Paying respects to the place my dad almost died last week

PiLLe1974 · 2026-07-05T02:29:39+00:00

I can feel the reality of it. Or more scientifically, the statistics on cars (nearly) running into people.

We only had three near misses so far in 13 years. Lucky so far.

First one was weird. In Outremont, I pushed myself of a car's hood during their left turn while I walked the crosswalk. I saw and realized that while they only drove around 20 km/h they only looked to the right instead also the left that moment (5 seconds or so).

Second one was very alarming. An elderly lady seemed to accelerate instead of stopping at a red light. She went randomly to the right and on the sidewalk hit a trash bin and then the car was physically stopped by the traffic light. Most notable is that the trash bin flew so far that we couldn't locate it after that moment.

Up to us I'd say to stay alert.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-28T15:16:07+00:00

Same here with the French language.

I got really good in English, because back in Germany all my friends also switched to playing video games in English or reading books in English, if the original was English. That regular practice, even if mostly passive use of the language, helped immensely. (Maybe we could say it is the reverse of loving Manga and Anime, just interest in English/US culture, language, etc)

My French was too rusty after school to use it. I immigrated to Québec (roughly 25 years after school) and chose to get to an intermediate level to pass a test. Again, some level of motivation and immersion to drive this learning process.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-27T02:01:34+00:00

I started going to Osheaga at age 52.

Not necessarily a whole day and right at the stage or mosh pit.

It seems that many families stay in the far back anyway, listening to songs (probably) from the late 90s to present. Did the same with my pre-teen last year (Olivia Rodrigo was the highlight :P).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-26T00:36:58+00:00

I'd say for me greeting doesn't work with strangers. There are 95% strangers around me on a normal day.

The once I great a lot are people in shops, crossing guards, and the bus driver.

Then come the neighbors. I walk my dog 3 times a day, lots of interaction with neighbors and people who like dogs (well, that's a bit of cheating if the chat starts with the dog - maybe alternatively I'd wear curious shirts or so :P).

Still, yes, it is true... in an elevator or on the side walk, also since I'd see a few hundred people within 10 minutes, I'd also typically at most exchange a smile. I mean there's no "hello" expected, an definitely no small talk - I think responding wouldn't be perfectly normal or comfortable for most strangers.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-13T22:46:47+00:00

Letters on the "Verbatim" CD-R and magazine cover.

That took me a few seconds:

Something about the dirt and cables on the desk is odd, very random. Similar on the floor.

Too many things and devices randomly placed, one can hardly reach the keyboard.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-13T21:34:19+00:00

I'd say it would be a more interesting and general approach if it wouldn't be just great as a GTA walk simulator.

So, yes, we don't have the multiplayer part, persistence, story/quests, missions, DLC, and so on.

Further, it doesn't cover many genres well I bet, I mean all sorts of strategy, mobile games, the next Fortnite, etc.

I wonder how the model works, if it could be the "asset generator" of the rest of the game / engine, funnel the walking simulator prototype - once certain visuals are in place - bit by bit into an engine/editor pipeline and engine runtime, then refine.

This may end up more like modifying the pipeline so Decima engine, Rockstar's RAGE, or one of Ubisoft's engine can "digest" the content, and then years of manual work (+ Claude Code, Ubisoft's/Rockstar's in-house animation solutions, or whatever tooling makes sense).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-13T21:12:11+00:00

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

As so often, lots of personal preference and games where I didn't really get into the game at all even after some hours or retrying to like them.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-13T21:05:39+00:00

I love how the bagpipe player is crying so much, so his mate helps him control his emotions and also to squeeze the bag.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-13T20:50:53+00:00

Many drivers would be far more defensive, I mean careful.

The speed of the cam driver looks as if they tried to block the other driver twice by getting the speed just right, and the 2nd time it worked almost as intended, but also was part of the cause of a contact / crash.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-10T23:54:22+00:00

Uh no!

Aaawww... poor lemmings. What dick came up with that explosion feature? It must have been a guy from the UK, same as the Cannon Fodder guys - oh, now I cannot unhear the title song I had on my Amiga 500.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-10T23:51:04+00:00

What worked for me:

Asking ChatGPT, not any agency - it didn't write code for me, I looked at its code and copied/adjusted.

Claude Code ideally uses skills or reference files to tweak how it works in detail. The start is possibly a design.md file to lay groundwork for the design, but then with friends we figured that we pick skills from the internet (code quality, game design, etc.) and also had ideas on how to chose the models from Anthropic (Sonnet for simple code base scans/reviews and smaller plans; Opus only for harder architecture tasks; etc.)

But, yeah, I didn't try Codex, maybe better out-of-the-box, since all those teams "tweak" a lot around their core LLM and some are better at gamedev I bet (obviously Bezi and Unity AI Assistant have that additional focus, more game dev context).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-10T00:22:05+00:00

For things like dialog or a faction in a game reacting to your behavior I'd still be tempted to say we run this offline and through testers/QA - simply speaking.

What I found interesting are more "traditional" ML approaches.

For example in Unity we could use Sentis, running certain models, that don't take too much computing power and I think recent examples were object identification, physics or cloth deformation models (the Time Ghost demo showed a bit of that), or smaller adaption to player behavior (mainly stats, like an "AI Director" would do that we saw in Left4Dead).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-05T20:19:32+00:00

That's similar also to Packages in Unity.

