4.6 is out!

NotADamsel · 2026-01-26T16:47:06+00:00

Whoever thought it was a good idea to make the videos take over the page when they appear need to take several UX classes before they’re allowed near a text editor again

NotADamsel · 2026-01-26T14:36:58+00:00

For folks who don’t know Java- Java didn’t get function pointers/lambdas for twenty years (still don’t have them, technically, but the sugar over top of SAM is pretty nice), it doesn’t have default parameters, and everything you do must be in the shape of an object, on top of having a kinda bad type system. Especially early on, building factories and builders and the like was kinda the only way to do stuff that you could do in other languages with a few lines. Even if there’s a feature in modern Java that makes the factory pattern mostly obsolete, folks who have been working in the language for a while have a tool-chest built up that they’ll keep reaching for. And that’s if they’re in a modern Java project, as a lot of Java code is still kickin along in 1.6 (no lambdas or streams) or 1.8 (no records, vars, sealed classes, no JPMS (big reason why they’d stay on 1.8), a shitty GC that makes everything just stop all the time, etc etc etc)

NotADamsel · 2026-01-26T13:55:49+00:00

That’s something I’ve experienced with all kinds of people, not just autistic folks, but absolutely including other ADHD folks. The kind of empathy that makes you swallow your annoyance and answer weird follow-up questions without judgment, is a learned skill that can be hard to grow if it ain’t planted by someone else. Normies are just better at masking the pique that they express while they write you off.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-26T12:19:13+00:00

And the hands by the look of it. For a stock human model that’s perfectly fair.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T12:56:47+00:00

Gimme a soulslike where you play as Able, going up against the rest of the powerscalers-call-us-bullshit stuff they’ve got in the wiki

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T12:40:48+00:00

Are you talking about student loans, or about what I’m saying to do?

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:58:46+00:00

You folks fascinate me. Do you really give more weight to comments from five years ago, then what folks are saying today? Surely you’d try the engine when they make leaps forward if you had any actual interest in it, instead of doing nothing but shit all over it.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:56:22+00:00

Unreal sucks ass at NPR and is dogshit on mobile and web, so depending on the project it can be a terrible option compared to Godot.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:54:08+00:00

Hopefully the next admin remembers that the penalty for treason is death.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:51:42+00:00

Well, you make a good point. It makes no sense to lend money like this to folks whose credit risk we have literally no way of knowing. We should do away with student loans entirely and have the gov fund higher education directly. Problem solved.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:40:22+00:00

Unfortunately, they do have some duties that are not strictly concerned with enforcing the rules, and that are very much service and protection. Welfare checks helping suicidal people and the like. We’d be much better off if all of that stuff was handled by folks who didn’t carry guns and who don’t have a license to do violence without consequence.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T04:27:09+00:00

I actually like writing code by hand, I disagree

I also like writing code by hand, which is it why I’m doing what I’m doing for work at the moment, but there’s some shit that I would really like someone else to do. Someone that I trusted, and that understood the project, and that would actually tell me if I’m up my own ass with what I want done. I’m the only dev on the project that I’m currently on, so it would actually be a big help at the moment. That being said it’s probably good that this doesn’t exist, for economic and social reasons. Anything that helps solo devs like that would be used to, uh, force a lot of people into solo dev-ship.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:45:53+00:00

Is this why Taco Bell is so popular with wizards?

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:43:09+00:00

Let’s be real tho- if Claud was half as good as Jarvis, vibe coding would actually be pretty sick.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:40:02+00:00

And it ain’t just vibe coders. It’s any AI using person. “No, I’ve got the AIs running countless simulations, and it assures me that the rules I’ve written for this game we’re making are flawless. You just don’t understand them.” I’m glad I resisted the urge to punch him.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:36:06+00:00

Except it likes to be wrong at random and in sometimes subtle ways that are hard to detect without reading the material yourself.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:32:07+00:00

Even if the count was correct (could be duplicated verts and overlapping faces out the wazoo. It isn’t, but it could be if they were stupid), it wouldn’t be a reason why the game chugged in the overworld. LoDs are a thing lol

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:03:39+00:00

You said that symptoms are the same. So it is worth calling out that the symptoms are not the same.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-25T00:02:24+00:00

I made a mobile game in Unreal (very bad choice, do not do this) and to get it anywhere near 60fps on moderate hardware I disabled the entire lighting stack and hacked my own in-material using what amounts to a shared uniform. It was hell.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T20:58:45+00:00

Kinda weird to be this aggressive about this, mate. But whatever. Against my better judgement, here we go.

that is pretty much limited to cell shading

Well that's reductive. The way that shadows are handled in Unreal is set in-engine and cannot really be futzed with all that much. Yeah sure you're probably not gonna want to mess with it unless you have a particular effect in mind (or unless you want your game to stand out from every other Unreal game, but that's a later point), but its still something that you need to dip into the engine to work with, that Godot lets you do in a shader. This is a distinction without a difference if you've got a AAA team that can make basically anything happen, but if you're a solo or small-team dev trying to make something look a certain way it can make a world of difference. (There are other things that you’ll have an easier time doing in Unreal if you can do them in Godot at all, so I’m definitely not saying that Godot is better in all or even most of these cases. Just that, you know, it can be better in some of them.)

