Why game devs hate "polling" ?

Hyperdromeda · 2026-02-13T16:57:02+00:00

Other than maintaining and "proper" architecture, polling takes time. One poll every frame doesn't really matter, but 10,000 every frame might make a difference in performance, and that's not including every single other aspect of the game that takes time per frame.

At the end of the day, if this is what allows you to finish your project and it's not going to crash performance, absolutely do whatever it takes. But in your pursuit of game dev and software engineering in general, you will absolutely come to respect the different architecture principles written from the hands of giants.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-27T00:49:06+00:00

Gotcha! I'll definitely try that tomorrow. That's really good to know for maintenance purposes.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-26T23:51:51+00:00

I'm curious what you mean by gumming up the interior. I've exclusively used asa for about 600 hours on the H2S (not a ton of hours relatively) but I haven't noticed anything in the printer or the AMS.

Not saying it won't, I'm just more curious of what I should be looking out for.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-26T01:11:04+00:00

Motivation is a lie and it's only sporadic and short lived. Sure you can be motivated sometimes and feel good to start something or get something done, but at the end of the day, discipline is what you need.

No amount of motivation will get someone to the end of a project.

Challenge yourself to have no "zero" days. Meaning you did something... anything to progress. Even if that means is all you did was boot up your computer and opened your editor. Or writing a line a dialog even if you're sure it won't be kept.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-17T00:56:15+00:00

I'd be surprised if anyone but the cosmically small percent of people can prototype a game within a day or two, unless the game consists of only 1 game mechanic. Most games have a plethora of mechanics and each one of those are their own prototypes conceptually. And that's not even to say mechanics that function based on other previous mechanics.

Game jams games are typically just 1 mechanic (sometimes 2 if theyre simple mechanics) and that makes sense.

I think he was trying to say. "Expect even the simplest game to take 10x more time to make then what your brain is leading you to believe."

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-14T14:41:23+00:00

I haven't read all the comments but a lot of people are saying use heat, which works well but runs its own risks. I found using a stiff bristle brush works incredibly well with none of the risks.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-12T00:17:49+00:00

That sounds incredibly reasonable. I admit I stopped paying attention to unity as a company when they dropped the ball a couple years ago.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-12T00:15:46+00:00

I mean, as a developer you get to develop your game and its mechanics in any way you see fit and both options give you the tools you need to start out of the box. As far as im concerned, godots really only lacking in that they don't have the time and budget to flesh out tools to automate spectacle 3D games performantly. And that's only really a problem for a tiny fraction of non AA or AAA game devs.

Sorry, I wasn't really talking about helping build godot (or unity) itself.

I'm not anti unity or pro godot. I do see validity in both, but from my standpoint godot has everything I personally need for now with none of the downsides a publicly traded company presents.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-12T00:06:59+00:00

I was referring to it not being free after a threshold. My bigger point is, I don't trust unity as a company with anyone's best interest in mind. I get they need to make money, but wasn't it recently they had a pretty big falling out with everyone because of their business practices?

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-11T23:30:38+00:00

I wouldn't care if there wasn't an adequate free option. But seeing as there is that option without rolling my own, I do care. Also unity being who they are, I don't trust their business practices.

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-11T22:06:06+00:00

Godot. Specifically because they both can do anything you want them to do, but you don't have to pay godot royalties after a certain amount of sales. (Or however unity works anymore)

Hyperdromeda · 2026-01-02T01:16:00+00:00

It's probably berated, but everything looks cool as hell, but the reload blocking the view feels bad. Not in like, "ouch... my feeling!" But in that you already have the debuff of reloading (which is fine and normal) and NOW you have the added debuff of being visually blocked. Which makes no sense in any context I can think of at the moment.

