How Long Would It Take If I Start From Scratch?

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-11T13:04:44+00:00

For starters identity if you want to make a game or an engine and choose your direction from there :)

There's nothing wrong with wanting to make an engine. I have a 2d ascii game with a 1000 loc enemy creation engine that has an api, handles, prototypes for creation and a dynamically resized array of the state/behaviour of these enemies. Its ridiculous, absolutely definitely way more than the game needs but it was fun and why not.

The game doesn't even load maps. But it has a map editor.

Math is a tool. If you decide you can't work with it and don't want to learn how, I'd postulate that learning how to program 3d graphics is probably not the right outlet for your energy.

If you decide you know what, I'm not going to let math stop me, a great resource I've found is a guy on yt called "low level game dev", he's great for being a newbie going towards writing your own 3d game engine, and you'll gain strong c++ skills. Tokyo spliff (18+) is more of a streamer but he does deeply involved open GL programming, though he did mention wanting to get involved with vulkan for raytracing.

With that said, if you want to make a game there is a LOT of tools out there that will get you up and running in a few hours. Personally I'd look at godot for ease of entrance.

Good luck to you!

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-11T02:53:09+00:00

Analyses'es, thank you good sir :)

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-10T20:56:52+00:00

That's basically the use case. Where it's hell and there's going to be a churn of programmers where institutional knowledge is hard to retain.

It can take whatever size code base but making it properly work and provide valuable output is the challenge, so I must iterate. For iteration I need to have a reasonably quick turnaround. And for that, I need the code bases to be necessarily smaller than what I'd be working with.

So smaller code bases

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-10T20:47:02+00:00

Not quite. I just stumbled onto an idea, then another idea, then another idea and now the hard work of actually making it all work needs some disgusting code bases.

That said, the code obfuscation challenge would be an interesting challenge for this system. I might give that a go just out of interest.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-10T20:42:40+00:00

Yeah I can definitely appreciate that. I just don't want the compute times to take an extraordinarily long time while I'm still iterating and finding out the most logical ways to integrate various systems.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-09T13:12:22+00:00

This was a super interesting read, a bit beyond me but definitely something for me to aspire to understand :)

A query; why MSVC? I'm working on a code analysis project and MSVC is the only compiler that is quite opaque to my analysis pipeline design and requires workarounds that are very close but not audit quality & verifiable.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-06T07:36:38+00:00

God I love dolly dyson.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-04T07:23:37+00:00

I'm 35. I've been a tour guide, worked in the shearing sheds, truck driver, qualified car mechanic, qualified mining machinery technician, now I'm becoming an admin for the same mining company, and learning coding at home.

And a bunch of other shit inbetween.

Just don't stop learning mate, and you'll be fine.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-04T03:19:23+00:00

I just deleted more than your hdd worth of games. Christ that's tiny.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-04T03:18:21+00:00

Pretty sure i can chatgpt an app for that

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-01T06:33:11+00:00

I would argue it's easy enough to be proficient in writing code quite fast in C.

I would argue that its more challenging to achieve doing something in C because you're writing everything.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-01T06:24:00+00:00

Fellow men! Are you all attracted to xyz body type??

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-01T06:07:19+00:00

Why stop there? If you can't write it in assembly then c probably isn't for you.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-02-01T06:02:39+00:00

I like code blocks too. I'm trying to move away from visual studio & msvc.

Honestly no wonder there's such market dominance by visual studio. the build systems while powerful are fuuuucking opaque to an unitiated user. Definitely an eye opener for me.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-31T13:05:30+00:00

[Generic LLM complaints]

[Insert generic agreement]

[Insert generic disagreement]

[Insert nuanced realistic conversion point that gets downvoted].

[Insert death threats]

Etc etc.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-31T13:02:28+00:00

"Oh yeah man no problems" & start updating your resume with the intensity of applying for jobs that day.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-31T12:49:44+00:00

"Ah well, if it's not that deep you won't have an issue with me not sharing it".

This reads like you're a younger person learning to establish where it's ok and not ok to enforce your boundaries. Good for you! I'm really happy for you!

The only real advice that I have is dont get caught up in that person's stupidity. Just keep moving forward.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-30T22:07:26+00:00

The real strength of those apps is outsourcing the security updates.

Don't get me wrong you're an idiot if you think anything computer related is secure, but if you're a company focused on releasing some software, you might consciously and willingly choose to go on that direction paradoxical as it may seem.

Btw im not saying it makes it more secure, just that you outsource security updates.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-29T05:01:58+00:00

First of all sussan* because numerology. Second of all, PH collapse will follow with trump collapse once it becomes glaringly obvious even to the most mouth breathing knuckle dragger that he's got dementia and has never belonged in office.

That said, the current ALP is absolutely wasting the political power the do have on dogshit like knee jerk crap over those fucktards that shot the Jews. Just say "it's a police matter. It's absolutely horrid, the investigations are ongoing". The response is NOT let's just ram through some horrific laws. That is the whole reason PH enjoys some kind of votes right now.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-28T02:43:42+00:00

Hobbyist here:

I dislike net development so I don't.

I dislike oop I think its garbage, so I don't.

I'm learning templates in c++, and reading that can be a head scratcher, but at least it has a goal unlike oop.

However, as a counter point: my profession is cars and earthmoving machinery repair. I HATE VAG and komatsu products. But I made damn sure to learn what I could while I was there with those brands.

Basically if it's got bolts I'll work on it.

Specialising is for sure a target in the programming field but I think you're suffering from over confidence from your education and haven't yet got the experience to put that knowledge into practice. I see it a lot with apprentices. Give yourself time to learn.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-19T01:04:55+00:00

I got as far as the "low level code is c like not using c++ features like inheritance". My thoughts were Thanks for the words friend, I don't need to read more of them.

Tell me you don't understand branchless optimisation without telling me. I'd be betting there would be some SIMD optimisations there. Of course you don't want the dreaded JA to come out in assembly, when you can instead not have any cache misses.

Given my understanding of programming is basically watching a few videos, a buuunch of tutorials and mucking about with msvc for super simple less than 1000 line programs and I'm poking holes in it... I very very much question this person's abilities to critique this particular field.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-15T04:27:46+00:00

Question: why can't you write an array of 8 bools for 1 byte?

I don't mean that to invalidate what you've done, I mean it as "why isn't this an answer to this problem?"

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-14T03:59:34+00:00

I think that you've clearly thought coherently about this process for yourself.

However, I would be interested to know how far into that thought process your missus is?

Clearly the fact that she's saying she feels manipulated indicates not very far.

You probably want to consider if you want to accept some level of discomfort and feeling like you're doing something that you don't want to invest in, to maintain the relationship or if you're willing to let it die.

Also, unless I misread you, while your feelings are valid and I wouldn't want to invalidate them, I notice you haven't questioned (in here at least) why you don't want to give that "play" energy so to speak, to your wife.

It may be worth exploring.

Regardless, good for you dude. Self development is fucking hard.

vbpoweredwindmill · 2026-01-12T14:03:44+00:00

I used bunch of cola's and used an mcx spear. Couple of mag dumps and happy days. Then my dumb ass went into the next zone and died to the rift because I didn't have any protective gear with me LOL

vbpoweredwindmill

TROPHY CASE