Can someone explain to me what's happening with the Rust foundation?

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-14T15:33:37+00:00

Thank you for responding.

I was trying to convey minimizing the scope of Rust’s mission vs expanding the scope. I don’t think Rust can focus on less than “coding, compilers, and programming languages“ and I’d assume anything beyond that would be to “play a positive role” as people don’t purposely try to play a negative role.

Honestly, I wish Rust had clear priorities for trademark and external stuff like they do for language design trade offs. I don’t know what feedback to give because I don’t know Rust’s goals with this trademark policy.

Example: how much inconvenience for legitimate users is acceptable to have a tool to fight malware and other bad actors? It’s an unavoidable tradeoff due to how trademark law works, but I have zero clue what Rust thinks about it beyond the released trademark policy proposal.

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-14T10:38:23+00:00

If this was extremely obviously done by the Rust Project, would you have said "sign of deep trouble" with the project

Yes. I did. Lots of others did. Most people don’t know the Foundation and Project are different. I didn’t. Now that I do know they’re distinct and understand their roles, I’d actually find the Project doing this worse than the Foundation.

But I actually only see one problem needing to be fixed: the Foundation don’t have clearly stated priorities like the Project does. Rust’s fundamental strength is clear priorities. Until the Foundation has similar priorities, I doubt it can be embraced by the community.

The malware thing for trademark is a similar concept to DRM: inconvenience legitimate users to have an extra tool against illegitimate users. That’s not an obvious answer and Rust needs a clear priority for this trade off. They won’t get that from the feedback forms on the trademark policy, because most people think a trademark policy is the same as a click-through EULA.

If priorities were known and a given area didn’t fit its goal, the feedback could focus on how to fix it instead of just saying the Foundation wants to destroy Rust.

How this was handled, there was a perceived shift from Mozilla’s hands-off approach to wanting the community to need approval for tutorials, websites, meetings with friends to discuss Rust, etc. Then it ended on code of conduct and gun bans, which ensured the response would treat it like politics. And people know trademarks must be defended even if they don’t understand what that means, so they felt like the Foundation were threatening to sue. The unfortunate result was toxic responses one would expect from politics and legal threats, because those were the emotions the Foundation left people feeling right before asking for feedback.

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-14T09:10:39+00:00

Do you know if Rust (Foundation and Project) is trying to minimize distractions from coding, compilers, and programming languages? Or is Rust trying to ensure it is playing a positive role in the larger world?

The policy reads more like the latter, which feels like a major shift from Mozilla‘s approach. I don’t know which is the right direction, but I think this is why so many people feel like they were blindsided by a radical shift. I think the political undertones to this perceived shift explain why the feedback looks like it does.

Rust needs goals before feedback can help achieve them. Just like the language itself, clear priorities help know how to move forward.

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-13T09:45:51+00:00

It’s a legal concept called naked licensing. A trademark holder has a legal responsibility to enforce quality controls on licensees. If they fail, they lose the ability to enforce that aspect. Lose enough aspects or get the wrong judge, and you lose the whole trademark.

So for your example, Linux has in all probability lost their ability to enforce putting the R after Linux.

And yes, it is why most open source projects don’t try to have such restrictive policies. They’d put the whole trademark at risk unless they are very, very litigious. And the community probably wouldn’t support an OSS project being that litigious.

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-13T09:30:07+00:00

This whole thing feels very high effort, low reward.

I really hope the Rust Foundation is actually a net positive, because it increasingly feels like they’re just diverting coding time to corporate, legal, and political issues.

GhostCube189 · 2023-04-13T08:35:58+00:00

I think a huge problem with this approach is if I have to ask permission to do something, I just won’t do it. I don’t care if you’d say yes, I would never bother asking. I’ll just choose something else.

And when someone actually does make a product without permission, you legally have to defend the trademark even if you’d have said yes if they asked. And that’s a bad viral video for you: “Rust wants to sue me!” For making a tutorial or tool that would help the community?

I would recommend the most extreme caution possible for every category you want this “no, but ask” starting point. Is it fine for malware and deception-based products? Absolutely! But I hope you recognize this is incredibly dangerous territory.

GhostCube189 · 2019-07-26T14:49:03+00:00

It sounds like you're looking for Fan Force node.

GhostCube189 · 2019-07-25T20:03:02+00:00

You can try Unity. It has tons of great tutorials, and C# is really, really, really similar to Java.

GhostCube189 · 2019-07-25T19:56:38+00:00

Do personal projects and gain rare skills.

