Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
15hr ago
I like authenticity because maintaining some persona that is at odds with my more natural behavior just plain takes energy I'd rather not have to spend that way. I also like authenticity in others because that makes it easier to interact with them, thanks to not having to try and guess what's real and what's acting.
But I wouldn't want give up standards just because I authentically would naturally like to be much lazier than the reasonably industrious professionalism I try to live up to. I'd rightfully be judged as a worse person. Hell - what if everyone else gave up theirs, too? No amount of judgement could save us then. Judging others for their behavior is very obviously good, and having standards is in my opinion a question of how to define them rather than some categorical question of whether or not to have them at all, and if so then just as the status quo is. And man, I wish people would loudly advertise their standards so that socially inept morons like me won't be reliant on futile attempts to read the room.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
20hr ago
Tried several, but always bounced off. Not sure why exactly.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
1d ago
Yes. If they can come for 4chan, they can come for The Motte.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
1d ago
It makes sense, it's exercising a part of your brain that didn't get tired out during the course of the day, which is my main struggle with my projects.
Makes perfect sense, honestly. Doing software dev during the day certainly saps my enthusiasm for doing more of it in the evening.
It used to be that I picked up new methods and ideas at work and thought to myself "I need to try that at home", and then I went and did that. But I guess nowadays I no longer encounter exciting new ideas at work.
Well, I can definitely sympathize here, and won't bother you about it this time. I like thinking up stories too, but every time I actually sit down and write anything down it 's a) torture to get any words down on paper, b) utter cringefest that goes straight into the garbage bin
It comes rather easily for me, pretty much a flow state, but the outcome is the same. Not fit for human consumption; at least not the first version.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
I ended up writing a few pages of lore.
Hell. I didn't know I still had that in me. I used to write a lot of worldbuilding fluff before I started programming, i.e., something like 15 years ago. That took a backseat since because I was more interested in procedural content, simulated systems and emergent dynamics. But now that I rarely get to do any of that...it turns out that I can still write a few thousand words even when dead tired and nominally out of time.
It's not good, mind you. Low-quality drivel, maximally cringe, the opposite of literature, certainly not going to post any of it. But it felt good to write down something, something at all, even if only inert verbiage rather than code. Given a lot of editing, it could be turned into a tutorial narrative for a specific scenario, and/or maybe just some fluff dialogue. More game stuff than sim stuff.
I'll also be on vacation for the rest of the year, so maybe I can eke out a few hours of concentration time at some point. Hope, yet.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
4d ago
Krankenkrasse
There must be a rap group operating under that name somewhere.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
4d ago
Clunkier than resetting all the clocks and telling everyone to shift their routine back and forth by an hour and pretending that noon is when the sun is one hour off from the highest point of its transit?
There are many institutions that have different sets of opening hours for different seasons. It's perfectly feasible to change those, if change they must, rather than to pretend to be time travellers.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
5d ago
The most significant benefit of eliminating DST would be that I no longer feel like an idiot for a) forgetting it exists and the switch happened yesterday, b) forgetting which way around it works and c) needing more than 5 seconds to figure out what that means for setting my clocks.
Also, yeah, having noon at noon would be neat.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
5d ago
FWIW, he did start his own subreddit and there are plenty of people who care about his opinion. Enough to sustain a community of its own? One might go and check.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
6d ago
widespread acceptance that, where the healthcare system fails, it fails because there isn’t enough money, and that’s that.
Debatable for Germany. Leftists will always claim this of course, to justify more redistribution and centralization. But the rest of society seems to have a set of beliefs that blame anything from buerocratic overregulation to protectionist doctors to immigrants overtaxing the system to people being pussies who go to the ER for every bullshit reason.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
6d ago
Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?
Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.
No idea why though. What went wrong?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
8d ago
Home situation deteriorated, even less time for anything than usual. I got myself a Notion account so that I can use my breaks at work to jot down some notes that synchronize automatically. I'm increasingly leaning towards giving Unreal another try and just holding my nose when it comes to the aspects I don't like. But no time to actually get anything done. Thanks for keeping up the pings, it remains useful.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
15d ago
Sick, working, dad-ing, husband-ing, preparing christmas presents, organizing couples therapy and talking to a lawyer.
