As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

!rant

Working on a C++ game engine

I asked my teammates if it would be ok if I made multithreading code for the collisions of our game engine and they just sent me this, I'm going to try anyway. Yolo.

I finally got a new job!! 😃
Actually i’v been working here for 3 months, but i was in trial mode so i didn’t want to post it yet but it looks like im staying 😃
They are the most talented team i ever met, they host all our local gamejams, have their own internal game engine and a gamer bar where the company’s devs have 30% off from the prices.
Their projects are exciting (even if i’m not currently on a game project) and my team lead is awesome!
I’v been wanting to work here for about a year 😃

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Today when showing a game that I made:
X: So you used Unity, it's so easy
Me: Yeah I mean compared to....
X: Thus since you used a game engine, I can't say your game was completly developed by you.
Me: So you are saying that since a builder didn't make bricks thus he can't claim credits on the building he made?

I'm developing my "game engine" for over 2 years. 9 complete rewrite and 3 language change (c#->java->c++) but I love doing it. It's an amazing experience :D

IM TRIED MAKING MY OWN GAME ENGINE
I MADE A 2D TRIANGLE
IM SO HAPPY

A game being built in Godot engine..

So much better than unity 3d

I want to marry C#

Seriously, I've never found any other programming language I enjoy the hell out of using quite like C#. If I could, I'd write my game engine in C# instead of C++

Impostor vs Kenner syndrome

We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.

So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.

I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.

It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.

Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.

But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.

Coolest thing i've built solo? I think it's my 3D snake multiplayer game.

It all started with a simple 2D snake game to teach programming basics at community college. Then i added a multiplayer mode based on a simple UDP implementation. Then i wondered how it would look ike in 3D and i had the idea to figure out how to implement a 3D engine by myself and i dove into the maths and wrote a simple 3D engine based on a windows forms picture box.
I showed the game to my colleagues and the loved it and we played it a lot.
So i added special mode boosters, and sound and map events and obervermode and observer polls.... you know it.

Here's a little collage of the journey...

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?

Had a video game thought a few years ago. Wrote it down. Created a board game of it last year. Tweaked it. This year I am diving into Unreal Engine 4, Maya and C++ to make it come to life...

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

No... No... No!

The game engine is not in charge of code optimisation, if your program runs like ass; it is 99% going to be your fault...

Sick of seeing people judge engines because of the poorly optimised things made in them by half assed developers... Why do the good things never get any attention where the shit gets all of it... Why?!

(Just had someone crack the shits at me because I'm not using a 'real' engine and am not a a 'real' developer because I'm not using unreal... So I'm in a fan-fucking-tastic mood after that :-D)

Sometimes.....

When I want to escape how dull/repetitive/boring the world of web development is. I crack open a nice lil terminal, dust off my gcc/g++ compilers and fuck around in C or C++ till my eyes start to bleed.

I have been fucking around with systems development. Mainly with Linux programming. I have also started to get deeper on game engine design and compiler design....because low level development is where its at.

A man can only fuck around rest apis, css and html and the endless sea of Javascript and other dynamic languages for so long before going crazy.

Eventually.....I would want to code something impressive enough to give me a spot somewhere as a C or C++ developer. I just can't work with web development any longer man. It really is not what I want to do, the fact that I do it(and that I am good at it) is circumstantial more than because I really enjoy it. I really don't

Oh god, my first proper rant...

Ok, I am finally fucking sick of all these people shit talking game engines because some people make shitty games with them.

What does it matter what game engine someone uses, unreal engine, game maker, unity, it doesn't matter what you use.

If you think an engine is shit, make your own engine from scratch with all your code, Jesus Christ people -.-

Weekend milestone finished... 27 minutes to late but finished. Mini Voxel Engine for a Game in Unity.

Did someone else finished a milestone this weekend also?

Show me your progress :D

My manager just left the company to become a independent game developer. His game is also available in steam as early access.

He just became extra cool to me.

And he is using unreal engine for it.

That made him extra cooler to me 😁

When you finally accept that in order to write a game engine all your self, you not only have to be a programmer but a mathematician.

Alright. Time to hit the math books for a while.

I did it! My Senior Project is done! Seven months of my life have been spent leading up to the completion of my game engine and it's finally over. It is awful and should never actually be used by anyone, but it's done and that's all that matters.

And as my final middle finger to my school's administration, somebody has to grade a binder comprised of nearly 200 pages. That's what they get for not listening to me when I told them that it was a huge project and adding more to it. Dear administration, f*** you for making my life more stressful than it needed to be.

Godot

It's a very lightweight game engine with a lot of features, great community and active development.

(Unity is way too bloated for me since I only make small games as a hobby)

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

The game engine I'm currently working :-D

*Cries in the corner*

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

What is Unity?

At first I thought it was an Ubuntu UI... Then a C# app framework like PRISM... Now it seems to be some mobile game engine?

🎵 it's my birthday... It's my birthday... It's my birthday...🎵

Yesterday tried to hack the cash value in Dirt 4... Used Cheat Engine and tried editing the values to 999,999,999 but didn't work. The values (multiple address) don't update in the game.

Well tonight I started the game again just to play a bit.... And I see the credits are... 999,999,999!!!!!

Oh and yes it actually is my birthday today lol

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.

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

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.

Just found out why my computer didn't sound like a jet engine anymore: Both of the video card's fans were dead, and it turns out they're kinda useful for not overheating during a game.

On a completely unrelated note, websites look really shitty at 480p.

Alright! so it's not much but my game engine is slowly gaining actually useful features, just finished implementing a basic sprite class that now renders basic sprites!

It may not be much but kind of proud at how well I have been able to just pick up Vala from scratch and start building something!

Best: built an app that helps me with my colorblindness, also i contributed to a game engine ive been using a lot

Worst: had to use c++ for a project

Game is underway in unreal engine!

Been doing the art for a ridiculously long time, got help from many people! All sorts of suggestions, and great ones too! I've used paint dot net because it is reliable, Im not a great digital artist but can do a decent job!
So what's happening now is that I'm working on the maps and going to start on the character design tonight.
I have less than a month to get a huge portion done but I hope I execute it at an international standard! :D
Here's a preview of the basic part

So building a game engine and everything's internal name is wood/axe/lumberjack themed...

