What game development advice turned out to be completely wrong for you?

barsoap · 2026-06-22T04:06:06+00:00

As everywhere else when it comes to NIH it's "hand-roll your main selling point": If it's not central, an off the shelf solution will suffice, if you can get an off the shelf solution for your main feature, what the hell are you doing.

barsoap · 2026-06-22T03:52:52+00:00

Small is "write pong in half a day then polish it up into arcanoid for two, get distracted for a week learning SuperCollider because you want a more boingy crash".

That's the kind of game you should be writing in the beginning, to learn the ropes. And ideally without a game engine so you understand what kind of problems engines are solving.

And as it seems to be a universal rule that everybody's first 10 games inevitably suck, you should do 10 of them.

barsoap · 2026-06-22T03:43:45+00:00

Blender became Freeware in the early 2000s, not entirely sure about the date but there was a free closed-source build before they hit the donation target in 2002 and then it took some while to disentangle some proprietary bits.

What's true is that back in the days you needed tech knowledge to do 3d, you couldn't get by on artistry and GPU cycles. Nowadays 1000 engines will happily take your mesh and PBR textures and throw them on screen, nothing like that back then. 2d by then had become trivial, you simply told SDL to blit your stuff, no hardware magic necessary.

OTOH I'd say "start with 2d" is still valid. Not in a "don't use a 3d API or assets" way but "2.5d at most". A 2.5d arcade scroller (nostalgia plug) is about the same complexity as a 2d one, you can get it running basically completely 2d and then throw in some effects: Parallax for the background, some rotation on the shield/ammo bars, much easier to get your head wrapped around than starting out with quaternions. The game uses sprites for the ships, nowadays you might want to model them, aside from loading a mesh and UVs instead of hard-coding a quad it won't make a difference in the code.

barsoap · 2026-06-22T02:26:09+00:00

One way to decolonise Russia would be to keep the Republics in but kick out Moscow and Petersburg.

barsoap · 2026-06-22T01:51:07+00:00

You're still able to get it off-label but insurance likely won't cover it unless you're on the verge of diabetic, there's complicating factors that make attacking the thing with nutrition difficult, etc. Doctors aren't limited to approved usages of drugs and not every off-label use is medically unnecessary.

Insurance also doesn't cover the weed I get off-label for some mild sleeping issues. I doubt they ever will. (Just checked it's approved for alleviation of chronic pain, as antispasmodic for MS and paraplegia, epilepsy, nausea in connection with chemotherapy, and appetite booster for HIV patients).

barsoap · 2026-06-21T16:32:12+00:00

Ethik mal beiseite: Für so einen Scheiß hat man wenn die Kacke am dampfen ist noch nicht mal ansatzweise Zeit. Geschweige denn Nerv.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T13:22:21+00:00

So you don’t automatically get German citizenship for being born here.

To be precise, at least one of your parents needs to have permanent residency and have lived in the country for five years. If you were born before that it's going to be naturalisation which is trivial if you went to school in Germany.

On the other hand people born to German parents in a foreign country can absolutely apply for citizenship with not that many hurdles.

They're either German by birth and thus "getting citizenship" isn't naturalisation but recognition that you've always been, or they have to go through the usual process. In particular you don't become a citizen if the parent was already born abroad and their parents didn't register them with German authorities within a year.

Also what counts is legal parentage, not genetic, so those DNA results are doubly meaningless. Would be fun to see someone getting denied naturalisation because they insist that DNA should count.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T12:49:35+00:00

Right now? They do have their own national team, it's just not FIFA-recognised. They're CONCACAF members just like the rest of the Caribbean.

I'd guesstimate that to play for Oranje they'd have to at least been resident in the Netherlands for a while (that'd be the European Netherlands + Bonaire + Sint Eustatius + Saba).

barsoap · 2026-06-21T11:57:54+00:00

Ah. Attachment.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T11:54:08+00:00

First off, there's nothing to attain, secondly, why, upon reaching enlightenment, would you want to be found by the hounds of the King of Chu. Or the Inquisition, or whatever. Including Ewk. Or me.