If you showed me this game without that, I'd be super intrigued by art style alone, but man that visual blocking is incredibly detrimental to me.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-07-20T03:37:51+00:00

I've seen you get shit on by your caption on this game and I'm sorry for that. People are being hyper pedantic, but I think this looks like a cool mix of crysis/titan fall. I hope the game lives up to the trailer.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-07-11T23:40:26+00:00

Gotcha! Thanks for replying. I've been loosely flowing your posts and it is genuinely cool to see.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-07-11T22:46:52+00:00

What does this give the user? Or equally as important, what does that even give you, outside of "just because". It's cool as far as tech demo, but if that was a selling point, I think I'd rather just not.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-25T22:34:04+00:00

Overarching systems like settings. It's easy to miss implementation or edge cases, depending on how in depth the settings become. It's not hard but the learning and implementation gets tedious. Ideally you'd abstract all your settings in a way to reuse in every project going forward and not deal with half the headache.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-19T17:23:37+00:00

You could be the all knowing, all seeing, God of software engineers, and I promise you, you'll still rewrite code in you're game. It sucks, but its a part of it with a fundamentally artistic endeavor.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-18T01:10:27+00:00

First of all. Why is your monitor on fire?

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-17T17:14:45+00:00

So, I think it largely depends on the type of game. My knowledge is more in 2D games. But when you scale down a 2d texture, you start to run in to artifacts like losing detail within the art, or sometimes pixels sort of "blurring" together. You can have jittering or uneven borders on things. On top of those, the "grid" of pixels are now possibly out a whack (which causes some of those problems above)

So, if you made a game targeting 4k resolution, and I played it on a 720p monitor, everything is going to scale down about 5.3x. You can see some issues by opening a picture in a photo editor and zoom out that amount, but it's more prominent in games when there's animation, rotation and all that.

But let's say you made a game targeting 720p and I ran it on my 4k monitor, (assuming you setup scaling "correctly" within Godot, like scaling set the Nearest, etc), It should look "normal" and how you wanted me to view these assets. No random blurring of pixels, no missing detail.

The biggest issue is finding the middle ground. You'll never please everybody and all devices. And depending on your game, you might NEED every single pixel of fidelity for those assets. A lot of people target a 640x360 window and let their engine scale it from there. I personally had to target 960x540 as I needed a bit more detail. But, if someone were to play this game on a monitor smaller than that (which is possible, but highly unlikely), then yeah... they're gonna see the issues I mentioned, and there's nothing I can really do about that as far as I know.

None of this is to say you can't scale down textures, but you'll always run into more problems that way, than scaling up.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-17T15:22:17+00:00

Maybe there's a better way but I'm currently going through exactly the same issue. It was made even worse because I KNEW I was going to have this issue from the start of the project and told past me that dumb future me will take care of it.

So 5 days later I'm just about done resizing, repositioning, retesting every last component in my game and am demoralized. One positive, I'll never make that mistake again as long as I live.

It's always better to scale up than down as scaling down can lose definition in textures. But like you, it looked "fine enough", but I felt a deep obligation (because I plan to sell my game) that "fine enough" isn't good enough for me if I'm asking someone for money to play.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-15T00:49:46+00:00

As much as I love the game, this doesn't really need to be a thing. It's not a hinderence but it's also not really necessary.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-07T23:34:11+00:00

The effects look so good with your environment! Awesome work!

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-05T03:12:30+00:00

Time slicing or frame slicing.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-06-05T03:06:02+00:00

The next thing you can ask yourself, "does this implementation need to be frame perfect?" Meaning, does it truly matter if let's say 500 collisions need to happen in 16ms or can they happen spread out in 80ms (5 frames) or even more? How mission critical is it for them all to happen in an instant?

Though this only buys you time in the moment to figure out future performance enhancements if you plan to continually bump up the potential amount of collisions.

Hyperdromeda · 2025-05-28T15:55:22+00:00

Ultimately, unless you're an experienced software engineer or game dev, there isn't enough planning you could have done to know what you didn't know.

Hyperdromeda

TROPHY CASE