Free, Open-Source, Desktop & Hacking Simulator game.

Free advice take it or leave it
A few days ago I completed my one year work anniversary(is that how it's said) at my first job. And this rant is basically stuff I learnt and stuff I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. Here goes:-

When you are starting out your first job you would be a fresh out of college and people around you in college are your friends where as people around you at work are colleagues. Your friends can like you, but you have to earn the respect of colleagues.

If you sit yo ass too long u will become fat(started going to the gym again).

Don't bother your seniors too much. they have their own shit to deal with.

Don't bring your personal shit to office I don't want to hear how cute your dog looked while it took a dump on your carpet.

Avoid the person who gossips.
It's a two way street.

Whatever you find amazing your boss may not you know coz you are a geek and your boss isn't.

Don't talk to people when they are coding.Yeah just don't.

Avoid "below the belt" humor you may look funny but you loose respect in the long run.

Keep upgrading yourself don't stop learning.

Admit stuff you don't know don't Bullshit.

To sum it up it's a game of respect, respect of knowledge,respect of skill and most of all respect of attitude.

Installs 45gb game

Next day do an update - not enough storage

Sees 28gb free on disk

Googles

Turns out steam copies your entire game during an update so it can roll back of there's an error

Fucking brilliant.

*Showerthoughts*

Steam downloads games over plaintext, so can I whireshark a game and get it for free then?

*Showerthoughts*

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

Want to Google io earlier this month and a senior director at Google game a presentation and used a chrome dino for a demo and after I found him on LinkedIn and asked her m where I could buy one and he asked for my address and sent me one for free. Idc what any of you say Google is really cool for doing this.

I actually just wanted to say - what a great time it is to be a developer.

C# has stolen so many good features now that it's pretty awesome.
JavaScript and typescript are really fun to work with.
I really love angular.
Docker is great!

I can setup pipelines and deploy an angular app for free and really easily with github-pages.

I can use linux inside windows.

I can use cloud providers to do all sorts for really cheap.

I can plug my cable-free oculus quest VR headset into my laptop and build a game pretty easily with unity (thanks to all the great oculus helper prefabs).

I can use tesseract and data science technology inside my browser!!

And I can go to medium and udemy and learn all sorts of things.

Honestly...

Just saying.
I'm actually really loving being a developer right now.

And if I do have off day, I can rant on here!

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

So, there was this person I met on the internet who was preaching about how the success of games depends primarily on luck.
His argument was that even though he made a great game(his opinion) and uploaded it to the appstore his game failed to gain popularity.
He stated that there are about 500 games uploaded daily and it is only the matter of luck whether or not a game gets noticed and that he ran out of luck.
Now, his game was a pretty ripped off copy of the overused tile matching games. I pointed out to him that the reason his game didn't do well was probably because he made a ripoff(I actually used 'a copy's but 'ripoff' sounds more rant like) and that he priced it fairly high, while there were free games with more features and better graphics and mechanics(based on the description of the game and screenshots).
He then began to rage(all caps obviously) about how I am talking out of my ass and that I probably haven't even made a game yet.
I politely(the only reason I was polite was because the account was known to my Twitter followers. Sometimes one has to protect one's name) told him that I am an indie game developer and that I have made a decent amount of games.
He then proceeded to mock me and dared me to name a few.
So I posted four links to my 48 hour competition games and one to an official game.
He then began to call me an imposter, so I did a shout-out to him through my Twitter account.
Instead of continuing on Twitter, he ran back to the forum, and began to shit talk about how anyone can do it if they have a team with them.
I corrected him on that, stating how I was alone at the time and these particular games were the results of me working hard and striving to improve myself.
Then the guy finally starts spamming on different threads about how I am an arrogant bastard and other explicit forms of abuses before finally getting banned.
Sometimes I don't even know why I bother.
When I was starting out, there was this developer who would point out the faults in my games so that I could work on them. That was a great help and probably accelerated my growth. He was a great mentor and is now a good friend and is now in my team.
I guess some people are so hung up on their pride that they will refuse to accept their mistakes and make any efforts to improve.

My team are the best coworkers I've had. Admittedly I'm only 4 years into my professional career, but my team makes me stay with my current job.

My team do a lot of silly things to keep everyone in a good mood, and stress free. This week we've had a game where in a quote moment you just yell the name of a primitive type (like BOOL). Why? No idea, but we're enjoying it.

We also have a chicken hat that we named Barry. He sits with people on their desk to do code reviews and such. When people leave they get their own Barry to take with them to their new job. We introduce people to him as a regular member of the team.

Sometimes work sucks. Being a developer can be hard, and can be stressful. Working with this team makes it worth it.

Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.

I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.

The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.

It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)

I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be

Publishing fees:

Android - 25$ once (fixed*)
Microsoft Store - 19$ once¹
Steam Game - 100$ / game²
itch.io - free²
Unreal - free⁴
Unity - free⁵

And then there is Apple...
Apple - 99$ / year

¹ (99$ for enterprise)
² (legacy was 100$ once for charity)
³ (30% of profit for them)
⁴ (5% if more profit than 12.000$/year)
⁵ (until more profit than $100.000/year)

Use SSDs.

It's not hard. They've been around for a while, small ones are cheap now and are more than enough for at least 90% of developers. The rest can probably afford 2TB NVMe.

Why waste 60$ on a worthless 500GB HDD that will load the OS in the time that's enough for you to make scrambled eggs?
Instead, use 60$ on a 128GB SSD. Sure, it's smaller, but if speed is important for you, you can forget a bit about saving all of the porn you see online, or about installing every free game from Steam.

SSDs are cheap already. And the performance advantage they give is ENORMOUS. You can have a core i9, 64GB of fastest RAM bla bla bla, but if you don't have an SSD, a Celeron with an SSD will seem faster.

Get one, and NEVER again cry about long loading times of IDEs, unless you feel like 30 seconds for the longest load time is too much. If your time is THAT valuable, then you can afford NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 (which can be done easily in software with btrfs if you're on Linux).

Seriously!
Every day I see posts like "Visual Studio is crap because it installs for 6 hours", or "Android studio starts in 30 minutes", or "Visual Studio Code sucks because it loads for too long compared to vim".
It's as if you only have access to budget 10 year old computers.

Holy shit, I never thought I would see the day that Microsoft makes me even more disappointed, but this is a NEW low.

The windows 11 email client is being deprecated, and they automatically "upgrade" you to the new outlook.

THERE'S ADS. THERE'S ADVERTISEMENTS IN OUTLOOK. WHAT THE FUCK. IF YOU CLICK THIS, IT JUST OPENS THE AD IN A BROWSER. IT'S IN MY EMAIL LIST, THEY ARE ACTIVELY TRYING TO TRICK YOU INTO CLICKING IT.

This is crappy free Chinese mobile game ad level of scummy. I never fucking thought they would honestly stoop so low as to make misleading ads a default part of their operating system. But here it is, in an app installed by default, developed in-house by Microsoft. Actually astounding and appalling.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

I have my best moments but the first time I felt badass about computers was when I was at kindergarten.

There was one computer with one cool game with skateboard. I wanted to play but the other kids didn’t let me.

I thought that if it look like I fix the computer they will let me. I took me month or little more but I made shutdown bat(I didn’t really understood fully) and I added it to the game shortcut from usb.

One of the other kids started the game and the computer turned itself off. Hi tried a few times and then I offered to fix it, I created new shortcut replacing the “hacked” one and the game ran.

From that moment the computer and the game were always free for me.

