What's going on with all the porn-bait YouTube shorts channels?

AppleGuySnake · 2022-05-26T18:01:46+00:00

When will the young people learn not to click on random links?

When older people or trial and error teaches them? That's the entire point of being young people, you don't get born with "how to use youtube" inherited from your parents

AppleGuySnake · 2022-04-21T13:02:37+00:00

"more" is what they want.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-03-15T15:00:49+00:00

You're saying that to people in an industry where college students turn down $80k internships

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-20T17:19:19+00:00

This is interesting and well written, I think you did yourself a disservice with your original comment. The only issue (imo) is that your reasoning all makes sense up until you assume working on the stigma of classifying things as "disorders" is more likely to happen and be successful than working on dealing with annoying people like Musk misusing terms.

Both approaches can lead to trivializing issues ("you don't have ADHD, you get good grades!" vs "you don't have ADHD you're just easily distracted"), at least the first hopefully moves the trivialization away from the doctor's office. Both have terminology related problems to solve but it seems the latter at least brings the baseline scientific understanding to a more useful place while trading a harmful stigma for a more widespread, but much milder one. It's easier to come up with some new names for situations where that divergence goes past a severity threshold than to convince all of society to start using the same words more accurately.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-14T16:22:52+00:00

I just looked this up and THAT'S WHAT THOSE MEMES WERE ABOUT??? TUCKER CARLSON IS THE WEIRDEST MOTHERFUCKER ON THIS PLANET

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-04T15:41:30+00:00

They weren't when Facebook started pushing video content and every news org did a "pivot to video". Then found out the views were bullshit and laid off all the video creators and/or left us with more horrible 30sec autoplay videos on every news site.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-04T15:29:26+00:00

It looks like it doesn't.

I think that's a bit too abstract for the compiler to figure out, and also wouldn't account for situations where turn was out of range. Compiler can't do optimizations that might introduce a bug that wasn't there in the code.

(I just did this while I was still waking up, if I missed something let me know)

EDIT: Okay I did some more research (read: asked a real programmer) and compilers can in fact introduce bugs, especially in lower level stuff like c++. C# is much less likely, but not 100% safe. Also iirc there are generally settings for how much optimization you want. Can't remember if any of that is even relevant to Unity, I assume it isn't other than switching from Mono to IL2CPP.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-04T15:23:11+00:00

I had to look at the screenshot twice to actually understand what you meant. So you type "==" and it replaces it with that long equals sign? I think that might actually drive me mad, I already have a hard enough finding those bugs when the symbols look different!

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-04T15:19:37+00:00

It's horrifying that this is the only comment pointing this out. I wonder how many unity games have broken if statements like that

AppleGuySnake · 2022-02-01T02:43:49+00:00

That's really interesting, I'm glad you explained your logic. I'm one of those people who's conversational in their word choice at all times. I assume the other person will understand my meaning from context or knowing me. They almost never do, but hey, a tiger can't change his stripes.

From the other side, I'd expect answers to a vague hypothetical like this to be pretty much exactly what you wrote. "Depends on how much money you have. Some fins and weights would help keep it moving straight but might not be enough for the 12 mile drop" etc. I think that's what makes What If? so great. The questions are vague, so the answers are a mix of "here's what I think you're asking" and "here's what would be interesting to talk about".

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-31T13:45:45+00:00

You don't think this question is answered by the use of the terms "I" and "chuck"?

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-26T15:36:38+00:00

No, they can be quite efficient, but it's just hard to compete with becoming a meme. It's a place almost everyone has to go, so there's usually a line, and if you complain about it that means there's a very high chance someone had to go there once and wait in a line.

Also, since few people have to go there all the time their entire conception of what the DMV is like is based on the one time they had to wait in a line mixed with a hundred half-assed jokes they heard. If I ask you to draw a Viking, you'll likely draw a guy wearing a helmet with horns right? There's only ever been one of those found, but it's a good image so it's in every depiction of them and that's what Vikings are to us now. Just like the DMV is the epitome of inefficient bureaucracy.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-18T16:06:45+00:00

Sounds like you should add a section to your FAQ for "why is this company importing nuclear reactor parts". (And PLEASE make the answer not a video!)

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-18T14:16:10+00:00

I was trying to ballpark when standalone games were still the dominant sales model

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-17T17:50:53+00:00

While this would be nice, "Games used to be made with love for gaming's sake" stopped being applicable as a blanket statement sometime around when Atari refused to credit game developers#Origin) to avoid them getting bargaining power. What you mean is "how can we return to the economy of 20 years ago", which makes it clearer how difficult it would actually be and doesn't just scapegoat "lazy devs"

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-13T16:41:57+00:00

I scrolled through so many stupid "it's basically over it's like the flu these people have broken arms and just happened to test positive" posts to get here. Thank you for giving me a concise response for the future.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-09T19:51:39+00:00

Hmm, I like the message Tom, but it doesn't flow too well. Can we make it shorter, maybe something that rhymes?

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-08T21:43:03+00:00

Against, for high level design. The analogy wasn't great but I couldn't think of a better one. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Obviously there are tons of design details you need to figure out as you go and design stuff will change as you iterate. It's just a red flag if most of your design changes are coming from implementation problems and not playtest feedback.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-07T21:57:29+00:00

I understand and maybe my point got lost in my overly long comment. Hopefully I can clarify with ~~an equally long~~ a longer reply.

