How can I feel so smart and so dumb at the same time?

You know that you work in a fucked up field when they start calling frameworks "tech".

You're kind of picking extreme examples of both.

In the context of data flow and architecture, game development actually is simpler than frontend app/web dev.

In most cases you have a main loop and the state is written and read in each iteration of the loop. So you don‘t need reactive frameworks with subscribers, observers and change events.

This is of course a simplification which doesn‘t consider input events from mouse/keyboard. But even those are often coupled to and handled within the main loop.

This simplification comes at a price, though: Your CPU (and gpu) is constantly at work. That wouldn‘t be viable for a normal app though. So we need complex mechanics to keep the state consistent without updating and querying it continuously.

Of course, games have other complexities that still makes them a hard craft.

@Lensflare specifically the rendering, the amount of elements active together on a scene, frame skips, the users pushing edge cases which you would never dream about and Bob.

Bob is a senior dev who fucking believes it’s fine to have functions made of ~200 lines of code which in addition also rely on a variable of the instantiated object they are part of, but only on line 79, if you do a backflip and if another object’s variable is set to “French toast”.
Oh and ofc he believes it’s more readable to wrap the whole function in an if statement instead of just returning if the opposite of that statement is true. Ah and doesn’t really understand that OR and AND don’t really go on with the evaluation if it is not needed, so he actually wraps the function 4 times.

Fuck if I wish this was a joke.

@piratefox: I know Bob personally and am pretty sure, that he also has some 10k lines long functions too. He also is a code golfer...

@Oktokolo I’m frankly amazed at Bob(s)’s incoherence… still have to figure out how a person can believe these two sentences can be said by the same person without them looking like a clown:

“Just spawn one more object and do it the dumb way, unity is about doing things in the editor, not in the code”

“Don’t use variables, just have 8 checks all in the if statement because variable declaring is one more instruction and that consumes battery.”

(In the second case: 2-3 cases could be grouped to end up with something like: objectValid && imageReady && objectInScope)

@piratefox: Well, that is Bob. He certainly can overengineer and cut corners at the same time... Really wonder, how he still makes his shit run so darn fast.

@Oktokolo the trick is in having few lines of code in the codebase. I thought Bob wrote the inventory system, but apparently somebody worked on a feature called “fixing code” on most of the lines… uh… odd

@piratefox: Well, that 4kB "one-liner" doing the actual work probably hasn't been touched though...

@Oktokolo no, the one liner is sacred:
- You don’t touch it
- You NEVER question it (it can hear you)
- Every Saturday a sacrifice for the one liner is mandatory

@piratefox: Exactly. Bob created that beast. And only Bob can touch it lest there be endless suffering - and downtimes...

When I'm making some AI or game I love to make every thing I can, the logic, functions, calculates (when i can)