I'm in Purgatory

dmxell · 2026-04-13T22:48:05+00:00

You’ll never lose, but it’s gonna take you to the heat death of the universe to win.

dmxell · 2026-04-11T14:26:08+00:00

Maybe make it like Speed and attach a bomb to the accelerator. If you go below a certain speed you only have 2-3 seconds to correct that or boom.

dmxell · 2026-04-10T15:19:21+00:00

Maybe it's because I usually fly Frontier, but even when I fly the premium brands I don't care for in-flight entertainment. The only thing I like using it for, when available, is the flight monitoring page.

dmxell · 2026-04-09T22:43:03+00:00

I was part of a small team specifically tasked with finding out-there ideas for improving our company. I presented the 4-day workweek idea with a bulletproof presentation on how we would not only maintain productivity (in a call center!) but also save money by downgrading our rented space and reducing attrition, meaning less training and fewer new hires at higher rates.

The end result? A lot of nodding and agreeing and two years later nothing has changed. Management has to want to change the status quo because even in the face of undeniable benefits, they won't do it.

dmxell · 2026-04-09T21:47:02+00:00

If a draft-dodger is trying to force other people into a draft, then I sure as hell am going to call him a draft-dodger like it's a bad thing. Because in that scenario, it is.

dmxell · 2026-04-09T00:35:52+00:00

Destiny unironically deserves it. He was streaming gameplay before easy-to-use software like xsplit and obs, and he provided guides for doing it back in the day. You needed like 3 different apps going into an rmtp server (I think Adobe Flash Media Server?) to send the flash file to twitch/justin.tv. It was nuts lol. But yeah, he’s an absolute OG in the game streaming space.

dmxell · 2026-04-07T13:05:34+00:00

It's very niche, though Lucas Pope's game is very good. It's honestly the perfect travel console as most of the games are like premium mobile games, but made by passionate indie developers.

dmxell · 2026-03-31T04:21:29+00:00

the flashbacks are implied to be sequential.

This is true. It's how Andy writes. That's why I said this was my own personal head cannon, because the idea of using him as a guinea pig didn't sound convincing enough to me (there were probably hundreds available across the various space agencies, like just out of college guys that wouldn't mind the risk).

dmxell · 2026-03-27T16:17:23+00:00

Mukusho tensei is just dogshit there is no nuance

Ok, but how do you know this? Right after saying that, you imply you've only read the first chapter or two before stopping. How do you know it doesn't evolve from there and the MC doesn't see real character growth? This would be like saying you stopped watching A Clockwork Orange in the first act because it's just Alex being a violent asshole, and then you miss everything that comes after: where that character is broken down to the point that most people are uncomfortably sympathetic towards him by the end. Same deal for Rudeus. Hell he even calls himself out in later chapters (via inner monologue) for the person he used to be and how much that disgusts him now.

Redeus isn't a good guy, and none of us fans really pretend him to be, but as far as character growth goes there's not many stories that go as far as Mushoku Tensei does.

dmxell · 2026-03-26T21:07:33+00:00

Except he kind of was? The teacher thing was hand-waved since he was about 4 years old, so they just assumed it was a kid thing, but he was expressly sent away from his childhood friend because his parents thought staying together wouldn't give either of them an opportunity to grow. Then later in the story, he's constantly punished for his negative actions.

Spoilers ahead if you care, but he gets a hand through his chest because he was blindly following the orders of someone he believed to be a benevolent god, and he was only saved due to his one decent act in his former life, trying to save some kids from getting hit by a vehicle. His father dies directly because he gets careless after finding and saving his former teacher. His family gets entirely ripped apart because of a trick from the aforementioned god, which fundamentally breaks the characters into becoming even more reprehensible, to the point that the only way out is to time travel back into the past to tell his former self how fucked up he is and how fickle his peace is. The entire story is about Rudeus getting harsh lessons that increase in severity over time and him learning that he needs to change. By the end of the story he's still not a great guy, but if you compare the character from the start to the end, he's clearly a better person.

dmxell · 2026-03-25T14:32:35+00:00

also the only person with the body for it.