Started work on the scripting language and gave it the code name faggot script... Took me 48 hours to realise I should probably change that...

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

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!~)

Definitely Godot Engine. One of the greatest and easiest Game Engines I have ever used! Lots of great features and there are getting more and more!

The inbuilt programming language GDScript is really awesome too! It's a custom language built extra for the Engine, which makes it super easy to use and integrate! The syntax is a bit like python but better.

Because it's not as old as unity or unreal engine, it's not as feature rich. But I think that's okay. It allows you to get used to the current existing features, and then heading on to the new ones.

What I really enjoy is that, just as in this community, you can just talk with the creators of the engine. Asking questions, suggesting features and discussing things! They'll answer nearly everything!

Not to mention the graphics! They are really good and are nearly able to compete against Unity!

There's also a visual language you can use. Just like Unreal Engine Blueprints! Never tried it tho...

The scenes system is very easy to understand. You basically have a lot of "components" which you can use in each of your scenes. This also allows for making simple extensions!

All in all, a great engine! If you are a game developer I can definitely recommend trying it out!

I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

Level up 😊

So tomorrow I have to explain to my non-technical principal that the "game engine" I say I'm going to make in my senior project proposal is in fact not a car engine in a game. And I also have to explain that a mechanic would not be an ideal mentor for this project.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

A simulation sandbox game engine where you literally have to use tools and power tools to cut through raw materials to build things

Top 10 database engines on db-engine... I never knew the top 3 were so far ahead of the game, if that site is anything to go by.

Nothing is ever more depressing than finally being able to install your preferred game engine using Wine only to be held back by being unable to install .NET 3.5 on Wine 3.0 :'-(

So I finally got my senior project approved by my school's assistant principal (the one who deals with every student's project) and he said that the three forms of evidence I suggested were not enough. A quick summary of my project: I'm supposed to make a game engine in Java before April of 2017. Every student needs 3 forms of evidence that they did the project so I suggested screenshots of my work, the finished source code, and pictures of me actually working on it. In addition to all of that I would have a ton of documentation and sample projects to test different features of the engine. Well, he doesn't really understand that for a high school student, that's already enough work for a couple of years and thinks I need more evidence. So what does he do?

He requires me to find at least 5 people to test the engine and complete a survey about it. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except I'm a high school student and don't know more than 2 people who are fluent enough in Java to work on a game. And, I have to finish the project before January now to give the people enough time to work with it.

Long story short, I'm not even out of high school and I'm already experiencing the struggles of dealing with non-technical people.

To all the game developers here:
This really needs more attention.

Unity or Unreal Engine... I am a noob to game dev. Please help

Best: Got into game modding and had tons of fun! Learned a lot about Unity engine and became very comfortable with C#.

Worst: Abandoned my social life as a result of my new obsession. Need to find the balance.

Could do with some dev input here.

Going to rename most of my projects before I start them up again just for some consistency amongst everything so...

Because I name my projects internally as a different tree for each milestone (1.0 is maple, 2.,0 is pine etc) I'm going to have my other stuff follow a tree related naming scheme, first up is my game engine/framework...

It's currently called the 'Mod Engine' but I have 3 idea's and want to know people opinions

- Woodsman Engine
- Lumberjack Engine
- Lumber Engine

Which is best do you think or can anyone think of any better ideas? :-3

In a world full of game engines, only the courageous dare to use OpenGL.

My game engine that isn't building itself for some reason 🤔

Anyone else ever just have those days where you just think of just giving up on programming all together?

I just seem to be having these days every second day or so, I mean I've been programming since I was 11 and I'm just about to turn 21... I've essentially stuck with game development in the same engine in the same language and to this day have nothing to show for the past 10 years other than a million half assed prototypes that seem to just rehash idea's already done by other but a million times better...

Tried learning other languages and none have stuck, I can't grasp C++, don't have a fucking clue how to use Vala and can't even think of anything to make with said languages...

Tried making a pushbullet front end in Vala and can't even learn how to use the fucking API's so once again, that project has been put on the shelf with everything else.

It all just drags me down and makes me think if all the trouble is worth the pain and annoyance.

Maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself (110% chance this is the case) or maybe I'm just not cut out to be a programmer...

So building a game engine/framework/thing/thang and was working on a scripting language designed for the Dev terminals commands/applications...

Then I also have to design a language for the asset scripts, instances (probably going to do JSON) and it only took me about 4 months of planning to realise I could just use the same language for everything and just double down on the one.

Well aren't I a fucking dickhead .-.

Is it only me or does Unity really force people to write ugly code?
Sometimes I think to my self : " just go and write your god damn own fuckin engine"

But then I sit back and realize that I'd never finish a game that way.

Love & Hate Unity !

I've discovered that working with artists on a videogame is the equivalent of the chapter when Homer asks for a wish to a monkey arm on the Simpsons.

- I want a png image of the player on idle position. And I dont want a 30000 x 30000 image, neither an image which half of it are transparent pixels, neither the image not to be centered or any strange thing ok?

*They send the image*

- Normal resolution, well drawn, no visual artifacts centered on the image...

*Tries to import it on the game engine*

+ Can't import .jpg format images

- FFFFFFFF#@€&£$$}•{^÷|CK!

This happened after a year working on the same project on the same engine with the same image format specifications.

Unreal Engine SDLC:
1. Start Epic
2. Wait
3. Start Unity
4. Wait
5. Open Project
6. Wait
7. Wait more
8. a bit longer...
9. (it usually crashes here, or freezes, in which case go to 1)
10. Game opened, make modifications in C++ codes
11. Wait VS to load
12. Wait VS to parse all the file in solution
13. Make changes
14. Compile
15. Run from Unreal
16. (sometimes, go to 9)
17. Goto 9
18. 9
19. Goto 9
20. Congrats on finishing the game, and losing your patience

I love good advertisement but I hate bad products with "good" ads!

