The Official Status Thread
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@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
How dumb/blind do people online have to be
Do not ask questions you don't want the answer to!
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@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
STATUS: PSYCHONAUTS 2!
The last thing I expected from this game is tsarist propaganda.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Some of them play their own stuff, but by then internal cargo cult has taken hold so the many problems don't seem to be problems. Happens everywhere, not just in game dev.
Disclaimer: it's not about you you specifically.
It appears to me that other trades tend at least to frown upon that, if superficially. Gamedev seems to range from "oh you don't play games? that's perfectly fine" to "stop fooling with the shit you... err, make and sell to other people".
Steam has this shit - developers playing their own games. I've turned it off. It's often painful to watch how folks muster everything they got to sound somewhat passionate (well, when they're not on crank or something). I get that. It's very difficult. If you can see past the faults (that you may be unable to fix), you have immense knowledge about the game. You're not surprised by anything, because you were the one who worked all the way to make it. Public dogfooding is not even testing, it's marketing.
Other than that I'm seeing the excuse that when you're working on something professionally, you can't find time and drive to do it anymore at your leisure. Or that you tend not to enjoy, but to analyze the work of others. Well, the results of that analysis could be useful, so get to it.
Playing games and developing them are two different things. One is the result and the other is a process. They complement each other. Gain understanding of developing and you stop being a chair-wetting twitch kid that knows how to fix everything. Gain understanding of playing and you get to know what chair-wetting twitch kid thinks about your shit.
Second of all, that's it. You've lost your passion for the result. It's just work now. Those are words of a toilet cleaner. Yeah, I suppose you wouldn't want to bring any of that work home. And I can sort of understand that. I've lost passion for coding, for example. Burned out, never really picked up again. But at the same time the result of "just work" is what we now got.
Third of all, there is a legitimate reason that there's more to a person than a vidja nerd. That one is the most plausible of all and... frankly, almost never comes up. Other excuses come first.
Well, then I guess playing games should be made part of work obligations for designers and project leads. Like practice sessions for musicians. Pull up that timesheet. "Two hours straight mostly being pissed at the shitty UI of the quest log in Game Name 3 by The Other Company. Totally looks like something we also do."
I don't know, maybe I'm totally off the mark about all of this, but perhaps if you sat down and actually played it from start to finish, you'd find out how ridiculous it is.
/rant
For instance, I'm currently fixing a long-standing issue with items that can be held, in that it's impossibly unintuitive to position the relative transforms describing where the object goes when held. End result? There's two ways to specify this that are mutually incompatible, and half the items use one system and the other half use the other, and it's fucking nuts!
Does the player care?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Well, then I guess playing games should be made part of work obligations for designers and project leads. Like practice sessions for musicians. Pull up that timesheet. "Two hours straight mostly being pissed at the shitty UI of the quest log in Game Name 3 by The Other Company. Totally looks like something we also do."
Back when there were 40 of us we would regularly have the entire office playtest the latest build and solicit feedback, and technically the door was always open for street goers to have a go at any time. But I can understand a gigantic company not having their randoms do the same. Would be great though!
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
For instance, I'm currently fixing a long-standing issue with items that can be held, in that it's impossibly unintuitive to position the relative transforms describing where the object goes when held. End result? There's two ways to specify this that are mutually incompatible, and half the items use one system and the other half use the other, and it's fucking nuts!
Does the player care?
Some do. They got a Calico cat plushie and were upset that if they grabbed it with the right hand it ended up in a position like you were cradling it, but if you used the left hand it ended up looking like you were fisting it. I want to try fixing it in the current system and gave up after half an hour.
Stupid shit like that which should be a quick adjustment currently isn't.
The underlying goal is to actually enhance functionality to the user side so they can set the grab points on 3d art they make. For example, say they made a flower. It is currently impossible to specify that when you grab it you should have it on the stem. Currently it just takes the origin of the object, which (unless you specifically drew it in a particular way) very likely would not be where you want it.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
They got a Calico cat plushie and were upset that if they grabbed it with the right hand it ended up in a position like you were cradling it, but if you used the left hand it ended up looking like you were fisting it. I want to try fixing it
Which way is the fix is left to the reader's imagination.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Back when there were 40 of us we would regularly have the entire office playtest the latest build and solicit feedback, and technically the door was always open for street goers to have a go at any time. But I can understand a gigantic company not having their randoms do the same. Would be great though!
