Tinker Tuesday for November 26, 2024
What is this place?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
Still thinking about which engine to use. Are you tired of this topic yet? I am.
I had a bit of a thought.
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.
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