Focus on algorithms first and syntax last. Solve problems, then code.
If it uses power, has an I/O interface, and stores code, you can do stuff.
Dont get caught up in the little shit like specific code formatting and who's right or wrong between tabs or spaces. (It should be TABS anyway.)
Don't take shit from anyone.
Be confident not cocky.
Learn GIT as much as you can.
Don't burn out.
Get up and stretch.
Don't argue with your Operating Systems professor about why you shouldn't have to learn Linux.
Don't fall into the "I want to be a game developer" trap. Make your own games on your own time. You won't learn shit at school about it.
9/10 of the real world workforce is who you know, so don't be a dick. Those people might be the difference between Ramen noodles and steak dinner for you.
Charge market competitive rates and set an hourly rate that defines the clientele you deal with.
Don't ever, EVER, do trade or spec work. Free work don't pay the bills. Always start the clock when you're not sleeping, eating, or shitting. If you're emailing, calling, texting, or otherwise interacting with or on behalf of a client, bill them. Don't be a bitch when they decide they don't want to pay you. Get yours. Watch "Fuck You. Pay Me." at least once a month on YouTube.

Wanted to make a website with some of my friends about whatever kid thing we were into at the time. None of our parents cared, it was the 90s and nobody took the internet seriously.

Copied and pasted bits of html into notepad and FTPed them to some free webhost over dialup. The website lasted three weeks -- my friends got bored, I got hooked.

A few years later I found myself wondering why some websites used ".php" instead of ".html". I discovered this shiny new thing called PHP 4. Built a website for some video game I was into using it. Spent the next two years teaching myself everything there was to know.

Took programming in high school. Chose CS over mechanical engineering because I liked the university better. Got an internship which turned into a job which turned into a career.

Why do people get so unbelievably greedy when there is something for free.

Like "it's a free game server host, let's just create 100 accounts so I can have 100 empty servers"

Or "you can get a free game key if you contribute a lot, so let's just spam until I get the key"

It's so painfully to watch.

I fucking love my local phone service provider. They have a game (70mb) like Temple run where we get free mobile data for playing it. The 70 mb for downloading it gets reimbursed too !!

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

I have in my head parts of a game, I'd love to build. A top-down space colonization game. You control various spacecrafts and build spacestations etc. to expand your control.
The catch is that you have limited direct controls in-game. Most of the "gameplay" consists of having your own piece of software running somewhere, communicating with the API and controlling your colony.
Similar to Screeps, but I don't like the limitations of writing JavaScript and uploading it to the service. I'd love for the user to have free control of what language to use. They just need to be able to create a TCP socket and communicate with the API

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

When you're not funny nor miserable enough to post a good rant but you're still trying your best to get more ++ so you can get free stickers but the requirements keeps ++

I need to up my game :(

It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).

// Sorry for the long post!

EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces

Should I Close-Source my project?

I have been working on a Desktop/hacking simulator game and up until now the project has been Open-Source. I'm at a point now where I haven't gone too far to turn back.

Last night I got to thinking about my game, and what I want to do in the future. The game will always remain Free, but I might sell it to another company later down the line, something I can't do if I stay Open. I want to makea good game. And I don't want to do it for money (because that has never worked out for me in the past) but I want to *be able* to make money if I wanted to. I mean, I have been told by several developers that my game will be "ground breaking/a worldwide phenomenon/a Minecraft competitor" while being Open is one of my main selling points, besides populatity, what do I have to gain? I said I don't want to develop for money (mainly because the pressure gets to me) but I'm so poor I'm almost literally starving. I make $3/mo from Patreon and survive from donation from relatives. I feel like I need this. But I also feel selfish. Information should be free, ya know?

Idk.. This started serious and turned into a ramble.. Guess that's what this app is all about.

Leave your opinions below.

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Installed Miami Street earlier today.. some random free Shaftgame.
Late at night now, I figured "let's try this out".

> Logging in...
*crashes*

*goes to the settings for this crap game*
> *crashes*

Fucking worthless piece of Microshit.. yet another data collection hook that REQUIRES your shit to log in just to fucking work? Fucking Shaftfuckers, 5GB of internet traffic I spent on this?! Just to see it be a worthless data-hungry paperweight?!! Luckily my residential connection is unmetered and has some decent speeds.. but still, FUCK YOU MICROSHAFT!!!

Coincidentally, keyboard input completely broke when I wanted to do a minor edit to the drafted rant. Microshit can't even design a decent keyboard driver anymore, huh.. I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS SHIT FOR A SECOND TIME, FUCKING REDMOND MICROCUNTSUCKERS!!!!

Hello, I'm now gonna rant for a bit. I'm usually not a ranty person (wait, why am I on this site again?) , but here we go. I sometimes feel misunderstood about my side projects.

I don't know about you guys, but when I program on my free time, sometimes I just want to grab a glass of wine and explore things I think bout during the day. So, during the start of my CS-education, when I started to get my programming feet a little warm, I wrote this tic-tac-toe game (as you do...), and I thought "Well I know how to play the game. Surely I can program an AI to play against". So I thought hard for an evening or two and came up with something that wasn't too shabby (I can't win).
Then another time when learned about creating GUIs we got to do simple menu based stuff with buttons and pulldown menus following a certain structure, but we also learned that positions of components can be set freely. So I thought "Well, if I can freely change the positions of components, surely I can animate stuff and if I map that to some keys I can create a real time game!". So I wrote a small platformer with two squares that ideally succeed in killing one another. After animation I started fantasising about 3D rendering, so I created a small application which creates the illusion of 3D, which was cool and all, but that got me dreaming of creating a real 3D engine. It became almost like a cause of mine; to understand how it all works and create a 3D engine from scratch.
So now I've written a 3D engine. A simple one, mind you, without all the bells and whistles, but still a 3D engine.

So, after all this rambling, what is this rant about? It's about how people react to all this. The reactions are divided. Some are impressed, mostly people who cannot program, but others are like "hm...". For example, during job interviews, when people ask me if I've done anything on the side and I mention this, people usually go like ".... hm... :| Well that's great. So mostly just done your own stuff?". Well YES! What is that supposed to mean? That I've not created shippable applications? I've explored, which I myself believe is valuable! I believe I've learned something along the way. And most importantly I've enjoyed it. Maybe I'm over interpreting this, but sometimes it feels like people don't even understand the joy in it, like it's illogical. Why create something that in the end won't create any real value?

Am I alone in this? Or perhaps, have I just written far to long and uninteresting a rant for anybody to read this far? I don't know. You tell me.

Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.

I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.

It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.

Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

What kind of person doesn’t install Windows 10 for a free pre-installation of Candy Crush Soda Saga thrown into the mix? I really enjoy it when my Operating System comes preloaded with bullshit. It’s almost as if I’m losing rights to choose what I want installed on my operating system. It’s really enjoyable when Candy Crush Soda Saga appears in the background in task manager despite never opening this “””game”””. I find it amazing that after building such a powerful computer I can know that my fast 16gb ram is being used to keep bloatware running in the background. Every night I dream of the people who buy new computers with a fresh copy of Windows 10 pre-installed on it to find it has a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga already waiting to be played! The joy and tears that must come to such a persons eye to know that Bill Gates was kind enough to bless the world with every middle-aged persons favourite game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, to be the first app that appears on their start menu. The thoughts running through every developers mind at Microsoft as they pre-load a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto every copy of Windows 10. They must really feel alive and definitely would not consider doing anything else for a living but copying the files of Candy Crush Soda Saga across onto Official Windows 10 Installations. The rush of blood into their mind as they know that thousands, if not millions, of users from around the world open their brand new computer for the first time to see that King managed to bribe Microsoft with more money that you’ll ever get your hands onto into making them add a free copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto their computer. As thousands of those users move their mouse over this work of art, right click it and press uninstall without a second of doubt in their mind, rendering Kings investment to be a waste of time, money and effort. This is a story we will tell for generations and generations in the future of how the worlds most popular Operating System was not preloaded with a free copy of McAfee, but instead a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga for the entire world to rejoice. Good day to you all.

Let's play a game!