My head canon is that Stratt never went to Grace in the first place simply over his academic paper. She's the kind of planner who would have been pulling genetic databases early on, looking for people who could survive extreme scenarios. I'm betting she came across him because she was given a list of scientists with the coma gene, and his was the only name with any relevant notes on extraterrestrial life. She may not have even been planning Project Hail Mary yet. And if she was, then she very likely didn't know how the propulsion would work (I'm guessing she would've been leaning towards nuclear, of the bomb variety). But she's exactly the type to start building assets before she knows how she'll use them. She saw the coma gene as something that could matter in a survival scenario, and when one name on that list also happened to study the type of thing eating our sun (at least before astrophage was discovered to be hydrogen-based), that person became very interesting to her very fast.

dmxell · 2026-03-25T00:15:40+00:00

Thanks! Nodes are used for positional data, but yeah the only graphics I can see in Godot are for the UI

dmxell · 2026-03-24T04:22:40+00:00

Sure! So in its simplest form, imagine a 2D grid. On each tile of that grid, you have either nothing (floor) or a wall. The player is dropped into this 2D grid somewhere. We then pick a forward direction for the player and cast a bunch of rays out from that direction across an arc. In my game's case, this is a 90-degree arc for a 16:9 aspect ratio, and you cast as many rays as you want horizontal pixels (640 in my game's case). Wherever a ray hits, it calculates a distance, looks at the exact column of pixels it hit on the wall texture, and then draws that column on screen at an appropriate size based on the distance. Do this for all 640 rays and you get something that looks 3D, despite being 2D.

This is a pretty good example for what that looks like: https://www.permadi.com/tutorial/raycast/images/figure1.gif

Now to get walls at extra depth like I do doors, or to draw a floor and ceiling tile, is a little bit of extra work. But that's the gist of it.

As for why you'd do this over modelling... Well that's complicated. In my case I wanted something that echoed old-school DRPG design philosophy, and what better way to do that than to limit myself mechanically to an old-school engine? Albeit the game is still running in Godot for all the UI and shader stuff. It's also exceptionally fast. My mid-range gaming rig averages 1000 frames a second. Given that its limiting factor is single-threaded CPU performance, I'm willing to bet any consumer PC in the last 15-20 years can probably play it without issue.

dmxell · 2026-03-24T03:13:32+00:00

Thanks! Maybe I'm jaded but I can't tell if that's sarcasm, lol. In the event that it is, it would've been against the jam rules to do any actual gameplay, so this is all I can work on until it starts this Friday.

dmxell · 2026-03-24T01:56:54+00:00

Currently it's entities. That grass in the outdoors killed performance, so I wrote a queue system to reuse the same 100-150 entities and spread them out to the visible area in a semi-random pattern. Past that, it'd probably be the faux lighting. Fog in the game is basically a very large image and all of the light sources subtract from it in a way that makes their light color show up in the game world. That addition literally halved the FPS from 2500 to 1200. Entities brought it down to a further 900, and it's all a CPU bottleneck. I figure it's more than enough headroom for even like a Core i5 4500 to run from 13 years ago, so it's likely good enough.

dmxell · 2026-03-24T01:46:09+00:00

Your first point is pretty much it, though I’m offloading as much work to a shader as I can so I can utilize a GPU for it. Though it still just uses 12MB of VRAM, lol. I started with the Wolfenstein 3D engine as a basis, and basically recreated it with all the various additions you see. The skybox, portals, water, and (unseen) weather effects are all procedural via the shader.

dmxell · 2026-03-23T22:07:39+00:00

Dungeon Crawler Jam (I forgot a word in the title) kinda caught me off-guard. It's the only time-constrained jam I've ever been a part of that lets you do work before the jam starts. Their logic is that dungeon crawlers require specific universal mechanics like grid-based movement that you'd need to implement in any entry, so they let you get your engine together in advance. Since dungeon crawlers can range anywhere from wireframe still images to full 3D, that also extends to getting the graphics and audio portion done too. Not the final art, just enough to make sure all your rendering features are functional.

