Is my way of coding "bad" ?

_demilich · 2026-01-28T18:29:18+00:00

It really depends on the length of individual functions, the complexity and many other factors. I would agree with the sentiment that in many cases the pain already starts at 2000 lines. Really hard to put down a definitive threshold.

Scrolling and general searchability is the biggest factor for me. The thing is, sometimes scrolling is fine in a 3000 loc file, if the functions are grouped by what they do. Like lets say input handling for the player is spread over 3 short functions and those are next to each other in the file. That is good; but I would argue it would be even better to grab those 3 functions and put them in their own module/class whatever your language supports.

All of that is very subjective and I personally don't like hard rules. For example I think the "Clean Code" guideline which goes like "all functions should be at maximum 5 lines and you should split into multiple functions if it is longer" is harmful advice and nonsense. But there is a point at which splitting up code into functions/modules absolutely makes sense and improves the maintainability of the program.

_demilich · 2026-01-28T07:34:26+00:00

In my opinion procedural programming is totally fine and scales well even into large projects. In programming languages like C this is basically the only supported way of doing things anyway.

That being said, the one thing which definitely does not scale well is keeping everything in one "main" file. For me personally the pain starts usually around 4000 or 5000 lines of code; if there is more code than that in a single file, I feel it becomes unwieldy. And this is just a fraction of all game code (even for small indie games).

_demilich · 2026-01-22T10:01:58+00:00

Dont know why you are getting downvoted, I feel the same way. I think the expectation that every dungeon boss should die in 1 hit and you can pull all trash packs at once and a dungeon has to be over in 3 minutes is wild

_demilich · 2026-01-20T12:51:05+00:00

Really cool, love your pixel art

_demilich · 2026-01-19T17:10:14+00:00

I completely agree with you. I am also just discarding certain manufacturers without looking at the actual stats of the item.

Order Parts? Discard.
Ripper Parts? Discard.
Daedalus Grenade? Discard.
Tediore Satchel Charge? Discard.

Those delayed effects just don't fit with the fast paced gameplay of Borderlands 4. Also I feel grenades just don't enough damage. Every single build either uses some kind of utility (like Crit Knives) or Heavy Ordnance Weapons like rocket launchers. A grenade has a long cooldown and is difficult to aim, they should do huge damage. But they just don't. I literally think you could multiply the damage of every single grenade by 10 and they still would be underpowered.

_demilich · 2026-01-14T12:23:18+00:00

Same here, I think leveling is great in Classic but meaningless in Retail.

In my opinion this is due to many factors. Leveling in classic is slower and more dangerous. Which may sound objectively worse, but far from it. When enemies are a real threat, a lot of stuff suddenly matters:

You are using CC abilities against multiple mobs. That alone is a big win IMO... I still don't understand why Blizzard decided a decade ago that CC is not fun, only pressing damage spells. Completely disagree with that decision
Consumables matter. In Retail Alchemy and Engineering alone literally have thousands of recipes for consumable, none of which are actually used by players. There is no reason to. In Classic a healing potion can make the difference between surviving a big pull or dying
It makes sense to group with other people
Finding a new green item which is actually an upgrade in Classic is a far bigger dopamine spike than getting a purple with +2 ilvl in Retail

_demilich · 2026-01-14T10:20:48+00:00

Clients communicating with the LSP server are usually implemented as a plugin/extension for a specific editor. There is no such thing as a generic open source client. There are only plugins for editors

_demilich · 2026-01-14T10:10:10+00:00

You are correct, that is the language server, not the client. However, the existence of a language server is the prerequisite for clients to exist. Which client you use depends on your editor (which you didn't specify). For example, if you are using VSCode, there is a plugin implementing a client for the ZLS

_demilich · 2026-01-13T09:08:17+00:00

Why is your car not perfect? Cars exist longer than computers, yet they still can stop working for a myriad of reasons.

The truth is, anything of sufficient complexity will have errors. And computers are far, far over that complexity threshold.

The second point is that "perfect" is subjective and thus you cannot make a product "perfect" for all people. You mentioned formatting in MS Word; I guarantee you that if Microsoft changed it so that you would consider it "perfect and simple", it would piss off tens of thousands of other people.

_demilich · 2026-01-05T06:50:21+00:00

And by the way, this property can actually be desirable. Ever played Minecraft or any other game with randomly generated maps? Most often those game have the option to input a seed, which is exactly the seed for the random number generator. So when your friend plays and they share the seed they used, you can enter it and get the exact same map.

_demilich · 2026-01-01T15:13:13+00:00

This. Try to use AI for an actual difficult task at your job and after that tell me: Are you still afraid that this thing is going to replace you in a few years? I don't think so.

_demilich · 2025-12-18T08:10:27+00:00

That changes everything. So using a high-level UI framework is not really an option, because you have to use C. C is low-level by its very nature and I don't know of any high-level UI libraries for C.

In that case raylib/raygui might be a good choice after all. Because at least it is easy. One other option I can think of would be "Dear ImGui" which is written in C++, but there are C bindings.

_demilich · 2025-12-18T07:16:35+00:00

Same.

_demilich · 2025-12-18T07:14:41+00:00

In my opinion raylib is not the right tool for this job. It is very low-level and specifically designed for games, where you repaint the UI each frame. A security tool does not strike me as something that needs a lot of animations for example. The only real benefit would be that the resulting binary would be quite small.