It's not really about dogfooding your own games or offering them to testers. Playtesters and, later, players will tell you lots of things, often contradictory. One doesn't like X, another is okay with X, but not Y. I would do that depending on the time of day! Playtesting is important. Unless you pay playtesters, because that's what everybody does, but then piss on their feedback, because fixing things, as you know, is difficult. But it's not your personal experience.
You as a designer or project lead have to play other people's games from start to finish (provided that there is one; if not, some other long-standing goal). Maybe you used to, long ago. You don't know what that's like anymore. You play a level or two, or a demo, maybe, to get the general idea of what kids are up to these days. Then you make the same blunders you did 20 years ago, because your experience is actually handling Jira, Word and Powerpoint and maybe whatever design tools are relevant to your job.
Some do. They got a Calico cat plushie and were upset that if they grabbed it with the right hand it ended up in a position like you were cradling it, but if you used the left hand it ended up looking like you were fisting it
Granted. Seems like a fundamental thing, especially to anything to do with VR.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Seems like a fundamental thing,
One would think. And yet.....!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Then you make the same blunders you did 20 years ago, because your experience is actually handling Jira, Word and Powerpoint and maybe whatever design tools are relevant to your job.
If you made a game about what you really knew, you'd end up with Jira Saga World 3D, and that sounds really terrible.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
Jira Saga World 3D
Now that you've said it, Jira Management Simulator is probably coming to Steam Early Access Q4 2021.
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@TwelveBaud said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Got an e-mail from a recruiter asking me to fill an opening at a small .NET shop in Berea, Ohio. Split between onsite/remote, low pay (compared to DC) but excellent benefits and perks, good coworker community, working on developer tools.
It'd be a good fit except for two things. One, I'd have to relocate to Cincinnati, away from my family, friends, and fiancee. Two, I'm almost certain Inedo already turned me down for this job; having to pay a slave trader makes them less likely to hire than before, not more.
Honestly, after a conversation I had with Alex here, I don't think I'd want to work at Inedo.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Does the player care?
Hey! It's not nice to imply there's only one of them.
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@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Does the player care?
Hey! It's not nice to imply there's only one of them.
Not always the same one
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@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Honestly, after a conversation I had with Alex here, I don't think I'd want to work at Inedo.
Yeah I hear they use continuous integration and source control.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Honestly, after a conversation I had with Alex here, I don't think I'd want to work at Inedo.
Yeah I hear they use continuous integration and source control.
They probably even have style guides.
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@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Does the player care?
Hey! It's not nice to imply there's only one of them.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Honestly, after a conversation I had with Alex here, I don't think I'd want to work at Inedo.
Yeah I hear they use continuous integration and source control.
They probably even have style guides.
It's worse than that - the website uses
<div>s
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Status: Trying to figure out how to migrate a repository from subversion to git. (Not because git is good, but because it's de-facto standard with down-stream tooling.)
Following some article online, in preparation for this I'm running a command:
svn log --xml --quiet | grep author | ...The repo has about ~2500 commits. The command has been running for over 30 minutes now. How can this be so slow?
Viewing the full log messages on the web server (using trac
) takes about 10 seconds for 999 messages. That seems kinda slow already, but even then the whole thing should be done in under a minute.Feels like it's running Windows Update for every commit message.
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@topspin Is the XML output by
svn log --xmlformatted? If it's all on one line then grep is just pushing the entire contents through to the next command which might be ill equipped to deal with all the data...EDIT: Or worse: is it actually building an XML for the entire history in memory?
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@JBert said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin Is the XML output by
svn log --xmlformatted? If it's all on one line then grep is just pushing the entire contents through to the next command which might be ill equipped to deal with all the data...EDIT: Or worse: is it actually building an XML for the entire history in memory?
The xml seems to be formatted thusly
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <log> <logentry revision="2500"> <author>topspin</author> <date>2021-08-25T13:30:0Z</date> </logentry>The whole thing should be about 200KB in size, i.e. basically nothing.