It's so difficult to find a reliable and up-to-date source for what's a good and bad game engine at the time. Every engine says it's the best. Every browser says it's the fastest. Every anti-virus app says it's the safest. God damn, come of with creative way and don't say your product is the best! *tilted*

In school we got asked 4 our future jobs. I saif: im gonna get informatician, because im already really good at it... Look, i can evem build compilers... In the break, my friend: could u program a game, dude? Me: no, im not using a graphical environnement. If i wanted to i would have to learn unity or flash or some sort of game engine He: then, ur not an informatician, and u shouldnt get one either...

(hes a windows user)

Today on forgotten games – Vangers.

Even though the game is extremely hard and very, very frustrating, it somehow has an ability to make you obsessed with it. A very complex pieces of information, either carefully crafted or accidentally emerged from the void, delivered straight to your brain, making you an addict. If you play it and not delete it after five minutes, there is no way back – you better get used to new, different you.

There are many hard but addictive games based on simple mechanics, but Vangers is a different story. Compared to Vangers, Dark Souls seems nice, simple and easy casual game.

One can easily imagine "the hardest game possible", but all of them simply makes you delete the game and not to play it at all. Vangers precisely balance over this, achieving a very fragile equilibrium, being hard enough to frustrate you like no other game does, but not hard enough to simply make you quit instantly. While doing so, the game makes you a junkie, addicted to its eerie psychedelic nature.

This game spits in your face. This game makes you a slave, a desperate addict. All of your previous gaming skill, and speedrun experience doesn't matter.

The plot roughly goes like this: humans fucked up while experimenting with portals and accidentally discovered an advanced hivemind race. Trying to escape they fuck up spacetime and the two incompatible civilizations annihilate each other, creating a primal soup of creatures, from which the whole new world emerges. So there are many different strange creatures trying to survive in fucked spacetime where incompatible worlds are forcefully fused together, and you are the Vanger, one of many other Vangers trying to figure out what they are and how they was created.

The game features a voxel, fully-destructible world mapped on a torus. The game lore and terminology are extremely complex, and no one will explain it to you, you have to figure everything out yourself. Skip the dialog and no one will repeat it, you're on your own now.

Every playthrough is different. There are very many game mechanics and play styles available.

Everything in the game including complex rendering engine was written in C and Assembler back in 1998.

There are two types of Vangers players: the ones who was able to escape early and the ones who think that Vangers is the best game of all time. This says it all.

Last warning – DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. You better watch some playthrough on youtube.

I swear to god, Stardew Valley is some form of crack cocaine, my partner got an xbox and a copy of it, I played it ages ago and got a little taste from her, now I have just been playing it non stop again.

Planed to do some prototyping and get some of my game engine finished but nope... My parsnips need me!

Finally Godot Engine 3.0 is out!
Wohoo!

I already have a little game in mind that I want to build after my current project.

/*
!rant
I'm bored so let's take a vote!
Should I write an operating system, or should I write a game engine?
Or something else?
*/

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!

There was a competition being run by a large bank in the Netherlands. The competition involved playing a simple game on Facebook to win prizes. After discovering that much of the game logic was client-sided, I used a combination of cheat engine to speed up the clock and auto mouse clicker to keep the games restarting. Turns out I was able to play several thousand games in a few minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK so after working with SDL for a bit, we have a circle rendering!

Next step is to start working on keyboard input and then onto importing sprites, first time building a game engine from the ground up and working with Vala in this capacity...

EDIT: Gif in comments because it doesn't want to work .-.

#!/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.

Being able to make THE game I've wanted to make for 4 years. I have a team of people who wants to participate (dev, artist, etc) and I even started building my engine from scratch.

But most importantly, my dream for this game is to have it published on the Nintendo Switch (also PC, OSX and Linux of course)

But right now I must focus on finishing my degree and doing contracts to make enough money to hopefully work full time on my game.

I'll see you in 2 years Albi

You know something is wrong when chocolate-doom, a full game (actually 4) with custom software rendering engine compiles in 12s, while your stupid Webapp with a few input fields and backend calls take over 1m to build 😒😒

So me and @ikdekker are working on this 3d engine in c++ for school and we are kinda forced to use visual studio. He absolutely hates it cause it's not convenient (he's used to netbeans). Anyone know extensions or something so he'll be happy?

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

!rant
How to earn a lot of money as a programmer?

So this question might sound a little naive and too simple, but earning a lot of money is what we all want after all right? Collecting experiences from people in the business should be a good idea.

So this is the position I am in:
I am a German student in my 13th year of school (which means I will graduate this summer) and I am very interested in information technology. I know C++ pretty well by now and I have built a rendering engine for a game I want to make using openGL already, which I am very proud of.
I would love to turn this passion into my profession and thats why I plan to attend a dual course of computer science next year (dual means that I will be employed at a company (or similar) in parallel to the studying course).

But what direction should I be going in if I want to make big money later on? I am ready to spend a lot of time and work on this life project but I don't know which directions are the most promising. I hate being a tiny gear in a huge machine that just has to keep spinning to keep the machine alive, I want to be part of a real project (like most people probably) and possibly sell a product (because I think that is how you really make money).

Now I know there is no magic answer to this, but I bet many people here have made experiences they can share and this could help a lot of people directing their path in a more success oriented way.

I personally am especially interested in fields which are relatively low-level and close to memory (C++), go hand in hand with physics and 3D simulation and are somewhat creative and allow new solutions. (These are no hard lines, I just thought I should give a little direction to what I know already and what I am interested in)

But really, I am interested in any work you are likely to earn a lot of money with.

What game engine would you recommend to an indie developer? The type who can't afford a fucking server to run the bloated and buggy unity editor but is actually a developer so isn't afraid of typing.
I've had enough of the improper sandboxing (will crash bc of game scripts), tempfile-based crash-unaware instance tracking (won't restart afterwards) and lack of UI scaling (seriously, that's like accessibility/retina support basics) that is the unity editor. If they had command line tools I'd use them happily.

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

Convo with me an my friend today (i purposefully left out my opinions and reactions):

Friend: i want to learn c#

Me: sounds good, but I'd go java if i were you

F: yeah but i want to do unity

M: sounds good, but I'd go with unreal engine if I were you

F: what language is unreal engine?

M: C++, but if you want to make apps, go with unity

F: yeah I want to make an android app

M: sounds good, but I'd try out renderscript if I were you

F: yeah I've used that before

M: oh really? What does it do?