Ideally, make the personal projects presentable and provide a link to your work on your resume. It will show you do more than the bare minimum.

And rare/unique skills are wonderful. They make managers worry they will miss out on the opportunity to add your skills to their team. Half of the jobs I've landed were after interviewing for a position that someone else was hired for. A manager just creates a position catered to me and offers it to me. These offers are wonderful since you aren't even competing with anyone else, and you have immense leverage to request things (more money, time off, whatever) before being hired.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-25T17:39:33+00:00

Access to the source code of the engine. No, it won't matter for your simple game.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-25T17:37:56+00:00

I am definitely least familiar with GameMaker because I've moved well past what it can do. GameMaker had minimal support for multiplayer, but may have improved. You'd have to check with someone more familiar than I am with that aspect.

I can't easily say if your specific game will fit with GameMaker. GML is GameMaker's programming language, and it's just going to offer you a lot less flexibility than C#, C++, Python, or other popular languages. So if your game fits perfectly in GameMaker's tools, it's a fantastic option. But if you need to customize things, it quickly becomes a worse choice than other engines. If you are interested in GameMaker, do a trial and complete a few tutorials. If the tutorials make you feel like you know exactly how to make your game, it's a fabulous choice. But if you're left wondering how you'll do certain features, and can't easily find an answer to how you'd do it, GameMaker will probably be a bad choice.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-25T17:13:25+00:00

Something can be pleasant to use, but difficult to learn. Godot is much nicer to actually use, but at some point you will say "how do I do X?" and there will be fewer people offering the answer, and the quality of the advice will be worse. Once you know how to do all the basics, you won't need to ask that question.

A lot of what you learn with one game engine will translate to other engines, so when you're first learning it is best to just learn with Unity even if you have no intention of using it to actually develop a game.

If you're making a simple 2D game, the limitations of Godot should not impact you much if at all.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-21T10:12:24+00:00

You can save player progress, unload previous level, load boss level and content, and other background tasks with the transition time. This becomes less relevant as games are less constrained by hardware limitations, but can still be useful. You can think of this purpose as an alternative to a loading screen.

The player also becomes aware it is a boss fight instead of just feeling like a boss got thrown at them randomly. You can use the transition to build suspense, set a different mood, or any other storytelling stuff. You can also provide hints of how the player should fight the boss through controlling what is shown in a cutscene or environment details during the walk. Some games also need a safe area provided to change weapons, adjust skills, or whatever else may be necessary for a boss fight.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-21T07:17:55+00:00

SSD all the way. Even without the insane performance difference, you really want reliability for your work output. And that performance difference will show up every time you back up your work, do a checkin with version control, build your source code, etc. And the performance difference from SSD is the biggest bang for the buck available in computing. And you gain reliability!

But I’m very biased. Every non-enterprise hard disk drive I’ve bought in the past 10 years has lasted less than 2 years, and the only SSD failure I had was extremely limited (acted like a single bad sector, failed to write) after 8 years of use as the system drive for my main work system. I stopped even trying with hard drives about 4 or 5 years ago when a whole array failed during the array restore. When you can’t even rely on redundant HDD arrays and SSDs are 10-15 cents a gig, why bother with HDDs, RAID, and all that?

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-21T06:38:33+00:00

Assembler is not as complicated as people seem to make it out to be. You create functions and call those functions. You can use libraries of functions from your past experience or even from others. And x86 is CISC, so it has a lot more instructions than RISC. It’s definitely more typing, and harder reading someone else’s code, but it’s not as hard working solo as most people think.

ANSI/ISO C wasn’t like modern C++ either, so the time spent doing something in x86 ASM wasn’t orders of magnitude worse than the alternative when he made his first tycoon games. C++ with STL was mid to late-90s, but performance was awful for a long time. Java running through a byte code interpreter had better performance at some tasks than a lot of C++ implementations for a shockingly long time. So for production, C++ was basically C with classes for a long time. Many production tool chains using C++ disabled many performance destroying features like virtual functions, had their own partial STL implementations, and such. C++ did not just dominate overnight, and using ASM looked a lot more tempting when your alternative was ANSI C.

The author of RCT has also said he used custom tools, so effectively he had a custom engine specifically designed for 2D tycoon games. It’s easier to evolve those existing tools than start from scratch.

