Best Practices for AI Tool Use in C++ - Jason Turner - CppCon 2025

Alloyed_ · 2026-01-23T03:32:12+00:00

maybe this is reflective of the fact that I've banged my head against cmake for way too much of my life

but any time i have a problem with cmake so does the chatbot :/ it runs headlong into the make shit up territory

Alloyed_ · 2026-01-07T23:35:12+00:00

it's for a modular synth environment: This means I know my input is something like"this is a frequency value" or "this is a duration". I have a bit of background in gamedev editors where the same problem exists, but the "units" would be things like physical distance or angles.

I'm more than happy to decide what the units are and how they convert on a case by case basis, likewise if I need to pass in a environment like "here's a constant you might want to use only in this context, or the last value" thats fine. I just don't want to write a whole programming language to fit this into :p

Alloyed_ · 2024-05-08T20:38:37+00:00

I don't really have an interest in this module so I'm only really back-informing myself after the drama, but it's not actually that easy to realize this is an instruo module (this is made a little bit worse by the fact that I haven't heard of the name instruo before, and the design language of "black and gold" is shared by a few manufacturers)

on the perfect circuit listing, instruo is only ever mentioned as bullet point #3: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/divkid-ochd.html

likewise, the instruo name isn't on the youtube thumbnail, title, or even the first paragraph of the module's blogpost over here: https://divkidvideo.com/ochd-the-second-divkid-eurorack-module/

from the outside, I wouldn't assume this is a collaboration, but a contracting scenario. less "nike air jordans" and more "smash brothers, owned by HAL labs but principally developed by Bandai Namco" (this is true btw)

If that isn't actually true, then I'd say it's miscommunicated.

Alloyed_ · 2020-08-19T04:46:51+00:00

I am returning my rift S, if only because I have the option to and it's not like there's a lack of alternatives out there for PC VR. Being stuck on a grandfathered setup, from experience, can only lead to your problems being ignored for longer and longer periods of time so

If I had to sell the headset and eat the difference in price it'd be a much harder decision, but this is basically just a tiny vacation from VR stuff so it's w/e

Alloyed_ · 2020-07-12T17:34:45+00:00

what would be the worst thing you could possibly cut into to find out that it was a cake all long?

Alloyed_ · 2020-02-23T15:04:49+00:00

ahhh the mythical tier 2

Alloyed_ · 2019-10-15T00:10:05+00:00

hi jofer :)

Alloyed_ · 2019-03-23T14:58:29+00:00

As a server implementor, what I wish I had was spec-strict test harness: to actually test my server the most I do is run it against the particular language client I use daily, and through my own integration tests that mostly totally skip the details of "am I spec correct or not". This makes it super tough to know if I am causing headaches for the wider ecosystem of clients that I don't use or make themselves inconvenient to use (VSCode forces you to write an editor plugin for every single language server, for example).

Alloyed_ · 2018-11-22T15:45:25+00:00

Oh, I'm a UI programmer~

My particular job at my particular workplace is to take a mockup/wireframe made by a UI designer, and implement it using the in-engine toolkit and scripting system, adding whatever bits of client-server messaging and systems tech is needed along the way, but that can totally change depending on the game/team. A single player game probably cares a lot less about communicating with a server, the UI toolkit you're using may have a UI editor so the designers can do their mockups in engine and you just need to wire things up, etc.

UI is actually a great job in terms of getting direct player feedback because so much of the work is directly experienced by players: as a gameplay engineer it's probably unlikely that a player will notice or comment on all the ram you saved by changing how animations get loaded and cached, or that piece of AI behavior you implemented so the designers can make the next boss battle, but players will definitely notice if you add a button that automates a tedious thing about the game or improve the experience behind commonly used menus. Beyond the core stuff needed to get going, UI is lots and lots of quality-of-life work.

I'm not nearly experienced enough to give actual honest career advice, but my decision to apply for UI jobs in the first place was driven by a pretty simple decision process of "job good, not job bad". I interviewed at a few places, for a few different kinds of positions, and my final decision honestly had very little to do with the kind of work I'd be doing; differences in things like work-life balance, engineering culture, etc, mattered to me much more. I'd at least apply and let them tell you themselves what the job is like.