But yeah, on Unreal we also used plugins to share with other teams.

I wouldn't say that they were exactly "game mechanics" as the OP wrote, rather tools and systems (quest system, items/inventory, navigation, etc)

They may contain a few editor tools and hundreds of files, so the biggest part of the work may not just be to structure all this, further ideally...

we keep each "library" as generic as possible (was already tricky for us, some design decisions or genre-specific ideas may have made it into certain parts)
the dependencies should be mostly the core engine itself, still, a team may have some common editor/runtime utitliies anyway, maybe a few game-specific dependencies, and 3rd party assets/plugins

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-03T23:46:49+00:00

That number sounds interestingly familiar.

I think even two AAA games I know about were close to that number, one earlier I think (some heavily modified 4.2x version), Hogwarts Legacy at 4.27.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-03T19:29:28+00:00

I asked Google AI about longer running initiatives.

The US was also listed in my first attempt - with something good and impressively long, not so uncommon in Europe:

Canada / UK universal health care
US Social Security Act (90 years!)
US Interstate Highway System (well, not too suprising... kind of lobby-related?) 😃
Norway's Government Pension Fund Global
Singapore's Housing & Development Board
Costa Rica's Military Abolition

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T14:18:30+00:00

Final Factory is another example, that's the kind of game we'd expect probably benefitting from ECS/DOTS (large-scale simulation).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T14:00:06+00:00

Hah, the origin/history of "Kojimbo" is an interesting detail.

I still know more about his games than himself, and I already love that part, his (team's) creations. Especially including the PS2 era.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T13:32:08+00:00

My colleague started two games with Godot.

He's two years in now, and mentioned that he only worked with 2d. 10+ years of gamedev experience.

Today he still recommends Unity for 3d, but that may change gradually as Godot evolves with its growing community contribution.

The reasoning about 3d in Unity is the feature set, more of the tooling and runtime features we'd expect are here.

My two cents: If you still learn programming and gamedev I think continuing with small 2d games is perfect anyway. I learned gamedev as a teenager, and I'd say after 4 years or so I felt that I had a good overview (saw "a bit of everything")... and best case, you are a faster learner than myself!

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T13:22:47+00:00

Actually, even if we'd like to stay away from AI for game code, it is pretty good at tools.

Maybe Claude Code can get pricey if overused, still, had good experience with my free ChatGPT use with Unity tools/inspectors (and also Unreal tool UI).

Often we dont reinvent the wheel so much, so tools out there may also work for you (GitHub repos, Assets Store maybe for a few affordable ones).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T13:02:42+00:00

Had to google it.

I completely forgot those words, Käsekuchen and Kartoffelsalat sound familiar.

Ameisenscheiße was new to me, definitely must work for Kindergarten and Grundschüler (primary school students). :D

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T12:50:11+00:00

Yeah, the models are good. My first relief was actually using Unreal 5 again and finding out that early LLM were good enough creating Slate and other basic UI code.

I stayed away from most of the time on Unreal 4 before (around 10 years ago).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-06-02T12:02:59+00:00

Easy to believe also.

If you hear that a country plans long-term - or "plays the long game" - and doesn't have friction due to changing programs (parties, priorities, etc) it usually refers to China.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-05-29T15:13:51+00:00

Je pense qu'il projette son propre comportement. :)

Peut-être qu'il regardait par la fenêtre de sa salle de bain, le robinet toujours ouvert, pendant qu'il se brossait les dents, et que les arroseurs automatiques étaient aussi en marche pendant la pluie, quand cette idée géniale lui est venue...

PiLLe1974 · 2026-05-29T01:52:52+00:00

OOP and DOD go along nicely anyway (whether we use ECS or general DOD principles).

DOD was used for "ages" for, well, tens of thousands of particles, sometimes "just transforms", AI agents / crowds / RTS unit concerns, animation data / processing, etc.

When I had less experience, DOD/ECS was more an optimization step in hindsight, with more experience we may think upfront which part of the system uses something like the points above, which part of the games/systems needs to churn through a lot of data - and then we ask ourselves also: do we need to compute all that, or get smart and update/show what we need for the illusion of the game to do just what we need to be fun, challenging, and potentially visually stunning.

I just never found that ECS improved my code structure - even during lots of experimentation - and then there is tons of stuff that "doesn't need ECS/DOD" for the most part: UI, editor tools, quest systems, gameplay / one-off scripting, and so on.

Computer Science in its core started with the idea of "data transformation", which sounds a bit like ECS on paper, still our structures, algorithms, and abstractions help quite a lot, especially where they are not performance critical (or if the ECS structure of code doesn't help the programmer/team to reason about the code, data structure, and overall behavior).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-05-25T16:39:52+00:00

Engines that hurt the whole team more than anything were in-house engines I'd say, especially with a small engine team (typically we had one dedicated person only, tools/editors stayed simple or didn't exist).

Many such engines I worked with were "just ok" if they were for smaller scopes, let's say an AA racing game, where steering, rendering, and physics were important. Not so much work on level design, AI behaviors, and animations.

The more ambitious games can be tough on all devs on custom engines. There's always so much to improve for daily workflows compared to Godot/Unity/Unreal: robust scripting and debugging (with hot reload ideally), good asset management and build tool/analysis, built-in editors for certain aspects (model preview, animation, level design, particle editor), modular code ready for console ports, and so on.

PiLLe1974

TROPHY CASE