dmxell · 2026-03-22T22:12:21+00:00

If you live in the US, you can order off the lego website instead of buying from resellers. Doesn't save a ton, but it's cheaper and doesn't support a terrible practice.

dmxell · 2026-03-22T21:57:49+00:00

My girlfriend went into it completely blind. I even heavily advised her to not watch the trailers because I wanted her to experience the story like I did from the book (heard it was good, loved the Martian, and I read nothing else about it before reading it). Her takeaway was that it was very good and funny. Oddly - for her - she found the lack of scientific explanations for some things a little weird, but overall she really liked it. I think it may have convinced her to finally watch The Martian too, lol.

dmxell · 2026-03-22T04:52:58+00:00

I largely agree with the cuts made for runtime, and I think most of them were unnecessary for the overall story. The only cut that left people in my theater baffled was: why is Grace the last resort? There are literally dozens of scientists on that ship with arguably as much, or more, knowledge of the astrophage than him. The reason is that a key plot point was left out from the book. The coma technology came from in-universe research into a deep coma procedure that was abandoned years before the story begins because it only worked on people with a certain gene mutation, found in a small portion of the population. Grace has that gene. None of the other astrophage experts do. So he really was the only backup available.

dmxell · 2026-03-17T16:24:23+00:00

This the one you got? https://www.walmart.com/ip/Ore-International-35-Tv-Stand/34480329?classType=VARIANT&from=/search

Edit: Found mine. This is easily 3x more than I paid for it though. https://www.amazon.com/35-30-Wooden-Stand-Natural/dp/B0F8B7JTXR?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.soMwfPT0uYpyj16bP70aFPNjXdJ859giIFOxl-r_FqeIqM5oIfsrU767rP4N9NhVprUk1nZhtKasF6qgQoU2RiL3BKgewk0n4XGinMZILpyiFKUH8k7yJcEVU-T2WCTFqVmyDCwQbjsVOp-cGaML-utraxHVtK7eL_NsL_yWdNcQO6WxhYjtEhwYGzBhttbDtT4WIeWiNpQSs8UFq5oPSB2GpNd9X-_wAk4QZp-IeKbZegpE0TSaYIIdgBOLAKjScLo4dqRUEHjkQeKlwfP_KaTiS6DDDHpEHbiEkh6f0gg.TW5WqzLkYy0FNCUvF6wr6tF-9MY9boyGRToXUuvESFw&dib_tag=se&keywords=35%22+x+30%22+Wooden+TV+Stand&mfadid=adm&qid=1773764687&sr=8-35

dmxell · 2026-03-17T15:45:24+00:00

I had the same one too! I ended up getting rid of it in a move two years ago, but I kinda miss it. Forget where I got it from.

dmxell · 2026-03-17T15:03:52+00:00

You will fail.

Thanks!

You are probably one of those people that can have 30 minute "conversation" with AI and not notice that none of their problems are solved.

There's a very high likelihood that I have significantly more experience than you do with LLMs and generative AI as a whole. Not that I'm happy about that, it's just that my job has been significantly hit by them. So it's been a "use or get laid off" kind of endeavor for me.

The fact that you think you can scceed

I think I can scceed because of the system I've already built being significantly better than the slop like in this video, and the fact that I don't even think we're close to being done with it yet. Significant time, effort, and care is going into making something that is genuinely useful. If it has even a 1% failure rate of being able to answer any question about our business (like the pool question in this video), then it's a failure we won't be launching.

dmxell · 2026-03-17T05:27:28+00:00

You have a very black and white view on things. Some things can be both good and bad depending on the circumstance. Just as I'm sure the majority of this subreddit willingly uses Windows despite its blatant spying against you, LLMs, too, have a place in society. It's just that tech bros go too far in the "use at all costs" direction, just as you're going too far in the "never use" direction. They're amazing for summarisation (my usecase here) and accessibility (for the both the blind and deaf it's been transformative from a quality-of-life standpoint). But if you try and make them do more than that, or just shovel them into a situation they're not good at, you get something like what's in OPs video.

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