F: I don't know

M: its for gpgpu because android game devs needed better performance

F: yeah I've used that

M: what does gpgpu stand for?

F: umm… i know what gpu stands for

M: okay dude, you didn't use it

F: yes I did, I made a cypher

M: dude, you didn't use it

F: yes I did!

M: what does gpgpu stand for?

F: *left*

*five minutes later*

M: *checks phone*

M: *sees text from friend*

Text from friend: dude it was general purpose gpu

After a long break for studies, I'm finally gonna continue working on my game engine. Wish me good luck.😃😃

Why do all my friends think that I am hacking Facebook, when I am just coding a crappy game engine. xD

When I got my first game engine working without actually reading about how a game engine works.

Fuck me, I lost my motivation AGAIN!
I mean, yea, this is a big project and I alone am obviously not enough workforce to do it, but I at least hoped for a prototype. And instead of writing anything like that, I end up writing all sorts of unnecessary modules and wrappers for game engine functions. Grrr.

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?

I think that would be config tool for F1 Challenge ‘99-‘02 game which was called VMT Engine. It introduced me to modding community, the VMT Engine project taught me A LOT about software development.
The origin of this tool was I posted on F1 2014 VMT development forum thread “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tool that let you change tires type?”, so the VMT leader said “Why don’t you do it?”...So I did it 😐

I’m actually still updating the source code to this day

[linux distro stuff]
Hey guys!
Im considerig switching to linux because:

My macbook does not support mojave and the new ones are expensive af.

Windows 10 is bloated and not a great user experience(removing stuff from the control panel and adding it to the very stripped down settings app, privacy etc..).

I love open source software

However i did not used linux for a long time, back then i used ubuntu and SUSE.

My considerations:
Debian - because .deb on them haters
OpenSUSE - because i used it in the past and it seemed very stable and fast
Arch - i heard from a lot of sources that it’s “da best”

My use case is game development and 3D modeling. I use gimp, blender vscode and unity (the game engine) at work i sometimes use autodesk stuff (motionbuilder, 3ds max) because of fbx.
For audio stuff i use audacity

So overall i’m looking for a distro that is fast, lightweight, i can develop on it (mostly 3D stuff) and occasionally play some games

Anyone has experience with the mentioned distros? What distro would you use for this?

Got bored and started work on a basic 2D game engine using vala and GTK to provide basic windows and UI...

If I can get a sprite moving on screen with at least 8 axis of movement I'll consider it a job done and throw her on GitHub and probably never touch again 👍

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Command Line Game Engine in Java

Spent 2 hours wondering why Unity Engine sees my 2 joysticks as Joystick 1 and Joystick 5 (or 6 depending on a UBS port).
Turns out, for some reason, Unity remembers ALL the ports that were ever used (even with the usb extender). That's documented...exactly nowhere. Ok, at least I figured that out, but what am I gonna do about it? Nothing, there's no way to change the order.
So after a quick nervous breakdown, and a cigarette break, I decided to build and run the game, just to see how it looks, and...what's this?
Everything's working! Unity removes all the joysticks from it's array and puts only active ones in the right order and that too is documented...NOWHERE!
Ugh... Unity I still love you, but god damn, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!!!
Needless to say, this day is an emotional roller coaster.

Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.

I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.

Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...

The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete

When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...

The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.

The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.

But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.

To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.

Things to accomplish within the next two years = [
0. Get a job that actually pays me.
1. Use money acquired from said job to buy a bunch of stuff I want. (Like an actual PC instead of a laptop)
2. Learn a bunch of things about back end development (CSS is my passion)
3. Make a 2d game engine, so I can find what the fuck a game engine is/does.
4. Learn to comment my code more frequently.
5. Move out of the big nest.
6. Stop getting mad at video games.];

i wrote a website, a server in go, a small os in c, a game in js, a game and server and web scraper and other desktop apps in java, mobile apps with flutter, a website with php also, implemented aes in go, wrote a parser in java. done sysadmin stuff on my vps and pihole/openvpn/nextcloud on my rpi. learn about c vulnerabilities and used metasploit. attempted to write an interpreted language. did some led displays with arduino. currently learning tensorflow.

i have never...
- written a driver
- made a game with a game engine
- created a file encoding
- implemented an oauth2 server
- made an api
- worked with vr

what am i missing? i want to be a very well rounded dev.

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

You know apple has its dick deep inside your ass when you buy a Macbook pro with no discrete gpu for game development(unreal engine) and then shell out $1500 for a fried cpu.

Why does everyone hate Unity (the game engine)? I've used it and it's honestly not that bad.

I have to show weekly progress on my 2D game engine this monday in order to be graded.. but I can't focus due to tooth of wisdom.

I'm THIS fucking close to using these:

I've said this once before and I'll say it again, if you create a game engine, development kit or the like that is single threaded with no easy ability to allow multi threaded work loads, grab a cactus and firmly shove it down your urethra :-3

(It's mostly a rant with GameMaker but fuck sake, we have CPU's with more than 1 core... Let us use them!)

First post here...Here's a funny thing that happened to me yesterday. I'm with my friend, we're both taking a break from school, and he comes up to me and mentions how he wants to make 3d games. Conversation goes a bit like this:

Friend: "Hey, I found this 3d model website. I'm thinking of using it for my 3d game."

He was already making a 2d game at this point, so I assumed he just gave up on it.

Me: "Well...do you have Unity?"

Friend: "Yes."

Me: "Well if you're going to make a game on there [stuff about c#]"

Friend insists he can easily make this. I tell him it would take years on end to learn C# and make a good game with it. And then he says something I never wanted to hear.

Friend: "Actually, no. You ever heard of Dani? D-A-N-I? He made a game in 2 weeks. He's actually making a new game and you should wishlist it on steam blah blah yatta yatta."

This guy believed someone else who was previously a game developer (if i recall) learned an entire programming language and engine in two weeks. He could've, but to me that seems seriously outrageous to someone who doesn't even know a smidge of programming.

He then advertised his YouTube channel and his games and brought down my arguments like "he probably had previous knowledge" completely. This guy doesn't even know where to start with C#. Really, all I could do after that was mention three.js (oh wow another JavaScript library, exciting), show him a game Google made with said library, and then said good luck...

