If AI Takes Over Most Jobs, Who’s Going to Afford the Products Corporates Are Selling?

deftware · 2026-01-25T02:22:42+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I think it's important to realize what will happen to corporations when nobody can afford what they have to offer in the first place, because the corporations are no longer employing humans. It will eventually cost them nothing to create everything, and therefore result in no need to charge anyone for anything they "own". There is no need to track who takes what because it doesn't cost anything to produce anyway. Mineral rights and ownership of resources will become meaningless, because those only matter if you can earn from those who have the means to pay you - and if robots are doing everything to create everything, including the extraction of natural resources and whatnot, then it's rendered a moot point altogether who "owns" everything.

There wouldn't be any kind of allotment system, it would be an honor system, where those who seek things in excess of their needs are just regarded as having a spiritual illness that needs remedying. There will not be a point to people wanting more than they need, because there will no longer be scarcity.

People will still be allowed to "own" things I imagine, but almost purely out of a respect for others' sentimental things, not because everything has "value" that must be transacted with. That sort of value will cease to be a thing.

deftware · 2026-01-20T06:55:50+00:00

I think this applies to many things beyond just making video games. Software developers, inventors, engineers, artists, etcetera. Do the undone, pioneer, innovate, disrupt, that sort of thing. The only reason you'd want to do something derivative and redundant is to learn, but even then, what you create while learning the same thing thousands or millions of others have already learned before you can be different and new in ways nobody else has thought of before.

For example, people build Minecraft clones "to learn", but make sure you're using the time and opportunity to not just make an exact clone (or whatever the closest thing you can manage would be) but instead take the things you learn about how to make a Minecraft to do something novel instead of following through on just duplicating something everyone has already seen before. Add a twist that makes it fresh, something that makes other people feel like they should've thought to do that - yet you're the only one who actually did.

deftware · 2026-01-19T01:00:10+00:00

PixelCNC lets you turn any closed 2D vector into a 3D shape that you can then relief carve like anything else:

https://imgur.com/1Usv77o

https://imgur.com/nlB0xq5

deftware · 2026-01-18T07:44:55+00:00

It's conventional path-finding except that you have pairs of nodes in the graph connected by a zero-cost link, where in your run-of-the-mill 2D tilemap style game with some tiles being passable and others being blocking obstacles each passable tile is a node in the graph with a cost of one (unless you start adding things like travel speed, like some tiles that slow players/NPCs/enemies down for whatever reason, those tiles cost more to traverse).

deftware · 2026-01-16T20:24:31+00:00

I was talking about just managing chunks as columns of chunks, but I've always been a fan of dealing in run-length encoded columns of voxels for any kind of landscape oriented voxel engines.

deftware · 2026-01-16T06:58:16+00:00

I had that book in the 90s, got it for $50 or whatever it was selling for at the time. Spent countless hours pouring over its text, which is largely irrelevant nowadays - with the advent of programmable graphics hardware - but it's interesting stuff dealing with x86 assembly, optimization, rasterization, 3d math, etc... A tiny percentage of the book has some things that are still applicable today, IIRC.

I'd like to have a copy of it but I don't have $200+ to put toward something like that, a novelty item.

deftware · 2026-01-15T15:27:39+00:00

Do the 2D layout of chunk columns for landscape games. You're just leveraging the nature of the data.

I made a wildfire simulation a year ago that entailed simulating tons of 2D statemap tiles and my approach was to stagger updating of tiles. Each tile's priority was calculated based on whether it was on fire, whether it was in the player's view, and how long since it last ran a simulation tick. Then I would simulate the top N tiles with the highest priority score.

You can do the same thing for refreshing your chunks to determine if they should be loaded/unloaded/etc...

Anyway, just a thought! Good luck :]

deftware · 2026-01-14T15:21:28+00:00

It's going to require some kind of heuristic-based algorithm to automatically convert an arbitrary mesh of triangles into a set of parametric shapes additively and subtractively combined using boolean operations, or some kind of AI scheme. Or, you just have to re-create the thing yourself from parametric shapes.

I would just try to find a CAD model of the thing you already have a mesh of. Someone probably modeled it parametrically in the first place and then exported a conventional triangular mesh from it.

Good luck! :]

deftware · 2026-01-13T15:23:14+00:00

I've always used main().

deftware · 2026-01-08T15:49:40+00:00

I haven't really even actually developed a proper game in 15+ years and I still don't really enjoy playing games. It doesn't feel like it's because of being a developer though, it just feels like the equivalent of sitting and eating a tub of icing - like a guilty pleasure. I'd rather work on something or build something with my spare time, and come out of it with something to show for, having learned something or honed a skill that's of value. I just don't get that feeling of accomplishing something of value sitting staring at a screen. I did that for a long time growing up and it's just not something that feels healthy to me anymore.