Oh look, it finished in just under an hour. I could literally have done this faster manually!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Other than that I'm seeing the excuse that when you're working on something professionally, you can't find time and drive to do it anymore at your leisure.
Yeah. I intentionally chose to go into the specialty of electronic engineering I did, rather than one more aligned with a hobby, because I didn't want my job to interfere with my enthusiasm for Amateur Radio. I may run into that with a retirement business I want to start (hopefully, before I actually retire, so I already have a revenue stream going).
Or that you tend not to enjoy, but to analyze the work of others.
I do mixing (and sometimes directing) of live video as a volunteer (not professionally), and I often find myself distracted from the content by the technical aspects of others' videos.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
I often find myself distracted from the content by the technical aspects of others' videos.
Something like: "FFS, CAN'T YOU SEE THAT THE ASPECT RATIO IS COMPLETELY WRONG, AND HEAR HOW BAD THAT MICROPHONE SETUP IS MAKING YOUR VOICE SOUND? "
...huh... I mean... I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I definitely can't relate.
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@Zerosquare I don't pay much attention to the audio (unless it's really bad), because I have no competence in that arena. I tend to notice thing like cuts that are poorly timed, or a camera that moves when it's not supposed to. Sometimes I notice when things are especially well done and flow beautifully, but of course it's the mistakes that tend to jump out.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I could literally have done this faster manually!
That's not the point. I automate tasks because I don't have the attention span, not because it's faster.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zerosquare I don't pay much attention to the audio (unless it's really bad), because I have no competence in that arena. I tend to notice thing like cuts that are poorly timed, or a camera that moves when it's not supposed to. Sometimes I notice when things are especially well done and flow beautifully, but of course it's the mistakes that tend to jump out.
@error_bot xkcd kerning
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I could literally have done this faster manually!
That's not the point. I automate tasks because I don't have the attention span, not because it's faster.
I mean, obviously I didn’t do it manually. But I could have. Copy-pasting the one liner and waiting an hour allowed me to do other things in the meantime.
Like slacking off, or complaining here how this should be two orders of magnitude faster.
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@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Does the player care?
Hey! It's not nice to imply there's only one of them.
Soon as might have a few more explorers! Once I fix the account creation system...
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
@JBert said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin Is the XML output by
svn log --xmlformatted? If it's all on one line then grep is just pushing the entire contents through to the next command which might be ill equipped to deal with all the data...EDIT: Or worse: is it actually building an XML for the entire history in memory?
The xml seems to be formatted thusly
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <log> <logentry revision="2500"> <author>topspin</author> <date>2021-08-25T13:30:0Z</date> </logentry>The whole thing should be about 200KB in size, i.e. basically nothing.
Oh look, it finished in just under an hour. I could literally have done this faster manually!
Isn't the log just a text file though?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Isn't the log just a text file though?
Apparently not when you pass the
--xmlargument, which the command I copied used. Don't think it would've made any kind of difference. The output is tiny, so it can't be the formatting that's the problem but the server being slow as fuck to comb through the repository.Related status:
RA layer request failed: REPORT of '/svn/repositoryname/!svn/me': Could not read response body: SSL error: A TLS packet with unexpected length was received. (https://svn.domain.com) at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Git/SVN/Ra.pm line 282.I love technology!
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra I'm not that credulous.
Then why worry?
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I could literally have done this faster manually!
That's not the point. I automate tasks because I don't have the attention span, not because it's faster.
My whole life has been a lie
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I could literally have done this faster manually!
That's not the point. I automate tasks because I don't have the attention span, not because it's faster.
My whole life has been a lie
No, the way you personally operate your life differs from another.
Syncing worldviews is hard, yo!
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Apparently not when
When you use the actual tools, no. But I mean, inspecting the files on disk should show that all the transactions (commits) have the required metadata in separate distinct files. One could just iterate the directory,
heading the first three (I think) lines and have all you're asking for...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Apparently not when
When you use the actual tools, no. But I mean, inspecting the files on disk should show that all the transactions (commits) have the required metadata in separate distinct files. One could just iterate the directory,
heading the first three (I think) lines and have all you're asking for...SVN isn't distributed, a normal checkout only gives you a local working copy of the last commit, not complete history. I guess you could clone the whole repository with svnadmin somehow, but that wasn't what I was doing.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
, a normal checkout
ah, for some reason I was under the impression you had server access. Nevermind then.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
They got a Calico cat plushie and were upset that if they grabbed it with the right hand it ended up in a position like you were cradling it, but if you used the left hand it ended up looking like you were fisting it.
