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.
1d ago
Lots of time wasted on engine switching and reconsideration. Better focus more on disassociation from engine even at cost to performance. Said this before, but optimization always draws me towards tighter integration - need to not do that. A cleaner separation with minimal engine specificity (is that a word?). Don't let the siren song of premature optimization lure me from the good path.
Is there a way to do C++ without header files? I realize it's incredibly petty, but having two files per class just keeps turning me off of Unreal.
Other than that, I keep comparing engines.
Unity:
- C# as a scripting language.
- Single-precision coordinate system only.
- Messy development, priorities of the Unity company are unclear, future is uncertain.
- Documentation is pretty decent.
- Has a live scene editor.
- Many features are semi-maintained only and better not used.
Unreal:
- C++ as scripting language. Big meh. I just don't find it fun to work with.
- Overengineered editor and blueprint system keeps getting in the way.
- Huge file size and memory footprint.
- Amazing features; would anyone contend that this is the most powerful engine?
- Double-precision coordinates out of the box.
- Documentation is OK, but surprisingly thin on many features. Seems to live mostly in youtube videos.
Godot:
- Does support C# scripting AND double-precision coordinates...but good luck getting that to compile, nevermind getting support for it when it bugs out.
- Engine
- Documentation is OK.
- Community is very actively woke.
- Has a bunch of bugs.
- Amazingly small file size and resource consumption.
- No live editor.
Redot:
- Like Godot, minus the politics but I'm not sure how long it'll live.
Stride:
- Engine written in C#, open source, and scripting is in C#. C# versions are up to date. It's a dream come true.
- No live editor.
- No double-precision coordinates.
- Very buggy.
- The documentation is completely worthless.
- The community is agreeable but doesn't have the manpower and/or time to bring the engine up to scratch.
- Even if I don't use the engine itself I can cannibalize many utility classes of theirs and even learn a thing or two about efficient C#!
No idea where I'm going with this. Right now I'm trying to fiddle some dev time into my new routines. Not yet sure how to. Maybe I'll just get used to the job and end up being less weary by the end of the workday so I can get something done in the evenings, or maybe I'll follow a friend's recommendation and just get up even earlier to do some coding in the mornings. Or maybe I'll find a way to take a few short breaks (legitimate breaks, not slacking off.) during work to...I don't know, dictate code to my phone?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
1d ago
which I remember @Southkraut taking great offense at for reasons that still strike me as insufficiently thought through
They are. The thought terminates at "Rightful German clay must remain in German hands."
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
3d ago
And then he was replaced by a lesbian, and many an article was written about it.
Surprised I never heard of this on the Motte.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
4d ago
Sorry for being unavailable, by the way. My excuses are kid's joining Kindergarten and I started at a new time-consuming job.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
4d ago
What even is the message?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
8d ago
Redot
I'm happy to hear it. If they can make it so that compiling for double-precision AND C# actually works, then they're winners in my book. I'll check it out once I've established a new weekly routine that makes some suitable time for sitting down and tinkering.
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway.
Thanks for asking, and please do keep it up, even though it's a bit of a drought right now. I did not get around to anything at all - I was always at work, or making up for my absence by going full hog on dad duty, or just plain tuckered out.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
It wouldn't. It's not related to the engine question. It's rather a change in how I approach my cluster of projects, and a change that snuck up on me and I only recognized it long after it happened. Let me illustrate the comparison a little.
Old: There are many Physical Entities. All these entities have complex physical properties and interactions. All these entities are always rendered and physically simulated. Some of those entities may contain so-called Functional Structures. Some of those Functional Structures might support Behaviors. Some of those might be Agents, who actually act upon the game world. All their actions and interactions go through the physical properties of their Physical Entities.
New: There are many agents. All these agents have goals and sets of possible actions. Some of those agents have physical bodies. But the actions and interactions of the agents only account for their physical bodies in the broadest sense, i.e., usually just location. Those physical bodies that are very close to the player's location are actually rendered and physically simulated, but the abstract behavior of the agents has priority over the physics simulation, and they can interact with non-rendered, non-physically-simulated agents just fine.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
I didn't really take the initiative on this until the last job really started falling apart, but it's still a sound improvement overall. Better salary, conditions, benefits, location, and most importantly I get along with my new colleagues very well, which was sadly not really the case in the old job. That last point is very important to me; I'm much more motivated when people I actually like depend on me. I'm also on premises all the time, which helps a lot with actually focusing on the job - no more distractions on the home front. The work itself is extremely dry and technically uninteresting, but I suppose you can't have it all. I'm honestly surprising myself with how easily I manage to adapt to the new working conditions after four years of practically pure home office, and how much energy I can muster for work after so much time spent just dragging myself along in a job I hated. It's nice. Exhausing, too, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
How did your similar situation turn out?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
13d ago
I'm strongly considering going back to Unity or Godot. Stride is a documentation disaster that obscures whatever technological disaster may be going on below. I suppose there's a reason why Distant Worlds 2 is the only halfway well-known game to have been made with Stride, and it's a strange example because it's both based on a unique fork of the Engine and, frankly, technologically the opposite of impressive. Stride is halfway between a community project kept alive by plucky contributors and straight-up abandonware. It's a post-apocalyptic vision of a Game Engine, where the original creators are no longer around and the people who maintain it now have only very limited insight into how it all works. It's a hard sell when there are alternatives that actually work out of the box.
That said, an open-source Engine that's built from the ground up to consist of and support the latest C# is a pretty great pitch to my ears. Amazing in concept. Sadly it increasingly looks like I can't live with the implementation.
