@kirakira you did and i think about that a lot

@kirakira and almost shared them with me

the naive say it was a problem

replaced babey laptop’s ram and it passed memtest \o/

@kasdeya bloodstained is very much a spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night – it was largely led by Koji Igarashi who was previously the assistant director of Symphony of the Night! highly recommend

monstral (adj)
of or relating to monsters

@kasdeya i guess if i had to answer “why do i use complicated solutions” it’s because the problem i’m trying to solve is complicated. when making a game, i’m not interested in solving how to make a render graph, or how to make camera which utilizes that render graph, or how to make a renderer which supports multiple cameras and multiple rendering stages. i want to make a game, not an audio system that can be used in a game, so i try to pick the right tool for the job. in some cases, the problem i’m trying to solve is trivial enough that writing it myself will be the best option, but sometimes the problem is so broad and complicated that trying to do it myself would simply result in me giving up

@kasdeya i don’t think of myself as a programmer in the sense that i enjoy the process of writing code or even thinking about the specifics of computer science, i do get a roundabout joy from it especially as it serves my other passions. i think i fall into your definition of amateur. but i’m probably also results-driven in that any joy i derive from programming is mostly supported by how much it will help me achieve what it is i’m trying to do. that could be “this code isn’t horrible to look at” or “i’ve abstracted away something really nasty so i can focus on what matters.” i don’t derive any joy from the abstractions themselves, only how they serve me. so i guess keep that in mind for the rest of this post?

i don’t see bcts as substantially different from using an external module, package, or even code-snippet from a random github gist. the only fundamental difference to me is how much i’m taking which i find very important in terms of cognitive load. when i take a 10-line function from stack overflow, i can generally understand it exactly as it is, it requires very little work from me to figure out how to incorporate it into what i’m working on.

however, as i borrow something more substantial it becomes imperative that i can efficiently understand what it is and how i’ll use it. in many cases, reading line-by-line would be overwhelming and unnecessary. what i really need is to understand how i can use it to solve the problem i’ve selected it to solve. if this is a little library that gives me a single data structure or two, that just means i need to know what the methods do and its general purpose. though, in the case of something much larger in scope, i may need to understand it in broader terms and digest the details as i get to them. “oh, so this is an ephemeral nosql database with a focus on performance” lets me know that it’s probably used for caching or something. if i want to store and persist my game’s data while making relationships between all of it, i know to skip this database.

and then of course, bcts like Unity or Blender. these are often meant to do more than just hang off the side of your app – they’re so substantial that it dwarfs whatever code i’m going to write, so it makes sense to architect my code around it instead. it’s not necessarily that i want to use it, but if i have an idea for a game that requires any significant amount of complexity, i’m going to need to learn a lot of stuff to pull it off. and this is more than just replacing unity with a bunch of libraries which roughly sum to the same feature set – i also need to have the knowledge on how to orchestrate them to get what i want.

@kasdeya although i get increasingly uncomfortable with vagueness and high-level concepts as i approach the point of implementation, i find it extremely valuable to know what something is supposed do to before i invest a bunch of time trying to figure it out from its low-level details. too many times have i been left with some horrible api docs just to figure out what the fuck an application is supposed to do

in one sense, i think of high-level architectural descriptions as contracts for how the low-level implementations will operate. it doesn’t tell me exactly what it does line-by-line, or even function-by-function, but it does set my expectations. sometimes the implementation details don’t matter (“will i use a dictionary or an array?”, “should these be int32 or int64? or maybe float32?”) and i just need to know broadly how something works (“it returns a collection of numbers”). this is useful when i don’t want to box myself into thinking about specific optimizations or anything else like that.

each game entity has components that are processed through a data pipeline

what i get from this is that it follows some type of component-based pattern. “that are processed through a data pipeline” doesn’t communicate terribly much to me aside from “entities are handled in some multi-step fashion where they are progressively transformed into something else.” i would want to know more about the data pipelines – do i set them up? are they configurable?

thinking in broad strokes before jumping into a sea of complexity helps me figure out at a glance if something will work for me or not. it gives me an impressionist painting of what working with the software will be like.

@vivi so talented!

@vivi waa

🐏 sketched storm hedgehog as Krampus
this kinda suits him : v
#mlpstormcreature #mlpart

"goodnight :3" --> 15 minutes of sending each other hugs and pats --> actually sleeping

when it is cold outside it is imperative to keep tummy stocked full of warm

really ecstatic to receive this piece from @cantdoxthedrox (part of this YCH)

@eclairwolf hey im one of those!