The first person to figure out the password to this account before April 7th will get two sets of devRant stickers for free!

When you've got the password, log in to this account and @mention yourself to prove that you solved it!

Here are your clues:
7 4 12 e 8 18 5

7d 76 64 7a 42 5a 36 7d 3d 4b 36 7f 5b 40 3f 47 44 3d 6d 54 46 6a 61 4b 42 79 53 36 5e 75 5f 38 5c 4a 3d 60 42 55 6d 72 76 36 54 4a 2a

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

Windows 10 "update" just broke itself... I can't wait for game companies to start building more games for Linux so I don't have to spend my free time fixing my spywar... I mean operating system

!rant && extra('worried');

My 11 years-old brother seems to be addicted to Minecraft, not the "dis iz so kool" addiction, but the "I put my health and education in danger to keep playing this game (homeworks badly done, grades free falling, showers without soap in 30s flat, food eaten in 15s, starts to yell at parents when they want him to stop playing (parents bitch slapped him a few times for this, but he seems to persist)).

My parents are over 55 now, so they don't really know how to handle this (can't / don't want to blame them), and I'm supposed shove some reason in his dead brain next weekend (I live 150km away).
I've been addicted myself to videogames in general and WoW in particular ((almost) no regrets) a few years back.. what should I say to him else than "This shit will ruin your life even before you started it" (which is planned anyway) ?

Okay, here we go...

I need a new Programming language.

Coming from a Python background, so go easy on me. x.x

C# can do what I need, but it's quite complex for me. I'd rather something simplier is possible.

Brief summery:
So, I've come to realize that I wont be able to make my Python game(ExitCode) as powerful and fancy as I'd like. And I decided that I should just start from scratch before I go any farther. (Though, I might go ahead and stabilize the current versions on GitHub)

Here's what I need:

Powerful UI support;
* I am re-creating an OS as my game. I will need to drag and position windows and icons in-game, as you would in a real OS.
* Needs to support Ads, Animations, Images, Videos, Sound, and any other media I might need?
* Preferably can render HTML & CSS (Though, this is just a preference)

Support for reading JSON and/or XML files SAFELY (XML had major vulnerabilities in Python)

Supports Windows, but I would prefer cross-platform-ability

Easy to compile

I am not really looking for a game ENGINE. I am looking for a language to create a game in from scratch, that has powerful UI libraries.

In the end, the game will be Free, and Open Source. (Always!~)

There once was a game.
In that game, there was an OS.
But that OS knew not his name.

The OS was mad, wild, and free.

"Oh, would you find a name for me?"

Seriously, I need a name for the Linux OS in my game. :3
I'll be used for hacking.
Please be original.
Bonus point if you google it to make sure it doesn't exist already.

:3

(Disclaimer: This rant is satire and only here to feed an algorithm by @PrivateGER)

This FUCKING fuck company where I had my fucking shit internship - just fucking asked me to freaking work for another project and fucking baiting me with a shitty damn payment for my little shit project I had (and still fucking work on today) while I had this damn internship. This idiot wants me to fucking waste my free time besides FUCKING SCHOOL (doing my absolute nonsense uselessfuck Abitur) and my lovely PASSIONATE GAME PROJECT with shit damn HTML-ing and CSS-ing and good damn JS-ing - for a SHITHEAD-200€ JOB. This bastard wants me to register my ass as a "Kleingewerbe" (dunno english therm but it's a small similar for to being freelancer) probably to enslave me or USE me as a cheapass worker. I'll call this dude today and politely tell him to FUCK OFF!!

(Nothing against the company, they're freaking cool! The dude too)

Should i make my game open source? It will be free, but i'm worried about theifs..
(reuploading as their work, or selling)

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

The entire modern gaming ecosystem is a scam.

I added The Crew: Motorfest trial version to my library for free.

Click on Install and it downloads 43 GB of data.
Now it's time to launch.
Click on launch and Ubisoft Connect takes over and it starts downloading another 43 GB??????

WTF ??

If I can't even get the trial version of a game without nearly wanting to kill myself, how does the company expect me to pay full price for it?

Piracy FTW. Fuck all the companies.

I try to take things slow for a few days. I also stop coding on my free time and play some game or watch some shows/movies. And sleep a lot more. Chocolate helps, too.

I’ve been trying to use Debian without a graphical UI, at least for the most part. I use X window to run firefox since I feel that is the best way to browse. But simply using the terminal for almost everything feels so refreshing somehow.

I start to find these gems such as a music player for the terminal that works really well, my HOME area feels so clutter free and I feel like I finally can finely control and tune my system to a much larger extent. I’m coming from an extensively cluttered windows system so just seeing a few things makes me feel like I can finally focus.

For me it feels like I’ll have an easier time managing my projects by setting up github in a good way in HOME. I’ve been putting more time into my vimrc to make it better for my different workflows and general productivity (and for the sake of minimalism trying to keep it mostly to hand written stuff). I’ve also been looking into Lutris to be able to fire up games or use wine for other necessary tools that I might need during cowork with others.

Generally I believe that if this test works out I’ll truly consider to make this my main OS. The clutterlessness keeps me much more distraction free. The terminal environment make me read about and learn of new ways to do things. And most of the tools I use can either be used from command line, multiple ones with a multiplexer and in the case I truly need to use GUI or want to play a game I can just fire it up on demand.

*happy*

Do you guys have any distraction free OS or setups that you want to share? Anyone with a similar experience of revelation?

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

The Linux Kernel is propably the best working example for open source.

Personally I had the most exciting experiences with open source games, like Super Tux Cart, OpenTTD, 0 A.D.
Once I watched a streamer playing OpenRCT2, but the Twitch integration server, which allows to have the names of the people in chat appear in the game, was offline. Because the game is open source, I was able to have a look at the API, write my own server in a couple of hours and share it. Was a really funny stream then!

Wine is a great project, too. I really like the idea that people cooperate with each other to bypass commercial limitations and on this way be able to play their favourite games on a free operating system.

I guess that counts? Some of the local burger kings once had an online game they advertised, where you could win free burgers if you are the first on the highscore (the other 2 places got some sort of coupons for cheaper meals), turned out there was a score submit bug you could abuse after finishing a game (me and a colleague noticed, while trying to find some sort of bug), when I reported it they didnt care (didn't get any response, maybe spam filtered?), so I got us some free burgers, scanned in the receipt and send it again, they paniced or just realized you can generate any amount of free burgers for the time of the game being online, took down the game for a day or two, sent me a short email thanking me, thats it.

One night, after one very stressful week of production code fixes (I was working on a game with some friends and I created the network infrastructure for P2P and database communication from scratch), I was at my gf's house. After we fell asleep, I stood up and screamed right at her something like "I fucking already told you how X works and how to communicate with Y. Learn to write code properly and after double checking yours then you shall ask me for a non-existing 'bug' fix. Learn how to properly write event based code and use polling you moron!". After that I turned to the other side and fell asleep immediately.
When I saw her the next morning sleeping in the couch, I could not understand why... Only after she described to me the whole incident I started laughing.
After that I just took two weeks off the project and after that period I never actually worked the same way (so hard) in my free time with them.

More than 3GB ram is useless on android phones. Change my mind.

I bought cheap lg g5. It has 4gb ram (my old phone had 1gb ram). I have opened chrome with 4 tabs, an AAA game, devRant, Instagram, a vpn app, android settings and I'm listening music. There is still free 1,2 gb ram. Also this is not my everyday usage. I use maximum 3 apps at same time.

What the fuck is up with interviewing these days. Now I have to invent a video game and work for free for ten hours just to find out I have no idea what the fuck video programming has to do with frontend. You kids need to figure this shit out. It’s really fucking annnoying.

When someone post a review (3 stars out of 5) where asks to make the app/game free so the developer will get even more downloads, he will give him 5 stars instead of 3, and everyone will be happier...