I've drawn up a spreadsheet comparing the various engines. Their strengths, their weaknesses, my personal problems with them. Color-coded it, too. It didn't help. Everything is distinctly lacking in one way or another. Trade-offs will have to be made.
Looking back upon my Unity project and comparing it to my current Godot/Stride iterations, I am struck by one fundamental difference that wasn't even intentional. My old project is primarily a physics simulation, and whatever abstract logic or behavior happens is a consequence of physical entities interacting. In the new version, everything is abstract entities that possibly project into the physical realm. Huh. I'll need to do some more thinking about this.
Anyways, I just started on a new full-time day job this week and haven't gotten anything done since the weekend, and probably won't see much progress tomorrow either. Maybe on the weekend.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
16d ago
But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?
Punish people who scream at babies, regardless of their sex.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
17d ago
"Last enemy wasn't so bad now that we have current enemy" seems like a pattern on both sides.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
19d ago
Leaving, but turning around long before they get there. It will be an in-joke, and we get to make fun of the idiots who actually fly to Alaska.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
19d ago
What do you mean? He all but name-dropped each and every one of us individually and hand-wrote the themotte.org URL on every surface in the world!
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
19d ago
Please explain for someone out of the loop.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
20d ago
Same as in Germany, then.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
21d ago
Same problem here. 2nd generation, too - it's certainly genetic. Not overcome it so far. I breathe hard, I often wake up at night from not getting enough air, and I get recurring and long-lasting colds at a rather bothersome frequency especially in cold weather. I can do sports just fine when I'm not having a cold, which sadly means not that often, but breathing is troublesome at rest and at sleep.
Xylometazolinechloride works fantastically at fixing the issue...but is said to make it worse with prolonged use, so I don't.
I once got my face scanned and they detected some deformations in the cartilage of the nose which seems to block one nostril almost entirely, and my Otorhinolaryngologist (do anglos really use that term?) recommends getting surgery to fix it. I've been putting it off. So surgery it will have to be at some point, but my confidence in it actually helping is low since a family member with the same problem had it and still catches a cold practically every other tuesday.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
21d ago
Boo Outgroup?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
22d ago
It's a struggle.
Stride documentation is close to useless and the community may be willing to help but is often unable to do so effectively. There are very simple thing that Stride simply can not do out of the box. When I try to do something with Stride, it usually doesn't work, sometimes works after a lot of fiddling, and often stops working spontaneously for no discernible reason. The elevator pitch of Stride is great, but the reality so far is nothing but frustration. If this is as far as it goes, then at least I was able to cannibalize their code base for a bunch of useful utility code. But actually using the Stride Engine is a pain. Right now I've slowly been able to claw some of what I needed out of the engine, but it was a fight every step of the way.
At least I managed to get a deal of refactoring and other useful reworks done on the way.
I'll need to add a few more workarounds before my control scheme works again (Stride's coordinate system is bizarre; +Z is forward...but Cameras and rotations in general look backwards by default). My procedural meshes work again, but I need to wrestle with Stride's material system a little more before they actually look like something again. Performance is crap right now, but I'm putting that off until later; it's too early for profiling.
Aside from the code, I'm doing some concept work on how agents prioritize tasks, but it's still fairly abstract for the time being. I'm definitely overthinking it.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
23d ago
That's a bit strawmanny, but then again now that I know you're a transsexual (I previously assumed you were a woman or simply a metrosexual) this behavior matches what others of your kind have displayed in the past; the rapidly escalated assumptions of hostility when faced with anything other than affirmation. And instead of asking simple questions and getting worthwhile answers to better understand each other, we can instead pattern-match the other to our preferred ideological enemy group.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
24d ago
Wishful thinkers tend to reinforce each other.
No idea whether it's the case though. I couldn't bring myself to watch that Interview.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
24d ago
Not to be smug, but...that's advertisement.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
24d ago
So why are you doing this yourself?
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
24d ago
I suppose you could consider Homeric Simile to be somewhat rambly? Or the extensive repetitions? It's not how I'd see it, but Homer isn't exactly concise and rigorously structured.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
25d ago
To me it looks like the follow-up came 22 minutes after the previous comment. Must be a space-time anomaly on your end.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
27d ago
Family, mostly — specifically, that the costs of disposing of my remains exceeds my net worth, and they'd be on the hook for the remainder.
Well that sounds like a solvable practical problem. Grab a rubber boat, row or motor out to sea as far as you can, tie an anchor to yourself, knock yourself out via sleeping pills or whatnot (I am not a doctor) but poke a hole in your boat before you fall asleep. It'll all take you down to the bottom of the sea without you even realizing it. Not my idea; just something I read recently.
and may I say thank you for not resorting to the usual clichés about how life is always worth living, suicide is never the answer, yadda yadda yadda. Where else, if not a rationalist-adjacent space like this one, can I get people who will rationally assess whether or not a particular life is worth living? Who might conclude that suicide is the reasonable action (and not just tell me to KYS out of emotional animus, politics-driven or otherwise)?
To be honest, most of the time when someone tells me a story like yours, it's just at some low point in their life and the situation is not as objectively bad as the report makes it sound, and the person in question still has a lot of options. But all I have on you is your post above, so there goes. If you really have nothing left to live for and your continued existence is at odds with your values...
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
27d ago
Somehow you're not making any more attempts though, and what attempts were did not succeed.
So, what's keeping you around? Is there family? Friends? A love of leisure? A fear of pain or death?
It is. I posted late at night and was tired and got dumb and messed up my Englisch to the point of stating the opposite of what I intended. Contend, contest, contradict...Nach Müd kommt Blöd.
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