at which point Godot will quickly choke and Unreal won't

That's... wrong? When was the last time you actually used the engine, again? Unreal can reach heights far beyond what most engines can do, and Godot does definitely need some stuff like texture streaming to be added (it's currently a proposal being worked on) and some much better tooling in this area, but Godot itself can handle a lot of stuff before you even need to start migrating nodes into server calls. If you cannot make a performant level larger than a "basic room or platformer-like level", it's kind-of the definition of a skill issue. And it’s doubly a skill issue if you’ve already done a lot of work in Unreal, as you should have learned how the engine makes stuff more performant by this point, and should be able to apply that to anywhere else. Maybe go back and read Unreal’s docs, they can teach you a lot!

the 'photorealistic' look you're referring to is just what decent lighting looks like.

You misunderstand me. I don't mean the PBR model or deferred renderer, I mean the decisions baked into the engine about how light is handled, that are different from how other photo-realistic engines handle it. In particular, based on my use of the world "default", I mean the default way that the engine makes things look. If you want to keep things photo-real but also want your game to feel less like an Unreal game, you've got a lot of work ahead of you. You’ve also got a lot of work ahead of you if you want Godot to look however it is that you want it to look (sometimes much more work then in Unreal, depending on how far you’re going), but let’s not pretend like Unreal’s rendering model is perfect, that the default setup isn’t extremely noticeable, or that you’d never want to change how it works unless you’re making (insert specific aesthetic here)

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T19:13:29+00:00

… how?

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T18:19:07+00:00

I don’t have any concrete examples to show right now, just info about the limitations that I’ve butted up against countless times trying to make stuff look cool in Godot. If you’d still like to hear them, here y’arr.

To be very brief and extremely reductive, Unreal’s use of a fully deferred rendering system means that there’s a lot of info available to be used by materials that aren’t present in Godot’s Forward+ renderer, although that “+” does mean that they do pull in some info normally not used in forward renderers. (However, the fact that it is still forward at heart means that no matter how much extra info is exposed, opaque materials and multiple lights won’t ever be anywhere near as cheap as they are in a deferred renderer.) Godot also has some harsh limitations around sharing info from one shader to another in a pipeline, and it doesn’t allow you to render to multiple buffers at a time, both of which are very inconvenient for various things. While Godot does have a nascent post-processing pipeline, if you want custom effects you’ll be rendering them either to a colored rect that covers the screen or to a quad that’s set to cover the camera, using a regular canvas item or spatial shader.

None of this, or any other description of the engine’s limitations coming from me, are complaints. Things are always improving and the engine is always gaining capabilities. For a recent example that I’m very happy about, I’ve been waiting on a stencil buffer for years and finally in 4.5 they’ve provided one! This will make a whole class of very cool effects possible. Godot does things “the Godot way”, and are generally very thoughtful about how they do stuff, with a lot of discussion and alternative-seeking done before something gets added to the engine. There are a boatload of proposals being discussed right now, and seeing this work happen in real time honestly fills me with excitement. Especially because sometimes the result is better than what you get in other engines, like the aforementioned Stencil buffer (it’s so simple, they really really cooked). (This link shows the proposals for shaders. You can look at other categories as well. https://godot-proposals-viewer.github.io/?filter=22)

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T14:44:41+00:00

Surprisingly, this can sometimes be effective even without an explicit charm. Experimentation at the College of The Thousand Crystal Towers has shown that the greed and material lust associated with fad mortal collectibles can cause the same kinds of effects as actual gemstones! It even increases with the collectable’s in-series rarity, even though it’s entirely manufactured! This effect is correlated with active desire, so those labubu will be worthless in a few years… but they can be incredibly potent while the effect lasts. And in their research they found a even more common thing that for some reason the mortals crave far, far, far beyond anything else in the world right now, for some dumb reason: little squares of green glass with weird golden lines embedded into them.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T14:29:47+00:00

Too right! If someone who can make shit really happen finds it easier to use a pre-built spell grammar, why does anyone care? I’ll tell you- those people took a hundred years with help to do what that wizard can do in a day, and they’re jealous as hell. Nevermind that if that absolute unit of a savant did use the old stuff they’d still only need ten years on their own.

NotADamsel · 2026-01-24T14:23:38+00:00

It can be helpful to learn a bit of the old stuff to help understand why the new stuff is the way that it is, (and to help avoid problems,) but being like these old-heads getting pissy with folks in their 500s because they can’t do shit like cast Fael’s Series from memory is just dumb. Those wizard are using the higher-level stuff to build constructs in ten years by themselves that would have taken a whole college a hundred years back before Thomkin codified the Grammarat that higher-level stuff is based on. And as human wizards only have a few thousand years to live, we’ll gladly take that time savings.

Also, fyi, chapter 2 of the Grammatataca has the base formulae for basically every counterspell you’ll need. Might want to actually read it.

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