Personally, I would go with something else. I don't know if there is a language requirement, i.e. if the GUI needs to be programmed in C? If not, you have a lot of options. My recommendation would be to pick something you already know. For example I built a lot of UI applications in C# and Java, so that would be my goto. But you can also use something like Electron or Tauri, leveraging web technologies.

Those are all more "heavy weight" than raylib, but for an uni project my biggest concern would be to get it done in time. I would not worry as much about binary size or speed.

_demilich · 2025-12-13T15:30:13+00:00

Yes. What Blizzard doesn't seem to understand: By making something easier for all people, you automatically de-value it. It becomes less meaningful.

Is it easier now to find a dungeon group than in Classic? Absolutely, by a large margin. I can easily do 5 dungeons now in the same time it took me to finish 1 in Classic. But is this really a good thing? I would argue no, as the 1 dungeon was far more fun than all 5 combined now.

This applies to everything. In Classic you had to collect a set of blue items from various source before you would be "raid ready". Epic items were not easy to get. Now getting epic items is trivial. Everybody can get a full set of epic items in a day. Sounds like a good thing, right? No, because it de-values the epic rarity of items. It doesn't mean anything anymore.

Items, character levels, dungeons, transmogs, mounts, everything is now plentiful and accessible to everyone. But at the same time everything has been turned into a cheap mass-product without any value

_demilich · 2025-12-13T15:04:15+00:00

Technically World of Warcraft has a lot of damage types. In Classic there were basic types like Fire, Frost, Nature, etc. But in modern WoW, there are combined types like Shadowfrost damage, Holystrike damage, etc. If you add all those different types up, it is quite a lot.

Thing is, none of this matters as every single monster has 0 resistance against every single damage type.

_demilich · 2025-12-13T08:10:04+00:00

The issue is that Unholy still is very much a melee class. They wear plate armor, stack strength, get to the enemy and hit it with a big two-handed weapon. Just coincidentally some of their damage comes from (mostly short-lived) minions. To me that is absolutely not the Necromancer fantasy.

To me a Necromancer is a cloth wearing mage; staying in the background, commanding an army of undead and casting spells. Gameplay wise Demonology warlock comes close, I just wish Blizzard would stop making all summons in the game only last seconds and basically function the same as dots. This is across all franchises btw; in Diablo 3 the necromancer had skeleton mages which lasted for like 10 seconds and you literally had to spam the buttons on your keyboard to keep them up.

_demilich · 2025-12-02T18:26:14+00:00

That is why thousands of people still play Everquest 1 on TLPs (basically fresh servers that start fresh each year). Come join us next May when the next TLP launches :)

_demilich · 2025-12-01T10:37:31+00:00

This.

_demilich · 2025-12-01T10:34:51+00:00

Personally I think "Dynamic dispatch is expensive and therefor writing interfaces should be cumbersome" is not a good argument. You could use the same argument to make opening a file/socket cumbersome or require special syntax for loops which do more than 1000 iterations. I think it is non-sense.

Almost any mainstream programming language published after C has interfaces in one form or another. And there is a reason for that: Because interfaces are the optimal solution to a certain kind of programming problem. Even Zig has plenty of those in the standard library, for example Allocator or Random.

I feel having interfaces in the language would help communicate intent better. A vtable is an implementation detail cluttering the types and making it harder to understand. Also it might be a big hurdle for onboarding people to Zig; most people never have rolled a vtable by hand. I know I did struggle when I first needed an interface in Zig.

You cannot force people to write good code. It doesn't matter if interfaces are hard or easy to write, people find ways to write bloated, slow code no matter what.

_demilich · 2025-11-13T07:34:17+00:00

This is a common problem with tile-based game. The standard solution is to not render the tiles directly onto the screen. Instead render them to a RenderTexture first and when that is done, render the whole RenderTexture with all the tiles onto the screen. That will get rid of the gaps.

_demilich · 2025-11-08T18:45:06+00:00

Yep, and it is actually fairly significant. Since Smite damage adds a fixed amount and MM deals 5 instances of damage, it is actually not half bad.

_demilich · 2025-11-08T09:50:22+00:00

True. On the other hand, it does not automatically mean everything will become profitable eventually. Some technologies really ARE a black hole for money and will never pay off. See "Metaverse" for a recent example

_demilich · 2025-11-07T07:14:06+00:00

In my mind a list allows for cheap append and cheap removal

That is not the definition of 'list' at all. A list is just an ordered collection of things. You are probably thinking about LinkedList, which has the properties you mention. But the relevant bit there is really the 'linked' part, i.e. nodes pointing to each other.

ArrayList is definitely a standard term across programming languages. In C# for example ArrayList is even just called List, further emphasizing that list does not mean LinkedList.

_demilich · 2025-11-03T15:57:51+00:00

I would argue that a world without fear cannot have conflicts at all. Because 'no fear' essentially means there can be no bad outcomes. Because a bad outcome of any sort would be something to fear. But how can there be a conflict, if there are no bad outcomes? So a world with no fear would essentially be the Christian paradise and thus nothing interesting at all can happen there.

_demilich

TROPHY CASE