Worst thing is, he uses Scratch to make games. And he genuinely thinks that is a real programming language.

That's it for my first post, thank you very much for reading :)

Not a rant... But I have a question guys...
I am currently a student in 2nd year of college.
I have been using and learning C++ since like 4 years now and it is my truely favorite language. It just is a joy to work with. Tried others but couldn't handle them (no offense. Just a personal preference) so here is the question:

What should I do in future? Like which field would be most enjoyable?

Currently, I feel game programming is it... I do enjoy whatever puny game like thing I make way more than anything...

I also specifically enjoy creating backend stuff...
(I always end up creating mechanics for working of game engine but never creating the actual game... Like creating an asset manager or something but not using it).

By backend stuff, I mean something which requires me to think a lot as to how can I implement something and then implement it (again, in C++). And then another developer could make use of it.

I heard game development has a very low scope for growth and is very very tedious... Is it true? What route should I go to?

Edit 1:
Btw, I enjoy building stuff from ground up, although ofc that doesn't happen haha...

Alright got an idea I have for my game engine that I'd love some input on...

So the engine has emphasis on user made content and openness to that content (EG. open source dev tools and no licencing of art) but I also want to try and build a basic ecosystem with the engine and one way I'm doing it is with cross game mods (Take a mod from one game and drop it in another and it just works... Famous last words) but something I want to try is a companion app for the engine itself...

So it'll have a custom written save system baked in engine to make progress saving and the like simpler for the end user, thinking about building an app for smart watches and phones that would connect to the engine and actually back up and sync local saves to the app and vice versa as long as they have a connection (Hotspot your phone, bluetooth or wifi) but allow you to manage some data within the app by building a basic API to let devs show the user information about the save and the game by adding description, thumbnails to distinguish games and the like...

Just want opinions if it may be a good idea to invest some time into and if anyone has idea's that could make it better.

Working on a project to create a space Invaders clone using Android studio/java. Point is to prove teamwork and our ability to optimise for a phone.

Leader makes the engine
Passes code to me who is doing gameplay.
Creating classes, testing them with a temporary activity class to get them on screen.
Okay, time to get it going properly.
Starts creating the game by placing aliens to the screen via the new alien manager, created in the true starting place.
Nothing appears on screen, sounds still play.
Odd. Repeatedly try to fix, but objects will not appear on the screen if created outside of temporary activity.
Show problem to leader as I haven't been able to figure out.
Gets lectured to no end about how I can't just ask him for help (first fucking time) if I get stuck!!!
Turns out, the value for frame time is way off for the first frame, and their positions get going way off the screens range when being placed. Temp activity works as it skips first frame.
Why did this happen? Genius leader didn't properly initialise it, so first frame time was equal to the First Date Object time ever locked - current time 🤔🤔🤔
We figured it out together.

Hey fellow devs, my friend showed me this Godot game engine. Ive spent 15hrs over the weekend building strategy game client which consumes my api server. Ive done a lot! It was easy to understand custom Gdscript which is okay. But before i dig in, i want to know what you guys think about this game engine? Is it going somewhere? Is it good option for indie games? Is it good option for building android/ios games? I need to make my mind 🤔

Decided to change how my game engine asset loading and sorting systems work, giving up on making everything editable JSON files just so it's easier to manage and actually build things.

Currently trying to work out a way to load all of the packages sprites into 1 singular asset bundle and here is the evolution so far...

Revision 1: Compiles a single 328KB PNG into a 24MB file in 190 seconds.

Revision 2: Compiles same image into a 24MB file in 5 seconds.

Revision 3: Compiles into a 16MB image in 4 seconds.

It's not much but it's a start :-D

(Still haven't built a loading system so who knows if it works yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Ok so there are a lot of things out there like #WhyIUseLinux, well as a Linux lover that is stuck using windows, I say we start a 'why I use windows' discussion.

For me, I'm stuck on windows simply because the game development engine I use is only on windows and mac and doesn't seem to play nicrly when run on a VM, if the software was released on Linux I would swap over in a heart beat!

Another small update on my games modding stuff...

Currently building a command line tool to pack the game data, currently have a working sprite packer and am able to actually read data from the packed file and export all images byte for byte... Holy shit I might be able to actually do this!

Let me know if anyone might be interested in seeing a demo or some very unclean source code!

So I have never done 'real' development on anything bar my current game engine Virgil, however found myself referring to C documentation for GLib and SDL2 rather than valadoc documentation.

Decided fuck it, I'm already converting everything to Vala's pointer syntax so I can have manual memory control, implementing stb_image and contemplating reworking SDL2_image into raw C so I'm not depending on extra libraries... Why do all this when I can just learn C and have more control.

Everything was going well and decided to buy the C programming language book, already knew about pointers and structs but ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boi was I not ready for malloc .-.

participating at an coding challenge.

the mission is to write an game solver for an game engine - in java. based on astar, pathfinding should be made possible by cloning objects.
never seen a so hardly misconcepted challenge, where character instances and their variables are static and contain uncloneable data😂 oh god what a waste of time realizing this bs

1. Finish my damn game engine.
2. Get my own company up and running with actual staff and funds.
3. Finish the game a friend and I are working on using said engine.
4. Getting out of this fucking job since I’ll have my own company to deal with.

I started building a voxel engine with openGL and Clojure during December, so my goal is to make a game out of it. Long way to go but seems fun.

I don't think anyone said it yet so I'll have to choose osu!. It's a rhythm game and now it is being remade as open source. It also uses a open source game engine dedicated to rythm games. The osu staff is great and the main dev (peppy) streams on twitch while making the game sometimes.

It's a great project and I hope I can contribute some day.

Plans for 2019 are to release two products.

1. A text-based strategy game engine that will act as the core of two or more progressive web applications, using Node.js/Express, EJS, and SCSS. It will be proprietary, subscription-based, and playable 24/7 online or offline as a web site or mobile app with nightly/weekly/monthly events and items (think KoL, on steroids, with butter on top.)

I am currently undecided whether to go with MongoDB, MySQL or PostgreSQL, so any feedback - without derailing the other choices, and understanding that it needs to be minimal at first with the ability to expand to millions of users - would be appreciated.