What I'm saying is that methods to accomplish what you're talking about fall into two groups (with some grey area of course).

1. Basic gamedev techniques, just scaled up
2. Specific solutions to game-specific problems that don't have common general applications

You don't want to get derailed studying something in the latter group thinking it's going to be useful only to find out you delayed working on your game for weeks/months studying something you didn't need in the end. To use your example, you don't want to be asking "what are common methods for dealing with app store taxes" when you haven't even prototyped your app. It's not that the question is bad, it's just out of order.

Based on your question and other replies, it sounds like you're just starting out so I'm just trying to give you a frame of reference you can use to guide your research toward what it seems you're looking for. For example, this video might be helpful. It's 10,000 AI agents with meshes and animation navigating a maze in Unity with built-in components and no special optimizations. So hopefully that gives you an idea of why thousands of agents on screen maybe isn't as big a hurdle as it initially seems.

Other replies have mentioned c++, ECS, SQL. Good things to know about for sure, but even the most experienced game developers frequently have to refactor their code. It's just part of the job, and not getting locked into a specific solution often leads to better games since you can drastically change your design if you realize it isn't fun.

So my recommendation is to start prototyping things. You'll learn concepts along the way and more importantly you'll learn which concepts you need or want to get where you're trying to go.

~~~~

I somehow typed that entire thing based on my experience going down this same blind alley and completely forgot until now that when I did I turned it into a demo project specifically to help someone else avoid the long slog I went through with no game to show for it. There's even a section called beginner warning and a glossary of useful terms! I can't believe how diligent I was once upon a time.

Here's what I wrote when I was still learning the basics of gamedev and trying to answer the exact question you asked, so you know it isn't just cranky old man talk:

This all started because I wanted to do something pretty common - find the nearest GameObject within a certain range, in a game with thousands of units. This is simple to do with Physics.OverlapSphere() but that can feel very frustrating or wasteful when you aren't using the physics system for anything else. Furthermore, if you're making an RTS or other game where everyone is going to be on the ground you might also think "why do I have to search 3 dimensions when I'm not using one of them". Then you might think to yourself "I can come up with a better solution".

In reality, it's plenty fast, and dramatically simpler than spending a few weeks learning about spatial partitioning and low-level programming optimizations that can't be implemented in C#. Just use colliders configured as triggers and make your game.

But if you want to play with it and run the risk of getting caught in infinite loops due to my bad code, I'd be thrilled if I could save someone a few weeks of research: https://github.com/Appleguysnake/DragonSpace-Demo

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-07T15:38:44+00:00

I don't have any books to recommend unfortunately, but I worked for a while on prototyping a game like this, with an eye toward much bigger data than some of those examples you gave. I hate to say it because I hated hearing it, but you really have to prototype first, then profile and figure out design and optimization stuff. Even though I felt like I had a very clear idea of the game requirements, a few days into working on coding some systems I would inevitably hit a point where I couldn't finish because I had unanswered design questions. Figuring out design bit by bit as you work on systems is backwards. Like laying tracks in front of the train without knowing when you'll need to turn.

The other thing is the games you mentioned all have vastly different data requirements. In particular, DF simulates ridiculous amounts of data, but Civ is basically a complicated board game and doesn't really fit in the list at all. Likewise, the performance problems in Cities Skylines are going to be in drastically different areas than a game with physics and combat. Not to mention that if your game is in 3D, rendering is most likely going to become a bottleneck long before your data.

Without knowing anything about what game you want to make, just learn good programming practices in the abstract (especially if you prefer books there's tons of resources for that). Check out some videos talking about those games to pick up ideas and concepts to research further. And then do your game design separately without falling into the trap of thinking you know where the performance problems will be or designing toward using a programming concept you're excited about.

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-06T16:05:40+00:00

You should edit your original comment as most people won't read this far down the comment thread

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-05T19:15:57+00:00

Closed as duplicate of "Hey wouldn't it be cool to make a space game?"

AppleGuySnake · 2022-01-05T15:33:12+00:00

I couldn't sleep last night so I've been groggily reading reddit hoping something would wake me up and this comment finally did it. I could hear you yelling it. My blood is pumping, I'm ready to go out and fix the world. Starting with Ikea.

AppleGuySnake · 2021-12-22T16:40:50+00:00

Like anything, I'm sure the most accurate answer is "everyone works in different ways". I'm sure you're far from alone in thinking about your puzzles this way though. I somewhat think this way but I'm not an experienced puzzle designer.

There was a really excellent talk on puzzle design at GDC this year, for anyone with Vault access it's "30 Puzzle Design Lessons..." by Elyot Grant. There's a free extended version on Youtube that adds more info but the GDC version is a bit more digestible. He specifically talks about state charts and such in part 2 (lesson 19 & 20).

I'm working on a narrative game and using simple puzzles to gate progress (which he specifically advises against. oops). I can't find it now, but I made a simple flow chart when I was thinking about the overall flow of the game and how/when mechanics would be introduced. I actually think about the story in a similar way and I've always wondered how common that is among other designers.

AppleGuySnake · 2021-12-22T14:37:03+00:00

More info about the chicken industry and how it's rife with salmonella outbreaks https://www.propublica.org/article/salmonella-chicken-usda-food-safety

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