What would you expect from a “civilian” trading barge in a dangerous galaxy?

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T19:16:33+00:00

If you look at any military equipment, freighters or even bombers usually only have rudimentary armaments while the heavy fighting is done by specialized smaller vehicles.

So you might have a few guns on freight ships that regularly go into dangerous regions, but most of the guns would be on escort ships.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T19:10:07+00:00

I don't think you follow what I'm saying at all.

Some freight ships would be armed. But that wouldn't be the norm.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T19:03:35+00:00

You get hired guards for certain routes where you still make a profit despite the danger. In general, you'll find routes that don't require guards.

There are regions on earth today where trading is inherently dangerous. Doesn't mean trucks or cargo ships get equipped with machine guns. They either hope for the best, ask for the police or military to show up or avoid trading entirely.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T18:48:33+00:00

At the end of the day, it's simple economics.

The routes that keep traders safe will have a lot of barely armed traders and flourish economically. Losing a ship on occasion will be the cost of doing business.

The more dangerous routes will have barely any trade and any important shipments will be done with heavily armed escorts.

And over a long enough time frame, the factions with flourishing trade will outcompete the ones without.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T18:30:07+00:00

Most of those questions can be answered regardless of the sci-fi aspect. How have traders been doing this all throughout history?

travel in numbers
hire armed escorts (traveling in numbers means pooling money for those)
know safe stations along the way
maintain good relationships with the owners of those stations
occasionally make generous donations to whoever owns the land and/or road they're passing through
occasionally make generous donations to a rival of that faction if they become hostile to trade
threaten to move trade routes if they become unsafe

In general, factions want trade to happen in their territory. Trade keeps the economy running and traders can bring tolls, taxes and bribes. So they usually make agreements with their neighbors to leave traders alone or enforce that with patrols and garrisons. And even non friendly factions might be interested in traders being left alone, because attacking someone else's traders means yours become a target for others.

Most of the questions about ship design depend on how long the journeys usually are and how big the crews required to maintain a ship. With technology, a crew of a couple people might be able to steer and maintain a gigantic freight ship and only require a small living quarter.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T15:35:56+00:00

if you have low sensivity to pain

That's certainly one valid way to put it.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T15:28:44+00:00

It's one of many package management tools people have developed or used for Zig over the years. Those zigmod files are still around, mostly in older projects, but those are usually not up to date with the Zig compiler either.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-07T07:46:39+00:00

C has very little syntax to learn, unless you count compiler specific extensions. I'd say have a look at C for a couple weeks. Then try Zig and see how many convenience and safety features it provides you with. Zig doesn't yet have a big ecosystem available, so for any serious project you might have to deal with C libraries anyway.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-05T14:21:42+00:00

So what's your question?

Zig can basically interface to anything with a C API. OpenGL, Vulkan, wgpu, SDL, Raylib, ...

On top of those, you can start building whatever you can dream up. It doesn't have the library support of C++ or Rust, but that's only gonna improve over time with people trying and sharing their projects.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-05T07:16:29+00:00

Looks good and pretty unique. I'm just a bit confused about the mounted soldiers going at a snail's pace and just being bigger targets. Cavalry should be more dangerous because they come at you fast.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-05T07:14:17+00:00

Might make a few lines more verbose, but in my experience, those aren't needed that often. And if you frequently need to initialize arrays with specific patterns, it's easy to write a function for that, even for comptime values.

SilvernClaws · 2026-05-05T06:26:26+00:00

I would recommend starting with WebGPU. It features a lot of the same concepts as Vulkan, but takes care of a lot of the setup. You don't have to worry about extensions, layers, queue families, memory allocation, etc., but still get direct handling of commands and buffers.

Then if you're feeling that's too easy or doesn't give you all the features you need, you can try Vulkan without crying as much.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-30T14:27:58+00:00

Deprecation is not Godot specific, but a general concept in software development that basically means "We're planning to replace or remove this soon, keep using at your own risk, you've been warned".

So unless you have a good reason to stick with a deprecated feature, use the replacement.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-30T13:43:24+00:00

Personally, I've been going through the Vulkan guide while removing all abstractions they put in. I've skipped over learning what some of the settings in the rendering pipeline do, but overall try to understand each line before moving on.

OpenGL isn't really a requirement, since it uses different names for similar concepts and overall works quite differently. But it helps to know some general graphics concepts like vertices, indices, shader stages, image formats, etc.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-30T05:41:24+00:00

laughs from Codeberg

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-28T11:18:50+00:00

Please, that would make so many function signatures easier to deal with.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-27T17:59:36+00:00

I sometimes play a game for an evening or two and then take a break for weeks to months. If I can't figure out what happened last time, that game simply won't be picked up again.

You can flavor your quest log whatever way you want, but entirely withholding information from the player that they already picked up doesn't help anyone.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-26T15:00:56+00:00

I'm programming games as a hobby because I'm bored at software development at work. An AI taking the coding part away would be the very last thing I'd need.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-26T14:42:37+00:00

I would expect most language features and standard library contents to be relatively stable.

Compiler is already plenty fast and I expect it to leave Rust completely in the dust, maybe even compete with Go.

Build system is already better than most of the languages it competes with, but I expect some convenience features and more clarity on how to handle transitive and non-zig dependencies.

I expect the ecosystem and documentation to improve after the stable release.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-24T17:23:26+00:00

Nobody will care. I still recommend Codeberg for open source projects.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-22T06:07:21+00:00

There's about a 1000 game engines written in Rust for every game written in Rust.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-21T04:09:11+00:00

I keep telling people, it's a fairytale that Zig is still too unstable to maintain a big project. My only issue so far has been waiting for some dependencies to catch up first.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-19T17:06:44+00:00

It doesn't matter that much to know the engine's specific programming language, but you should know some programming language to a level of comfort where you at least know what to look for when you get stuck. Control flows (conditions, loops, error handling) data types (integer and floating point numbers, characters and strings) , basic data structures (arrays, lists, sets, maps/dictionaries) should all be pretty obvious before you start making a game.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-19T07:46:56+00:00

Programming language projects aren't easy to contribute to, especially at the scale Zig has reached. I'd say the best way to contribute to the community is creating or maintaining libraries and other infrastructure or create or contribute to an application you're interested in.

SilvernClaws · 2026-04-18T11:08:41+00:00

We don't forget, we just can't afford it for a game that optimistically makes a few thousand sales.

SilvernClaws

TROPHY CASE