixels or duplicate neighboring pixels when drawing. You don't need extra memory for that. Literally just mapping a subset of the pixels from the texture stored in memory.

When enough pixel duplication occurs you may want to enqueue a request for a higher resolution texture to be loaded into memory and let the resource pool decide. You can see this in effect in some older games where you're able to "outrun the horizon/frustrum" so to speak or when too many objects spawn and the level of detail is terrible for a while until the game catches up. Otherwise this is just a most-recently-used cache. Mipmapped textures can either be many prescaled static copies on disk or precomputed from the single full resolution asset on disk while loading a level.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#27

Post by ravenstine »

danielvaughn wrote: post #4
wly_cdgr wrote: post #2

Making six figures (by sheer luck of the fact that their work scales better than most jobs, including most harder jobs)

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries. I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better t…

Reminds me of the recurring conversation on HN about how people should stop driving cars and just walk everywhere.

It's like, yeah, in an ideal world, all 8+ billion humans could pick up craft coffee as they stroll 5 minutes to their big tech employer who doesn't actually care when they show up. There's legitimate criticisms for how cities have been designed, but going further by vilifying car owners in the present and suggesting everyone could just walk or ride a bike to work is a level of being out of touch that only Silicon Valley types could achieve. Even politicians aren't as brazen with such silliness. As if the rest of the world can choose where their employer is located, how far their groceries are, or how much child support they have.

Just be a tech bro, bro.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#28

Post by CobrastanJorji »

Can I say how much I hate Medium these days? Remember when it didn't suck and was doing such a good job of not sucking that all sorts of very serious people created Medium accounts to start blogging? What the hell happened, Medium?

I started reading this story, got about halfway down, and the story stopped and I got this big centered H2 reading "Create an account to read the full story."

Fine, I want to read the rest. I create an account. I go back to the story. Now the story still stops at the same place but the big centered H2 has changed to "Jorgi, read this story from Tom Smykowski — and all the best stories on Medium" and there's an "Upgrade" button. That was not our deal, Medium! You said I could create an account to read the full story.

So I click the button and it takes me to the signup page, of course on the "pay annually tab," with a small white button on a white background that reads 'monthly' for other options. Fuck you, Medium.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#29

Post by ben_w »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #10

laughs nervously while trying to get performant 2D rendering of large tilemaps in their first game I can barely begin to imagine all the pain involved in creating AAA games. Decades of whitepapers to read and build upon only to get to a point where consumers aren't downright angry at the quality of graphics being given to them.

That seems surprising, and I've been a game dev before I switched to mobile.

How large is a "large" tilemap?

And what is it that makes them particularly hard in the AAA space?

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#30

Post by kazinator »

> 1981 A first 3D game called Tempest is published

Battlezone is actual 3D, and 1980.

I'm not saying that is first, either, just that 1980 > How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping:

MIP mapping is not primarily a RAM problem solving device. It's a way of precomputing the shrinking of texture images for when they appear in the distance, so that they don't have to be antialised on the fly.

Thus is a CPU saving device, and requires extra storage. However, not much more! The half-size texture needs only 25% more storage, and the quarter-size another 6.25% or so.

The renderer has to consider the depth and index into the appropriate scale of the texture. I don't remember all the details, but I see to remember that it's dynamic. Like when the textured surface is in deep perspective, the distant pixels are derived from the smaller scale data, while the near part from the larger scale.

It could save RAM if we can avoid the detailed textures for objects that require them and are all far away. I.e. lazily load the detailed texture as the objects are approached, and free the memory when they recede again.

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