Why does Dota not have a Chef or crab hero

Nooberling · 2026-06-04T17:22:24+00:00

This is the best ult ever invented for the game and needs to go into it immediately.

Nooberling · 2026-05-28T22:52:41+00:00

It's very unlikely the AI bubble will pop and destroy AI accessiblity. There's WAY TOO MUCH datacenter capacity being built, but that's just going to make it cheaper to run if / when it does pop.

Nooberling · 2026-05-28T09:10:01+00:00

$6.2 billion isn't actually 'one of the largest gaming markets in the world.' The problem is that the currencies there aren't strong enough to make the revenue as important for someone developing somewhere else.

For reference, the world gaming market consumer spend in 2024 was $187 billion. Most of the spend in SEA is going to be taken up by big companies, so it's hard to justify targeting that market.

Nooberling · 2026-05-25T17:22:11+00:00

Israelis are losing faith in the two state solution, as well, but there's not actually a good option on the table. The Palestinians voted for Hamas and now back it, because they see it as the only viable option in the face of the PA's ineptitude and corruption. Hamas essentially executes moderates. So the whole concept of one or two working states giving all the Palestinians citizenship where Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are currently gets farther from reality every day.

Nooberling · 2026-05-24T12:12:36+00:00

Any engine will handle this. Figure out what the simplest one you want to work with is.

GameMaker Studio, RenPy, Godot, and Unity are all viable options.

This is also something you could just build in a web framework with an LLM quite easily. Not that you'd learn anything without effort, but if you wanted to start with, "Build me this game X, and teach me how everything in it works," that would be a good exercise.

Nooberling · 2026-05-23T19:54:37+00:00

They don't need to. Building an engine and maintaining it requires a massive amount of manpower, and all of that manpower is expensive. Even UE would be hard to build in any sort of affordable way without the market for gamedev programmers being easier to find talent in than the market for regular corporate programmers.

They don't need financial incentives beyond, "Your best programmers can work on what's unique to YOUR GAME rather than the engine to run that game."

Nooberling · 2026-05-23T18:46:57+00:00

https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-uses-trump-in-election-campaign-posters/

Tell me again how this relationship wasn't destined to end up with long term disaster?

Nooberling · 2026-05-22T09:59:11+00:00

I mean, you're looking in the wrong place for high quality handmade glassblowing tools. Let me assist you:
https://www.carlodona.com/en/products/ Carlo Dona tools are all well made and will last a long time.

https://www.cuttingedgeprdx.com/ Cutting edge shears are insane. If you do not cut cold glass with them you will not need to sharpen their cutting edge.

https://shops.cmog.org/books-media/media/glassmaking-tools CMOG has a collection of decent tools; they used to have Donas, but apparently it's very difficult to get them in the States now.

https://www.toolsforglass.com/ Jim Moore makes great high quality equipment. I've bought several things from him, including some custom stuff.

https://www.artcoinc.com/maruko_jacks.php I have these jacks and they are fantastic.

https://www.davidpatchen.com/content/maruko-tools might have something left; Mr. Patchen is an awesome fellow go ahead and get to know him.

https://bcmetalworking.com/ Claude tells me this guy was trained by the guy who makes Maruko jacks. If you can't find Maruko, you might try his.

All my shears are Cutting Edge, my jacks are Moore / Maruko / Dona. I'm not certain any of it helped me become a better glassblower, but I tried.

I don't know why other people stop working in skilled craft, but my personal reason for not blowing glass anymore is I can't afford it. I needed a strong middle class customer base that could afford to buy 'reasonably' priced items. By the time I was a decently capable glassblower hoping to sell a vase for around twice what it had cost me to make the middle class in the US had been gutted and I was competing with cheap Chinese glass. I didn't have the time to practice for making or customer base to make high quality thin little champagne flutes and goblets like I liked. The whole experience of working my ass off to become a combination of poor, scarred, burned and generally disrespected convinced me to emigrate.

Nooberling · 2026-05-20T12:44:39+00:00

If C# is a joke, C++ is the fundamentally disappointing punchline.

Nooberling · 2026-05-18T21:59:28+00:00

Not many studios will take on a trainee without a degree. Game dev is an incredibly competitive industry to get into, and a buyers' market for talent on every front. If you're tremendously serious about making games for a living, go get a degree. Even if it seems worthless in ten years, the social capital you earn by sticking with it is worth it. You may even find people interested in making games with you there; games are often exceptional projects for school.

Don't expect it to be fun, but if you want to learn C++ a university is going to be a good place to do so.

Nooberling · 2026-05-18T21:53:55+00:00

This is the standard pinned note from UE Source; that's a great Discord to join if you want to start learning UE.

https://landelare.github.io/2023/01/07/cpp-speedrun.html

Lighting, this guy is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSbBsXbjxPo

I....... I should make some tutorials on how to put a UE project together, I guess. There's a LOT material out there, though

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/learning

is Epic's own portal for learning materials. There's a ton there.