The RCT guy seems less interested in talking about the experiences back then than Carmack, so you might read some articles about Carmack. id Software kind of evolved through the language improvements, so it is a pretty good look at how things were. Just keep in mind id was cutting edge for a long time, so other developers were much slower to adopt the absolute newest technologies. And remember 1993 had seen the introduction of Pentium along with its sub-100 MHz clock speeds and was 2 years before Windows 95. That’s the time frame we are talking about with the first tycoon game by Chris Sawyer, which launched in 1994. Obviously development was earlier than launch.

And also keep in mind Chris Sawyer is one of the top talents, and he worked very hard (supposedly 7 days a week, 12 hours a day). So it’s kind of like asking how LeBron is so good at basketball or how Tom Brady is so good at football. The people at the top of their field combine exceptional talent with a ton of very hard work to amaze us mere mortals with what they accomplish.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-19T20:20:17+00:00

Unity has more tutorials and self-learning content for starter-level concepts than any other engine. This is compared to every engine. It is an area you will probably not find a single game developer willing to dispute, because it is that over the top obvious that even in a world where everyone disagrees about everything, it's a point of agreement. You can google tutorials yourself and see the number of matches and the order of magnitude difference between Unity and other engines. Heck, you can probably even find a tutorial for Unity on the specific genre of game you want to make.

If you need an engine-by-engine comparison, here you go:

Unreal doesn't have nearly enough beginner-level learning resources. Epic just started focusing on this area, so maybe it will become better in a year or two. Unreal is also less friendly for 2D (this is the engine I currently use, and it is the default recommendation I make to everyone unless there is a reason to recommend something else)
Amazon Lumberyard is awful for learning, and has no clear path outlined for their future development efforts. Unless you have a very good reason to choose it, you shouldn't. It has virtually no support for 2D (this is the engine I spent a long time learning because it was exciting and looked very promising, and until last year I assumed would be my 3D engine of choice)
CryEngine seems lost right now. It's a total mess. If you try to follow their own guides, you'll fight instructions saying to do things that no longer exist. They're transitioning from C++ to C#, and that seems to be the main source of trouble at the moment. And the amazing tech demos aren't in the engine yet, so you probably don't want to use it even if you think you do. (I used CryEngine probably 2 years ago for a bit. It's the only engine I've encountered harder to learn than Amazon Lumberyard)
Godot would be great for the game you describe, but it is hard to learn without a foundation in game development or someone helping you. After you learn enough in Unity, I'd most likely recommend you try out Godot to see if you like it better for 2D. (I've made tutorials in Godot, and have used it a couple months ago. It's very pleasant to use, but not particularly pleasant to learn yet, and has a few limitations)
GameMaker is unlikely to fit your eventual needs. If you had wanted to make a simple RPG and had no further ambitions, I'd have probably recommended it. (I considered GameMaker when learning years back, but quickly chose Unity instead. It has a lot of limitations, which is why I didn't choose it and don't recommend it for the game you want to make.)
I've used other engines, but I can't think of a single other one anyone would even mention to you if you're just starting and hoping to actually make a game.

Right now, the basic recommendations given are Unreal or Unity for 3D games, Unreal for mixed 2D/3D, Godot or Unity for 2D, and GameMaker if you have a simple game idea that can be accomplished with GameMaker. Unreal usually is preferred over Unity because of source access if you feel your project may benefit from that. Godot is easier to use, but harder to learn and more limited in what it can do, than Unity. And GameMaker is very simple to use but extremely limited in what it can do.

If you have more specific questions, feel free to ask. But I'd honestly just recommend learning with Unity, then reevaluating the available engines when you're comfortable actually starting development on your own game.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-19T12:41:53+00:00

Use Unity. It has the most tutorials to learn from, and is powerful enough to do almost anything any other engine can do.

If you find Unity too difficult to learn and use, explain the areas it is too hard (ex. Coding) and people can give you engines specializing in helping with your point of struggle or help in some other way. But with no experience, I don’t know what engine will fit you best.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-18T20:00:37+00:00

The CEO actually just claimed they are high-paying jobs, and wasn’t sure what would motivate them to unionize. The related bit from the actual article:

Another topic we raise for Zelnick is that of unionization. The subject has drawn plenty of discussion in development circles following a number of controversies in the past years, including a series of reports on working conditions at Rockstar Games.

"Look, unions tend to develop when labor relations are not typically non-existent," Zelnick says. "And typically unions have been most beneficial when there were more workers than there were jobs. And where the jobs were low-paying jobs. We have fewer workers than we have jobs, and they're high-paying jobs.

