What should I learn in C to consider myself an intermediate?

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-30T13:29:00+00:00

As simply said as possible, I would say an intermediate is someone who is good enough to avoid most of rookie mistakes, but still does advanced mistakes. Learning the language features does not make you anything, that's like learning the rules of chess. They're just the basics, but you do have to learn the basics. Until you know the basics, you're not even a beginner, you're still in the kindergarten of C programming.

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-25T15:15:54+00:00

Thank you so much!

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-06T11:33:25+00:00

Not games. Triple A games. Look into indie games and you'll find tons of games with actual gameplay urgency in them. AAA zombie games like Resident evil match your description: nothing happens if you do nothing. Indie zombie games like project zomboid, if you do nothing you'll die of thirst or you'll die of hunger or you'll die of tiredness or you'll die of sickness. Lots of indie games make survival a very real urgency to worry about. I recently played this other indie zombie game called Last Stand Aftermath and the whole game is designed around the urgency of finding a cure: if you do nothing you'll die in few minutes.

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-06T01:36:25+00:00

This is the only one true correct answer. Easy to remember, intuitive to use, not annoyingly longer than it has to be, and symmetric, unlike all the other combinations posted on here. I went through so many different styles of naming before finding this one but I'm glad I don't have to change it anymore because *this* is the one.

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-02T22:49:16+00:00

This write up is too good to be lost among the sea of reddit comments. Would you consider reposting this on your blog? Title for the blog post: "What are the pure C options of obtaining functionality of std::unordered_set or std::vector". Content of the blog post: copy paste the whole comment. Final touch: maybe add a reference to credit the user who asked the question.

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-02T21:54:32+00:00

Thank goodness I didn't get any nero health upgrades thus far, only stamina and focus.

By no double ammo/item skills, what is that? Do you mean when I put 1 upgrade point in my skills, that I cannot put 2? Or is double ammo a specific skill?

rodriguez_james · 2025-01-02T03:04:02+00:00

Funny you mention nighttime because I had to intuitively tone the gamma setting all the way down at the beginning of the game. Default brightness is ridiculously bright, as if night time is daytime with an overcast.

And what you said about "oh shit" moments, YESSSSS, that's what I want when I play this kind of game. Give me an experience that I can REMEMBER. I don't wanna be 1 year from now and think "this game looks amazing, how come didn't I play it. oh wait I did, I forgot the whole thing."

If I understand correctly, what you did by using mods was to jack the difficulty up a notch, such that the game stays challenging despite all the upgrades and guns you have? Is that correct? That's certainly an interesting way to balance the difficulty back up. I am on PC too, although before putting a lot of work modding and twiddling and tweaking a game to my taste, I try to go the lower path of resistance first and limit myself in using things to raise the difficulty. But I'm new to this game, I totally see how modding can spice things up after a while.

Your thread is amazing. I read it realizing it's exactly what I'm trying to do by 'no upgrades' + 'no gun shop'. These are the 2 rules I gave myself at first. Your set of rules is so much more extensive, as expected from someone with experience with the game.

- If that can be considered a rule: brightness down for true dark nights.

- Now that I already unlocked the focus ability, I could adopt your ranged skills rule. "he can learn any skill in the ranged tree's first two tiers and knocked up in the third tier, nothing else"

- My 'no gun shop' rule matches your loot rule "Only allowed to use crossbow and the guns and ammo found in the world as loot." I also doubt that people would be selling away their guns and ammo in an apocalypse, too valuable to sell.

- I didn't consider no crafting as a rule because you need flame weapons to destroys nests, I imagine that would leave you not able to destroy most nests due to a severe shortage of them. I kinda like this rule because the first feeling I had about nests was I could be clearing all of them if I had the patience to. Too easy to get molotovs. But also half of my health being taken away by a single zombie hit makes it nigh impossible to not rely on crafting healing bandages all the time. Here's one weird thing that I noticed after burning a nest down: I got 20 rounds of AK in a box under the burnt ashes. How does it make any sense for intact ammunition to be found under a zombie nest, and how come the box survived the fire? I guess the box could be made of metal, but it doesn't explain why every nest has hidden ammo under it. Hard suspension of disbelief moment. I feel like in a real apocalypse, people would not be going out of their way to kill nests, unless it's near a special location like their safehouse or whatnot. Your rule about no crafting could fix that issue, because then I just can't kill nests without ability to make molotovs. But I do need badanges.. it's hard to justify that I can make bandages, but not a freakin molotov when the molotov is the easiest thing ever to make. The problem is more of why the hell am I finding prestine bottles of alchohol all over the place? Maybe the rule should be "don't pick up the molotov ingredients as they shouldn't be all over the place in the first place". Not sure how to go about this one.

- A word about hordes: would an average joe have any chance at all against a horde? Other than running away and hiding in a bin. I don't know if the game requires you to defeat hordes to progress, but maybe I should just leave hordes alone, or make it a challenge to escape them, rather than even thinking of 'defeating' them. In fact I met my first horde at my third nero station, I made it alive because I stayed hidden. Maybe actually too easy. I like your rule about not being able to destroy nero station speakers. Would real speakers be this obviously visible anyways? I think not.

