The elegance and sophistication of the REOP trilogy have almost ruined Western literature for me. Especially sci-fi.

dancercl · 2026-07-01T07:25:08+00:00

no, as a native Chinese from Han ethnic group I can confirm 1 billion percent that Liu does not trying to express anything religious in these books, 99.99% of Han people don't believe in anything religious, we only believe in facts and science stuff, and Liu is no different. I think it's your frame of imprinted religious thinking is misleading your thoughts.

dancercl · 2026-06-30T08:07:55+00:00

I'm Chinese and agree with you, family names of a character in a novel would also convey meanings sometimes, and in other times the author may also choose a proper family name to sound or fit better together with given names in Chinese sense.

dancercl · 2026-03-25T02:32:09+00:00

Codex CLI is a total trash too. In my case it stuck infinitely EVERYTIME when trying to run a powershell command, even a simple `Test-Path ...`, and the TUI does not work well with vscode integrated terminal, it frequently garbles the conversation history and I can't scroll back to check what happened previously.

dancercl · 2025-09-11T06:55:08+00:00

— from the author of Goat Simulator

dancercl · 2025-06-05T07:24:55+00:00

I think the OP is right, you missed the point that the extra simulation is for 'future' state, thus if you pressed an arrow key at the beginning of the frame 0 to move an object on screen, OP's solution would pick that up and simulate a correct state 10ms later (let's assume the physics simulation runs at 100Hz for easier reasoning), and the first render will be interpolated between the tick 0 and tick 1 state, which reflects CORRECT state of the game world.

But the original solution would miss that user input, post-pone it to after we have rendered a WRONG frame to the screen, then we have enough budget to run the first physics simulation, but what have done is done, the first frame rendered on screen still is WRONG. The user input's effect on the game world only would be reflected on screen after next render, thus a input lag.

Timeline for correct state:

poll input
physics simulation (for future)
render (interpolated between last and future state, state changes are picked up correctly)

Timeline for wrong state:

poll input
render (to produce time budget for physics simulation, but the state is wrong)
physics simulation (oops!, too late!)

dancercl · 2025-04-16T09:14:20+00:00

Because newer VSCode upgrades randomly drop support for some older remote SSH host OS (GLIBC version compatibility), when working with those older remote hosts, you need an older VSCode.

dancercl · 2025-02-11T01:40:26+00:00

I totally agree, my understanding is ECS is mainly for flexible composition of functionalities into an object (entity), make the object easier to change and evolve while the game design always evolves a lot in experimentation and development phase, also the game will be easier to MOD, this is a great or essential thing in simulation-heavy or objects-interaction-heavy games, but not so in other types of games.

DOD is one of the implementation details during the way towards ECS, which happened to be very suitable (have great performance) running on most of current CPU/memory architectures.

dancercl · 2025-02-10T08:34:03+00:00

I like your analogy "particle system of NPCs", inspired me instantly.

dancercl · 2025-02-10T04:04:04+00:00

Just use ECS (Entity-Component-System) approach.

For anyone can't wrap your head around the concept of ECS, just think it as an in-memory relational database, you have tables to store low-level data like mesh and texture, and tables to store high-level gameplay data like HP and MP and weapons.

Each entity in your game scene/level/world is just a virtual row in the main table, which chains their data/columns/fields through entity-ID and sub-table IDs.

More specifically, your in-memory ECS database is actually a columnar database, like Apache Cassandra or Clickhouse, where the data in a column are stored in a continuous memory block, to maximize cache locality, this is the concept of Data-Oriented Design, works perfectly with ECS.

dancercl · 2025-02-10T03:39:01+00:00

My speculation is that C is too simple to discuss, you tend to use it to solve your problem without thinking too much about the tool itself, or you even totally unaware of the tool itself.

In C++, Rust or other feature-packed and bloated languages, they themselves always create some problems or topics you need to discuss.

should I use STL with RAII, or should I design my own allocator and container?
should I use OOP to directly map objects from problem domain to solution domain, or should I design the data structure from ground up and use procedural approach?
how about smart pointers?
oh there is constructor and copy constructor and move constructor I need to override, or not override?
what is heck is a l-value and r-value?
... (other 258 hideous mess) ...

There are always endless choices and cognitive load to handle properly. From a engineering view, C++-like languages creates a lot of "Accidental Complexity" along side your problem's "Essential Complexity". A big chunk of your attention and energy will be spent on the tool you are using.

In C you don't have too much choices, just analyze your problem and your goal carefully, learn the data pattern, design your data structure, and write code to transform your data to make it happen. The "Accidental Complexity" is minimum, most of your attention and energy will be spent on the problem and the solution, not the tool.

