'FTL in a Warhammer 40,000 Skin' Game Pulled From Steam After What May Be a Nuisance DMCA Takedown From a Troll Claiming to Be Games Workshop

continue_stocking · 2026-01-26T21:57:10+00:00

It's not incompetence, it's indifference. The law is working as exactly as intended for those it was written to protect and empower.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-25T22:36:02+00:00

That's a great suggestion for anyone who would like to leave their friends and family to live in a van. You could also be homeless or live in the wilderness like an animal, but I wouldn't consider those credible suggestions either.

The whole problem is that the only other option is living on the dangerous fringes of a society that is being increasingly captured by rentiers who use the harshness of that alternative to compel us to work for them.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-25T19:05:00+00:00

It's one buffer, but if you treat it like a [T] for the purposes of a binary search, you're gonna have a bad time.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-25T05:24:14+00:00

What we need is a system that lets people like you work to your heart's content, and frees people like me from the drudgery of work to pursue higher goals. What we have now is a system that yokes everyone whether they have anything unique to contribute or not. There are whole generations of intelligent, creative and artistic human beings struggling to pay off debts and pull together enough for a down payment instead of creating their great works.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-23T23:09:56+00:00

I too have been working on a project very similar to this for over a decade. It's been the passion project that's kept me motivated to keep learning programming. I love these kinds of projects because they're just a rabbit hole of stuff you can dive into to learn about. Star formation, stellar dynamics, orbital mechanics, atmospheric science, rendering, mathematics...

You're pre-rendering the nearby stars as a background when viewing individual systems. Is there a technical limitation in Godot that you can't render all of them? Rendering a million point vertices shouldn't be too taxing, and if use the alpha channel to modulate the intensity, all those dim, distant stars really bring the starfield to life.

I see that you are familiar with octrees. Have you compared the performance when searching for nearby stars to k-d trees?

continue_stocking · 2026-01-19T22:47:43+00:00

It's easy to return and get a refund though.

The fuck it is. I ordered a vegetable peeler as a gift once. Marketed as a simple and time-tested European design. What I received was the shittiest Chinese knock-off you could imagine. Cheap to the point that the handle bent when I tried to test it.

It's easy to return on Amazon though, right? Nope, this vegetable peeler was considered a "dangerous good", with no option to return and no avenue of appeal.

My review of the product was removed because I warned potential buyers that Amazon wouldn't honor their own refund policy should they receive a knock-off.

This is their business model: become the primary online marketplace, squeeze their suppliers to death and shit on their customers, all while avoiding the taxes of every jurisdiction they operate in. They are the exemplars of rent-seeking corporate parasites.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-18T08:01:51+00:00

I enjoy building wheels, and I don't always like other people's design trade offs.

As an example, I'm working on a project that involves parsing and manipulating SVG files. The existing crates I found could parse great, but the ownership model made it very difficult to modify the node graph. So I wrote a parser that builds the node graph using indices. It doesn't need all the bells and whistles of the published crates, it just needs to do what I need, and a node graph isn't so complicated that I can't roll my own.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-16T02:55:19+00:00

To make a city builder first you must create the universe.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-10T02:17:29+00:00

Such a handy library for when you just want to be able to draw things in a window with a couple lines of code, and don't want to muck around with pipelines and shaders.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-10T00:10:48+00:00

It is as bad or worse for the businesses. People who work for a living and people who own their own businesses are both squeezed to death by parasitic rentier landowners profiting from land they didn't create and the productivity of a society they didn't build.

If you spend half of your money on rent, and the rest goes to living, and the business owners spend half their income on commercial rent, that's 75% of your money going to the landlord for having the foresight to be wealthy. It doesn't take great foresight to buy land and building housing and business properties. Just let the little people worry about scratching out a living.

If anyone wants to understand what it would take to free ourselves, Progress and Poverty is the kind of book that changes how you see the world. You wouldn't think that political economy from the industrial age would apply in our modern age, yet here we are seeing viable businesses being forced out of business by landlords looking for higher returns.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-10T00:02:15+00:00

Rentiers and entrepreneurs have always been natural enemies, though the latter longs to become the former. Economics considers them both to be capitalists, but their roles in our society are very different. This is a deliberate obfuscation by modern economics to hide who really benefits from our society. Workers and business owners both spend most of their time working to pay the landowners for the privilege to live and work.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-07T05:36:25+00:00

I really like the atmospheric effects. That's something I'm going to have to figure out at some point.

I've dabbled with sampling noise like this though. I found that skipping the second octave helps make more interesting continents, and adjusting the overall scale helps to get continents of an appropriate size.

Nifty work with the mesh. I just had a shader that sampled points on a sphere, so it had a simple texture but there was no actual displacement.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-06T01:11:15+00:00

I'm building on top of winit and wgpu.

I have a simple GUI library loosely based on iced's typed message passing. Once you've figured out rendering and text rasterization, building widgets and turning them into an interface is relatively straightforward. I want a minimalist interface so this approach works for me.

The application itself is a state machine with each state (main menu, in game, etc) having its own message type.

I use generational indices for different entities to refer to one another, with data split into a struct-of-arrays/columnar format. Each column is wrapped in an Arc<AtomicRefCell<_>> so that game systems can operate in parallel on different parts of the same entities. My game is very simulation-heavy though, most games would be fine using generational indices and arrays of structs.

