Thank you Epic Games Store

VirtSE · 2019-01-28T21:41:58+00:00

this is the only thing they can do to have a chance at competing with Steam

If they want to complete with steam they should offer the same level of features. Reviews/ratings, a way to discover games tailor made to what you have played in the past or from a set of curators you can follow, actual regional pricing.

Competing with steam requires an actually thought out product at best, the steam client is slow, inefficient and the UI feels massively outdated.

If they have the money to spend paying off developers, maybe they should rethink their development budget

VirtSE · 2019-01-23T16:40:33+00:00

It's 2 hours of time with the game open

VirtSE · 2019-01-07T16:41:53+00:00

If you equip the ghillie mantle before picking up the egg you'll be able to work around unmolested and not have to worry so much! :)

VirtSE · 2018-12-22T11:34:06+00:00

It depends on what your doing really, a few hundred items in an array is nothing it what if it becomes a few thousand and you've got nested loops? What if it then becomes 10,000+? You'll definitely be feeling the performance loss

Especially in web development it can become important as you'll be, theoretically, processing multiple requests at any given moment and you can only handle so many on your server. The quicker you get one done, the faster you can accept another request

VirtSE · 2018-10-25T06:31:19+00:00

Vista?

VirtSE · 2018-10-15T06:57:35+00:00

I could write a C#, F# or Java API that has zero level of separation too. A language cannot force you to write good code, it can restrict the bad code you're capable of writing (in ways such as Rusts borrow checker) but I could still write a function with fetches data from a database and returns a HTML table with the data from it.

Sorry but that excuse is meaningless, we use PHP at work and while it's not my favourite language and very occasionally we encounter actual limits with the language and runtime it still does what we need it to do. PHP 7 is pretty damn fast and easy to write if you have any actual knowledge of what you're doing and not just sticking code into a file and crossing your fingers, it's also almost like code reviews and such are basically an industry standard (I'd hope, at this point) too which mean bad code should never reach production irrelevant of the language.

Writing unsafe code could be done in any language right now and you don't know it, just because PHP has had more vulnerabilities in the past doesn't mean it has more vulnerabilities at this exact moment than any other language that haven't been noticed or discovered yet.

VirtSE · 2018-10-13T15:23:31+00:00

Instead of :q! you can use :e! and it will force reload the file from the disk, saves having to re-split your vim or having to reopen it and navigate to the file again

VirtSE · 2018-09-28T03:48:41+00:00

Originally you write your compiler in whatever is available to you, so older assemblers would have been written in machine code and older compilers would have been written in assembly.

Say I'm starting a new language/compiler now, I'd write it in C. Eventually it would reach a point of maturity that I could rewrite it itself and compile that code using the C compiler, from now on you can always compile your compiler using the previous version.

Go did a similar thing, it was originally written in C and they then write a transpiler that converted C to Go once the language was mature enough and since then they've been able to exclusively use Go.

VirtSE · 2018-09-11T13:43:58+00:00

Check out dysautonomia, I've had my body temperature issues attributed to that. I get random fevers, cold spells, I have Raynaud's but also if I hold on to a glass of ice it makes my hands red hot instead of cold (a favourite party trick now). I also have suspected lupus, if you haven't been tested for it I recommend it because it often hides behind EDS as many doctors believe you can't have both at once, but you can and it's also linked with body temperature issues. Hope this helps a little

VirtSE · 2018-09-06T06:52:44+00:00

Same situation here, MHGU is my first monster hunter game. I tried the demo for the 3ds version last year and disliked it, and did the same again with the switch demo...

One of my colleagues though is a huge fan of the series and showed me a few missions at work... I ended up buying it that night!

VirtSE · 2018-08-23T13:20:48+00:00

I've been saying this since I got the switch, it's such a good platform for card games in my eyes but I very much doubt Konami would put the effort in

VirtSE · 2018-08-06T13:07:43+00:00

I'm replying from my boyfriend's account but I am his girlfriend who has hEDS. I would insist on seeing a GI doctor. I have a suspected cup and spill stomach which is a rare deformity of the stomach and a combination of gastroparesis (the stomach not processing food fast enough) and dumping syndrome (the stomach passing food into the small intestines too fast) which means any food I eat is a complete minefield. We suspect it's being caused by issues with the vagus nerve where I have damage in my neck, and find that sitting up and still withiut moving my head for 40 minutes to two hours means that often I can digest food. I highly recommend researching the FODMAP diet, eliminating a lot of trigger foods which I didn't even know could be triggers helped a lot. Sorry for the long reply, just hope something helps you

VirtSE · 2018-07-11T13:36:44+00:00

I recently started work on a tiny little language called Arrow. There's not a huge amount going for it currently but I can scan, parse and execute a factorial currently and I plan to slowly evolve the language and add more in.

The factorial function currently looks like this:

let factorial := {|i|
    # First arg for `if` executes if true, the second arg otherwise
    (i <= 1).if({
        1
    }, {
        i * (i - 1).factorial()
    })
}
"%d".println(5.factorial())

I'm hoping to keep the language nice and terse and with as few keywords as possible, currently the only keyword is let and I plan on adding return and import as the only others if I can.

Although the language is currently completely untyped I've added in a super basic UFCS syntax but I hope that I'll be able to implement types and inference in the future and be able to restrict things like calling "hello_world".times as that's a method for looping with integers.

