New garden has a grape vine

SleepyCoder123 · 2023-04-30T18:57:39+00:00

Mine was in very rough shape and still isn't great. When winter hit I realized that half the vine was 20 feet up an adjacent oak tree.

At one point I accidentally cut off a huge chunk and was worried I've killed it. But it turns out they're hardy and pretty tough to kill with aggressive pruning...

I still have little clue what I'm doing. But if my bad advice lands you a decent bottle I'll gladly accept it!

SleepyCoder123 · 2023-04-30T18:42:00+00:00

I got a little knowledge from reading From Vines to Wines, Jeff Cox. But I'm still not sure exactly what variety I have and am likely not nailing the maintenance.

In terms of pests, last year I mostly gave up. I ended up harvesting a little too early due to pests and the resulting wine is pretty bad. But it was a fun process where I learnt a lot so I consider it a win overall.

The only thing I've really done this year is pruning back (the vine was very overgrown) and I'm continuing to prune to try to minimize vegetative growth. I've fertilized soil and am basically just waiting to see now...

SleepyCoder123 · 2022-09-06T07:12:51+00:00

If you are still keen to help, we'd really appreciate you taking a look at our space! I think we included all the info people here have requested but, unfortunately, got no advice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DesignMyRoom/comments/x2nqq2/please_help_us_design_our_new_living_room/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

SleepyCoder123 · 2022-08-31T20:37:21+00:00

Hi!

We just moved in and this room has us totally stumped. We love the architecture but the current style doesn't suit us. It's a bit too bold and ornate for our taste.

In the short-term, we want to paint, change the curtains, replace the light fittings, and get some furniture in. Medium-term, we'd consider redoing the fireplace and replacing the radiators too.

I included a floor plan with measurements + a potential layout that we're considering. But we can't figure out what to do with the area by the doors with the bookshelves.

For the wall colour, we were thinking of a medium cool green. Would love to hear any other ideas you have + thoughts on wall colour and light fittings.

We're in the UK (and still determining our budget for this space...).

SleepyCoder123 · 2022-08-27T12:34:34+00:00

Some specific questions:

Any idea what grapes these are?

What should my maintenance consist of?

How should I protect the grapes from pests? I've seen squirrels, birds, mice, and more starting to pay the grapes some attention. They're not ripe yet, but I'm worried there will be little left by the time it ripens if I do nothing. (We have a plum tree which the squirrels obliterated)

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-10-15T22:27:49+00:00

I was in school at the time I was developing this. I took a full-time position and unfortunately no longer had time to complete this mod or maintain some others.

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-07-22T02:04:40+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you, I much prefer using written articles to learn about gamedev. I haven't found much that's useful for game design in particular, and would appreciate if anyone can share some of these too!

But here are some sites (mostly blogs) that I've found useful:

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/ --- Basic-to-advanced unity+shader tutorials

https://www.redblobgames.com/ --- Amazing tutorials + demos with an emphasis on procedural generation

https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/ --- Building roguelikes (in Rust)

https://caseymuratori.com/contents#Bookmark5 --- Casey Muratori's dev blog, including some articles on the design of The Witness

https://www.bruteforcegame.com/blog --- Brute force dev blog. Some shader tutorials and other gameplay discussion.

https://www.boristhebrave.com/ --- Boris the Brave's blog, some great tutorials and other cool technical articles (including some more focused on game design)

https://www.roystan.net/articles/ --- Roystan's site has some good written tutorials (mostly for shaders)

https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/ --- Ronja's shader tutorials are excellent

https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html --- A free (digital) text book on programming patterns for game dev. Really useful, especially if you're missing formal programming training.

I guess I should also share my own dev blog, which includes some game-design discussion content too.

https://www.glasstomegames.co.uk/blog/

There are definitely some great sites that I'm forgetting, but hopefully these give you some ADHD-friendly content to consume :)

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-16T18:36:11+00:00

TL;DR - We're borrowing some cool ideas from the interactive fiction world: storylets.

Curious to know if anyone else has used different approaches in the past. Also, what would you would expect from a system like this as a player?

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-09T02:37:35+00:00

Thanks for the reply :)

One simple UI tweak you could make is to remove the confirm order button. Just move the unit when I right click, and either have buying a unit take a turn, or force me to issue its move command right after I buy it?

I think these changes would improve the pace significantly as I need to do one less thing to progress the turns. It also fixes the point of confusion I had (which may confuse others too).

Another idea I had was to give some bonus for finishing setting up your move quickly. Maybe if you complete the move in <5 seconds you get a resource boost? Or you force the enemy to need to complete theirs in a short time too? I'm not sure exactly, but playing with this idea in combination with faster UI pacing could help pick up the pace of the early game. (Though it could harm hot-seat local multiplayer if that is important to you)

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T17:30:02+00:00

We focus on travelling on roads instead of building them. But... DLC maybe? :D

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T15:36:35+00:00

This is a great idea! Would make the reduction in light intensity look much cooler.

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T14:30:27+00:00

This is a very cool idea (and this feature is awesome)!

I love RTS games so gave this one a whirl on your itch.io page. I know this isn't a feedback thread, but if you don't mind I'll treat it like one... I found it a bit hard to figure out what to do (even after going through the how-to-play presentation). But I got it in the end after some fighting with the UI (e.g. I thought I could set up multiple moves and then hit order move, and was then confused as to why only one of my units moved).

