Was playing fallout 4 a couple days ago. About 20 minutes in. The computer just shuts off. Like no power at all. I start up the computer again. Try fallout 4 again. It shuts off at the beginning video. WTF... I try Skyrim wondering if video card is busted. Skyrim runs perfectly fine. I startup Fallout 4 again. It runs. WTF...

Next day I try fallout and bout 20 minutes in power off again. Now I am assuming cooling issue and I am trying to see temps with programs. Cannot really tell.

So today I take apart my laptop and vacuum every cooling orifice out. Vacuum any dust looking crap I can see. There was dust in the fans. All clean. I run a memory test for a couple hours. Memory passes (it was brand new memory, thought maybe flaw in ram). Now I run fallout 4. Runs fine, zero issues for about an hour.

Me to myself: CLEAN YOUR DAMN COMPUTER MORE OFTEN! Okay...

In between I read about Fallout 4 causing system reboots and shutdowns due to loading and heating. Apparently something about Fallout 4 causes this more than other games. Wild... Pretty sure it was thermal shutdown protection going on.

I drank two pots of coffee and am now paranoid. I want to do memory test of my new ram. So I am going to use memtest from https://memtest.org/ . Out of paranoia I decide to test with VirusTotal. It passes 68 out of 70 tests. 2 say its bad. Windows Defender says it is fine. I usually just rely on Windows defender. I test with another site and it says it is clean. But is it really clean? Why do so many assholes ruin a good thing? Scammers and blackhat hackers are scum.

I have been trying to come up with some funny oil jokes. My wife said they were all crude.

I am feeling a bit boolean. I am either on or off.

I shouldn't try to make up jokes. I have to face it that they are a shade unfunny.

It seems like very version of Ubuntu I use at work has jank. Ubuntu 18.04 would have file managers that just die. After locking/unlocking the screen it would move windows between monitors. One window would seemingly cause other windows to have discoloration and I would see phantom objects text overlaid with what looks like transparency. This was all Gnome. Lots of little quirks that I just got used to.

Now I am running 22.04 and while a lot of jank went away I am getting new jank. Every once in a while if I move a window or bring a window up after hiding the window. The window will oversize across the screen like I zoomed in. Noticing this with Firefox. It goes back to normal size real quick. But it is kind of wild. Jank that stayed is my external monitor I have attached through hdmi takes its sweet time to reactivate after being asleep. This might actually be a weird hardware issue. This is also Gnome.

I just find it wild that this jank is there and we are like: "Oh well. At least it ain't MS Windows jank..."

So this is truly something random. A dude I work with randomly slapped my ass today. It was around other people. I simple looked at them and said, "I feel uncomfortable." He started saying: "We need to get uncomfortable..." I said: "No, we don't." I am pretty sure he meant this in jest, but I hope I made it clear it will not happen again.

I am not comfortable with people randomly touching me. I don't care if you are male or female. Keep your hands off. I will shake your hand at work. I don't understand what would make someone think slapping your butt is okay. He is older than me I think. In his 50s maybe.

When you have a coworker who is not healthy (extremely obese) and you walk past their office. You notice they may have their eyes closed. Are they asleep? Are they dead? I need to leave work ASAP as I don't want to be the one to find out...

Anyway, I hope not. Would make for a shitty start to the weekend. I also don't think he and his family would like that weekend either.

I feel for the guy, he had a family member commit suicide. I think it fucked him up and he either reached for the bottle or for food. Either of those would make you unhealthy and could make you fat. I think a lot of people hide a lot of pain in their lives behind faux smiles.

This is one of the coolest shader tutorials I have seen.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

It simply walks you through start to finish enhancing a weapon. I also found it can also be applied to 2D games as well. What I don't like is it is not setup to be generic. I will have to figure out how to make it be a weapon effect you can apply. I think having weapons provide a mask for where the shaders should be applied would make that possible. Then the generic effects can be applied to the weapons or removed. No need to have unique weapons of every type and for every effect.

This is the kind of tutorials that really get me going. When thinking of 2D I had not really thought about using shaders like this.