I'll give you a few reasons to walk away from a dev's chair:

1. if you want your life to be simple and not challenging, if you just want to go with the flow - choose something else. Dev's life will definitely bring some challenges to your day (and sometimes night, and sometimes - your weekends). Especially if you feel you are a perfectionist, dev life could turn your life into a living hell if not handled with care.

2. If you like to see people smiling, if you love that feeling when you help someone and that someone has a better day thanks to you - choose something else. 1st line SD would probably do, but the further from technology you go - the more smiles (and human faces overall) you'll see.

3. If you prefer person-to-person interaction over to talking to machines - definitely don't be a dev. Go to management, administration or smth else, but development. >90% of the human interaction in this field is arguments and conflicts; ~8% are requests for assistance, and the remaining 2% are shared by saying "hi" to the office administrator and your (semi|)annual reviews with your manager. Not kidding.

4. If you have a personality where you find it difficult to stand your ground and not budge to the pressure/blame game/your managers asking you to stay in late. Like it or not, it happens quite often. Many devs have spoiled the management by budging to their requests/demands to stay for OT/unpaid OT to "fix the mess they have made". That's a blame game right there. And these people stay in and do what the slaves do - work for free because they are yelled at. And then management sees this technique work and (ab|)uses it on other devs. If you can say NO and stick to it, prolly wave with some printed paragraphs of labour law in front that manager's nose - it won't be a problem. But if your consciousness is too troubling - stay away from this field of engineering.

5. If you want to easily "disconnect" from work and go do something else - dev's career might be a problem. Yes, your computer might be shut down/hibernated/suspended after 5pm until 9m the next morning, but your brain will most likely keep trying to solve the problems you were facing. You'll prolly use your own computer to do some research, check some forums, docs, etc. - this is all your free time, this is all your family time donated to your manager (and to your personal knowledge base). Not to mention, all these things you learn will soon enough become obsolete, as new technologies will replace them. So if you'd like to easily "disconnect" after 5pm, doing that as a dev might be too challenging.

Fire your whole fucking web team Bethesda

* Your design is a classic ipecac. Whatever the fuck you are doing doesn't in frontend doesn't justify the 4Mb of bandwidth I wasted on a single js file. Why the fuck can I see the whole fucking node_modules directory when looking at the sources?
I know this is supposed to be a webpage for a game development studio, but I'm seriously wondering if your budget would even get me a prostitute.
I'm a greedy fuck and want a free game. apparently your servers are only good enough to register me, but login is apparently too much to ask for. Yeah sure. Oh and also thank you for choosing an "incorrect username and password" error message by default, even though your fucking gateway timed out. Please be kind enough and punch me directly into my face next time. Not like I'll ever access that shit ever again

Been 122 days since my last post, since then I have been working on a game engine on Vala using SDL2 in my free time (Lol I have none)

Decided to put that on ice or just work on it when drunk (very common occurrence) and teaching myself C while working on a game or game engine, hopefully will have some quality rants inbound!

A couple of years ago, we decide to migrate our customer's data from one data center to another, this is the story of how it goes well.

The product was a Facebook canvas and mobile game with 200M users, that represent approximately 500Gibi of data to move stored in MySQL and Redis. The source was stored in Dallas, and the target was New York.

Because downtime is responsible for preventing users to spend their money on our "free" game, we decide to avoid it as much as possible.

In our MySQL main table (manually sharded 100 tables) , we had a modification TIMESTAMP column. We decide to use it to check if a user needs to be copied on the new database. The rest of the data consist of a savegame stored as gzipped JSON in a LONGBLOB column.

A program in Go has been developed to continuously track if a user's data needs to be copied again everytime progress has been made on its savegame. The process goes like this: First the JSON was unzipped to detect bot users with no progress that we simply drop, then data was exported in a custom binary file with fast compressed data to reduce the size of the file. Next, the exported file was copied using rsync to the new servers, and a second Go program do the import on the new MySQL instances.

The 1st loop takes 1 week to copy; the 2nd takes 1 day; a couple of hours for the 3rd, and so on. At the end, copying the latest versions of all the savegame takes roughly a couple of minutes.

On the Redis side, some data were cache that we knew can be dropped without impacting the user's experience. Others were big bunch of data and we simply SCAN each Redis instances and produces the same kind of custom binary files. The process was fast enough to launch it once during migration. It takes 15 minutes because we were able to parallelise across the 22 instances.

It takes 6 months of meticulous preparation. The D day, the process goes smoothly, but we shutdowns our service for one long hour because of a typo on a domain name.

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

been a couple of years since I was last active here.

Source Engine still has its claws on me today - but Nii broke free and properly got into other engines and made some cool projects! We both study different stuff now.

I tried to get into Unity a couple of times now, even made a small VR grappling hook prototype once (def not nauseating). But it's hell. It's kinda sad that modern engines don't understand the needs of level designers as well as Source's Hammer. Even though Source is outdated af.

Thing is, I am more and more starting to doubt that this is what I wanna do in life. Game industry sucks. Ad industry sucks even more. I might just become a tree and produce oxygen.

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from rant import depression as fuck
from WhiskeyBottle import *
import time

while bottle.contents > 0.0 and time.datetime():
fuck.rant()

Yeah ok, this will be one of a few, but I'll try to keep it short. Damn, whiskey is not helping. Nor various smokables.

So yeah, have you ever had a dream? I consider myself a gamer the whole life, always loved creative worlds, dynamics, mechanics, plots, stuff you could and couldn't do. To the point I promised myself I'd make a game - NAH - I'll be making games in the future. You know, good games, that you come back to. Like Doom. Or those porn games.

Never went to Uni or nothing. Was born in a poor European country with Internet more broken than my soul right now. Years later, after acquiring some good hardware, learning a bunch of languages, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and experimenting for about 10 years now with small scripts, apps and mini-games I've come to this realization.

I only made one "full" "game" in my life, and that was when I was like 16 in Klik & Play (early Game Maker). And it was shit. It was horrible, horrible shit. It literally makes you want to cry when you play it. It's 16-bit brain cancer. And it's the best I've ever published.

Now I've been through countless prototypes, none of which I've developed any further. I had ideas, plans, even made some more advanced roadmaps and dev cycles. Estimated costs, time, mechanics, gameplay hooks.

I never finish anything.

I get bored. Frustrated sometimes. There's always an improvement, something that "if I'd finish that it would be it! Screw this thing I was working on now, THAT will be worth sacrificing it." It's tiresome. I'm getting old.

And honestly, I don't know how people do it anymore. Trying to compromise those side-projects (they take all my free time which is not much) and work is just... draining. I'm losing hope. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed into the gamedev world after all. Maybe I'll just pump half-assed pieces of crap everybody will hate.

Or worse, nobody will care.

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

As of late I'm creating private game servers on my local network in my free time for fun / relaxing

I've already running:
a World of Warcraft vanilla;
Travian version 3;

And I am currently working on a conquer online private server, but getting the right client for it is the hard part...

Which PC / Mobile Games you guys are playing?

I was playing League of Legends till last month but it's too TOXIC and Riot doesn't care.

So I stopped playing it from last month and started 100daysofcode challenge but as a gamer I can't survive without good game (lame).

Now I think I lost my habit of playing game like drug addict( but Still when I am bored with coding I prefer to watch YouTube).

What you guys do when you are bored with coding??

File hosting like GitHub?

Basically.. I want to let my Patreons download major updates to my game before I upload them to Github. Now, I will get a GitHub Developer upgrade once I get $7+ per month from Patreon, and host the updates on a private repository for a few days before uploading it to my main dev repository, but I something until then. Some place I can host the loose files, or a .zip at a static link for free. (that can only be accessed by that link) ^~^

My dream project is to continue and improve my gaming website. It's a blog & community that's supportive of (but not limited to) female gamers. It's a positive place for gamers of any type to go, judgement free.