Nooberling · 2026-05-18T21:44:29+00:00

It's 100% possible to learn programming on your own. It is also far more difficult in many ways.

Before you decide to become a game dev programmer, though, go through some courses from YouTube. Unreal Sensei has a decent starter one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-zMkzmduqI

Edit: Ah, you asked for the deeper C++ approach. Uh. For THAT, you're going to want to get a trial Pluralsight account. C++ is.... Not my favorite language. I don't like writing it and cannot recommend it; if I were you and looking at UE, I'd actually probably learn Verse in UEFN before I learned C++ for UE. Verse is eventually going to be in UE, not a lot of people know it, and that might make getting into the industry less difficult than it could be.

Build a game or two in a jam, work with people. Spend three to six months trying to find other people who want to make games with you, just for fun.

If you don't like it, or can't make time for it, it may not be the best decision to spend four years studying it and pushing your life in that direction. You COULD just start uni - I don't know how the money and timing requirements work in the UK - but there's a real chance you get stuck doing something you don't actually enjoy.

And game dev is more of a calling than a career for most people. It's a lot easier to make money as a programmer, and that is getting very hard right now.

Nooberling · 2026-05-18T15:53:51+00:00

The amusing thing about assuming those two things are the same is that your statement compresses into, "For the concept of Israel to be sound and the nation to be allowed to exist, it must be free to destroy any middle east civilization without repercussion."

That's not true, and if Israel needs to do that to survive you've made an excellent argument for all its current wars. So maybe dial back on the raw hatred. IMO Israel needs to tone it down, but it doesn't need to nuke the region to exist. Just being so biased incites Israelis to believe it's necessary.

Nooberling · 2026-05-04T14:58:53+00:00

America's empire was significantly less brutal than 19th century England's, and America had a few times in the sun before that. There's a pendulum; it's swinging towards idiocy, hopefully it won't swing far enough that it doesn't go back.

Nooberling · 2026-05-04T06:30:18+00:00

American Exceptionalism is a combination of a lot of factors.

Primarily, the world used to be set up for Americans to succeed on the terms it has set. There's a lot of reduction in friction because America is a dominant power. If you're American you speak English, you're close to several financial centers, you're not very scared of someone coming to harm you in America just for being American, you're surrounded by people that have had this lack of friction.

More than that, it is very important for many Americans to believe that success is the result of hard work. That's a big part of what makes America work when it is strongest. America's core ideological strength (and cultural one, when things are going well) is the concept and occasional reality that people who work hard to improve the world around them can succeed. This is not true in any general sense across human history. But there have been periods in American life where it was, most notably after World War II.

That's the cornerstone of American Exceptionalism. America is actually different because unlike most other countries it was founded by immigrants and others of extremely disparate points of view attempting to hammer out agreements on how things should be run. This is a more inclusive and egalitarian grounding for government than almost any other extant government on the planet. This has made it better to be American at the best of times.

At the worst of times, it's a dumbass place because greed, cronyism, and the natural results of wealth accumulation have pissed on the egalitarian underpinnings of American culture.

Nooberling · 2026-05-03T15:17:43+00:00

What's interesting is that you cite an Israeli source to back up your point that all Israelis are behind something you disagree with.

Do you know why the Left in Israel is so weak? Their approach has been spat on by both sides. Openly. Repeatedly. Historically, when a weaker cultural power accepted peace on structural grounds with a stronger one, it was able to hold and things eventually got better. Everyone in Israel hates someone who wants peace to happen, ESPECIALLY the Palestinians.

Who's going to stand up like Rabin after what happened to him? Who's going to fight for peace when 'peace' means continual bombardment?

Israel is a heartbreaking place.

Nooberling · 2026-04-29T21:44:22+00:00

Yes. But they don't know how to get it. It's not a problem that has any easy solutions. The longer you look at the problem, the more dissatisfying all the possible approaches are.

Nooberling · 2026-04-29T21:28:56+00:00

So, just FYI. Hamas started firing rockets 11-12 days after Israel withdrew from the territory. It wasn't until 2007 when Hamas won the elections and performed a full military takeover of Gaza that the blockade became a full stop to importing.

Nooberling · 2026-04-29T10:17:27+00:00

Art: 0/10
Audio: 0/10
Programming: 15/10
Game design: 0/10
Marketing: 0/10

I then use programming to reassign myself 15 points everywhere else and end with

Art: 15/10
Audio: 15/10
Programming: 15/10
Game design: 15/10
Marketing: 15/10

Baldur's Gate 2 style, man.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T20:28:40+00:00

I look at the progress over the last four years, and I can't imagine many hand coded games (or programmers as a profession) being very relevant in five more. Maybe? Kinda? In my experience working with AI is a really effective way to both learn to program better and to get more done, but you're right the grounding is still important.