Been looking into 2D maps for a game. I am learning how to use tools that do autotiling. I want to have generated worlds for terrain. It is interesting how the scope of what you are learning starts expanding rapidly and can overwhelm you. I started wanting to learn autotiling. This went from that to autogen, to modifying terrain, to how to store generated terrain, to how to store difference between autogen and player modified, to how to separate things into chunks, to how to store a whole world worth of data! Like dude, chill. Just learn how to use autotiling first. Then learn how autogen, then learn how to efficiently chunk things,. Also the 2d data won't be big so just store the data you genned so if modified. The worlds don't have to be ultra huge. Really stop freaking out what it could be and see what it is. JUST FUCKING ITERATE!

It is wild to watch yourself get featuritus without learning how to crawl fist. Just divide and conquer.

A man dies, but how did everyone know he was sick? They saw his coffin.

Ted passes gas in a meeting. Manager: You have gone to far Ted!

I have named my oven Michael Jackson. It takes far to long to pre-hee-heat!

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.

Having a hard time thinking the alternates to if statements is a good idea. I was genuinely curious how this was done. The examples I am finding seem to just spread the logic everywhere across multiple objects. To me this makes the logic objectively less clear. I didn't understand the obsession with objects until I saw the examples that creates a fuckton of boiler plate objects. How someone can say this is preferred over a few if statements boggles my mind. I actually am trying to understand the functional mindset as well. It is not going well for me. I can sorta see some value in using a map. Technically a lookup could be faster. But again it spreads the code all around adding more boilerplate.

https://blog.bitsrc.io/reduce-if-el...

https://dev.to/phouchens/...

Is it because these are contrived examples? I initially searched to find ways of reducing ifs in a functional approach. I did find it in the second example. I was however hoping to find that by lazy eval or something. I see people making references to how one you "get it" functional logic is easier to understand and evaluate. I cannot tell if this is straight up gaslighting or my brain is just too fucking imperative.

Dude I work with doing Windows developing gets hit by ransomware. He thinks it came through a VSCode extension. So I go looking and find this:
https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/...

The guy was demanding $10K. The amount of work lost would not be equal to that. We are just gonna wipe it and rebuild the computer. What a scum bag.

How do you detect this kind of stuff early?

So @ostream disappears shortly after @retoor agreed to meet up with him...

So I am driving home and stop at a light. Some dude in a truck behind me starts flipping me off at the light. The road is 45mph and 2 lanes. I am in the right lane. So when the light changes I speed up to 35mph so he can pass me. He decides to tailgate me and honk at me. So I stay steady and he eventually goes around me. I keep my distance. But it looks like he is going to the same place as me. Before I get to the road I want to park for my destination he takes the same road and parks his truck and trailer where I normally park facing the wrong direction. Okay, wtf, but okay. So I go further down the road to turn around and park somewhere else. He guns his truck to cut me off from that parking spot. I have to hit my brakes to prevent hitting him. I raise my hands in the are like "why?" I then finish turning around and head back to my parking spot and park. So this guy tried to cause a car accident. At this point I took my stuff inside and put it away. Came back out and called the police to report the incident. They said they cannot identify a crime, but I can fill out a police report. While I am on the phone with the police this guy leaves that street giving me this bizarre deranged smile. I refuse to engage. I spent the next hour filling out the police report. In the process I find out he lives on that street a few houses down. I am nowhere near his house, but he seems to not like me parking on that street. This guy must have seen my car on that street before and decides to randomly road rage. I gave his name and address to the police. My intent to build a case file if he doesn't knock this shit off.

So now I gotta buy a fucking dash cam and put it in my car because of some nutjob plumber. I have nothing against plumbers, but this guy fits the definition of knuckle dragger. His name isn't even Mario or Luigi, bummer.

Another thing that might be related is that during the winter somebody dumped a ton of snow onto my car when it was parked there. It looked like it was on purpose. If this is the same guy this guy drove his snow plow 4 houses down. Definitely has mental problems.

Well this is interesting:
https://slate.com/technology/2024/...

Will be interesting to see what happens here. I knew there was a jack up on prices for accessories. Never imagined it would be a lawsuit. I wonder if there is any collusion by Apple and Google to keep other phone makers out of markets? It seems like most phones are either iPhone or Android based. Maybe that part is organic.

Been thinking about if I want voice acting in my games. Potentially it would be really expensive. So I wondered if there was AI libraries for training your own voices. There are a few and some even are trying to do it realtime. Or at least fast enough for web site use.

