Making a game with my friend. He drew shitty images (sprites) and I made a shitty game. We had so much fun!

*starts Unity 2D project*
*puts sprite right in the middle of the camera*
*nothing shows up*
*deletes Unity 2D project*
fml

That feeling when your client connection is more stable than the connection of a fucking game server... Incompetent pieces of shit!!! BEING ABLE TO PUT A COUPLE OF SPRITES DOESN'T MAKE YOU A FUCKING SYSADMIN!!!

Oh and I sent those very incompetent fucks a mail earlier, because my mailers are blocking their servers as per my mailers' security policy. A rant from the old box - their mail servers self-identify a fucking .local!!! Those incompetent shitheads didn't even properly change the values from test into those from prod!! So I sent them an email telling them exactly how they should fix it, as I am running the same MTA on my mailers (Postfix), at some point had to fix my mailers against the exact same issue as well, and clearly noticed in-game that they have deliverability problems (they explicitly mention to unblock their domain). Guess why?! Because their server's shitty configuration triggers fucking security mechanisms that are built against rogue mailers that attempt to spoof themselves as an internal mailer, with that fucking .local! And they STILL DIDN'T CHANGE IT!!!! Your fucking domain has no issues whatsoever, it's your goddamn fucking mail servers that YOU ASOBIMO FUCKERS SHOULD JUST FIX ALREADY!!! MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!

After a long time for making a boiler plate. now i'm ready to implement game logic and sprites ! look at this beauty

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!

So this is an update of the afore mentioned IT related RPG I am making. I have settled on the title "Lords of Bullshit: a tale of corporate incompetence".

I need some ideas guys. I have Java, C, Python, PHP, bash and git as skill types, but I need spells for each.

For example in C I have malloc and dealloc as spells (revive and death spells).

I am having trouble with Java spells. I am trying to come up with things that focus on OOP or reflection and meta programming, but I am having trouble.

Any ideas? Also, anyone want to help with some sprites? All of the sprites the character generator can make are medieval looking.

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

Was cleaning up some of the old files on my system and found the first ever raycast program I had written.. in c++

This was during a time im pretty sure all of you guys just like me learnt the things that you could possibly do using code.

The experience of the first time I ran this and saw the sprites appear was the awe all of us have experienced in our own ways.

The reason I found this picture interesting is many of us end up losing the wonder and sense of excitement that got us into development in first place.

Go back , clean up your drives .. find your old code. I'm sure there is no better feeling than looking at the past you , writing bad code , with a probably bad language on a bad editor with sleepless nights to get nothing more than the output we wanted.

It's amazing when you realise everything is better when it's simple.

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I am having fun.

So, today, I've tried Gimp. And...

... It was the best s**t given me to learn and make sprites with.
Seriously, from the moment we know how to use it, it becomes the most useful thing for this.
Photofiltre is called off the stage.
#YouthoughtthatwasarantbutitwasmeDio

FRIDAY MADNESS:

As I was so busy coding, one colleague was taking a break and distracts me as he's done with his task. As he approached, I snobbed.

Him: Dude, did you know that there's a generator for all the images in sprite?
Me: really? How?
Him: spritegen.website-performance.org. What's cool about it is that the html and css are already generated just like in font awesome. For example, that i tag...
Me: cool. I wonder dude, why would they use i tag when it makes the text italicize, right?
Him: right. Probably because its used for icons also because icons starts with letter i.
Me: LOL.
Him: LOL.

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

// Define this isn't a rant.
this.isRant = false;

So just curious if there are any dev stroke artists on here that might be willing to lend me a hand with some prototype art...

Just need some character sprites made into modular pieces and a few edits.

Didn't know anywhere else to post this :-(

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 .-.

ok, so i remake music and make sprites sheets for smaller developers, in an attempt to make them more recognizable. the devs normally give me a place in the "special thanks" section of the credits, and then i got people spam messaging me asking me to make them a game or something, so i explain to them i dont make games, just assets. however no matter how many times i tell certain people, they still keep on asking me to make a game when all i do is remake music and do a bit of pixel art, so the conversation usually goes a bit like this -

Them: Hi! I was wondering if you could make me a game?