I have so many big ideas for the site, a forum, possibly user profiles, gaming quizzes and trivia, lots more ways to interact. I would love to do like a "find the right game for you" type of thing and have more time to blog..but I just simply don't have the time right now. :(

Baby steps for now. 🎮

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

I've been putting off my gamedev project for a while... while the golden age of free open source game development has long ended, I believe that a renaissance is long overdue!

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

I am the old famous kiddy here, who just came back days before school exam starts^^

Just to say, I want to ask you all, is it ethical(?) to release a hacking/cheating creation tool for games for educational™ purposes?

I have been making a cheat creation tool called Mysterium, but I am not sure where to use it. I made cheats for some big title games, and reported them to the developers, patched, and got some in game items in return....

Long story short, is it okay to release to the public, or should i release this product to game developers?

Sincerely,
A kid who made cheats since he can't play games well and wanted to get some free items

If you guys remember, i was teasing from time to time, that i'm working on some Rust Project in my free time.

Well here it is, i put up a whole bunch of Editor Windows in it, to showcase it a little bit. (It also reminded me, that i need to update the Version to 2024.01).

It's essentially a toolkit, with which i can create all the content, that is later used as a data basis, that is being fed into the Client + Server Combo of the actual Game. My Plan for this year is to go beyond the Editor and create a first version of the Client + Server to be able to playtest the stuff.

And sorry if it kinda sounds like an ad, but i'm more posting it here to show, how nice it actually is to build stuff with rust.

Let me know what you think ^^

I'm playing a PC game, Yakuza 0, for passing some free time. It's an action game so I get to fight and stuff.

In the latest mission, I'm supposed to run to the supermarkets (different ones too) and get 5 items for 5 NPCs to unlock the story progression.

I'm basically running errands for 5 NPCs.

What the fuck am I doing with my life

The only 4 mobile games on all app stores: "shit for other consoles or PC or Flash ported badly to mobile for $5", "idle clicker don't-play-to-succeed game fuck you pay me to succeed faster", "complete XYZ random quick thing 300 billion times", and "free-to-make shit like chess or crosswords or w/e but bad so we make money on empty promises"

i just want something good to play when bored in the car or some shit without needing multiple devices

Ugh. Challenges. I need to create a 3D two player online game with the new HTML5 WebSockets, and I'm using a free 000webhost server which I barely have control over. Does anyone know how to connect two client connections together in PHP?

I want to get into game dev, but don't know which engine to choose, Unreal or Unity. Both would be free, because Unreal is free for students. I already know C++, but I think it depends more on the API than the language itself. Maybe I would like to create games for Android too.
Which one would you recommend? Any experience?

OMG. This weekend, there is Rainbow Six Siege free to play on Steam. I have a desktop PC, but I can't get it to work. Tried Ubi support, but they give shit. So...I was hoping, I could finally try this crap game on my laptop. And here we go...

Normally, I use Linux. Only Linux, because Windows 10 on my laptop is extremely fucking painful. I knew it's going to be torture to install that game on it, but whatever.

OK, firstly, I was surprised, that Windows booted in just about 1 minute. I was like wtf just happened. Everything seemed to be fine and working. I downloaded uPlay, installed it and tried to install the game. Just to be clear, this rant is written from Linux again. And why?

Because FUCKING WINBLOWS desides to FUCKING UPDATE WIFI DRIVERS. 1 minute - internet works, second fucking minute - WIFI IS FUCKING DOWN. Thanks fucking pussy Gates. I really like you. And use this crap daily. Holy shit I would die...

I don't know my problem is. I lost my motivation to code, my enthusiasm and excitement to read a code and solve a problem. My love of my life for 6 years whom I thought she's the one, gave up on us. It was a long journey, lots of ups and downs, but really worth the time and sacrifice. Now, she's doing good, very happy on her life judging from her social media. Can't believe she just moved for 2 months. To be honest, i want her to be happy but quite bitter that she just moved on quite fast. And I don't if this is the reason why I lost my motivation and enthusiasm to code. Or maybe I just don't like the project we're working on. Well, I really don't like it since it's a mobile game, I really want to build webapp or mobile app but it's too late to change the project.

I'm not like this, I used to code until morning without noticing the time, excited to solve a problem that stuck on me for quite a while. I really became a lazy person right now. I feel the pressure to finish the project but I don't see myself working on it, I don't feel interested reading a code. I just play computer games instead of working on my project during my free time. I don't know if I'm depressed. I socialized with people, have fun, happy when I'm with them, but when I'm alone, sadness starts to creep in. I feel like there's an empty void in myself. I don't know, i just want the motivation and energy to work on my project. Im tired, lazy, and feeling burnt out. If you read until this very last sentence, thank you and I'm sorry for reading this nonsense.

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

Fucking hate my internet, ubisoft and steam regularly have a free weekend where a game can be played for free during the weekend. Currently The Crew 2 is free to play for this weekend. Its been downloading for 24 hours and its only at 23%. In my experience that means I can play it on Sunday evening for about two hours and have no internet the rest of the weekend.

I was at a car boot sale (mix between a flea market and yard sale for the Americans out there) the stall next to me was selling a PC tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for £10. So all day I was trying to sell my old toys (I was 9 at the time) but only made £5.

At the end of the day I went to the stall and asked if he would take £5 for it, he then game me it for free as he saw me trying to sell my toys all day.

Does downloading on all the scripts to a 3D webgl game to a free server so my friends could play it count?

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

Hi devRanters
I have been working on an android game in my free time as a hobby. It has been 2 years, so I have decided to finally put it up in play store (maybe as alpha or beta). If there is interest I might keep working on it. Any advice? It is the first time I make a game and I am completely green in regards to publishing it and things to take into account.
All advice is appreciated. I am a bit nervous as it has been my baby for 2 years...

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

This one happened to me two years ago:

Off on holiday overseas, just arrived and decide to check my Emails. Easy peasy..."Hey, we noticed you're logging in from a different country. We sent a security code to your backup account."

Welp, fine, login to my backup account: "Hey, we..." Can anybody guess the problem here? Yep, my primary account was the backup account for my backup. Lovely circular dependency.

Microsofts solution: Play the guessing game, where you name us Emails, Contacts and Folders to prove it's yours and we might unlock your account... or not (managed to get it back on the 2nd try)

Thank you Microsoft for ensuring my workfree, email-free holiday.

Disclaimer - Day in the life of a whitehat student.

Whitehat Whitehat Whitehat

What is this????
When I attended my first white hat jr online free trial class, I got to know that the teachers does not know the difference between java and javascript. Infact they were saying blockly as javascript. I was knowing the difference between the same. There were 3 types of courses -

***Note : - This information is taken from the whitehat official website***

1.) Introduction to Coding :-

Sequence, Fundamentals Coding Blocks, Loops
(Teach us to drag and drop blocks of code.org(blockly))

2.) App Developer Certificate:-

Events / UI,Conditionals, Complex Loop, Logic Structures, Turtle Coding
(Advanced drag and drop(blockly))

3.) Advance Coding with Space Tech -

Extended UI/UX, Rich GUI app, Space Tech simulation in Space Lab / Game Lab, Professional Game Design.
(GUI - with tkinter(python), Game Design - Blockly(code.org))

These things are rubbish ......making GUI's is simplest with tkinter and the students who make games (with code.org) submit their codes to the whitehat community (because the teacher says "they will compile it to an android app, then you can publish it to playstore" --- this is for 1% students who are able to design their own games).

The thing whitehat do with code given by 1% best students:-

Export to HTML from code.org
Download HTML to APK Convertor
Setup SDK
Successfully converted to APK!
Publish it to Whitehat Jr console account
Credits of the students
Income of the exporters

Rest all students will only think to be the CEO of google one day.