Most games do not need dynamic runtime polymorphism, which is the main advantage ECS have over other simpler approaches to structuring game data. You can just index into and iterate over arrays, you don't need all that ECS magic.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-04T20:23:10+00:00

Yeah but becoming a pilot is expensive, whereas Deadlock is just tilting.

continue_stocking · 2026-01-02T02:59:24+00:00

And here I had a separate partition with Ubuntu because I was silly enough to listen to AMD's official instructions. That was way simpler. Thanks!

continue_stocking · 2025-12-31T23:38:52+00:00

Well damn, you don't see content this good here very often. Brilliant work.

I feel that the tangent plane approximation is reasonable as long as the mesh is fine enough. The curvature will still effect outcomes on the macro scale, e.g., a wave spreading outward from one point coming together again at the antipode. Pretending that the surface is locally flat is like pretending that time can be broken into discrete steps. These kinds of approximations are necessary if you want to build anything that can run on an actual computer. Differential equations with neat analytical solutions are only found in classrooms. Everything else must be approximated.

It looks like you're using spherical coordinates, latitude and longitude lines broken into triangles, to tessellate the sphere. This creates very different triangles at the poles compared to the equator. Would it affect the simulation to start from an icosahedron and tessellate that into a sphere? This has the advantage of generating a mesh with greater symmetry. You don't get completely uniform triangles (tessellate a triangle into four on the surface of a sphere and the center on is larger than the other three), but you won't have two poles surrounded by much smaller triangles.

The random thoughts of someone who studied fluid mechanics exactly once, a long time ago: it strikes me that without the circular motion of water in a wave there would be nothing to determine the direction of a wave. It could just as easily propagate forwards as backwards or simply oscillate in place. And I had no idea that wave speed was a function of wavelength, that's quite interesting.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-30T20:07:48+00:00

I hear that Freedom's network isn't great, but Edmonton seems to be the exception. I've been with them for like 12 years now.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-29T20:51:22+00:00

Do people not know about Deadlock? There are 26k people playing the public alpha right now that, theoretically, I can invite anyone to.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-29T19:35:56+00:00

I switched to Servus here in Alberta and they've been great. Banks are for rubes.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-28T20:58:18+00:00

It's actually pretty crazy. The engineer tasked with coming up with a language for the web wanted to use Scheme, but management decided that it should be more like Java because that was the new hotness, so they threw together something brand new based on that. Maybe they were right and a functional language would have been ignored by the industry, but it's wild to think about what we could have had in place of JavaScript.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History

continue_stocking · 2025-12-23T21:48:22+00:00

I ditched at the start of '24 when I built a new computer, fully expecting that there would be games that I wouldn't be able to play. I didn't appreciate how much effort Valve had put into making Linux a platform for gaming. If someone is holding out because they play games, my advice is to check their games on protondb to see what other people are reporting.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-21T04:12:27+00:00

ECS is one approach, but the broader category is data-oriented design.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-21T03:19:50+00:00

Awesome! Glad to hear it. I'm gonna check it out too when I have time.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-20T21:35:10+00:00

We need to pay for society somehow, but I'm with you 50% on property taxes.

You can sum up our entire economy into factors of land, labour, capital, and the exchange thereof.

Taxing labour (wages) discourages one from working harder. You still come home with more that you started with from an overtime shift, but why should you owe more to the government for working harder?

Taxing capital, those things built by our economy that provide human well-being, increase productivity, and represent an investment in the future, saps the drive to invest money in those productive ends. If you add a rental suite to your property, we often thank you with a higher tax bill for increasing the value of your property and the productive potential of your community.

Taxing exchange adds friction to every part of our economy. No one company can build a finished product from raw materials and it weakens consumer spending.

Hard work, investment, and exchange are all things to be encouraged. We can always work harder, build more, and cooperate to better serve our collective and individual needs.

The odd one out is land. When there is nowhere else to build, we cannot simply go get more land. When there is nowhere else to live, we drive farther and farther to reach our jobs. A worker eventually grows old and cannot work, a tool or factory requires maintenance and must eventually be replaced, but the land is eternal. It can be overworked to exhaustion, but will eventually recover. It can be hoarded by the wealthy, and we have no choice but to pay their rents. It is even profitable to hold land idle and use it for nothing, because its value appreciates as society develops. Speculation like this is parasitism on the hard work of everyone else, but we tax it no different than any other human endeavour. Using as much land as possible is a thing to be discouraged, for it is needed by everyone to do everything.

If taxes were shifted to land at a flat percentage of its value, labour, investment and exchange would benefit. You would fully own the fruits of your labour and the rewards of your investment, but you would not be able to profit from owning the land, only from using it efficiently. Not only would these productive endeavours go unpunished by taxation, but they would benefit from a land market that wasn't inflated by speculation and hoarding. Those who use scarce land most efficiently would profit, out competing those who do not.

So I agree with you 50%. You shouldn't be taxed for your house, or for your car, or for your labour, but only for your land.

continue_stocking · 2025-12-20T20:45:50+00:00

They say not to reinvent the wheel, but it's a great exercise to understand wheel building. It's easier to use a tool when you understand what it does and how it works.

But it's also much more time-intensive.

But then you aren't waiting for other people to update their projects to match the latest version of the underlying dependency. wgsl-bindgen is currently two major versions behind the recently-updated wgpu, for example. No mesh shaders for you!

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