2. I'm sculpting collectors figurines of guinea pigs, molding, casting and then selling a limited set that are hand-painted by me with a certificate of authenticity, as well as marketing blank versions of each with a choice of three colors (including white, and either red or black for eyes - a total of five) for people to either paint by themselves, family members, or friends.

This will also have a website that allows you to choose the breed and colors (changing the picture according to your choices), as well as allowing people to use it as a social media outlet - as if their own guinea pigs had profiles instead of humans. It's also planned to support rescues worldwide and educate folks about properly caring for cavies.

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 :)

Godot Engine - great open source alternative to Unity, powerful with basically anything you need for game dev and with great community,
VS Community and VS Code for more serious things, because they're pretty pretty powerful and extendable.
Oh and Krita is kinda cool, but I'm not much of an art guy

Making cheat codes with cheat engine -> making games with game maker -> learning Python freshman year of high school -> ap computer science -> 75% of a computer engineering degree and 2 internships, soon to be 3!

I'm almost a programmer!

Just curious on whether or not to open source something or not...

As some would have seen I'm working on a game engine/framework and putting a lot of effort into the development terminal (lumber camp) and had a fair few people show interest in it so thought I might chuck it on GitHub as I go but I don't want to allow for merging until the main component is at version 1 and stable...

Should I release as I go and not do merging or wait till it is at version 1?

Need some dev feedback here, went to twitter and got nothing and thought here is probably the best place...

I'm working on a dev terminal for my game engine and I'm building a basic app development for it (CLI and CLGUI) but not sure if I should allow for full RGB via Hex or should I just stick with the standard CGA 16 colour pallet...

And I'm thinking of building a basic scripting language that will transpile into an obfuscated JSON structure (Mostly because I have a lot of experience at building systems that use JSON as a scripting language) but just want to know if anyone could recommend things to try

So started building a game engine in Vala using SDL2, I have never built anything from scratch and decided to do it with no tutorials and just looking at the documentation on valadoc... So of course all of the pages for SDL2 and it's sub components show up fucking blank... Well isn't this dandy .-.

What game engine would you recommend? I heard about Unity is a pretty good start?

What do you think about Godot Game engine?

To use Unity with VS you have to get Unity Build Tools as a plugin.

Alright, I'll download that.

Oh but now there's an error with connecting to unity, I need to get a newer VS and switch to the 2018 version of the engine.

Ok fine that's annoying but I guess I might as well upgrade.

Oh now there's no Intellisense? I guess I need to reload my project.

Oh what's this? Some major build error due to a missing component from Vs 2015?

This is getting stupid, fine let me install it.

Oh but to install the component you need to rerun the installer for VS, fine I'll redownload that.

Oh but apparently the installer _I JUST DOWNLOADED A FEW SECONDS AGO_ is outdated and needs to be upgraded. I can't _not_ update the installer and still install the components because that would be stupid, why would we let the developer decide what versions to use obviously they don't know what they're doing I mean it's not like they know how to use computers?

To get simple code completion, let's force developers to download an installer that then needs to be updated to install a component for this giant IDE that also requires the 2015 version of the IDE to be installed alongside a special plugin and patch designed for a specific game engine.

All this. For fucking code completion. I can't even get Intellisense to work in VSCode without fixing the issue since the C# extension in VSCode just binds to Visual Studio tools and runs the same shit with a different GUI.

Back at my game engine asset system and thought of a way to store images and recreate them in memory programatically rather than 'unpacking' them... Bu turned a 256kb image into 4MB... How the fuck does this keep happening?!?!

Ugh this shit is going to drive me fucking mental!

It's been a while since i stopped programming.....
It's been so busy with all the school work/assignments/ and the most important part is that school ends at 10pm, arrive home at 11pm, prepare for tomorrow school stuff, sleep at 2am, wake up at 7am next morning, and again ends at 10pm 5 days a week...
It is exhausting, but I am getting used to this routine.
Studying my own programming skills or working on a side project? Not sure when to do it... The only way to continue studying is at breaks at school, or sleep less and study....
But it is impossible....
I have some great projects that are waiting to go out to the world, to list a few:
- cloud gaming
- cloud storage with live streaming
- complete school schedule management
- home automation framework in dotnet
- deepfakes and ai image generation algorithm (~18 months of training till now)
- game cheat engine (20GB total omfg ^^)
- and more
and I don't have time to finish it. lol
I think it will see the bright world after 3 years of high school... By then, my projects will be ancient, probably....

TIme is really short.
24 hours equally, but feels like 8 hours a day....

Should I abandon the project rn and focus on studying? (probably should)
or should i sell the project or open source it?

Also, how do you manage your time between work(study) and side projects (especially big ones)?

Anyone with game development experience? I'm thinking of doing a game development side project soon. Not expecting the best results, but games like cuphead, hollow knight and salt & sanctuary inspire me (2D platformers).

Will PyGame or LibGDX suit me fine or should I use a bigger engine like Unity or Unreal?

My very own game/graphics engine. I just wish I had more time to work on it..

So I work at this place that primarily does games for training purposes using Unreal Engine and C++. I've been doing web development there in React and JavaScript. Our client wants us to transition to making the games playable in the browser (partially because of Coronavirus and the need for remote work / training). This is possible with Unreal, as there's a way to export a project to be played in a browser (Emscripten to compile C++ into JavaScript), though this feature was recently deprecated in a recent release of Unreal. The package size is ridiculous though, and for a very small proof of concept project we created, the package for the game totalled ~160 MB. This is for what was effectively a 2d game made with 3d assets. On a good internet connection, this takes about a full minute to load the game into the browser page. This is where the rant begins: it seems silly to me to be developing browser games in this way, and that we should switch to a browser specific option like Three.js with other tools. My coworkers on the game dev side of things don't know much at all about web development, and I've been trying to convince them that the package size is way too big. The browser games we'll be developing are going to be in very short development cycles, apparently one per week... So it seems like yet another reason why using Unreal is overkill here, and could slow our development speed, even compared to learning a new JS 3d library. The game devs tend to be very dismissive about the package size, making comparisons to the usual massive binary files they regularly deal with. Thanks for the read, this was my first post on DevRant. What do you guys think?