My Opinion - StackOverflow, Unity for Game Development, Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Kivy (using google colab for compiling the python code to an apk) for app development and Flask, HTML, CSS for web development.

Need some advice, which charging model is most beneficial nowadays? (for a mobile game):
1. Pay for full app
2. Free download and in-app purchase(s)
3. Free download and ads (pay to remove?)
4.?

!rant

I was propably 15 years old the first time i saw my friend coding html and and other related stuff i cannot remember! It intriqued me and i really wanted to learn it (i wanted to learn to hack.. xD..) but at the given time i wasn't happy in life and i was pretty much addicted to WoW..

So.. forward 12 years, where i had gone to the military, thought about becoming a physiotherapist, psychiatrist, korean translator and game designer.. oh and countless attempts from another friend to get me interested in c#.. i decided to start studying computers (software/hardware) at DTU (danish university).

That was rougly 8-9 months ago and i am now pretty decent in C, HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and koncepts about networks and OOP designs :).

I am super grateful to all the trial and errors throughout my life that have brought me to this place :)

Still 27, still has alot to learn, but i am really happy where i am right now. Even so, that i am spending my free time making my own projects :)

I also get super happy whenever i fix a bug of mine :p.

I truly believe that you will skyrocket to succes if you do what you love.

For me, i just discovered that part of myself a little late :)

Not sure what i hope to achieve with this post, but i hope it can give an insight into what people go through and yeah.. go for what you want!

Have a great time everyone!

And first !rant on this app!
I love all your rants! vs !rants

Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.
I hoed around in different technologies and fields. I had developed a game that i played with my friends back in high school. They liked it, so in varsity, i tried game development, 3d modelling scared me off, or rather I pussied out.
Web development, didn't go too deep, App Development with Flutter, didn't go too deep, Cybersecurity, went as far as passing the EC council's exams (the training wasn't that good). I tried putting my knowledge into practice, but resources like HTB aren't really free, you need money to learn (one would say i didn't try hard enough ) but now the certificate sits, useless in my resume, anything I learned fading away. I had an idea that applied blockchain, but my dad said "blah blah blah you could be targeted" (are there symbols for paraphrasing ?). I decided to decide on a stack (picked MERN, good idea ?) and work on it, but I feel like maybe tech isn't for me. AJR songs really hit now.
Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.

I studied computer game development at a university that had pretty low standards. It was perfect for a slacker like me. I enjoyed it. Maybe it was implied that you'd have to study on your own and that completing the courses wasn't enough to make you a competent developer, but maybe I'm a bit slow or something because that never occurred to me until after we were finished.

I was taught enough programming and database stuff to land me an entry position job at a consulting firm before I was able to complete my thesis. Technically I dropped out, I guess, since I don't have a diploma.

I built a portfolio consisting of different projects/essays I'd completed/wrote for different courses. That, together with my charm and boyish good lucks made me get the job.

Anyways, even though I learned more practical stuff my first year on the job than I did my 3 years of uni it was a very good experience. It helped me understand what I was interested in so that I could pursue that later and some of the people I got to know would help my career later.

I mean, if education wasn't free (except living expenses, books, etc) I'd might say that I had been better off just taking a year of egghead/udemy/Indian Guy On YouTube classes to learn what I needed to land myself a job. But I'd need to know which courses to take so I'd probably find a group of courses that someone else put together. I guess it would be nice to take those classes with other people so that you can work together, learn from each other, and make some friends and connections as well. Oh, that sounds kinda like uni ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?

I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!

Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos

That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!

Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger

Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!

Hello, world!

Okay, guys and gals... I need your creative minds. I need a concept for sort of a property manager for my game.. I have an idea of my own, feel free to tear it apart or throw it out the window.

So basically.. You'll no longer have one Computer System (and you wont instantly hit the login screen for that System on startup) Instead, you'll have a lot of things. They will probably only be represented using text and menu's (likely no 3D or 2D environments or anything.. Though, a setup like News Tycoon would be epic, but I think that would be too much for this game.) You'll basically start off with a small space (probably a basement) with x amount of free space. In that space, you'll need to add things like a desk, chair, and a laptop, or tower + monitor. You can also buy things like server rigs with a ton of space, but those are pricy and bulky. Each item costs X amount and takes up X amount of space. Also, you'll need a desk for a monitor (or multiples..) and other things.. (Like your rubber duck collection ;P JK) You can also rent and manage servers. (renting is more exspensive in the long run, but things on your server are not on your property. But, if you own a server on your property you can rent space to to NPCs) As well as manage your devices, properties, stocks, etc..

Also, there will be in-game time. Depending on how "comfortable" you are will determine how long you can stay up in a day. In-game events will take place later on at specific times so staying up (or not..) will need to be managed well. Especially if you're being targeted by a rival (NPC) hacker.

I need help!

This is gonna be a long question/story.

I'm a Syrian based in Malaysia working as a lead web dev in a good company.

I have a friend in trouble and I want to help him.

Here's a summary:

My friend is a project manager at a gaming studio he happens to be an Iranian atheist with around 2 years of experience in the game making industry.

He worked on and delivered a couple AAA games at his current place of employment as a project manager in one of the teams that made those games.

He stood up for his team when the management was overworking team till after midnight sometimes and forcing them to work on weekends without any tangible compensations ( basically they gave them things like free lunches, movie tickets, etc).

The result of his standing up to his team was the management handing him a notice telling him that he'll be fired within 2 months due to "underperforming".

This was a month and a half ago.

He looked around in Malaysia for a job that can get him a working visa, but his niche background couldn't help.

After his termination in few weeks he can extend his stay at Malaysia for approximately 2 - 3 months.

Now the reason why I mentioned that he's an "Iranian atheist" is the fun part of this story (sarcasm), Iranian government considers him as an "infidel" and he's banned from Iran.

His Iranian passport can't get him anywhere where he can make a living.

So basically he has close to no options.

Now to where I come into all of this:

I want to help him.

I'm going to dedicate my free time for the next 2 - 3 months teaching him web development, the problem is, I don't know how to teach web development in such a short time, in fact I've never taught anyone programming from scratch.

If he can show promising results I know that I can make a case for him get him a position in the company I work for.

I already convinced him today to try and learn web development because I can tell that in Malaysia there's always demand on good web developers.

Now to my request:

how can I best teach web development to someone with no programming background ? I'm thinking about teaching him front end development, so: HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript. maybe react js as well if possible ( high demand is usually on React/ Angular front end developers)

Did anyone here teach programming to someone else before?

Did anyone here learn web development in such a short time?

If you've read all this... Thank you :)

I've been a long time Windows user, worked with Linux a lot while working on servers.

Installed Linux Mint on laptop. Fell in love. Can't switch because I like to game in my free time and my favorite games are Windows only :/

Around the time Apple was denouncing it, I joined a chatroom for Adobe flash game developers. I really loved the idea of making games too, so I tried to learn ActionScript3. That failed, because it was my first language and since I was broke, I couldn't afford flash pro, so I was using an open source ide with okay documentation, but no newbie coder tutorials. I didn't actually start learning to code till Codecademy came out, I learned js, then I learned visual basic and Java for online courses the local community college had available, and now I'm taking C, C++, Java, and Python in college while I use C# at work and JS during my free time. Sadly, in a jack of all trades, master of none :/

I am going to rant about this being the exam week, it being hot as hell, and us having had a messed up semester study-wise... And I still managed to do good-ish in subjects somehow... Good as in, relatively good. I am no 4.0 GPA person by any means and could never be one if I studied only (if that's even realistic at all). Recently I applied to a job at Andersen Lab for a Trainee position. Got turned down because I lack experience. A TRAINEE POSITION. I could retake the interview but I feel weird with how I got rated a whole level lower than my IELTS score and two levels lower than my score at Epam (which is the more recent one!) and the questions were mostly so easy I could answer while half asleep. Just yeah. Also, while I understand the whole knowledge required thing... I don't get the need for THREE whole interviews only to then proceed to turn me down. I am continuously applying and still seeing no results. If I'm "lucky", I guess, I will get training from a bank. And then get employed there... Mentally doing very bad right now, just barely wanting to MOVE. Which is basically me being this close to giving up. Today's exam is in Linux Security and I swear, this was such a waste of a good sounding subject... Imagine, I could have learnt how to set up a server at home and all that but instead we did... The more basic stuff in Linux. And for the whole semester outside of two or three cases I was the only one in attendance. Anyways, I have been feeling like I just can't program anymore and stuff... Even though we did a Python subject this semester. And in that subject I just felt like we were going way too quickly considering a lot of the students there come from non-IT or close to that background...