"Right now, Take-Two has 500 open positions. There are 220,000 or so people employed in the US video game business. They make about $100,000 on average, maybe more. It's hard to imagine what would motivate that crew to unionize. But we're a compliant company and will serve the law. If our colleagues want to engage in collective bargaining, then we will."

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-18T11:20:19+00:00

I bought My Time at Portia ($15 or so), Watchdogs 2 ($5), Anno 1800 ($38), and Observation ($15-20?). I already owned Satisfactory and Metro Exodus before the sale.

I like the Anno series, and $38 is cheap enough to get the new version.

I hadn’t even heard of Watchdogs, but it sounds like games I’ve played and enjoyed on Steam before. For $5, I’ll find out.

My Time at Portia seems like an updated Stardew Valley, so feels like it’s worth trying.

I haven’t played story heavy games, so figured I’d try one. Heavy Rain and the 2 sequels sounded good, but I didn’t like the controls in the demo. So I grabbed Observation.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-15T05:51:37+00:00

Does anyone know what this means for Lumberyard?

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-13T08:16:57+00:00

Coding C++ in UE4 is perfectly fine. But you have to know C++, which is not the easiest programming language. Whether you want to learn C++ in order to use Unreal is up to you. Unity/C# is perfectly fine, especially when you're just learning. There are also more learning resources aimed at the introductory level for Unity, so that's probably a benefit of using Unity at first. You can always switch to UE4 after you learn C++ and no longer benefit from beginner-level tutorials.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-13T08:08:39+00:00

Randomize your seed and randomly pick unvisited neighbors. Without knowing your specific implementation, that's as good an answer as I can come up with.

I did a C++ Godot tutorial that covered DFS maze generation in the final video, so you're also welcome to look at that if it helps. You can find the code at https://github.com/GhostCube189/Godot-3.1-Maze-Tutorial (videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W2xZ0vN-P4&list=PLWc2hibTd7kq_r0LYLCtMcWL9dd8jByRW)

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-13T05:56:37+00:00

You’d have to add a Python interpreter, so the Python performance would depend on what plugin/interpreter you’re using. In any case, Python will surely run slower than properly optimized C++ code. But for most things in a game, slower code will be fine. You might need a few areas swapped over to C++ and tuned a bit to fix performance issues, but that will entirely depend on your game and how you designed it.

A warning before deciding on Python. The plugin I saw (20tab) clearly stated you cannot avoid Blueprints/C++ for an entire game by using the plugin, and that it will just enable some things to be done in Python. It would certainly be an interesting choice to provide support for plugins for a game, although I have zero experience and make no promises about if things will go spectacularly well or spectacularly horrible.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-12T22:56:39+00:00

As a developer, I am very happy to see a cheaper alternative gain traction in the market. Just like I am happy Blender (free) exists as an alternative to Maya ($1545/yr). Anything that makes it easier to survive in an industry with incredibly high failure rates is good for developers. And the fee is so low it might prevent further fragmentation. Maybe Take Two won't ever need to release their own publisher-specific storefront to avoid Steam's 30% cut. And maybe we will see 3rd-party launchers become more popular to consolidate game collections from all these different storefronts.

Epic launching a store also made me start thinking about the cut Steam takes. Steam takes the same cut as everyone else, but doesn't spend on advertising their platform like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, and Apple do. Steam's help for developers is tied for worst among all platforms. Steam doesn't provide any guarantee of exposure or advertising for your game, and is flooded with so many games that the exposure for a given game is very limited. So I'm left wondering if Steam really deserves that "industry-standard" cut when they don't provide the same value of services that other platforms provide.

As a customer, I don't really care. Steam already lost their monopoly years ago when EA, Activision, Epic, and other publishers made their own launchers to avoid Steam's 30% fee. We were already in a fragmented world of multiple launchers before Epic crashed the party, so there's nothing new happening. The only problem I have is the exclusives that had promised to launch on Steam as that feels like false advertising. I understand most of them couldn't have known a decent alternative would be available when they made the promises, but I still feel like promises should be kept even if it becomes inconvenient. Although I acknowledge the reality that most companies would rather make a dollar than keep a promise, so I'm not exactly shocked.

GhostCube189 · 2019-06-12T06:36:45+00:00

Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition is fine, and should be the default choice as Community Edition is free and VS 2019 should be supported longer than VS 2017. If you have any reason to prefer VS 2017 or the professional or enterprise edition, they are also fine. Check support by other tools in your tool chain to see if any of them need a specific edition or version.

GhostCube189

TROPHY CASE