A question to game devs : which design/architecture patterns do you use ?

Everytime I try to take a look at game development, I feel like there is a lack of guidelines, mostly about architecture.

It's something strange to me as a web dev, as we use much of these patterns on a daily basis. Of course I think about the near omnipresence of MVC and its variants, but not just that. Most of frameworks we do use are essentially focused on architecture, and we litterally have access to unlimited tutorials and resources about how to structure code depending on projects types ans needs.

Let's say I want to code a 2D RPG. This has been done millions of time across the world now. So I assume there should be guidelines and patterns about how to structure your code basis and how to achieve practical use-cases (like the best way to manage hero experience for example, or how to code a turn-based battle system). However I feel these are much harder to find and identify than the equivalent guidelines in the web dev world.

And the old-school RPG case is just an example. I feel the same about puzzle games or 3D games... Sure there are some frameworks and tools but they seems to focus more on physics engine and graphic features than code architecture. There are many tutorials too, but they are actually reinforcing my feeling : like if every game developer (at least every game company) has his on guidelines and methods and doesn't share much.

So... Am I wrong ? Hope to.

What are the tools and patterns you can reuse on many projects ? Where can I find proper game architectures guidelines that reached consensus ?

How long do you think it would take to write a simple data-oriented 3D - Game Engine with c++ and Vulkan?
Simple in a sense of graphically low performing. And all that alone?

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.

Rant!
Beginner tutorials are great.

Personal project UE4 (Unreal Engine Game Dev)
I'm having this bug where I dynamically draw every tick into a Uncanvas. (C++) First I call .ClearChildern and after I create UserWidgets by calling blueprint to fill text.

Text is Invisible when drawn in native tick
I works. If I don't do it in the NativeTick

Search Online: "UE4 UMG text dissappears"
Result: How to create a Button in UMG
Me: No I'm creating a complex UI system

Search Online: UE4 Issue with UMG Text disappears when drawn in native tick
Result: How to create textfield UMG with blueprints
Me: No I have a weird bug and trying to figure out why that is!

50 Searches later
have seen 50 tutorials on how to do the basics.

My problem with certain applications that there are so many tutorials out there that Sirius shit is hidden behind a cloud of beginners content.

Hoy to all!

I need advice for NNs.

I wanna make a chess engine that uses an NN. (see collabs)

I want the NN to output a probability for each move.

However, i dont know what data to train the NN with.

If i train it with the moves from an engine, it simulates an engine and that sucks.

If i train it from games, i only see one move, and thus, cant train the other moves.

My thougt is, that maybe, i let the NN play an entire game and if it loses, it adjusts itself somehow. But how?

If you wanna contribute, email me :wittmaxi@outlook.de

Don't suppose anyone has experience with a pinebook pro?

Finally giving up hope on my chromebook and working on my game engine using the Linux VM built in is just getting slower and slower...

Trying to get some opinions before I put down $360 to get one imported .-.

Shifting my domain from android to a game engine. Any helpful insights please.

So currently working on a basic game engine written in Vala using SDL, fuck me it is such a rabbit hole!

Have a basic renderer and and was using the default SDL frame rate manager and decided to write my own so I could knock out using the SDL gfx package.

So now I have to create a window manager and renderer manager just to handle a basic framerate manager that isn't completely negated by VSYNC....

Do you know the frustration you feel after you worked on your game engine all day and ended up with it not working properly anymore? It's so diffuse.. you didn't really do anything physically, but you still feel like you failed and broke something that you will now have to fix.

So I had to write a program for university... It got graded.. I got 1.7 (1 being best).
Now you might say that's good. But I wrote a whole fucking final fantasy like game with engine and the program I helped with of a friend of mine is just a little roulette game without animation.. and he got a 1.3.

TIL: Don't give your best. Just give no fuck and push something out quickly.

Just finished the prototype of my HTML5/Canvas implementation of a visual novel engine. The actual script exists behind the scenes on a REST like web service (to act as a sort of drm). The assets for the game and UI layouts are stored in what I call a shit file. Their is s a utility called the shitpacker that creates a shit file from a directory structure. The name of my engine is the Pyst engine. Pyst stands for Python Stub...as the game script is actually a subset of Python that I created. Eventually I will probably move Pyst to JS so I could hypothetically support offline games.

Pygame can handle kinect, but can't interface with asyncio. It freezes if I try to run event.wait in an executor. You may write the best game engine for a language, if you won't use language standards and don't support async, then it's shit.

I started down my career path to make games. I have never really made anything good. I think I am finally fed up with not doing this. So I am going to be working on selecting a game engine. I want 3D, I want to experiment with voxels, I want a permissive license, I don't want something huge, I want to contribute back in a meaningful way, it needs to support 3D. So after looking around I found Godot. Another programmer who lives near me uses this as well.

Does anyone else have some good positive experience with game engines for smaller projects? I have played with UE4 and Torque3D/2D. I don't like the bloated feel of UE4 even though its a very cool engine. I didn't like their install system at all. T3D is old and not up to date.

A dating simulator game engine for the web. I have created the engine already but I need writers/artist to make a decent demo.

Any game devs here?
If so what engine do you use.

Currently I make from scratch and I'm looking to expand to 3D games. Unity seems like a good choice. (Platform: Windows, C# or Java)

Is anyone able to recommend a decent game engine that has an editor for Linux?

I've had a look at Defold and considered Unity but neither of them have usable UI's on Elementary OS.

Just looking for something to keeo me occupied till I can actually begin work on my custom engine...

It's been weeks now since I looked through a language, called S-SIZE, filetype .ssz) that is so little used around (I think it's only used is for a game engine clone called Ikemen) that I can't find much documentation or talk about it on Google.
I'm kinda surprised actually. Is it kind of a common thing to see languages used for a single application?

Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.

I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.

WHAT DO I DO?

Ok... Able to pry myself away from fallout 76 and fire up for some programming...

Van't decide whether I want to build my game engines debug and root dev tools how I thought, thinking of building the engine to almost behave like a VM but not quite, it still is compiled just like a normal game but has a built in developer terminal that actually acts like an extra operating system/BIOS that can be left to boot the games assets and everything like you would have for an end user or the startup can be interupted to initialise the terminal prior to everything being loaded...

