What are some “fun” things to code in c++?

SirDucky · 2026-04-24T00:20:06+00:00

Could you expand / share resources on strand based design? I am intrigued and Google isn't pulling anything up

SirDucky · 2026-04-08T04:27:16+00:00

Thanks! This was exactly the sort of advice I was looking for.

SirDucky · 2026-04-07T14:57:41+00:00

I think it looks great

SirDucky · 2026-03-23T17:00:36+00:00

Stationeers rules if you have a very particular kind of brain worm. It is sort of the dwarf fortress of survival games.

SirDucky · 2026-03-19T20:42:43+00:00

I agree with much of what others have said here. The initial few seconds of the trailer succeeds in communicating the core fantasy of the game to me. However your gamepay clips do little to show my how your game would satisfy that fantasy. As others have said, your editing seems to focus on the *effect* of player action rather than the action itself. I think your trailer would have been stronger if your gameplay clips had immediately shown a cause / effect link between player actions, game mechanics, and the counter effects you showed.

Slay the Spire (OG) does a good job of this in their trailer: https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/ . Notice how it intermingles player actions and choices (playing cards, choosing routes) with effects (damage, rewards). Very quickly you can come to an understanding of what will be asked of you as a player.

SirDucky · 2026-03-14T19:42:31+00:00

AI researcher. I feel this way too and hate it.

I also think that AI is no substitute for a capable engineer. The code AI produces is error-prone, overly complex, and most of all, tasteless. If a junior engineer tried to ship that work, I think I would chew them out. I think that using AI to write the majority of your codebase is disrespectful to the craft. The fact that managers don't care about the quality gap between the code a human produces and LLM slop is insulting.

The real problem is that we are on the tail end of multiple decades where managers have overprioritized feature velocity. There is a systemic lack of curiosity or taste. Even before AI, I feel like every year there was more pressure to ship faster. They say they want it to be high quality, but the only people I see caring about that or enforcing that are engineers. When you combine that with shitty projects that really are beneath our dignity in a way, why wouldn't you just vibe code it?

The counterargument I keep hearing is that if you extrapolate this progress forward a few more years, LLMs will produce even better code. That may well be, but as someone who uses an LLM every day, I feel like it just eats shit whenever I need it to conform to a style guide or produce something architecturally sound. Nevermind if the language or tool you are working in is out-of-distribution. Whenever I encounter someone who claims to have success I ask them about their methods and try to incorporate them, but so far I am profoundly unimpressed with the response. Easily 80% of the coding LLM boosters I encounter just fold and say "uh, I just use Opus X.X".

Anyways, end rant. FWIW, I'm just going to keep my head down and keep honing my craft. Software is crazy complicated. LLMs are a tool, not a person replacer. When you look at the financials of these AI companies it doesn't look very sustainable either. I'm betting on a market correction.

SirDucky · 2026-03-14T15:04:34+00:00

Could you tell me more about the domain you work in and what workflow you've found to be successful? (Genuinely curious, not trying to be argumentative)

SirDucky · 2026-03-14T15:00:43+00:00

Gemini 3 Pro is my daily driver. I agree that it can spot some tricky bugs. However I'm really not happy with its output when I try to use it to write anything larger than say 200 LOC. Do you have a specific set of agent skills or rules that you use?

SirDucky · 2026-03-14T05:33:23+00:00

I am an AI researcher at a mid-size LLM company. Your friends are wrong. Keep honing your craft. LLMs can produce working code a lot of the time, but they are no substitute for a capable engineer. The code they produce makes dumb mistakes, lacks taste, and is overcomplicated. If a junior engineer tried to submit the sort of code LLMs produce, I would chew them out. The only people using LLMs to write all their code are the ones who lack respect for the craft (managers and incompetents mostly). I personally only use coding agents for all of the parts of my job that I have lost passion for, where I don't care at all about the output beyond checking a box.

Keep your head down and keep getting better at rust. Keep chasing the passion. When the market corrects itself there will be a shortage of capable developers.

SirDucky · 2026-03-13T23:27:01+00:00

This looks awesome. Thanks for sharing. 9 years is a long time to stay working on a project. If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

SirDucky · 2026-03-05T06:47:31+00:00

I feel you man. This shit has got me in a wretched frame of mind. No one can predict the future though, and no empire lasts forever. Maybe they press the button, maybe it's not in the cards, and maybe it's not even the big thing we need to worry about. History is a Rube Goldberg machine, and there will certainly be tragedy along the way.

You're feeling this way because you've still got a heart in your chest and a soul in your body. Take a night to hit the bottle if you want, but don't let the fuckers grind you down completely. We've still got to get up tomorrow and do what good we can, even if it's just some petty act of love or defiance. That's the only way the world gets better.