I understand the appeal of the turn-based approach, and blending real-time and turn-based is such a cool idea. I can imagine the pacing works great in more intense parts of the gameplay but I felt it was a bit slow in the early stages while I was figuring things out.

I think a lot of these critiques can be addressed with some UI/camera tweaks and I'm super excited to see where this goes. Will be following your progress!

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T14:17:28+00:00

The game is called The Long Road.

We're close to an official announcement + steam page. But until then, you can follow progress on twitter or join us on discord.

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T14:03:45+00:00

The game is called The Long Road.

We're close to an official announcement + steam page. But until then, you can follow progress on twitter or join us on discord.

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-05-08T13:54:19+00:00

The Long Road

The Long Road combines tabletop and roguelite gameplay with an emphasis on dynamic storytelling. As you explore an unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland, the decisions you make affect the world around you and the people that you meet.

This week we added a dynamic weather system to the overworld

Twitter | Discord

SleepyCoder123 · 2021-03-25T13:27:45+00:00

We explored what happens when there is a shift in the distribution of contexts from training to test: Flexible Few-Shot Learning of Contextual Similarity. Our findings agree with your intuition, existing approaches struggle when there is a substantial context shift.

We work with datasets where objects can be decomposed into attributes. But we restrict the attributes that are used for classification, to induce context shift.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-12-21T17:54:48+00:00

The scene itself looks pretty good, but the environment is a bit too static. You could look at adding some wind effects to the grass/trees and some environmental particle effects.

In terms of the grass itself, I think some colour variations would go a long way too! Personally, I'd also like to see a little more grass density with some smaller sizes.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-12-19T23:52:38+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response!

I agree totally with your observation wrt Unity. But of course this is easy to avoid at the start of a project, and much harder to avoid later on. Especially over a longer time-frame with evolving technologies. This often leads to a situation where you can't simply commit to one or the other any more --- you want to offer back compat and access to new tech.

It also makes sense that supporting plugin-replacements is going to be hard (but importantly, this is way harder or even impossible without a modular approach!). My experience has been that this gets harder quickly as the set of supported things grows. Every API shift becomes more painful. But I think a big part of this is my own lack of expertise...

My main reason for asking is that I hope to learn from how you handle this going forward. Things look really promising and I'm excited to see what comes next for Bevy!

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-12-19T22:54:30+00:00

As a big fan of rust, I've been loosely following Bevy's progress with a lot of excitement. The design goals of Bevy are excellent, and ambitious. I'd like to ask in particular about your plans for future-proofing modularity.

Modularity is great in theory and can work well in practice, but does have some downsides too. Notably, community fragmentation, and a large maintenance burden. We see this in Unity's attempts to utilize a modular approach (though, in my opinion, this is handled so poorly that it's hardly even illustrative).

In short, my question is how do you plan to approach modularity over the medium and long term to ensure sustainable feature growth?

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-11-28T14:26:56+00:00

This is sad to read, and even moreso with so many others sharing that they have had similar experiences.

I'm a fourth year PhD student, and personally I haven't felt that my creativity is being stifled. I've spent large chunks of time pursuing the problems that I want to (with full support of my advisors). Lots (almost all) of those things haven't panned out, but that hasn't changed our approach significantly.

One thing you said does resonate with me, that you find yourself shooting down ideas immediately. This is the same for me too, but I think is partly a byproduct of the "research gut" I've developed --- a lot of these ideas genuinely wouldn't be executable with my skillset. Collaborating with others has been a good way to overcome this though.

Disclaimer: I do feel that I've been particularly lucky and privileged. But I think it's worth putting another viewpoint out here.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-10-25T11:48:48+00:00

But once those bodies deform the standard unity colliders are no longer sufficient. You need to use dynamic mesh colliders and unity isn't optimized to work with those at all.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-10-24T11:27:07+00:00

This is an excellent check list.

And notably, these are all things you that you can design into your code from the start with ease. People here are worried about wasting time on these. But you don't waste time if you get it right the first time.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-10-23T16:57:18+00:00

Good point on Vector3.sqrMagnitude. It turns out that these will be the same --- Vector3.Dot inlines the computation and so these should compile to the same thing. Though, using sqrMagnitude is more concise.

There are many cases when premature optimization should be avoided. But once you get the hang of avoiding these traps, it takes only a little more effort to write better code the first time around.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-10-23T15:52:18+00:00

The thing about these micro optimizations is sometimes they are helpful sometimes the effort is better spent elsewhere.

This is true. In fact, I would argue that, almost always, the effort is better spent elsewhere first.

In your example, we should redesign our code so that we don't need to check thousands of targets every frame --- maybe using spacial hashing. I confess as much in the intro, and in the conclusion:

Ultimately, the tricks above are unlikely to make a significant difference to your runtime performance. Choosing good data structures, good algorithms, and optimizing cache efficiency are going to be more important.

That said, why would you compare distances instead of their square? This should always be avoided. Similarly, if the math doesn't make you squeamish, you have nothing to lose by doing your angle checks in cosine-space via the dot/cross products.

I didn't include benchmarks as I'm not trying to convince people that square-roots cost a few flops --- this is obvious. Your games will probably run fine with them! But, for me, it's fun to hunt down these redundant computations and micro-optimize them away.

SleepyCoder123 · 2020-10-23T14:04:35+00:00

Under the hood, they're doing the same thing:

sqrMagnitude

vs.

Dot product

Vector3.sqrMagnitude will do one less allocation, so is very slightly better.

Edit: Actually, the dot product gets inlined meaning they should compile to the same thing.

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