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Search - "survivor"
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October - Hired
November - Hear that CEO 2 was stealing the company money
December - Dismissing 6 persons. CEO 1 says to me that, since I'm the last hired, I'll be the first dismissed.
March - Company doesn't get better. Dismissing 3 persons... still there.
May - Company doesn't get better. Dismissing 2 persons... still there.
July - Company doesn't get better. Dismissing 9 persons... still there.
Now, with the remaining money the company should live for about 2 years and not dismiss employees anymore.
We were 25 employees, where are 4 now. I feel like the winner of Survivor.10 -
Rest In Peace My Dad. now he is going to follow my uncle. the best two person and developers in my world. as a lone survivor, your memory will continue to be remembered propagate through my life.
for fellow devRanters, Always love your family more when they're still in your side. doesn't matter how harsh, how bad they are; you can always find the meaning, the values life will give you, and that will be the best presents your parent will give you. Always. stay creative, they will be proud.
the short story of my dad : https://devrant.com/rants/1630147/...37 -
Whoever brought this keyboard up a month or so ago...you forced my hand. I needed one...and now I am $160 poorer :/
But it is beautiful and Cherry MX Clear switches are amazing.
I named it after my favorite weapon in PSO "Last Survivor".18 -
!dev
Saved this little one today (with some help)
We found it alone and seemingly scared/confused
It was shivering and it was very weak without its mother...
And its two siblings didn't survive :(
It's under care of some friends right now and they are going to take it to a care center tomorrow :) -
This is the code to hack into a GPS-Navigation. Taken from the Netflix-series "Designated Survivor".8
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My Daily WFH Routine :
Pretend that you are struggling really hard to solve some issues and it would be done by EOD.
Complete the task before lunch and the rest of the day is all mine :)4 -
I just experienced near death because of high blood. Super strong blood pressure. Avoid coffee, playing games, and sleeping very late at night. This is my advice as a survivor developer. I want to share this to help you. For fast deadlines or hard user stories, always negotiate reasonably with your SM or PM or PO or client.
Thank God he have me a 2nd chance at life. Take care of your health. Don't worry about deadlines. Health is more important. Always pray. I deleted all of my games especially my beloved call of duty mobile and clash of clans. I'll forget all games that I know because those contributed to my high blood pressure.
When you have a headache or head pressure or eye twitching . Stop what you are currently doing and relax, measure your blood pressure and contact your family asap. Take it seriously. My wife saved me.10 -
!(!StrangeRant)
I want to have a program that makes programs.
----CONSOLE------------------------
$ sudo makep
(makep = make program)
$ makep > destroy the world and make that me and i are the only survivor
$ makep > select language > TrumpLang
$ makep > Please wait...
$ makep > Compiling...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
(i died)
$ makep > .........
$ makep > Building...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
$ makep > .........
(ok, so i wont wait 1 million years here, so lets say 1 million years passed)
$ makep > Running...
Estimated time to finish: 1 million years later
$ makep > .........
(ok, so i wont wait 1 million years here, so lets say 1 million years passed)
$ makep > Destroying...
$ makep > Finished!
$ makep > Press CTRL+F to shut down.
-----------------------------------
Earth stopped.
This computer is the only survivor.
While he was compiling, he got artificial intelligence.
He tried to survive.
Now the story begins.
The life of a computer.
Alone.
In theaters at 2018/04/01.
Buy tickets now!
IMDB / RT rated this movie 10/10
-----------
Footnotes
This movie is containing parental advisory content.
(This is sponsored by the awesome people at Turbo C and IBM)9 -
It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."
Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.
We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.
Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.
* * *
In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.
I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.
After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.
Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.
We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.
Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.
And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.
What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.
Just don't.17 -
If people don't end up putting "Coronavirus Survivor" in their Twitter bio's after this shit is done, I'll be very surprised.
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I may be getting evicted due to landlord stupidity but at least I survived budget cuts and get to keep my job after internship. The full-time job offer will be emailed tomorrow
Two interns got cut but at least I and another intern survived.
But sadly now I have to go over my friends work and learn what they were doing well enough to continue it with the other survivor1 -
Why the UI/UX guys don't understand that aligning divs is not that easy???
We cant fucking drag those things ....6 -
And the stock market is plunging again.... Who gives a fuck....
It makes no logical sense? Unless someone wants to enlighten me... But I don't see much downside...
COVID kills us all => who gives a fuck about stock prices
COVID kills most of us => who gives a fuck about stock prices, aka pieces of paper. All the survivors will create a new society and either split the goods or fight over them. It'll be like Survivor... But real.
COVID goes away and doesn't do anything => great time to buy buy buy since all you idiots basically just gave me like a huge discount on stock prices. AKA a long overdue market correction9 -
Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?
A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.
If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.
But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?
And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.
In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.
By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.
In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.
For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?
One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.
Mechanics might include
1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.
2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.
3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.
4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.
And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.
Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.
If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.
How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.
The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.
And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.1 -
This afternoon I had my first close encounter with a core dump, while working on my C++ simulation. It was brutal and I probably opted for the less efficient solution to avoid the problem, after hours of fighting. But hey. I'm alive and that is what matters most.
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Data wrangling is messy
I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.
And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."
yeah, no.
(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)
Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.
So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.
Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.
But for now, flora.
For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:
* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.
For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)
Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.
The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).
Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.
As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.
Data wrangling is fun.1 -
First time ranter here;
I'm an aspiring developer, undergoing a bootcamp right now. But to pay the bills I recently started working in accounting in an insurance company, registering payments from ~10 years ago (my first office job, retail and restaurants were all my previous experience). The job is boring, I feel like nobody gives a shit about it, most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing, I don't get ANY feedback about my work... I just have to survive a few more months until I get a developer job or an internship, but good grief, it feels like such a distant future...1