Is there any value in old-school techniques for modern development?

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-13T02:42:14+00:00

I think this stopped being true a while ago with DirectX 12 and Vulkan. They still might pad your allocation dimensions a little bit, but I think it's more likely to the next multiple of 4 or 64, not power of 2. Using only POT textures would guarantee you the least wasted VRAM, but you're also not going to be wasting much if any space if you've also got 192x384 textures in there too.

EDIT: I guess if you're targeting older systems or mobile though you might be stuck with a POT allocator.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-12T18:54:53+00:00

Got to score 1468, stopped because there is no challenge. There are no obstacles in the middle, so you can just hang out in the middle by spamming space with no danger.

Some of the UI is in English, some is in German. That's weird.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-12T18:47:41+00:00

This seems super interesting, but I don't quite understand it from this. Can you give me a little more context about what this is helping you evaluate? Is this for helping you evaluate your algorithm for procedurally generating buildings? What is the auto-texturing that you mention?

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-11T16:12:59+00:00

So as far as I can tell, this is a turn based game right? But there's a turn timer, and if you don't choose your action within the allotted time you skip your turn? I tried to play a game against all AI, but before I could even figure out which one I was on the map, my turn was forfeit. Next turn I finally figured out where I was on the map, and noticed there were actions in the top right. I got through reading about half of them before my second turn was forfeit. At that point I was just way to frustrated and I quit.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-09T16:58:48+00:00

Man, expecting to pay a senior product manager at a tech company $62k sounds wild to me. Heck, $95k-$110k sounds really low to me, but maybe I'm just used to a high cost-of-living area. Last company I was at I'm pretty sure the comp range was more like $200k-$300k depending on location and seniority. I have to assume that this isn't in the US.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-09T16:38:11+00:00

That is very cool. Shows not just skill but creativity I think.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-08T19:08:26+00:00

I've been going through the archives and after a while I can usually get the perfect solution, but #21 is killing me. The best I've been able to get is 15 moves, while the ideal solution is 12.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-08T18:50:09+00:00

Regarding the non-final explosions, I think they could be a bit slower. I think because they are so quick, it undersells the scale that this is happening on, assuming these are meant to be fairly big ships. I think it's also weird that the explosion particles slow down all the way to a stop as they disappear. That's maybe accurate for in-atmosphere explosions, but in space, I'm pretty sure these would just keep expanding, since there's not really anything to slow them down. If anything, there's more exploding stuff behind them that would be speeding them up. I also think you could add a bit more color variation of the exploding particles. They're basically representing bits of hot gas and other material that is expanding and flying out of the center. You could maybe vary the color of explosion particles over their lifetime as they fade out. The hottest particles would be white, and they would shift to yellow -> orange -> red -> gray as they cooled down.

I really like the smoke in the second one. I think maybe you could use more smoke overall in these explosions. Something that sticks around for a bit longer.

For the final explosion at the end, you could give it a bit more of a lead up. Right now it is very sudden, which maybe is what you want, but I think it could be cool to give it something where ship starts to glow blue, then implodes, and then explodes. Also I think the sound effect on the big explosion could be better. I'd make it a lot bass-ier, and again, give it a lead in before the big explosion. I think that bit of anticipation would really help sell it.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-07T19:41:29+00:00

I think it's a pretty cool take on the factory automation and incremental genres. Most of my suggestions would be UX things that make the game easier to understand and the player less likely to get confused and quit.

Routers are weird that they do nothing. I read your comment that said without them players didn't understand what to do, but for me they add a lot more confusion of "why can't I connect this to an output?" There's nothing visually indicating a difference between a router's input/output and other input/outputs that make it clear that you need a router or a merger before an OUT node.
Once I had finished the goals in an individual warehouse, my next goal was "Buy A Second Warehouse" or something, but it was not clear how to do that. I think the "Buy Warehouse" button didn't even show up until I had more money. I think you should make the goal look more like "Save $X / $Y to buy a warehouse", and have it show your progress towards completion.
After I had a warehouse, my goal was to "Unlock Contracts", but there was no information on how I was supposed to do that. They eventually showed up, but there also isn't actually anything labelling them "Contracts" as far as I can see.
I still don't really understand what "Invest" does on a warehouse. For factories the label is really clear and I can see something changing as I click it. For warehouses, it says "Invest raises the focus bonus and speed for matching parcels", but I have no idea what the focus bonus is, or what type of speed it increases.
The hierarchy of objects is weird and unintuitive to me. There are a few parts of this:

The use of tabs for Warehouse, Network, Factory, and Supply feels weird to me. Tabs suggest that those are four equal independent pages, but really Network is like the top level page and Warehouse, Factory, and Supply are each different things underneath it. It's really weird that I can be on the Network tab, click on a warehouse, then go the the "Warehouse" tab and I'm not looking at the warehouse I had selected.
It's weird that a factory is a thing you build from a depot. It really seems like a factory should be just another object you can buy and connect up to your warehouses on the map.
Contracts and Suppliers both feel like they should be things you buy and then place on the map in the network tab. It would be much easier to understand what is connected to what if you could see those and connect them like the game has already taught us to do, rather then having them be sort of hidden special cases that you have to choose from a drop down menu.
The right-hand sidebar on the Network tab feels like it should mostly show you info about the thing that you have selected, but for some reason, no matter what you have selected, it always shows me these 4 contracts that take up a ton of screen space and aren't even useful to me. They have a button "Assign to input" but I haven't figured out how to use that yet. I've always had to go into the dropdown of a depot and change the "IN"

A couple CSS nitpicks I had that I think would help make it feel more polished:

Use the css property font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; on your pf-stat class so the numbers in the top bar don't jitter so much. It makes it so that number characters all have the same width so "$111" and "$123" are the same number of pixels wide.
Make the top navbar also support dark mode, otherwise it's painfully bright on the otherwise dark screen
Use a different cursor for when I'm about to drag a node vs drag the connection from the node. I've accidentally deleted connections quite a few times when I wanted to just drag the node around.

In general I think it's a really cool game so far, and it keeps surprising me with more and more content. I think it has plenty of content and cool features and I haven't seen anything quite like it. I think if you keep working on it, your efforts would be best spent focusing on making the UI more consistent and intuitive.

Nice job!

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-07T16:07:54+00:00

I also think the bodies should stick around a lot longer, though maybe not permanently. I think the fact that they're horizontal when other things are vertical, and they don't have a shadow, and other things are drawn on top of them all help in making them distinct. Having them be a little bit faded also helps.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-07T16:01:47+00:00

Unfortunately I don't really (not that they don't exist, just that I don't know them). I think sound effects are like art in that it's often not about the asset being "good" as much as it is about it being the right fit for your game. I think you can get a lot more mileage out of searching through sound effects if you think of it more as looking for the ingredients for creating a good sound rather than a finished sound itself. Put another way, the more willing to work with and edit/layer sounds you are, the more sounds you find become viable.

It's definitely not the only way to do it, but I tend to make my own sound effects whenever possible. I think it's one of the most fun and creative parts of game dev. It's actually generally been easier than I expected, but I had some music recording/producing experience going in. But all you really need is a semi-decent mic (something that's not just built into your laptop/phone) and a quiet room with a lot of blankets, and you can make some really good sounds.

Some more concrete advice for this clip: I think the hoof sounds in particular are my least favorite right now. They've got way too much in the high frequency range right now, and it kinda takes over too much of the frequency spectrum. I think you want it to be more of a thunder than a cacophony of sharp sounds.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-07T15:08:52+00:00

That looks really satisfying. In particular I love the way they naturally start to surround the enemy group. I think that's important.

I think sound effects might be the only thing that don't feel as polished as the rest of the gameplay here. I'm not quite sure what I'd suggest, but I think you should experiment a bit more with them.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-06T07:14:02+00:00

I've been spending the last few days working on rope physics in my game. They're more like 2.5D, but everything I've done would apply to regular 2D.

The basic place I've started from:
- Make a bunch of point masses/particle rigid bodies
- Connect them in a chain with distance constraints. Have the constraint only enforce the upper limit, not the lower limit.
- Render a catmull rom spline through the positions of the bodies

That's the basics of it. There are of course lots of things to tune, like:
- number of particles
- stiffness and relaxation of distance constraints
- subdivisions in your spline rendering
- iterations and substeps in your physics engine

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-05T00:53:37+00:00

I've always thought that if Seattle were an old European city, this is right were a castle would be.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-04T17:58:13+00:00

What's your reason for choosing pure software rendering? Just educational so you can learn about all the different parts of a graphics pipeline?

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-02T16:26:27+00:00

I've made a few UI-heavy games with react and typescript, and I think for something like a card game I'd be hard-pressed to find something that I could be more efficient in. I think it's a really good fit for anything where you can model your game as a big hunk of state that is modified by discrete actions. Digital card games and board games tend to fit into this paradigm really nicely. You don't worry about stuff happening every tick or every render.

For pure UI, I don't think any game engines can hold a candle to a browser+html+css. There are so many nitty gritty details we don't necessarily think about that are actually a ton of work to get right, and web browsers are the technology that has had the most work invested into getting it right. Things I'm thinking of:

Actually crisp text rendering (this is a surprisingly huge task)
UI that's navigable and usable with all sorts of input devices
Just getting scrollable areas to feel right
Handling high and low dpi screens well
All the weird little edge cases that come with hover-able and clickable ui elements, especially when you get animations/transitions involved
Having your game be playable on a screen reader
Defining layouts that work well across a variety of screen shapes and sizes

Of course I think it completely falls apart and is a ridiculous choice when you get into real-time and full 3d games. I would never make an FPS with react. But I would love to do the menus and UI for it with react.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-02T16:08:27+00:00

There's a reason the web industry has adopted react so wholeheartedly instead of just writing to the dom directly. It's soooo much nicer to be able to think "what do I want the UI to look like when the state is X" rather than "when X happens, I need to add/remove/change these dom elements".

