Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..

It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.

*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)

Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.

But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.

Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..

This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.

With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.

Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.

But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.

I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.

It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.

I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)

Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <3

I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.

Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.

I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)

And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.

But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.

You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.

Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.

The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.

This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.

If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.

No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.

But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.

Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.

As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.

When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.

I fucking hate esoteric code.

Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.

This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.

As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.

Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.

Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.

That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".

I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.

It's just the community.

Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.

You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.

Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.

You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!

On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.

And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.

I am participating in a project i called "Game of Thrones"

We pretend that we are a team, but in reality everyone hate one another.
It took only 3 weeks for Team Leader to turn everyone against him.
He is constantly fighting for power with Architect who is terrible at his job, and doesn't listen to his advice even if they are good.
We hate Team Leader because he is an tyrant, who is ruling from high tower his peasants. His favorite task is to create various rules that everyone has to accept. You have to write "I accept" in a chat but this is the only choice. You cannot disagree.

Moreover there are developers from client side. They "committed" current project which is full of bugs and generally doesn't work. I don't know why they are still working there, but I presume every of them is working for 5+ years, so they are the only ones able to dig thru the spaghetti they made.
They constantly fight with us about the how code should be written, they commits are garbage but they are very peaky when it comes to ours PR.
They always drag our PR as long as they can. Even sometimes pointing they mistakes as ours.

Highschool teacher tells us to work on a little text game, gives us 2 weeks. I wrote about 1600 lines of code with enemys, random map, fighting system,... And generally blowing everything out of proportion as always, because I'm so bored

Microtransactions are ruining the AAA gaming industry. I have always liked a good fighting game. So I looked at Street Fighter 6. Base game is $60, better version is more, bestest version is way more. Plus from reading reviews the fucking game is riddled with microtransactions.

What happened to buying a fucking game and not feeling like you got ripped off? When you bought the fucking game you got the whole fucking game.

I am disgusted with what these big names are doing. Ruining a once less sketchy industry.

I have even seen games that start out good. Then after a few patches they introduce the microtransaction bullshit. The Conan games are like that. The main complaint is adding this bullshit for base game items.

I wonder how they think this is good for their player base. They just fired the dude at Unity over trying to fuck over customers. Of course the company cannot be trusted so a lot of bigger labels are jumping ship to other engines.

What kinda pisses me off is I will try and find a decent game on Steam and look and look and all I find is garbage. How did Steam turn into such a trash heap? I won't touch an EA game (which is where that CEO from Unity came from). It is too bad because I really liked Mass Effect.

tldr - gaming has turned into shit.

Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??

It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.

All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.

Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.

Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.

If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.

Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.

Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!

When your friends at university discover you're programming a fighting game, one of them always ask : "Is this a hentai ?"

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

Fighting against a occasionally occurring bug, in a networking, multithreading, server-client game.
Thanks to the good excellent front end each client only uses around 20% of my cpu and ~1.3Gb of ram.

Shit happens when you join the development late and your partners code happens on-the-fly.

Maybe redoing it from scratch with something else than JSwing could improve the performanxe slightly

the moment when we made a Miami Vice inspired Rambo parody game with John Rasta ninja fighting Federal Agent Man to save his uncle from arrest because he possessed some sacred herbs. This was a school project... never got to know if our teacher got the hidden message or not...

!rant
Playing Battle Royal with friends, had to leave 2 of 4 teammates behind as the play area was shrinking and they couldn't be rescued. The 4th player ran me over with a game car just to get revenge for our other team mates.

With me alive we actually had a fighting chance to win the round. (8 kill streak and lots of ammo with a decent tactical position) ....but NOoo the fucker thought it more sweet to kill me rather than help me win the round!

Fuck this shit, I'm out!

I’ve met some of the best friends I could ever hope to have thanks to code.

I started with the MUGEN fighting game engine back in high school. Didn’t know a thing about code but I wanted to learn so I could make awesome characters.

If it were not for that, I would’ve never met friends from all over the world from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds. I certainly never expected to have a best friend who lived in Mexico (who is now in Japan). I would’ve never found the career I have today, nor would I have met the love of my life (even if I couldn’t have her, my love is still there), and I wouldn’t have traveled the world to meet some of these friends.

In the end, it was the engine, our passion for fighting games, and our discovery of the art of code that brought us all together.

Liferant. I feel annoyed If I compare my efforts to efforts of my "friends". I put 500% more in my self education, my career and professional life and I earn just a tiny bit more. I don't even know if I have friends anymore. We do not have a single thing common. While I want to develop, learn something, build something useful for people, they only want to drink, going out etc. Before we had some lan parties some game night but it was long ago. I lost any interest in travel and parties. I don't enjoy alcohol, I still consume it when I'm with them because there nothing else to do. I also become vegan about 2.5 years ago and those bbq`s are just pain in the ass. Plus I heard the sentence "show me your friends and I tell you your life" - uff.. I had never a single person who I knew personally and who has similar mindset like I do. Shall I start to look for friends? Even the thought feels kind of pathetic to me. I'm a freaking island in middle of the society who is trying to make it better but it's fighting against it with full force. I'm tired. I'm not suicidal and I still enjoy the life, but I'm crazy alone in what I like to do.

*trying to add innovative features to your fighting game*
*BBCF gets released with even better modes*
DAMN YOU ARC SYS, I can't keep up with you !

Need advice about protecting ddos via iptables and whitelisting. Currently I launched my gameserver and am fighting against a massive attack of botnets. Problem was solved by closing all ports on my gameserver linux machine and shipping game.exe with injected c++ socket client. So basically only gamers who launch my game exe are being added to firewall iptables via the socket client that is provided in the game exe. If some ddosers still manage to get inside and ddos then my protection is good enough to handle attacks from whitelisted ips from inside. Now I have another problem. Lots of players have problems and for some reason shipped c++ client fails to connect to my socketserver. Currently my solution was to provide support in all contact channels (facebook,skype,email) and add those peoples ips to whitelist manually. My best solution would be to make a button in website which you can click and your ip is whitelisted auromatically. However if it will be so easy then botnets can whitelist themselves as well. Can you advice me how I could handle whitelisting my players through web or some other exe in a way that it cant be replicated by botnets?