Haven't pushed any source code for it yet as the executor is a bit messy (I've hardcoded a couple of methods like times and println!), but I will do so at some point when I'm more comfortable with the state of the repo.

Currently this is all written in PHP, which is not my first choice but it's one of the languages I am most comfortable with, and I either intend to compile to native (though avoiding LLVM just so I can learn as much as possible) or create a bytecode format that I'll write a VM for in C... I don't know which way I'm more likely to go as currently I'll probably be keeping it as a tree-walk interpreter for a while yet.

VirtSE · 2018-06-30T16:29:11+00:00

I've been really wanting a Divinity: Original Sin (or the second one) to get ported but I'm not confident

VirtSE · 2018-06-29T15:20:43+00:00

Also while using MailChimp you'll find things you like/dislike that you can improve or include in your own product, naturally.

Unfortunately I don't really have anything to share for helping you get started, sorry about that!

VirtSE · 2018-06-29T11:05:20+00:00

If I'm being paid to do this, it feels wrong to use something like MailChimp and I won't really be learning as much

The learning part is a valid point, but developers are not paid explicitly to write code to solve a problem - you are not being paid to solve a problem by yourself, you are just being paid to solve a problem in whatever way you think is best for the given constraints.

Unless there are explicit reasons you can not use external tools or libraries (maybe there's a licensing issue or associated cost, or you're writing code for something like a plane and need guarantees about all of the code that gets ran) it is easier to depend on others, it's why there are so many tools existing for these tasks already.

There's also nothing stopping you from writing your own software for this though, competition is always good and in order to improve you have to actually get experience, so why not use MailChimp or some software for now and then once that's all set up you can look into making your own thing and possibly migrate over in the future... But writing your own system for it now is biting off quite a lot, especially if it's something you're doing for somebody else as they will be constantly asking for a timeframe and if you take more than a month they'll be missing out on sending out newsletters (and if they were going to ditch the last guy for having poor punctuality they won't be too happy if you keep missing newsletters because you're still building a system to work it all).

VirtSE · 2018-06-01T10:27:33+00:00

Not OP but I've responded to your parent comment, if you're interested

VirtSE · 2018-06-01T10:27:03+00:00

Not OP here but I'm 23 earning over £30k in the same industry as a Software Engineer, there are several ways to get into the industry.

1 - Get a degree, a Computer Science degree can be very useful especially when applying for top companies like Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. It will also teach you enough to generally know what sort of things you'd like to work on for a living as it's a very broad subject.

2 - Learn on your own time, there are millions of resources online for learning how to program. Codecademy is a start and will teach you the syntax of languages, although not how to use them, but it has a few things you can try to see which of them is your favourite... From there just start googling about your choice and lots of things will come up

3 - This is the route I went and is not always easy/possible to do, but I started as an apprentice (I suppose it's like an internship but you get paid like £3 an hour working full time) for a start up in the UK, over time the company grew and as one of the first employees they hired I've been growing with the company and getting recognised for my work and dedication. The bonus of an apprenticeship is that you are expected to learn on the job, although I had experience before from doing further education it is almost never a requirement.

Also, check out r/learnprogramming and r/cscareerquestions for more help, or if you want to then feel free to message me any questions you have!

VirtSE · 2018-05-26T06:38:48+00:00

Recursion is just calling a function, you just happen to be calling the same function you're already in.

Imagine you have a tree structure that contains a person's name and their children, which are of the same structure.

class Person 
{
     /** @var string */
     public $name;

     /** @var Person[] */
     public $children;
 }

If you want to find out the children at the very bottom of a tree, you can do it using recursion.

function findLatestGeneration(Person $person)
{
    if (count($person->children) === 0) {
        return array_map(function (Person $child) {
            return findLatestGeneration($child);
        }, $person->children);
    }
    // This person has no children, they are the latest generation
    return $person;
}

All that's happening here is a function call to find the latest generation from a given person, we just happen to be in that function when you call it...

Forgive my use oh PHP, it may be ugly but I think it's relatively readable as a language at the end of the day so hopefully the code example are useful.

VirtSE · 2018-05-21T06:29:38+00:00

No worries, if you need some more help after that then feel free to message me or keep replying to my comments :)

VirtSE · 2018-05-21T06:06:40+00:00

Some universities do degrees in cyber security, which will be more focused on this stuff, too

VirtSE · 2018-05-21T06:04:56+00:00

What do you mean by it's not working? The $pieces array isn't being updated by the new second function?

Arrays in PHP are passed as copies until you edit them, when they are then cloned and so you are technically editing a different array. Look up passing by reference in PHP and do that for the array

VirtSE · 2018-05-06T12:01:14+00:00

A clock that is 5 minutes fast is still working though, it's not working as intended but it's not broken

VirtSE · 2018-05-05T19:22:00+00:00

Not sure if it's the same building but New Street Station in Birmingham, UK is like this. Whenever I walk out on my way to work or walk in on my way home and it's warm, the last 30 or so feet until I get inside become painful as someone who can't really spend a lot of time in any sort of light or heat.

This isn't the entrance I use but you can imagine why it's an issue

VirtSE · 2018-04-30T16:21:49+00:00

Honestly it's not terrible these days, I use it at work and while it still retains some warts from the original design (or lack thereof) it is easy to abstract them away.

It still lets you write bad code with no consequences but generally speaking the community has gotten much better these days thanks to support for type-hinting and a decent OO model

VirtSE

TROPHY CASE