I somewhat doubt that there'll be much worth hearing from me for the remainder of the year, but please keep it up regardless if it's no bother for you.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
19d ago
Neutral questions: Then what is anyone's fault? What model of responsibility do you espouse?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
20d ago
Here where I live, in the same damn village I grew up in, kids get to play outside unsupervised just like they used to. But good luck convincing my wife that there isn't a ruthless violent pedophile lurking behind every bush - our daughter will never be allowed to go outside without a chaperone.
Social media and anxiety disorders fuck people up.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
20d ago
which shall remain nameless
Why?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
20d ago
having kids is inherently "unsafe"
Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
21d ago
Do you have some idea on how to achieve this? I always loved the idea, but any time I took a stab at it, I ran face first into a wall. The minimalist approach is to have the entire game world happen off-engine, and than output the results as scene objects of any particular engine. That's simple enough, but then you inevitably run into stuff that the engine already has good to go out of the box (say, collision detection, including stuff like "is the mouse pointer over an object"), that would have to be rewritten in the backend from scratch, or the whole idea of separation would have to be abandoned because in the end, you're still using the engine internals.
I swear all these engines are deliberately designed to make "engine agnostic" projects impossible, so if you come up with some elegant way to do this, I'd love to see it.
No, I'm afraid my engine-agnostic is probably your strongly-coupled. There's just a few points that I try to consistently follow to make things easier for myself in the long run (but more difficult in the short one, and performance suffers, too).
- Don't use engine-specific data types except for when directly communicating with the engine. (The casting here is a major source of performance loss, but that's a hit one must choose to take.) Example: Use your own Custom.Vector3 class or struct instead of UnityEngine.Vector3, and only cast to UnityEngine.Vector3 when assigning a value to a transform. Maybe even be cheeky and cast implicitly, but that opens up some black pits of anti-optimization.
- Any call of an engine function should be wrapped by a non-engine-specific method, and those wrappers should be somewhat centralized (in as few files as sensibly possible) so as to limit the points of maintenance in case of engine switching. Example: Don't call UnityEngine.Physics.Raycast(...) everywhere in your code, but instead have your own Custom.Physics.Raycast(...) that in turns calls UnityEngine.Physics.Raycast(...). Now when you switch engines, you only need to adjust your Custom.Physics class to completely migrate your raycasting capabilities instead of making changes in every single class that ever used a raycast.
- Use as few engine features as possible. This is fairly trivial for me because I hardly even do graphics, but your mileage will vary greatly if you want more out of the engine you use.
IMO, for someone who actually wants to leverage a great breadth of a given engine's potential, it makes no sense to aim for engine-agnostic design. It's a lot of hassle and performance cost for a type of damage control that doesn't even come into play unless something goes horribly wrong - and that really shouldn't happen in the first place for a well-designed, well-scoped project. The only reason why I drone on about it is because my projects are the vague, un-designed, tele-scoping, lifelong obsessions of a hobbyist with too little concentration but too much persistence for his own good.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
21d ago
1st person optionally violent interactor in a very large procedurally generated world with a side dish of "large numbers of people" simulation.
Look, I have no idea what I'm making. There are a bunch of themes I'd like to do and a bunch of mechanics I'd also like to do and a bunch of simulation aspects that I'm usually doing instead of either of the former because somehow I feel at home in technical rabbit holes.
But if I could just stay strictly on course and work towards results instead of in circles, I suppose we'd end up with something like a first-person Kenshi, if that means anything to you.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
24d ago
Still thinking about which engine to use. Are you tired of this topic yet? I am.
I had a bit of a thought.
- My main objection to Stride and Godot (and by extension Redot) is that they're buggy and poorly documented and support is often unhelpful. They're decent when they work, but too often they don't and it takes too much time and energy to figure out why.
- My main objection to Unity is that I'm not confident in its future development. Even with the recent issues concerning the pricing model having been laid to rest, Unity suffers from the company that manages it seemingly seeing it as a vehicle for advertisement, and its main target user base being mobile developers. Not exactly what I'm doing.
