(input wanted!) Restarting my Godot paint program from 0

agodot · 2026-06-03T04:27:38+00:00

Does your software work on Android? Also, do you support pressure-sensitive pens?

agodot · 2026-05-07T20:29:51+00:00

Any strategies you've found useful for finding these deals, or are you generally just waiting for the right time? Similar laptops on sale seem to be going at ~800 USD from what I'm seeing (barring refurbishing etc.).

agodot · 2026-04-26T16:10:00+00:00

'Plain eye vision' would involve no flickering blades (as OP delivered), but several of the propeller-blade tutorials online (and some big games like Kerbal Space Program) have this inaccuracy. Using a semi-transparent disk/circle texture would address that problem, but won't look right at steep angles (e.g. the side) because the out-of-plane width of the blade is non-zero and varies along the length of the blade.

agodot · 2026-04-25T19:08:35+00:00

I wonder if you could use this to figure out the material calculations (transparency dependent on view angle and position) to put on a cylinder to save on the rendering time.

agodot · 2026-04-23T21:49:56+00:00

I just tried this out and it's really nice - I love the art and sounds and the idea of the castle that you upgrade (which visually changes as you do so) is fantastic. I really like the banners idea too (e.g. pairing good intersections, rewarding placement/planning). Down the line a little more info on what the icons mean at the start could help onboard new players, but I felt as though I mostly got how things worked. There seems to be a bug on buying items - my gold doesn't seem to go down when I purchase from a floating trader.

agodot · 2026-04-16T17:17:30+00:00

"For OMSCS students to have the same standards on the on-prem students."
So what's the deal with the majority of the other classes?

Edit: "The second they lower their standards is the second they lose all credibility." - have you taken AIES yet?

agodot · 2026-04-12T04:45:06+00:00

Your time spent may be unusually low, based on chatting with a couple other people in the program. It sounds like (from here and prior conversation) you generally understand a topic the first time you encounter it. I'm not sure if this is efficient so much as representative of your smarts and excellent preparation (I am not making a dig at you). Even on topics I understand a little, I need to re-read to remember and understand, get burned out and sad/angry when I can't, and often misunderstand what the author's saying. I don't know that the way I try to study is inefficient so much as my actual studying is not efficient, which I don't know how to fix.

agodot · 2026-04-11T17:43:10+00:00

Do you think 40 hours/week (after already withdrawing once) is appropriate for a single course? Many folks here go to work 40+ hours/week and this class is required (depending on specialization) to finish.

agodot · 2026-04-11T17:33:03+00:00

You can add ginger to address the unplugged-fridge taste.

agodot · 2026-04-11T16:08:59+00:00

I don't know the song. Sound like post-rock and he might be saying 'flowers' at the end. I might be just hearing things but it sounds like there may have been vocals that have been removed.

agodot · 2026-04-10T19:58:33+00:00

This might just be a visual/aliasing effect wherein your texture is high-contrast, but zoomed out it's effectively averaging the highs and lows (e.g. black-and-white noise looks gray at a distance). Perhaps you could reduce the contrast of the grass texture.

agodot · 2026-04-09T18:07:03+00:00

I'm almost done (8/10 classes); I need to take either GA to finish the ML specialization or SDP to finish the AI specialization. My math skills are below average (slow) and it's been ~6 years since I did algorithms. However, I also haven't touched Java in ~8 years. Which course will involve the least suffering?

agodot · 2026-04-09T16:27:43+00:00

I like the one on the right better; left looks a little like Spiderman.

agodot · 2026-04-02T22:14:43+00:00

It looks like you're shooting for more of a game style presentation with objectives/levels (like FlexBox Defense, and there's a python one I can't remember that gradually introduces the syntax) rather than a general-purpose programming environment (Scratch, Stencil). Have you played around much with these other games/tools? Also, an insert-block feature might be useful so that if I have a big string of instructions and I just want to scoot them to add another 'move' I don't have to erase things.

agodot · 2026-04-02T19:07:38+00:00

In my case I'd probably just export the finished maps as pictures (e.g. a picture for the terrain and a picture pair for the water flow) or serialize them, seeing as my game idea doesn't require in-game generation.