Me: I don't actually MAKE games, just things you can use in your game.

Them: So can you make me a game?

Me: I don't know a single bit of programming, i just like to remake stuff.

Them: YOUR A FAKER???

Me: No-

Them: YOU SAID YOU CAN MAKE ME A GAME!

Me: i never said that, and i DON'T make GAMES,
JUST ASSETS.

Them: i'm blocking you

Me: why tho

Them: blocked :)

Me: [content hidden]

___________________________________________________
so yeah. this is why i stopped making assets for games and just remixed tunes for personal use.

I will never ever see, play, or think about video games the same way again. Even playing all my childhood games is never the same.

I will now forever see the game from the inside out, imagining what code the devs might have written to achieve what is happening: sprites, audio, triggers, AI algos, etc. No longer is a player or character just a player or character; they're sprites, animations, classes and variables and method calls. o.o

Does anyone else have that project that they work on in there spare time? Well mine was a Pokemon MMO because I'm not a games developer and found it a really nice challenge/break from normal work. It's almost ready to be played but it's sad that it'll never be released. I mean I could recreate all of the sprites and game mechanics but that wasn't what I originally set out to do.

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

i really hate writing boilerplate just for showing this animated sprites.

(i know my drawing is bad, that's why i need graphic designer)

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

I was working on some ground sprites for a personal project and the inside corners became a sun :) p.s. it's not an animated gif.

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)_/¯)

Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D

So I got my stress with unity settled a bit..
But what the fuck are these default coordinates on like every new object in the scene, using 2D?
Shit like (-0.4876651, -0.02003769, 0.0546875) dafuq.:D

Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing

1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then

2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year

Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects

Just about to get ready to import all of the hair sprites for my game and calculated it to be 1260 sprite strips to import... Fan-Fucking-Tastic!

To anyone out there thinking about making a 2.5D RPG, don't managing sprites is the worst thing known to man -.-

TL;DR: I should just stick to Python. I'm not touching front-end stuffs.

I got promoted to moderator of the subreddit of the game I play. Got greeted by a list of task involving tweaking the stylesheet (CSS). I said fine, I screwed around with CSS before I can screw with this again. So now I'm in charge of the whole op. Alone. Yay /s.

The objective is just dark-theme-ing the thing because white hurts (we all know that). So I fired up Firefox, made a test subreddit, cloned the whole stylesheet and sprites and started screwing around with my editor and Inspector Tool. And it hit me: One element refused to render (I don't if that's the correct technical term), and I don't even know why the fuck it didn't render. 15 minutes fuzzing through and it still gave a middle finger. Fine. Fuck you. Full revert, back to original. Then I changed the original sheet one change at a time, reloading after every changes. After changing everything, it suddenly work. What the fuck. Why the fuck. How the fuck. How the bloody fuck. How in the bloody fuck.

(""Fucks" per minute" sure is an effective measure of code quality)

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

rant == needHelp(c++/Qt)

Ok, so I want to pass a pointer to my main class like

CSprite2D::CSprite2D(int number, Ui::MainWindow *i = 0) //gets the number of total sprites from MainWindow
{
number_sprite = number;
ui = i;

QTreeWidgetItem *item = new QTreeWidgetItem;
item->setText(0, "Node 2D " + number_sprite);
ui->treeWidget_2->items.append(item);
}

But I get an error (blablabla doesn't have a class type)

I know, some people hate it, when others use devRant as StackoverFlow, but I can't get any good results off SO, as I always get downvoted for some minor stuff

Hard to explain to another student differences between Textures, Sprites and Display in CSFML

I really don't like to use image sprites, but when we have to, it's hard to explain how specific they need to be. (All the way specific) and then they need to be halved... so no odd widths or heights...