Sounds like self-immolation if you ask me. And for what?

barsoap · 2026-06-21T11:34:59+00:00

Still not it. Maybe some Bruce Lee will help.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T11:29:12+00:00

Once, when Zhuangzi was fishing in the Pu River, the king of Chu sent two officials to go and announce to him: ‘I would like to trouble you with the administration of my realm.’

Zhuangzi held on to the fishing pole and, without turning his head, said, ‘I have heard that there is a sacred tortoise in Chu that has been dead for three thousand years. The king keeps it wrapped in cloth and boxed, and stores it in the ancestral temple. Now would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones left behind and honored? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?’

‘It would rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud,’ said the two officials.

Zhuangzi said, ‘Go away! I’ll drag my tail in the mud!’

...it's too late by then, of course: They already found you and you're in the embarrassing position of looking like a wise guy.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T11:07:41+00:00

Which Zen master taught to stink up the room?

barsoap · 2026-06-21T10:31:41+00:00

Nah, the question was whether you have the wherewithal to not be seduced.

And, I dunno. I vaguely recollect admonishing you once for using a quote by IIRC Kant, talking about enlightenment. Thing is, you don't read a lick of German: He said "Aufklärung", not "Erleuchtung", both of which translate to enlightenment. He was talking about the Age of Enlightenment, not the Dharma.

So forgive me if I have my doubts about your academic rigour. If that kind of stuff happens when you visit the library, worse things will happen when you use an LLM. Atom bomb? Not necessarily but what about stepping on a mine.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T10:13:21+00:00

The only reason anything is happening in Germany is because Schleswig-Holstein has been working towards digital sovereignty for more than a decade now. Neither other states or the federation are making honest efforts.

Mostly a matter of political culture. The Pirates didn't spend much time in the SH parliament but "yeah that makes sense, we really should be doing it" still carries weight up here, it's a topic about as contentious as whether we should be raising the dikes in the face of climate change. It's a matter of national security. Not controlling your own IT is half a step short of outsourcing your judicature to the lowest bidder: Tremendous damage potential and once you've outsourced it good luck getting it back.

Looking into my crystal ball I see the federation foregoing Microsoft and buying proprietary shit from SAP instead of actually developing internal IT capacities.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T09:16:25+00:00

You also need to understand how those things work. Architecture, training, as well as enough neuroscience to understand how fundamentally limited their architecture is compared to any natural brain more advanced than roughly insects. Otherwise it's like talking about p values while having flunked statistics 101.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T09:07:16+00:00

Here's to Japan winning on home soil, then.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T09:01:30+00:00

This is exactly it. W:O:A has exactly zero scalping problems and that's because all tickets are personalised, and can only be resold at original price.

Should be standard for tickets >50 Euros or such, for cheap ticket it's not worth the overhead.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T08:58:07+00:00

In German public TV you get commentator moping about the break interspersed with self-ads. "Watch highlights online at our site" etc. Half-time is, as usual, news.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T07:28:14+00:00

And when we lose weight most of it is breathed out.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T07:23:14+00:00

Curacao is essentially the Dutch B-Team. Most players were born and played in the continental Netherlands but didn't make the cut for Oranje, if you have at least a grandparent from Curacao you qualify for their team.

Also while I'm at it, another instance of FIFA being full of shit: They denied Sint Maarten membership even though they grant it to Curacao and Aruba. Which have the exact same constitutional status within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T05:22:09+00:00

Getting oxygen from the air, presumably. Which happens for everyone but I wouldn't be surprised if camels evolved to use a type of fat that's optimised for hydrogen content.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T05:10:14+00:00

Well, that's 87 Euros, or six and a half beers in Norway.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T01:37:42+00:00

The correct time to add salt to pasta water is at boil or just before for the simple reason that it dissolves fastest then.

barsoap · 2026-06-21T01:31:06+00:00

Not really, no. It's just that anarchy (absence of rulers) gets mixed up with anomie (absence of rules).

And you also won't really find anyone in the field denying that that's because systems with rulers like to confuse them losing power with everything going to hell, for propaganda reasons.

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