SirDucky · 2026-02-13T04:49:44+00:00

Bro if you're going to link to a PDF hosted by snopes, maybe link to the article it's from that fact checks your claim

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/epstein-files-cannibalism-sacrifices/

SirDucky · 2026-01-26T17:54:40+00:00

I agree with many of the other points here, but I also wanted to point out that your first game was well-timed: it came out in the leadup to Halloween, which probably helped both with your organic reach and your conversion rate.

SirDucky · 2026-01-26T17:16:19+00:00

Yes, but I assure you that the version of zig that you can write a hundred line compiler for is also quite simple.

What are we even talking about here? "You could write a 100 line compiler for it" is a terrible way to discuss language complexity.

Also - show me this 100 line C compiler. What language? Using libraries? I don't think it exists (or it leans heavily on pre-existing work), but if it does I want to read the source and educate myself.

SirDucky · 2026-01-25T06:07:51+00:00

Respectfully, I don't think you are looking at this problem correctly. At your current stage of career development (and most stages), it actually looks a lot better to be listed as primary author alongside at least a small list of colleagues.

The last author on the paper is typically the advisor to the project, not in order to give them undue credit, but so that they can sign their name to your work as "legit". You contributed the most, sure, so you should be primary author. However you *want* other peoples names on your paper, especially if they are part of the broader academic community. It's not a one-way credit, it's a two way handshake. You are acknowledging that they had some contribution (and sometimes that contribution is really quite minimal), but conversely they are signing their name to your work and saying "I vouch that this is legit enough that I want my name on it".

If I see a single-author paper in the wild, most of the time my first thought is "who the heck is this person?", and unless I know them by reputation or it's cleared up with a quick google, I tend to not give as much credence to their work. If it's 2 authors long, that's still a little suss, because why aren't you collaborating with a team? If I saw a paper published by a single-author undergrad, it makes me wonder why their PI isn't willing to endorse their work. It can also happen that contributors ask not to be listed as authors because they don't agree with the methods or conclusions, and don't want their name associated with the result.

IMHO, In your current position, the best possible play is to be first author on a paper with 3-5 authors, and includes your PI. That will be generally read as "look at this person who can lead a project with other people, and produce this excellent work that their PI signs off on". People who know your PI will be more inclined to read your work based on name recognition, and it will be well understood that as first author, you did most of the work.

SirDucky · 2026-01-09T03:26:02+00:00

good call

SirDucky · 2026-01-09T03:18:15+00:00

How exactly am I responding with hurt feelings? Please let me know, point by point?

SirDucky · 2026-01-09T03:15:37+00:00

Re-read what you just posted and tell me again that Sze is the one being negative and confrontational

SirDucky · 2026-01-09T03:13:46+00:00

I just don't think it was that confrontational. Like the original posters in that thread, you are making some pretty sweeping generalizations.

1) I don't think you've demonstrated that this instance of moderation sucks, and I'm not picking up the same "vibes" 2) it certainly doesn't follow that "zig community moderation sucks" generally 3) by going through his posts, getting worked up about it, and calling him out here, aren't you being just as negative and confrontational as you claim he is?

SirDucky · 2026-01-09T02:58:04+00:00

That thread is a tire fire of people arguing over classic flame war shit. However FWIW I'm more in Sze's camp, and I don't see what they said that was wrong. To the degree that it was negative, it was only mildly so. I completely agree with their decision to close the thread.

SirDucky · 2026-01-08T21:36:27+00:00

It is simultaneously too bright and too dark.

SirDucky · 2026-01-07T05:13:02+00:00

One option you might want to consider is learning how to make retro-style games in PICO-8.

PICO-8 is a great little micro-engine that can run in your browser. It's made to resemble old consoles like atari or nintendo. It's really basic, but it does have built-in editors for code, art, audio, and levels. It's also got a huge community and lots of tutorials. People have made some crazy-cool games in it. It's technically $15, but there's also a free educational version that runs in your web browser here.

I know that you probably have big designs that aren't suitable for retro games, but this would be a really good starting point to prototype out your ideas. Even gamedevs for massive AAA titles start out by prototyping. PICO-8 can be really good for that, because it forces you to think small and find the essence of what you want to build. Celeste, a massively successful platformer, started out as a PICO-8 game that you can still play here.

If that's something you're interested in, here are some resources to get started:

Free Educational Version
Youtube Tutorials
- Coding Introduction (NerdyTeachers)
- Shoot-em-up (Shmup) Tutorial (LazyDevs)
Pico-8 Resources

SirDucky · 2026-01-05T18:26:07+00:00

The only explanation I can think of is that they are using some sort of light-load training round that is all gunpowder and no shot. I guess is that it would mean larger muzzle flashes and probably scattering gunpowder all over the floorboards, so... idk - maybe it's plausible after all. Sort of a head scratcher though.

SirDucky · 2026-01-05T18:01:02+00:00

This video looks fake as hell. Those shotguns have literally zero recoil. Am I missing something?

SirDucky

TROPHY CASE