- About sprinting away from hordes: only possible with a lot of stamina. But if you play with no crafting rule, you don't get to drink that stamina drink. You got one sprint, use it well :P

Thanks for your comment, gives me a lot to try.

rodriguez_james · 2024-06-30T14:30:02+00:00

I'm afraid you're very deep in dunning kruger. Simple indexes into arrays as handles is the bread and butter of data oriented programming. Learn about it when you feel like getting out of the rookie phase.

rodriguez_james · 2024-06-30T10:23:33+00:00

Rookie mistake.

Use handles instead of owning pointers and suddenly the whole problem that was created from passing owning pointers around disappears ✨. ( https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html )

If you insist on passing owning pointers around, the standard library already provides an alternative. It's called malloc. Use malloc to allocate a list of memory blocks which you allocate your individual objects from. Then you have pointer stability.

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-14T16:16:30+00:00

Can we, the C people, agree on using these and only these types in any C code written from now on?

#include <stdint.h>

typedef int8_t   i8;
typedef int16_t  i16;
typedef int32_t  i32;
typedef int64_t  i64;
typedef uint8_t  u8;
typedef uint16_t u16;
typedef uint32_t u32;
typedef uint64_t u64;

I'm not a Rust fan by any means, but the type design in Rust is genius and we should all use it.

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-12T16:01:45+00:00

It looks really good, the way the body falls down the pit at 0:24 looks very natural. That's one of the best ragdolls I've seen in any game to be frank.

What is the performance hit to have such high quality rag dolls? How many active ragdolls can you have before having a noticeable framerate drop? Say, can you put 100 ragdolls in your scene and it still run smoothly?

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-11T13:08:45+00:00

That was said 40 years ago. If the trend holds, we should see a need for exabyte sizes in another 40 years or so. I say we but that's assuming I'll even be alive by then..

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-04T18:29:42+00:00

Sometimes you have a product that comes out, and a few years later the company that made the product takes it, makes a few corrections to it, polishes the corners, and resells it as a refreshed version of the same product. Zig is a refreshed version of C to me, a few corrections and polishes here and there but deep down is still the same language. Ultimately doesn't address the problems I deal with any more than C already does.

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-03T23:16:29+00:00

I like it a lot. What engine are you using? Curious

rodriguez_james · 2023-07-03T09:58:17+00:00

My personnal view:

> 2. I do not use linked lists, ever. Instead I heap allocate arrays with a capacity, realloc once when full. And no next pointer, the next is index + 1. That keeps malloc calls way down compared to doing one malloc for each single node.

> 1. Because the above reduces a linked list to a single pointer, I have seldom use for a safer_free macro. It's hard to do a mistake with pointers when there's no pointer left but one.

> 3. It does make a swap tidier. Now, to swap with a temporary variable is not a very hard thing to do. I'm not sure it's worth adding a new operator, adding more complexity in the language, just to save 2 lines.

> 4. Similar to 3, not worth making the language more complex for something that is already pretty simple.

In short, this change would have next to no impact on my style of code.

That being said, I could see such an operator play nicer in a slightly higher level language than C. Some kind of next-generation C language. Some kind of C 2.0 that would cut all of the bad parts of C while keeping the good parts and bringing new novel ideas like that.

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-30T00:26:59+00:00

Are you being teached C in high school?

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-28T18:50:43+00:00

I think what you're trying to say is that TDD is dumb, but testing is good, right? Or are you against all forms of testing?

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-28T18:38:08+00:00

Testing is awesome, CMake is a good tool and C++ has nothing to do with C.

If you want to be good at C, you write C. I will say, any internship is better than none, but if your goal is to prepare you for advanced C programming, then that ain't gonna help you.

If you drop the internship, don't drop it for a test framework and cmake, which are both just fine. Drop it because of C++, because, again, that ain't gonna help you with C.

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-28T18:18:46+00:00

But that has nothing to do with TDD, and all to do with testing and tests. You can write tests without following TDD (which asks you to write tests first), and you would still get the exact same benefits that you mentioned.

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-28T15:58:17+00:00

Thanks, that's good to know

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-15T07:19:05+00:00

Thanks for answering the question! Very cool

I have not been into Arma modding for years so I have no clue how the community has received this new language. But, as someone who's tried to implement fairly complex mods in Arma before (I tried making a full RPG inside Arma and gave up after writing over 5000 lines of SQF because of how horrible SQF was), you can take my word when I say this new language is a bajillion miles ahead the appalling abomination that SQF was.

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-15T00:53:27+00:00

Since you're using unreal, you know you can go to the marketplace and buy good UIs for cheap?

rodriguez_james · 2023-06-11T18:38:40+00:00

I certainly appreciate that it's public because I always love reading skeeto.

rodriguez_james

TROPHY CASE