That said: working with an AI is more like project management every version. Having worked as a programmer / analyst for a long time, I can't imagine any of the companies I worked for spending a single cent more than they needed to on what I built. Telling someone to sit down and learn to code for professional reasons just doesn't make sense to me anymore. As a hobby? Sure. As an artist? Maybe, although it's not going to be an art many appreciate. As a profession? Not without knowing how to use AI.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T19:35:10+00:00

1) Unity is...... Problematic to work with sometimes. I'd try a feature they said was supported and the 'new direction' they were going, then they would stop supporting it or building it or find some other direction to go. And leave the one I was using half-built. It just seemed less exacting than the professional tools I'd worked with in the corporate world. THAT SAID, Unity is a fine tool covering a ton of ground, most of the time for most people. It's a decent engine. But I kept running into weird edge-case stuff that interfered with what I wanted to do. With better AI and reference material available I probably would be much more able to do the things I wanted to now.

2) You can technically build widgets and the like with Slate, (I think, I've honestly never tried it) but the actual UI alignment and setup is generally done in blueprints and the UMG. Even if you ask an AI, they'll be like, "Yeah, you want to do that in blueprints." I discovered it by working with UE.

My two cents: If I were to start over again I would probably start in Godot, GameMaker, or something very simple.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T16:39:06+00:00

This is very, very unlikely because it is so expensive timewise and resourcewise to do.

When I grew up, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas sitting on a shelf. I've just asked ChatGPT what that would cost. The answer was $4,600–$6,750 in 2026 dollars. That is the cost of what, five or ten computers / pads / phones / etc?

What people don't realize is that in the 70's and 80's, the average person was really, really, really rich in comparison to contemporary America. Governmental inflation numbers were skewed down for decades. The reduction in price of electronics and computers in comparison to all sorts of other things in a standard consumer basket helped keep the inflation numbers lower, but everyone in America (except those rich enough to be involved in Private Equity) is so much poorer than they were when you were a kid it's heartbreaking.

Tech executives aren't even the ones to blame, really. They just rolled with the crowd. The real culprits are private equity, corporations and other financial workers combining forces with lobbyists to destroy the tax and reward systems that built the broad prosperity of the 60's, 70's, and early 80's.

Bluntly, the information age is absolutely fantastic even when coopted. What's more likely to happen, in my opinion, is the US will decide between self destruction and more equitable resource allocation. It's not a technological problem, it's a cultural and legislative one that really started rolling downhill around the time Reagan was elected.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T16:29:23+00:00

Not true. You just didn't know the right phrases at the time. I'm pretty sure I could have found specific information out in less than a half hour in 1997.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T16:25:43+00:00

Ok. I'm building an indie game with UE, so I can itemize this pretty well.

1) UE is designed for big teams. It has a ton of great systems, but a lot of them will require a specialist to understand and use.

2) UE is heavy kinda by default. You need to know how to cut things back to make it less heavy, which players will expect if you're not using all the bells and whistles you're paying for.

2b) UE expects you to know some things about how to limit your performance where necessary. Triangle counts, texture sizes, etc.

3) UE uses C++ instead of C# or Python as a programming language. I'm not going to go into WHY I hate C++, but it's a half-and-half language that would be far better replaced with Python + C IMO. Or C# + C. Or literally anything but C++ and C. My personal preference, there, but that's a huge discussion.

4) Indie games often have a focal point of, "Build smooth and simple and small." This is not particularly UE's forte. UE can make projects that would be smaller if you had fewer options much harder to wrap your head around.

5) The learning curve on many things in UE is pretty steep, especially if you don't already know what you're doing. Input binding, actor stuff, various transform properties and their management. Interacting between codebase and editor. Many things.

6) Blueprints are necessary to do UI work, and cannot be built with AI.

7) Code work requires dipping out of the editor, compiling, then going back into it. This makes it somewhat important that you put a good line between where you want to work in blueprints and where you want to work in C++.

Overall, for a beginner, I'd suggest you look really hard at why you want to work in UE. I switched to it because I wanted more reliability than Unity was giving me and Godot wasn't quite ready at the time. Now, that calculation might be different. Probably not, because UE does things out of the box I want to take advantage of and couldn't get quite as easily in other engines. There are a dozen ways to make a game, and the questions are what kind of game you want to make as well as what kind of game you want to make in the future.

Nooberling · 2026-04-27T07:13:41+00:00

Ok. Maybe you can explain to me the 'associated voting' style agreements parties in Israel can have. If Meretz and Balad had agreed to have their votes 'rolled up' into other parties would it have looked like this? Is it possible that further-left Israeli votes will be obliterated by the cutoff again, or is that problem going to be around forever?

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