Following the osdev Wiki tutorials to actually build the dev terminal itself but just unsure whether or not to impliment this system the way I think or not... Opinions?

Really starting to reconsider being a game developer, I can never seem to get anything past engine prototyping. So many idea's, so many concepts, I have the ability to build it but I can't get past the first hurdle and it's really bringing me down...

Don't even have any dev friends to help me out...

YouTube... for video creation.

Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.

So I'm a junior dev in a few languages and I recently went to an arcade. I got some inspiration again to work on a small toy of a game. I was wondering what you guys think I should make. I was thinking maybe pinball or something along those lines. I'd be using Godot engine so 2d is the main focus. tell me what you think and I'll post updates as I work on it.

!rant

Just started with Unreal Engine 4, very basic stuff.

Any tips / tricks / suggestions / DOs and DONTs?

Ugh, making a game engine (It's more like a framework than an engine but idgaf) and it's all based around easy to make content and everything is built using 'mods' hence its name, The Mod Engine but I've been trying to come up with a logo for the engine... Why is it so fucking hard trying to make a logo!

Anyone have any suggestions? :-/

So, i want to dive a bit into game development. But firstly without a game engine. Just some small projects, like a short 2d game, to get knowledge.
Any suggestions, to do so?
Which language, ide, framework etc.?
Thanks

Hey Game developers,
I'm making a roulette game for a client. He wants that the motion of ball in wheel should look completely random but it should fall into desired number i.e. the outcome of roulette wheel should be predetermined, not random. Any idea how do I do that?

Any Unity3D devs out there?

My thoughts: Unity3D is an amazing game engine. It lets you really quickly go from concept to implementation and allows you to prototype very quickly. My concern is that I find it incredibly hard to write good code using it. It's very difficult to write in a test driven way, especially if you put any logic in a MonoBehaviour. It is possible to work around this by using Zenject or another DI framework. You could even use entitas which is an entity component system. But these all have their downsides too. Zenject I find to be quite boilerplatey and not that easy to test either. I also find it really frustrating to be using a really old very of C# (maybe C#4 equivalent but I think it's customised in some way for the engine).

Anyone else struggle to enjoy writing code for Unity3D games?

So I'm working on a game prototype and want to toy with the ability for people to create customs mode/maps/campaigns and upload them to a community marketplace.

I'm looking to host all my data using Google Cloud Console (I use it for personal stuff so i trust it).

I want to use the app engine to minimise some of the overhead from using a VM, but really would like to stay away from SQL if possible, would you guys recommend building a PHP back end or a Node.JS back end, I would have all the data get saved to a private bucket if you were curious how i would store stuff.

A space game (obviously) where ships are built and broken in convex pieces. With in-game computers and ship design/construction software, of course. Because what would a game engine be without the ability to play a game within the game, with exactly the same visual quality as in the outer one?

Edit: Game-within-game premise based on the idea that it will be easier to write the ship-CAD software in a game engine than from scratch

Edit 2: may as well also be able to play the actual game within itself, since it would be like holodeck simulations

Fuck.

I've just seen work offer in my city for junior unity developer. I'd love to work as a game dev (and currently am finishing my first "real" game in this engine) but I feel too anxious to send my CV.

Also for some weird reason I feel attachment and loyalty to my current employer, even though I'm more often pissed about working there than not. Stockholm Syndrome?

My experience was very recent. I was working on my game engine, Pillar3D, and realized that the setup allowed it to be automatically multithreaded with little to no concern about deadlock or race conditions. All based on the assumption that individual levels don't talk to each other, and that moving entities between levels could be done between frames. I can even track about how much work each thread has to do and use that to distribute levels among the threads. Now I can do things like force UI trees to exist in their own level and get fantastic multithreading.

Hi devs hows it going?
is there a java or javascript game engine i can use on my pc?or how exactly can i start developing games on my pc.
items i have: visual studio code, eclipse (JDK for mc hack clients (pls dont come for me))
thats all i got lel

i seen the legend himself used java to create mini craft which was my childhood school game

he also used typescript to build his pixel game xd
let me know!

So I was wondering if any of you know if any good ways to inject additional functionality into a function in CPP. My use case is injecting a counter into an OpenGL draw function to see how many times per frame it's called. I know I can do this using assembly Inca more hacky manner as you might do for cheats in games(code caves), but I'm more interested in adding is for debugging/statistics for the game engine I'm working on. Basically im looking for a portable stable way of doing it that when I compile as a debug build, the code gets added to various functions, and when I compile under release, it doesn't.

Example:
glDraw();

Would call
glDraw() {
drawCount++; //some debug stuff
glDraw(); //call the real one internally
}

I should mention with code caves you can do this by saving the original address of the function, patching the vTable to point to your new function that has the same parameters etc, then all calls to that function are redirected to yours instead and then you simply call the original function with the address of the function you originally saved. That said, I'm not sure how to access vTable, etc the "normal" way...

Devranters, what's your favorite game engine of 2017 and why?

And what do you think will change in 2018?

First day at programming course: I will write a game engine

Last day at programming course: Can anybody help me?

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?

My parents showed me how to play "Spy Hunter" on their Pentium III Windows 98 machine when I was 2, and I started installing games. Fast-forward to elementary school there was a game design afterschool class where we learned to use "Scratch" to drag-n-drop pieces of code used for animating and creating games. I wanted to do "real coding" so I got an internship at a local company, learned HTML, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Now, I'm developing games in Unity engine, and making mods on SourcePawn. The consumer is becoming a creator.

I really wish I would get the motivation to finish the monogame based c# game engine I started on a year ago.

Best: put my knowledge into helping others with programming in uni
Worst: rewriting an old game to make it work with mew engine

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

Hi, I'm a full stack developer. I want, with a friend of mine, to develop a multi platform mobile game. It will have online matches, a scoreboard, a shop. Something like "clash of clans" or any other online game. 
I read about unity, phaser, unreal engine and many others technologies I have never used ... But I don't know which one to choose and start learning. Do you have any advice? Any articles, guide about game dev? Someone who was in my situation has suggestions, or just tell his story?