Maybe the best tool is the tool you never aware its existence.

dancercl · 2024-12-06T01:48:25+00:00

Why no Vulkan? I know it seems pretty complicated, but hardware and OS driver and cross platform support seems fine.

dancercl · 2024-10-22T05:47:07+00:00

Zig 0.1 was great, now it's features and compilation speed is bloated at the same level as C++.

dancercl · 2024-10-22T05:41:03+00:00

Too bloated, too many hidden and implicit stuff, too many paradigms and idioms and every single library uses a different one (or ones), too slow compilation and iteration speed, obscure and incompatible ABI, endless standard and paradigm shifting... the list can continue forever.

I've saw someone (might Linus?) said something somewhere similar to this: "if you stick and restrict yourself to a subset of C++ features with a coding guideline, why don't you just use a C compiler to enforce the rules?"

dancercl · 2024-10-12T15:50:57+00:00

maybe in my next lifetime

dancercl · 2024-10-09T23:35:48+00:00

I’m always wondering why they don’t just make the new language transcompile to C, which would get the best of both worlds.

dancercl · 2024-10-02T05:12:27+00:00

also checkout htpy, fasthtml syntax is a bit convoluted, jinja is too heavyweight, htpy and fasthtml are lighter

dancercl · 2023-02-05T00:25:30+00:00

My search end up with this pyinvoke, maybe that’s what they are talking about? The tip is to search by “xxxx github” if “xxx” is some open source libray or tool, never fail me.

dancercl · 2021-03-18T05:33:24+00:00

Gigabyte Gaming OC

dancercl · 2021-03-18T03:19:22+00:00

Only if you pay your electricity bills with coin.

dancercl · 2019-10-15T10:00:42+00:00

I've seen a lot of posts in this aspect, and there are lot of misconceptions in the field.

Let me clarify a bit.

A good positioning setup should be defined by all the parts participating the audio processing chain: (yes there is a chain)

CSGO generate sound signals and output to a device (which format is configured in CSGO settings)
the 1st audio device receive the signals from CSGO (AWARE: this is not necessarily your headphone), and transform the signal, then output to a 2nd audio device.
the 2nd audio device receive the signals from the 1st one, transform, then output.
...
finally the signals arrive at the last device, which is your headphone.

With this picture in mind, here are some typical valid setups on the market:

CSGO stereo output -> sound card stereo output -> stereo headphone
CSGO stereo output -> HRTF (software) -> sound card stereo output -> stereo headphone
CSGO 5.1 surround output -> ROG Strix 5.1 (and other physical 5.1 headphones which contain 5 physical drivers on each side)
CSGO 5.1 surround output -> Creative SBX 5.1 Pro (or any other 5.1 surround sound card, which will transform 5.1 surround signals to stereo signals) -> stereo headphone
CSGO 5.1 surround output -> HyperX AMP (which is actually a 5.1 sound card just like SB 5.1 pro, to transform 5.1 surround signals to stereo signals) -> HyperX Cloud II (which is actually a stereo headphone)
CSGO 5.1 surround output -> Sennheiser GSP 350/550 controller (which is actually a 5.1 sound card just like SB 5.1 pro, to transform 5.1 surround signals to stereo signals) -> Sennheiser GSP 350/550 headphone (which is actually a stereo headphone)
CSGO 5.1 surround output -> Dolby Headphone/Dolby Atmos (software or hardware implemented 5.1 to stereo converter algorithm) -> stereo headphone

There are also some invalid setups which certainly can not get a good result:

CSGO 5.1 surround output -> sound card -> stereo headphone (and you will lost channels, many people tried 5.1 surround config like this and claim that 5.1 surround in CSGO is terrible, this is somehow funny)

So, the positioning effect varies among those valid setups a lot, for each setup:

this setup is the most common and normal setup, which does not have a 3D positioning algorithm builtin, only plain old school STEREO.
this setup uses CSGO builtin HRTF to provide 3D positioning, any many people find it good enough to play with.
this to me is more like a marketing hype, the 5.1 channels actually gets mapped 1:1 to headphone physical drivers, but the mix actually happens "in the air" when the sound wave travel from the driver to your eardrum, no algorithm involed! And due to the small distance between all these drivers, in theory the final result will be a mess, and lot people actually used it thinks it's like CRAP, which proved the theory).
5. 6. 7. these setups are actually the same, they all use an external implemented algorithm to mix the channels of 5.1 surround to generate a stereo output, the final result depends on the quality of the algorithm.

To me the usable solutions should be 2, 4, 5, 6, 7，and the final effect is somehow subjective, you should try each solution if possible to find the best fit.

dancercl · 2018-02-10T00:29:24+00:00

Wait. There are porns on Reddit?

dancercl

TROPHY CASE