I find this library:
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Looks interesting, but I need training data. I found that you can license a limited number of words from voice actors. The licensing doesn't seem to care if how you use the data as long as it stays inside your production (video, game, etc). There are even some free ones out there. I think it might be kinda fun to learn how to do this.

Yes, there are a bunch of AI websites, but the voices almost always seem conversational. Not voices in a game setting. Most of those are stupid subscription bullshit. I also looked at text to speech and most of those are subscription. I really really hate the SaaS business model. I avoid companies that use it as much as I can.

Why do I see so many developers in the game community asking if a <insert tool> is usable for making a game? (I see it a bit here too for language and framework suggestions.)

Then I started thinking that these people either don't know what they want to do or they don't research the tools to find out what the capabilities are. Yes a certain percentage don't have a clue and are asking out of complete nativity.

However, as a developer I have always looked into features I think I need and base decisions on that. Often times spending a couple of days to play with the tool. Learn by doing.

Then I got a bit philosophical. Are the people asking these questions because their value system is based upon collectivism rather than merit? They will be in for a rude awakening when they cannot finish a project on time or at all when a feature is not there.

I get it on some level though. Sometimes we gotta know if something is complete shit.

Seems like lately...

Really? Do you have what it takes?
Yes, it does compile.

So Stroustrup tells the White House: Fuck you, C++ isn't C (paraphrased):
https://infoworld.com/article/...

Go get em Bjarne!

The name of this game is: Identify the Context.

Found this gem of a quote:
"There is enough space between shaft and belt to sneak."

Now, identify the context!

So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...

The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?

Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.

Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.

I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.

I am not discussing linking at all, btw.

What games made you racist? Or had racist content when you thought about it? (Whether intentional or not.)

Skyrim (somewhat Morrowind too, not Oblivion). I hate piss elves (high elves). They are condescending cunts. Didn't much care for Dark Elves in Morrowind. They were always swearing at me. Orcs are kinda stupid, but their abilities made me respect them. I have great respect for the Nords. Some of them wanted to murder all elves. I am okay with this. The Foresworn are gross.

Minecraft. Didn't make me racist, but had some interesting inclusions. First off all the villagers looks Jewish and are the arbiters of trade. Weird that. Then there is the Endermen. They are black, they steal blocks, they were introduced with watermelons (maybe not true, what I heard), and want to fight you if you look at them. I wonder if they will get changed later because of this...

You know a game is doing something right on their stories to get you wrapped up in the politics to choose sides. I think this may be part of the success of Skyrim. I hope to make my own players polarized on topics in my games, but in a good way.

Got to talking with someone in our company about AI generated code. I said we still have to audit the code, understand how it works, and ensure there isn't any nefarious libraries or code in what is produced. Like what we "should" be doing when we find libraries on the web. I explained how people will purposely create libraries that are spoofs of other libraries, but have malicious code embedded in them. It doesn't take much to imagine someone using a sketchy AI to push this kinda code.

How do you reasonably fight this if we start increasingly relying on generated code by AI? So I suggested we need an AI to review AI generated code. Then we need an AI to review the AI that reviews the AI generated code. Then...

I suggested we make a feature that has a checkbox that is greyed out and always selected. It would have words describing what the checkbox does. This would inform the user about how the feature works, but won't allow them to change that behavior.

So I am ready and willing to create user hostile software features. I am ready to work for Microsoft.

My wife is a bigger nerd that me. She just told me Rooster Teeth is shutting down. Who knows shit like that? I haven't looked at anything Rooster Teeth since Red vs Blue.

Earlier conversation with her about something else:
Me: I can't believe how stupid people are. I cannot believe people are stupid enough to...
Her: Hold up. You really need to expand your imagination about how stupid people can actually be.
Me: I am not smart enough to understand how stupid people can be.

Yeah, I think she may be the smart one. She makes up for my weaknesses.

So my boss is telling me they plan on moving away from Qt. The value proposition is just not there anymore. Maybe I will learn to be a C++ programmer again, and not a Qt programmer. This will be interesting the next few months.

Unlearn what you have learned.

WTF of the day.
WTF did a duck fuck?

So my kid tells me that her teacher said my kid could teach the class. I told my kid that was great, good job!

Later my kid is talking to me:
Kid: Nerd!
Me: If I remember correctly. Your teacher said you could teach her class. My teachers never told me that. I think that makes you the nerd.
Kid: <big frown>

FUCK!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!
I have to put my dog down.
FUCK!!!