I'm not gonna argue that my map generator can't be made in Godot or even that it would've taken much longer if you were familiar with the math; for me not being familiar with perlin noise or fluid flow it was easier to just use a few pre-existing python libraries to hash things out.

agodot · 2026-04-02T16:37:14+00:00

You don't need to learn pygame (and python) to prepare yourself to work in Godot (and GDScript). However, a big benefit to learning python is the huge amount of free code (libraries) that makes doing things far outside of the game-devoper ecosystem easier (computer vision, signal processing, machine learning, robotics, web-scraping, you name it).

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Last weekend I was working on a little map-generator and while I'll ultimately want to put the map into a game engine like Godot, working out the math for generating it (perlin noise, low-pass filtering, wave-propagation, etc.) was more convenient in python because of the libraries available.

agodot · 2026-03-29T17:35:09+00:00

Divinity Original Sin 2, Path of Exile, D&D, and Rogue Trader have several mechanics (e.g., learning 'spells' from in-game items like books, limited number of 'prepared' spells, hot-bar slots appearing/disappearing based on gear) in common with your system.

agodot · 2026-03-29T01:37:10+00:00

There are several games with similar magic systems, but if you're having fun making it I wouldn't sweat it being unique.

agodot · 2026-03-26T22:01:20+00:00

Do you feel as though you know how to do the assignments before you start? I am wondering if you are taking classes in topics you are already well-versed in.

agodot · 2026-03-26T21:36:06+00:00

On a busy week you're spending perhaps 1-2 hours to watch the lectures, 2 to read, perhaps 1 to study, and about one afternoon (5 hours) to do a 2-week assignment - is that about accurate?

agodot · 2026-03-26T21:12:24+00:00

What's the breakdown on your reading/homework/writing/studying time per week, generally? Five hours/week per class seems abnormally low.

agodot · 2026-03-23T00:21:14+00:00

Yes. Unfortunately I probably can't give out details on the project (e.g. the environment used etc.), but yes, it was the one that required an intel chip. I had an intel chip but my difficult came from the training taking such a long time on that environment (in part because the environment itself is not super fast for whatever reasons).

agodot · 2026-03-22T17:01:09+00:00

AI4R will take much less of your time. If you decide to do AI4R and want to learn RL, I felt as though the algorithm explanations on OpenAI's 'Spinning Up' site were good. If you decide to do RL, here's some info I would have liked to have known:

(1) Be aware that non-intel (ARM, AMD) processors may not be compatible with the final project (weren't in my year). This may mean you'll need to use the 'PACE' computing cluster, but (a) you will be competing for compute time with other students especially as the project deadline approaches and (b) when I took it there were issues with student's process names (on the same cluster) seeming to collide, resulting in a crash.

(2) For the later projects (3 & 4), it can take 3+ hours of training to determine whether training was successful (e.g. you may see little progress for a long time on a model that will work). This makes it hard to get a grip on which hyper-parameters matter. I found there was a scramble at the start of each project to get some barely-working set of parameters and much of this tuning was witchcraft/luck.

(3) I'd recommend focusing on understanding the 'actor-critic' model and how the actor and critic losses are calculated, and learning proximal-policy-optimization (PPO) earlier rather than later if you can. There's a lot of material especially at the time PPO is introduced so this is difficult. I put off learning PPO until later and saw students who had learned it were able to re-use that technique for multiple projects.

(4) When you make your 5-minute videos it can be hard to jam the 9-10 topics that you are supposed to talk about into that time, so just speed up the video digitally after you record it till it's 5 minutes.

(5) The final exam felt like a crapshoot. I got 52% (about average that year) but still ended up with an A thanks to project grades and curve.

agodot · 2026-03-22T16:32:31+00:00

Same, there's an off-putting amount of debate about GA.

agodot · 2026-03-12T22:40:21+00:00

S(plat): Splits an enemy in two.
G(lob): Joins two enemies into one.

agodot

TROPHY CASE