I may need to put effort into learning 3D Environmental art, I have this feeling I would like doing that as a job in game dev. Oh, and I also wanna design this house that I have in mind for me. It's shaped like an Amanita Muscaria and instead of the white dots it has windows that are round, as well as a spiral staircase connecting the lower and upper floors. Need to figure out how to model that in something like AutoCAD (I have a bit of experience with it and that's why I'd like to try there... But I may have to learn other programs to do it for free), but it will take me a long time to execute since I am not the most organised in how I learn...

Anyways, I will only sporadically be there, so I may not see things here. I am somewhat busy with exams and then this NGO I recently became a founding member of (and I have to say, I kinda don't wanna be there, but there are things that have to be done). Also filling the documents for a Canadian visitor's visa to go finally see the family over there and all that. But the latter will probably not happen until next year...

Finally, I am wishing you all a sound mental health and happiness. I hope you do well in whatever you are doing at the moment or are planning to. Until next time!

My do-over would be going to a different coding bootcamp. I wonder if I could be making more money if I went to a better school.

The one I did go to was a big scam. They were more obsessed with teaching you to pretend rather than teaching how to code. They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—the students, the volunteers, the donors, the community. They were very cult-like with mantras like “trust the process.”

I spent 9 months there, but I felt I was a year behind. I am not misspeaking. I would have to relearn basic concepts the right way because they taught them half assed or not at all. I didn’t realize I was behind until I went to interviews and bombed. Seriously, I learned more in a 40 hour free library coding class than I learned in 9 months at the school. Most of the interviews I was getting were for unpaid internships. The school was telling me to go for mid level roles.

I found out recently that they’re breaking the law by operating without a license. In my state code schools do need a license. There are screenshots going around of a letter from the education department. They’re defense is “they’re not a school.” They’re still open. I think ppl should be warned away, but there’s only so much I can do. And I know ppl will give this place the benefit of the doubt before taking any student accusations seriously.

The biggest red flag is they want students to pay up to 70k and bind them to payments for 8 years. I say it’s a red flag because this place is operating as a nonprofit. Shouldn’t a nonprofit not be charging 3-4x more than competitors? They’re definitely not going to give you 70k worth of services.

They really just exploit the poor and POC by signing them up for debt and knowing those ppl would not be able to pay even with a 100k job. They have a very poor understanding about how poverty works.

It had MLM/pyramid scheme vibes when they started making recruiting students a game. They give out tickets to their annual fundraiser or promote you on social media if you refer the most students to them.

I’m one of the lucky ones who was studying coding before I started at the school. Also, job searching is mostly luck, so I was lucky at that too. But I still had to take a job that paid below market. I still wonder what would happen if I went someplace else.

I don’t even put this place on my resume or LinkedIn. Even without these problems, it’s not like anyone would have heard of the place anyway.

No this place isn’t Lambda or Holberton school.

🌎🌏🌍
The world needs to know the truth
👁️👁️👁️

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Have to make a separate rant for this cause it deserves to be outlined and for the whole world to know the truth about my junkhole trash country Serbia (europe)
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$1000 usd is 6 figures in my currency.

In economy schools they said

If you earn $1200/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 3% of highest earners

If you earn $2500/month usd in serbia you are in TOP 1% of highest earners

This must mean that i am now in TOP what 10% of highest earners in my country?

A bearly over 10,000$ usd a year, is TOP 10% of earners in Serbia. And i have to work 2 or perhaps 3 dev jobs as 1 person to be fortunate enough to be in those TOP 10%

And every day i keep seeing multiple 5 figure and 6 figure USD expensive cars, lambos ferraris brabus g wagons audi rs7 mercedes s class (2023) porsches, and when I say porsches people here LOVE porsches so much more than any other fucking car that porsche has became the most common car here that people drive! A used Porsche is at minimum 80,000$ usd!!! Thats 8+ years working my job, assuming im not spending 1 single cent, just to buy a used porsche, while hundreds of people drive them daily!!!!

My neighbor sold his mercedes s class and bought a GLS AMG 2023 brand new for over 225,000 fucking $!!!! Thats over 225 YEARS OF MY LIFE working this matrix job without spending a cent to buy that car. This is fucking RIDICULOUS

The world HAS to know the truth about corruption and slavery happening in Serbia. I will be the voice of truth that shall not be silenced. Anyone claiming otherwise is working for one of these corrupted shitfucks.

Incredible how corruption and unfairness sets you free out of the box than playing the matrix game. Unreal to me. I knew it was bad but i never knew it was THIS bad

If I was earning a normal wage salary i wouldnt be complaining. A normal wage salary for me is at minimum 100k a year. Or if i have to be generous then high end of 5 figures. Thats the only way to afford to buy one of these cars. Because how else do these fucking people buy them? Obviously not by working a matrix job

If you think i have unrealistic expectations then you need to unfuck your mind and realize that we are working a VERY difficult fucking job in this tech industry, SO difficult that a 100k should be the fucking minimum. Out of sheer respect towards this EXTREME HARD WORK, we DESERVE to get a high compensation in return -- not a fucking survival slavery wage salary bullshit! The moment you realize that you're underpaid if you earn less than 100k as a software engineer, is the moment you have unfucked your mind and now you have found the truth!

Do you think it's possible to get enough of a following on YouTube and twitch to fund your living expenses and use the rest of your free time to work on your own studio projects?

For example I'm a VR and AR game developer. I do the whole shebang for game development and design on my own. I could stream play throughs of the current game I'm working on as a weekly thing and create tutorial videos for other developers and students for more content on my channel, but to also stimulate growth in the VR and AR industry. I'd in a way be creating my own market. I could also stream the development of the art assets and whatnot.

Could possibly make some money from the ads at first. Maybe even within the game?

Idk I'm trying to avoid having to get a job anywhere else if I can float my own success as an indie start up. So thoughts on this rant please?

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

I'm looking for a game recommendation to play with my (non-gamer) dad
What I'm looking for:
- Android
- Online 1vs1
- Turn based (async)
- Simple
- Free
- Lightweight if possible (my dad's phone is kind of old).
Something like checkers or chess but not checkers or chess :)

Hmm... My first experience with computers was in 1991 or so, when my then best friend had C64. And I was 7. My first PC arrived in 1993. Prince of Persia is the first game I remember from that time. I started programming in 1995 or '96, writing useless things in Pascal. Using PHP since 2000. Still that’s my main programming language. And sadly, my kids have different hobbies than me, so they aren’t even trying to program.

I remember the sound of modem connecting thru phone line to some BBS systems and later to the first public and free internet service in Poland. I remember simple, really „computer-like” voice of my dad’s speech synthesizer (he’s blind person). I remember, when our time to „play on PC” was limited to max 1hr a day... What will our kids remember?