- All this switching engines has strongly reaffirmed my commitment to a maximally strict separation of my model from the engine, as explained last week.
- So there's nothing really stopping me from returning to Unity so long as I strongly separate the model from the engine so that if Unity does become unusable or intolerable in the future, a switch to another engine is as easy as possible.
All of this assumes C# scripting for easy migration, of course. So Unreal is right out.
From that thought onward, I considered my existing Unity codebase. There's a lot in there, ready to use, but it follows the old design doctrine of "everything is physical first, abstract second", which is of course the opposite of what I have discovered myself wanting. So even if I do return to Unity, it will take a lot of work to reshape the old code to conform to my new view, plus hanging into into the framework I build in Godot. I should think carefully about how to approach all this so as to achieve a good result without having to redo it several times over.
All that said, I'm strongly considering going for Unreal after all. It's been a pain so far, but for all the effort required to get anything done in Unreal, I am at least confident that the it will bear fruit at some point because the Engine is doubtless capable and not possibly-actually-broken like the others are in many respects. And unlike Unity, I needn't worry about its future nearly as much. That said, my two big pain points are of course C++, but maybe I just need to live with that language and its abominable two-files-per-class structure, and the fact that I won't be able to migrate over any of my old code.
So to recap: More thinking, still no coding.
And thanks for keeping this up. It prevents me from getting distracted entirely. Not like I'm getting much done either way, but this way I'm at least forcing myself to consider the issue regularly. There's hope yet. Please don't stop pinging me.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
You're not wrong overall, but FWIW there absolutely are non-woke devs. Very few are explicitly anti-woke, though, that's a very small niche. And either way, they try to keep their politics out of the public as an issue of self-preservation. The userbase being anti-woke isn't entirely true - there are elements of it, but numerically I think the vast majority of players are actually just plain not interested in politics. There is a sizable group of vocal anti-woke players, but they're a drop in a bucket compared to the many more who just want to grill game.
One problem is that even anti-woke devs need to cooperate with woke publishers, influencers, reviewers, community managers, contributors, and of course a sizable woke customer base. Very few anti-woke people who work in game development for reasons you have pointed out. It's better for devs to try and be apolitical than to risk suffering sabotage, bad or no publicity, uncooperative business partners, negative reviews and alienating a large number of potential customers. It's a woke ecosystem; you can't thrive in it by swimming against the current. And given how ridiculously oversaturated the market is, it's hard enough to make a profit without making yourself a public enemy.
As a result, non-woke games made by non-woke devs do absolutely exist. Take any game without controversy about it, and chances are it's one of them.
But who can make an anti-woke game? It might have to be someone who doesn't care about an uncooperative environment and doesn't care about making a profit, i.e., an indie hobbyist. Those games exist, but they usually don't gain much traction, visibility or longevity, because this type of dev has very limited resources with which to make an actually good game. Alternatively, a serious game development company that managed to associate itself with politically indifferent influencers, publishers etc. might decide to market a game as explicitly anti-woke...but it would still have to be a good game, else they're just shooting their cause in the foot and ruining their own future prospects on top of it. But here's the rub, for a hobbyist or a company: if they can make a good game, then why not market it to everyone instead of just the small anti-woke minority? Ultimately even anti-woke gamers are gamers first and anti-woke second, that's why they play games at all, and will play a good game over a politically appealing game.
In conclusion, game development is a woke world with very little breathing room to spare, and trying to fight an uphill battle in there just has you run out of oxygen.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
26d ago
Shame about the character.
Have you seen the Three and Four Musketeers movies from the seventies? If so, how does this iteration compare? And if you can speak to it, then where does the 2011 version fit in?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
Please let me know if you find out something useful about this topic.
FWIW, I also eat like a combine harvester, pace a lot, don't gain weight, and my skin ages poorly.
Not sure if there is anything to it all; maybe we're just reading too much into a bunch of coincidences.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
28d ago
Fair enough. I don't quite agree but that's more reasonable than it sounded.
Speak for yourself. It is perhaps a little boring, but significantly less so than moving a hundred units one by one because they cannot occupy the same space together.
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