Constrained geometry for CAD tools like Fusion360
What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
My grid right now is 144x144, so about 20,000 tiles. Things were working OK in iOS Safari when just using colors to draw the tiles, but the browser started crashing when I tried upgrading to image sprites. Turns out the trick is to not submit each individual tile to the GPU. You have to roll them up into larger, chunked meshes and submit those meshes to lessen the impact. I'm sure this is game dev 101, but I've never…
To be fair, Cyberpunk 2077 took 500 people 11 years and 400 million dollars, and even then when it dropped it was barely in a playable state. It seems more fair to compare modern AAA games to movies than indie games, in terms of the cost and resources that go into them. Although with movies, they're actually finished when they release (George Lucas and Steven Spielberg notwithstanding.)
But as someone who can mess around with tilemaps all day but still can't work in Blender, or rig a model, or understand OpenGL or shaders, I feel your pain.
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#63Earlier 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…
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 a…
This has also been something I’ve noticed, and I share your sentiment. It really is an opinion, strongly held, born out of massive ignorance.
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or maybe he knew, but pretended that he didn't. Lines are a waste of time, and serve little purpose besides punishment. Writing code is a much better use of that time. If I was a teacher, I think that's how I would react. The next punishment would be handwritten though, or something else, you only get one shot with that trick. I admit that in the early 80s, most teachers were not very savvy with computers, so it is p…
> Or maybe he knew, but pretended that he didn't.
1980s, before most people had computers.
A teacher. The kind who'd make a kid do repeated writing "to teach them a lesson." That teacher playing "make believe" about anything.
> But also keep in mind that teachers are pretty good at smelling bullshit
Even in the 80s, teachers weren't exactly rocket scientists. Rocket scientists would have been familiar with computers.
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#65Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#66> How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM. What it does save on is memory bandwidth , because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture for objects tha…
>Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM. While that's how it's mostly used today, mipmapping refers to storing scaled-down versions of the same texture along with the original texture. You don't have to load all of them to RAM (or VRAM). You can simply store the mipmaps on…
Mip mapping was originally developed neither for bandwidth nor memory reasons, but for texture filtering.
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#67"Create an account to read the full story." What game developers are good at is not making slow programs. Everything else, from point of sale to web pages to phone apps, gets slower and slower.
I do find it amazing how much leeway other industries have when it comes to performance compared to my native industry of gamedev. I'm constantly thinking about how to structure things to avoid dynamic allocations at all costs, reduce memory footprints, reduce branches, on top of balancing usual concerns like readability, extensibility, etc. This often means forgoing abstractions as often as is reasonable.
My coworker, bless him, who comes from a background in the financial industry once added a feature that involved making copies of 5 vectors of strings. Both the vectors and their strings were regenerated every single tick from c strings that permanently resided in memory, by way of multiple concatenations for each string. Profiling informed me we were now making some hundreds upon hundreds (sometimes thousands) of (re)allocations every 16.7ms. I diplomatically pointed out the wastefulness and he (partially) fixed the issue by changing 2/5 of the getter functions to return a reference. I could tell he was quite annoyed with me, and didn't really understand the issue. It's just allocating memory, how bad could that be?
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#68> 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…
Tempest is indeed a terrible example: - it's a static perspective view, less complex than sprite based 2D - it's implemented on a vector screen, where the cathode ray gun is drawing the lines instead of the software, not a bitmapped one - almost everything can be precalculated and only vertex locations need be stored Of course it's still a creative game, but not very hard to implement. It should be noted that Battlez…
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Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#69"Create an account to read the full story." What game developers are good at is not making slow programs. Everything else, from point of sale to web pages to phone apps, gets slower and slower.
> What game developers are good at is not making slow programs.
That isn't true. Many games, even really popular/enjoyable games, have really poor performance for what they do. And much of the performance that does exist is thanks to the people who work on the engine and not the game itself.
I'm not sure the average game-dev is any better at writing performant software than the average non-game-dev.
Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming isn't hard if you exclude debugging as being a different activity.
I think it elevates it to the level of other STEM fields, but I wouldn't put it over wrapping your head around Lagrangians or figuring out where the noise in your experiment is coming from. What'd I'd say though is that managing the process of shipping software isn't easy. e.g. building AWS was probably not easy. But then again, building a tokamak or a stellarator is not easy either.
You can get help with Lagrangians; they are not your original work; other people understand them.
In debugging there are situations in which nobody can help you. There are people with good debugging skills, but only you know that code.
There are no papers or books about the bug in your program.