And rightfully so. You should be able to do both at the same time.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Then you make the same blunders you did 20 years ago, because your experience is actually handling Jira, Word and Powerpoint and maybe whatever design tools are relevant to your job.
If you made a game about what you really knew, you'd end up with Jira Saga World 3D, and that sounds really terrible.
"As the Last Jiranaut, you need to recover the Lost AC."
Capacity: 60P
WIP: 4 PYou are at a desk. What do you do?
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Then you make the same blunders you did 20 years ago, because your experience is actually handling Jira, Word and Powerpoint and maybe whatever design tools are relevant to your job.
If you made a game about what you really knew, you'd end up with Jira Saga World 3D, and that sounds really terrible.
"As the Last Jiranaut, you need to recover the Lost AC."
Capacity: 60P
WIP: 4 PYou are at a desk. What do you do?
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
They got a Calico cat plushie and were upset that if they grabbed it with the right hand it ended up in a position like you were cradling it, but if you used the left hand it ended up looking like you were fisting it.
And rightfully so. You should be able to do both at the same time.
There's a flag
bAllowTwoHandedGrabthat would let this happen.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
Then you make the same blunders you did 20 years ago, because your experience is actually handling Jira, Word and Powerpoint and maybe whatever design tools are relevant to your job.
If you made a game about what you really knew, you'd end up with Jira Saga World 3D, and that sounds really terrible.
"As the Last Jiranaut, you need to recover the Lost AC."
Capacity: 60P
WIP: 4 PYou are at a desk. What do you do?
Capacity: 59/60P
WIP: 5P
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Honestly, after a conversation I had with Alex here, I don't think I'd want to work at Inedo.
Yeah I hear they use continuous integration and source control.
Struck me as a little hypocritical is all. There was a time that somebody told Alex to stuff his new ideas and go along with industry standards. Now he's in a big chair telling new people with different ideas to stuff them and do as they're told. I respect that he put up this website many years ago but that doesn't mean that attitude suddenly doesn't stink.
Edit: This is the message I was referring to. "Brokenness all over but shut up because you can't possibly know anything."
@apapadimoulis said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
The folks in an organization who would hire you (i.e. the solo engineer) really don't want, need, nor care about your input on how to solve their business problems all that differently. Sure, some advice on variable naming or code structure, fine, whatever, but I suspect you are thinking bigger than that.
By the time they've hired you, the business decisions were already made. You may have better ideas, but because you lack the bigger picture and organizational history, your ideas are probably wrong. It's simply not worth the time or energy to listen or entertain your ideas, because as I said, the decision was already made.
@loopback0 said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
They probably even have style guides.
It's worse than that - the website uses
<div>sRed flags are red flags.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zerosquare I don't pay much attention to the audio (unless it's really bad), because I have no competence in that arena. I tend to notice thing like cuts that are poorly timed, or a camera that moves when it's not supposed to. Sometimes I notice when things are especially well done and flow beautifully, but of course it's the mistakes that tend to jump out.
@error_bot xkcd kerning
The license plate on the car parked right in front of our communal garage.
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@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Edit: This is the message I was referring to. "Brokenness all over but shut up because you can't possibly know anything."
@apapadimoulis said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
The folks in an organization who would hire you (i.e. the solo engineer) really don't want, need, nor care about your input on how to solve their business problems all that differently. Sure, some advice on variable naming or code structure, fine, whatever, but I suspect you are thinking bigger than that.
By the time they've hired you, the business decisions were already made. You may have better ideas, but because you lack the bigger picture and organizational history, your ideas are probably wrong. It's simply not worth the time or energy to listen or entertain your ideas, because as I said, the decision was already made.
I think you mistook his point. And I base that assertion on my experience as an agency-based consultant who has done a string of “solo engineer” gigs over the past 5 years.