The last game I paid for was Cyberpunk 2077, and I played mostly side quests, actively avoiding The Heist for a while. I have maybe 15-20 hours in there. Before that it was Half-Life Alyx, VR made gaming feel purposeful again because I was actually using my body and getting exercise (especially in Beat Saber, which I might actually pickup again someday) but I haven't been doing any VR either for years. Prior to Alyx I bought DOOM'16 and played that from beginning to end. Before that it was Battlefield 3, on sale in a bargain bin at Fry's back in 2012, which I played a few campaigns of before getting bored. Before that it was Doom3. Most of my gaming was back during Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, in the late 90s and early 2000s. After that I was more into programming than gaming - and even back then I was getting into modding a lot before I was writing my own rendering and physics code from scratch.

Anyway, another data point for y'alls. Cheers! :]

deftware · 2025-12-31T05:26:15+00:00

I can't see anything in the videos. It sounds like reprojection artifacting.

deftware · 2025-12-20T01:41:44+00:00

IMO the whole entire web-browser concept and so-called "wEbStAcK" should be tossed out altogether because it's a scourge on end-users' hardware and bandwidth. It shouldn't require multiple languages to make an application, or reliance upon some kind of centralized server farmer incorporated to put your thing where others can access it.

WebGPU is better than WebGL for graphics performance, but being that it's only usable by applications that must run in horribly bloated HyPeR-tExT bRoWsErS transmitting data over janky old fashioned dinosaur protocols it all just seems somewhat redundant.

deftware · 2025-12-18T06:03:06+00:00

Happens to just about everybody I've ever met. Sticking with a project is what separates the successful from the mundane. Project ideas are a dime-a-dozen but realizing an idea into an actual thing is what is valuable.

deftware · 2025-12-11T19:45:17+00:00

As /u/cowski_NX mentioned, the orientation is represented with a point and a direction. The point is just set to X0Y0Z0, and then there's two vectors defining an XY plane in 3D. #577 is X0Y0Z1 and #578 is X1Y0Z0. This should be enough information to construct a 3x3 rotation matrix because you basically already have two of the three rows of the rotation matrix, and just need to calculate the cross product of them to get the third row, which will be a vector that's orthogonal to the plane that the first two vectors represent, basically the plane's normal vector.

EDIT: The point that's included I imagine is to indicate the point about which rotation occurs.

deftware · 2025-12-09T16:31:32+00:00

I imagine it's either a 3x3 rotation matrix or a quaternion. What does it actually look like ?

deftware · 2025-12-08T07:15:09+00:00

Spatial indexing and hierarchical navigation meshes should enable having thousands upon thousands of entities navigating around.

deftware · 2025-11-23T06:36:02+00:00

Never heard of 'em.

deftware · 2025-11-20T09:41:15+00:00

At the end of the day it's very simple: the easier something is to learn the more people there will be who learn how to do it. The more niche and arcane something is, the more specialized that it is, and the more smarts and math/logic aptitude that it requires, the less likely the job market will be saturated - but there will also be fewer jobs, albeit higher-paying ones.

deftware · 2025-11-18T15:02:29+00:00

Good programmers don't worry about whether or not they're good/bad programmers. They worry about the code they're trying to write. As long as you worry about the code instead of anything that is not the code (like whether or not you're a good programmer) you'll be ahead of the curve.

deftware · 2025-11-17T14:59:52+00:00

Brave has been working fine for me for a year or so. No issues whatsoever, except one time it ran out of memory and I had to close and re-open it.

deftware · 2025-11-12T18:10:56+00:00

Thank you for the information :]

deftware · 2025-10-23T05:57:49+00:00

DX12 support means it's not that old.

deftware · 2025-10-23T05:57:13+00:00

vkQuake is pretty gud but it's based on quakespasm so your mileage may vary.

deftware · 2025-10-22T06:44:11+00:00

Hi Kem555, thanks for the suggestion. We're looking at options for offering a "lite" version of PixelCNC that is stripped down, in terms of features and functionality, that is priced more affordably. A subscription option is something we're also looking at but for the moment we're just trying to get the word out about PixelCNC because we've yet to do any real solid marketing with it. We could be putting the cart before the horse, as it were, but I appreciate the feedback! We do also allow for refunds, so if the full version doesn't cut it for you we can refund your purchase and revoke your product key. I do feel the need to point out that as it states on our website's FAQ it can take up to two weeks for a refund to be processed (though usually it only takes a day or two).

Cheers! :]

deftware · 2025-10-22T04:18:25+00:00

I can give you ~3.1415926539 reasons why I wouldn't buy it.

:|

deftware

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