Everything startest​ with HTML. I got an awesome book about HTML/CSS and I just started learning and trying out some stuff. At the beginning I got a lot of help from my father but soon I created my own websites! I setup a free webserver and after some time, I met PHP. I made tons of stuff with PHP :)

After about 1 year of creating things with PHP, I learned Javascript. And with Javascript I got into game development. I created some games but I wanted more. So I tried Unity Engine. But... well... It was hard. Then I tried Godot Engine and I finally found a game engine wich I enjoy!
I created a lot of games.

Then in 2016 I met Lua, wich is my favourite language now! (But I didn't do much with it)
Later I also met Node.js but I'm still learning :)

!dev !rant

A couple weeks ago, my friend bought Risk of Rain 2 and got a free copy to gift to a friend, so he gave it to me. That game is so fucking addicting. I don't know the term for it, but it's one of those games where every round, you start with basically nothing, and you get items that buff you up, and so on. If you die, you have to start a new round. Then it just keeps going and going.

..That's it. I just wanted to recommend a really fun game to anyone who hasn't heard of it. For our Linux users, it runs in Proton and the first game has a native Linux port, so I believe the second one will have a port at some point (it's early access, so stuff is still being added).

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Automate is a great app...
(Scroll to last paragraph for a question if you wanna skip the faff)

Semi addicted to a time waster mobile game that has micro transactions. Yet you can get free ingame currency by watching ads over and over.

Using automate i managed to 'automate' the process of "watch add. Click ok. Repeat"

Now when i sleep or idle ill just let it rake up some cash. Sadly it isnt full proof as sometimes (1 out of 20 times) it fails to run the ad and that breaks ot all. But restsrting it is easy and thats another 20 cash!

What have you done to skip tedious work for something trivial or some trivial gain but felt good you did it anyways?

i have a very casual and boring job. it's a b2b company and you can get an idea of how less work we get (or how fast i am) that it's day 1 of the sprint and i have almost finished all my tickets. my manager always praises me as someone fast whereas i see myself as pretty slow and this company even slower.

i feel like quitting, but the relax environment and stability of the company on paper makes me wonder of that would be a correct decision.
It's a deep tech company (not just meat e commerce or car rentals, a proper b2b analytics giant startup with good profitability) , our sdks are used by major startups and yet i find it boring.

I am an android dev who would love to stay at top of the game. my previous company used latest jetpack libraries, kotlin, modular architectures and stuff. everyday was a hectic chaos of life where there were deadlines, new requests coming in every few days and i was becoming the awesome fast android dev that i am now.

in this company there is no challenge for me.But the amount of free time has helped me grow beyond a single domain. i am currently hustling in 3 areas : my body( i started working out regularly, got my tummy under control), my technical skillset( started taking web dev classes) and my physical skillset (started taking driving and swimming lessons) . the amount of self growth time increases since company has a good leave and PTO policy

it all feels pretty good but the constant feeling of being left out from the android domain makes me think if i should give interviews. am i being stupid or what? my friends are all growing up with better salaries and packages. i am way better than some of them and equally capable as a few of them, so i sometimes feel being behind in finances too :/

So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.

It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.

Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.

This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.

The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one.

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

I want to make a "game" on learning spoken languages so people can study while not stressing out on the learning.
The disadvantages:
-Vocab
-Method to memorize is different with every person
-Stress and frustration
-Motivation killer
Advantages:
-Can be interesting, depends on user's interest and willingness
-Explore vocab by exploring or reading in-game texts
-Grammar is heavily broken down to help relate meanings and thorough understanding of a sentence as well as slang
--
Why I put disadvantages first was to see how the software will impact a person's negativity/postivity when using it. As in for example, when you see something that is difficult to understand, users tend to procrastinate or drop it due to it being "difficult"/alienated.
-- onto the rant--
Many apps have really awful way of teaching, its just 3-4 apps chucked into 1 aka all-in-one and expects people to pay just because of the all-in-one app containing flash cards, sentences, audio etc. I use my phone (android) and normally during my intern or my way to school, I would do my reading in the other languages, (separate apps, all free). Also apart from that, students sometimes take 2 years to learn but drop because it's difficult.
TL:DR; apps and classes give shitty lessons, I want to outdo them and let students have a better chance at studying new spoken languages.

happy rant 😄
just finished our group software project in uni (5 students, a way too complicated game) and just got the highest possible mark of all!!🤩🤩🤩
the project was focused on having a working, bug-free game, so yeah our game was UGLY AS FUCK😅 ... but 99% no bugs😎
best group in years😇
next chapter:
human-computer-interaction(is that the translation for Mensch-Computer-Interaktion?), we'll take our games and bitch about their usability and design😅
by the way i was responsible for the design/ux and did a kinda crap job because of too little time😐😅

So as an avgeek(aviation geek) I open my secondary laptop and fly a bit with fsx(Microsoft flight simulator x).I also watch tons of airline trip reports on YouTube.I also play a game called SimplePlanes.I can create vehicles using various parts and test them in free flight and missions.

I saw a thing on the Workplace stack exchange site. This college kid with no in industry experience read the false narrative that "pitting your testers against your developers for bonus money encourages better productivity and bug free code". And thought it sounded good on paper. This worries me in many ways (especially since he wants to make a startup). The first being that he couldn't see how both sides would game the hell out of such a system, which I feel any worthwhile engineer types would easily figure out. The second is seeing money as the major motivating force behind software devs doing their jobs. I had a third but I am tired.

But seriously, who is still writing this bullshit (that article, not the kid's question) in 2016?

I wanna work on small video games more. I thought of joining some small game jams so that I would have to finish a project within a weekend or so, but I don't really have time to dedicate a weekend for that.

And every time I do have enough free time for these things, my motivation drops to 0....

When I built a scripting language for game bootup and shutdown to load and free needed files and memory but used the language to debug a completely seperate program.

Got me excited that I was able to use my code for complete opposites of tasks

Which OS would you guys recommend for game hosting?
Im currently using Ubuntu Desktop (i was complete beginner when i installed it) and plan on switching to Ubuntu without Desktop. It doesnt have to be similar, im very willing to learn, as long as its a free OS :)

Is there a better way to run SC:BW on Ubuntu bionic than VirtualBox with the free IE11-Win7 image?
The game keeps flickering and it's quite annoying...(using the experimental Direct3D from VBox extensions)
(Note: Wine craps itself when battle.net client tries to run so that's not an option)

I hate Lucky Patcher. Also Game Guardians. People are using these programs to hack my mobile game, turn off ads and get all inapp purchases for free :(

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

I need advice:

I'm a developer, I have lots of experience with Java and Python (More on Java than Python). But I'm not a game-dev.

I've been thinking about dedicate serious time to develop a game, like a long term plan, using my free time.

Top down adventure / puzzle game; you know typical go here, get key there, put three gems here, unlock that and so on.

I have two options: Go with Java as I can move easily with it OR use an engine like Godot even though I've never used it before.

So game-devs, any advice on what should be the best approach here?

So my mom really really dislikes the Xbox text system. Everytime I would ask for a game on Xbox (when I played Xbox) she would just fucking throw her card at me and bam free games. Not really help, just kinda less stress.

I have a long question for developers out there... bear with me.

I'm currently learning and devoting all my time towarda Java and have been for the past two years although it's moving slow because of summer courses. The catch to this is, I'm not sure what I'm learning it for. How do I implement this code, I'm not sure what to do with it. The only project I plan on doing is a discord server management bot... besides that, I'm blank... Is java used in web development? What exactly should I be using it for..?

I'm planning on learning javascript, php, mySQL, and CSS I pretty much have down but I don't know what to use them for. Besides how I want to script for the game Hackmud which is in javascript.

I'll put it into simpler terms... I love java and I'm looking forward to mastering it but I don't know what to use it for. I want to use it on my free time and all but use it for what? One more thing: what other languages go hand in hand with java? Sorry if it's confusing lol.