The issue isn’t that you do or don’t have solutions for the business’s problems with changes to the process or the major design decisions. The issue is that as an interviewee or a new hire / first day consultant, you can’t possibly have enough business knowledge to KNOW that your way is better. Even if you have a lot of general domain knowledge (say from working at their competitor for 20 years), you simply lack the context of THAT business’s state, culture, and history.
When my agency is preparing consultants for their first gig as an embedded staff member at the client, we stress that the goal ISN’T to swoop in from on high and grant the client better processes. It’s critically important to meld in as the low point on the totem pole and observe the client’s processes, asking questions to clarify why they do things that appear inefficient or wrong. Sometimes there’s a real business reason for it. Sometimes they know it’s bad and want figure out how to change it (or how to sell to management that they need to change it). And occasionally, it’s just the way things are and you’ll have to determine if it’s worth your credibility and political capital to sell them on changing it, at which point you have hopefully built up enough business knowledge to have a sense of the cost of changing it so you can sell them on your improvement.
Whether one is a HPC or a captive employee, you need to partner with your team / company to improve things. Not save them from themselves. If you’re going into a potential gig with a “me vs them” mindset, you’ve already poisoned your candidacy.
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@izzion I have serious PTSD from working in environments of "we can't accomplish X, but we must accomplish X, but we're not going to consider any ideas on a path forward to accomplishing X." As you're well aware, the hammer is about to fall on me again for "somehow" not managing to accomplish X under those conditions. There's a certain level of autonomy that I expect and I do not deliver when it's not afforded.
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Status: Who is Teepublic fooling generating a shipping notice at 10 PM?
I hope this shirt I ordered fares better than the last one. It seemed like they had lowered the quality on the standard shirts to fit within the lower budget of their 30% sales. But I had better luck with the thicker shirts...until the last one. I got one wash out of it before it started to flake off and at the rate it's deteriorating I don't think it'll make it to ten.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Going to go play some vidja games I guess....
It is my unyielding resolution that if devlopers were to actually play vidja games, we may see them better designed.
Like, sit down and take note of every annoyance. Then don't do that shit in yours.That sounds good on paper but falls apart pretty badly in reality. Who plays video games the most? Hardcore gamers. What do hardcore gamers do when the game is being annoying? Git gud. What happens when developers git gud at the pre-alpha version of the game they're making? The late 80s/early 90s happen - games so hard it takes years to complete one even though there's just 30 minutes of content. And by hard, I mean the controls are awful and not that the enemies are challenging.
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Status: Had to unblock unknown callers for 2 days so that the technician from my internet company can call me. In that time, I've got one confused Uber driver, one stranger who told me I called them earlier, 2 extended warranties, 1 loan relief and 4 disability advisors. #Mericuh
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@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Had to unblock unknown callers for 2 days so that the technician from my internet company can call me. In that time, I've got one confused Uber driver, one stranger who told me I called them earlier, 2 extended warranties, 1 loan relief and 4 disability advisors. #Mericuh
Status:
> Be
> Doesn't block calls.
> Waits for scammers
> Months pass
> Nobody calls.
> Wants sum fuk.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
The repo has about ~2500 commits. The command has been running for over 30 minutes now. How can this be so slow?
Slow? That's subversion. It really doesn't cope well with actually talking about more than a few commits (the ones near the branch tips). I don't know what the exact cause is, but I suspect it's Schlemieling when going back through the history and doesn't have an efficient representation of the state as anything less than a full checkout.
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Oh look, it finished in just under an hour. I could literally have done this faster manually!
Yes, but not as accurately. Importing is one of these things that you set going and then go and do something else. And only later do you spend time considering just what wasn't quite imported correctly (if anything) because there's always room for “Fuck You!” in any plan.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
Yes, but not as accurately. Importing is one of these things that you set going and then go and do something else.
But it wasn't even the import, it was only to generate the users.txt file containing a map of the 15-ish SVN users to git-style name <email>.
And only later do you spend time considering just what wasn't quite imported correctly (if anything) because there's always room for “Fuck You!” in any plan.
Yeah, probably.
1015: Kerning - explain xkcd