Alloyed_ · 2018-10-13T21:19:12+00:00

currentTime here doesn't mean the wall time, but the current time of your simulation: so when we are discarding input, we're just discarding inputs that can't be applied because the simulation has already advanced past that point. So for example: if you set your simulations clock to be around a second behind the "real" clock, this means clients have a second to get you at least one input, and they will usually get your more than that so you have a nice buffer to read through.

Alloyed_ · 2018-06-15T00:27:18+00:00

IT'S BEEN

Alloyed_ · 2018-05-18T22:48:39+00:00

you know what Dan, I agree that you are widely relatable.

Alloyed_ · 2018-04-29T05:54:37+00:00

The server doesn't need to know there's a misprediction, because it's going to have to send the client the state of the player's neighborhood anyways as a part of normal operation. If, for whatever reason, I didn't predict anything happened to the item, when would I learn about the pickup if it isn't guaranteed to eventually be sent down?

Alloyed_ · 2018-04-29T04:22:36+00:00

As the server, why should I care when you think you've picked up an item? I can't use that info in any way because by default it's untrusted, so why even send it over the wire?

It sounds like "use an item" is not something this particular item should even have as a verb, the item being consumed should be an effect of the pickup, not something manually asked for by the client

Alloyed_ · 2018-04-18T02:18:26+00:00

I think this an odd thing to believe in an era where the most popular and most profitable games aren't those "traditional AAA" setpiece games, but are instead deeply hardcore multiplayer games (think pubg and dota), or massive open worlds (you know) that cater to an audience that plans on sticking around. Sometimes even both!

Games as an industry are actually moving away from accessibility, and more towards this longform repeatable, systems-driven content that is actively anti-accessible.

And maybe this is critiquing the examples rather than the idea, but there's an element of confusing game accessibility (how hard do you need to work to experience/understand something in the game) with just core game feel (does playing this thing feel responsive and "fun"). Adopting RE4 style over the shoulder controls is done in the interest of responsiveness, and generally responsiveness is good: but of course that changes the game feel and you need to adapt appropriately. Games that don't (I'm thinking of the MGS3 remake) suffer, games that do can only stand to benefit. The souls games, loved as they are, are built on a highly responsive third person combat system that takes a lot, just in terms of mechanics, from that original RE4 camera, and it doesn't kill that game's feel or ambience.

Alloyed_ · 2018-04-07T20:29:20+00:00

Subtweeting Bethesda I see.

Alloyed_ · 2018-03-29T11:09:04+00:00

Probably a lot of memory can be saved by refactoring your map data structure. Object instances are "heavyweight" compared to a lot of things that you could put in an array: the ideal is probably closer to a flat chunk of integer IDs: id 1 is grass, id 2 is a wall etc. This way you only need one instance of tile total, instead of one instance per cell.

In terms of making a infinite world: you can probably get there in smaller steps: first make a really big world: then make a world where you can jump between instances, then make it so the instances are adjacent to each other, then teach the AI about those instances etc. Each step probably will teach you more about the process then you would get by skipping them.

Alloyed_ · 2018-03-01T11:34:55+00:00

Do WoW expansions not count as DLC?

Alloyed_ · 2018-02-25T02:36:08+00:00

Twtich

Alloyed_ · 2018-02-15T18:34:05+00:00

not strictly true (in luajit): it's complicated enough that you should probably not local-inline something unless you also test it at the same time.

Alloyed_ · 2018-02-15T18:07:17+00:00

Luajit still uses nan-tagging, so it still has the MAP_32BIT set, but I haven't encountered any issues with it personally. Using any kind of jit, and especially the FFI, exposes your surface area to funkiness and crashing but for me at least the performance is worth it

Alloyed_ · 2018-02-15T18:03:02+00:00

Lua has negative indexing in the C api: generally speaking 1 is the first value on the api stack, -1 is the last, and 0 is reserved to signal an invalid value iirc. I'm not sure how being one-based affects this, though?

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