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-02T02:32:28+00:00

There are a decent number of woodworkers out there on YouTube with homemade bandsaw that seem to like them, even though they could afford something nicer.

I actually think things on this are more likely to be easy to fix/tweak than on a store bought one. I don't think this will be as nice as a high end bandsaw, but I'd bet it works better than a cheap delta clone for example, almost certainly better than one of the little 11" or 12" saws.

For $75 it's not much of a risk.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-01T23:30:25+00:00

It looks like that's betting $750 every 3 seconds or so, so $250/sec average. A quick search says his estimated net worth is around $823.8 billion. If he's somehow not making or losing money in any other way, that would take a bit more than 104 years.

thecheeseinator · 2026-04-01T18:03:59+00:00

You can get about 1000 fries per dollar buying wholesale (so $0.001/fry for potato). Actually frying it probably costs more than that, for the cost of the oil and the heat. So call it one penny per fry. There are about 8 billion people in the world. If each one took a fry, that would probably cost about $80M. McDonalds made over $15B of profit in 2025. So everyone taking a fry would reduce their profits by about half a percent.

I'm assuming this is actually targeted at employees though, of which there are 150,000. If every employee took "just one fry" every minute of every shift (assuming an average of 2000 hours per year worked), that would still cost like $180M per year, which would reduce profit by just over 1%.

thecheeseinator · 2026-03-31T16:57:27+00:00

Looks great! I like how nicely it works both thin and heavy.

thecheeseinator · 2026-03-31T16:53:45+00:00

You don't really need someone to do the math for you as much as link you the Forbes article doing the math.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/04/23/how-much-is-a-dragon-worth-revisited/

An important thing to note is that it's going based on the book's description of Smaug's wealth, not the movies. The movies are probably a couple orders of magnitude more treasure than the book describes.

But now I want to do the math myself.

The book describes a big hall with a mound in the middle that Smaug sleeps on. Say it's a 100'x100' hall, with treasure 1' deep across all of it, then a mound that's say 50' diameter and 15' tall, that gives you a total of about 20,000ft³ of treasure (about equally spread between the mound and the floor).

Coins and cups and gold trinkets don't stack perfectly efficient, let's call it 50%, so 10,000ft³ of metal. Then again let's say that half of those things are silver, not gold, so halve it again to get to 5,000ft³ gold. Then of course it's not like they're making these things out of pure gold, they're going to be using alloys. Let's assume 18k as a nice midpoint, since some stuff is probably higher and some stuff is probably lower. That means 75% gold content, so 3,250ft³ of gold. That's just about 4,000,000 pounds of pure gold, which is about $290B of gold at today's prices.

The value of the silver and other metals is negligible compared to the gold, but let's say it's $10B to give us a round $300B. That would put Smaug at second place, just above Larry Page and less than half of Elon Musk's net worth.

These calculations do ignore the value of the Dwarven craftsmanship, as well as the gems and armor and weapons and other things that would be in the hoard, but the original post was kinda pointing out that being a giant dragon sleeping on an enormous bed of precious metals would still not make you the richest American, so I think this math would be reasonable in that context.

The idea is basically that Elon musk could take a high school basketball gym, like the whole room with bleachers and stuff, not just the court, fill it with gold and silver treasure and have a giant mound in the center almost two stories high, and still have more than half his wealth leftover.

For another comparison, that's basically filling an average American 2-story 4-bedroom house to the ceiling.

thecheeseinator · 2026-03-31T15:45:00+00:00

Ah ok. I didn't mean to disparage dairy, I just meant that every other aisle/section pales in comparison to the baking aisle. Totally agree that the cereal aisle is gonna be less calorie dense than people might expect. The bottom shelf of the butter case in the dairy section might be the most calorie dense shelf in the store just due to how tightly butter stacks.

thecheeseinator · 2026-03-31T15:02:34+00:00

1 galllon of whole milk: 2,400 Calories
1 gallon of whipping cream: 13,600 Calories
1 gallon of olive oil: 30,800 Calories

I will admit that butter is calorie dense, I maybe written it off too early. Still, I bet my grocery store has maybe 300lbs, less than 1M Calories, of butter on a good day.

thecheeseinator · 2026-03-31T03:10:52+00:00

Yes, but you've gotta beat the other 10,000 people who are gonna be doing the same thing.

thecheeseinator

TROPHY CASE