andolanra (u/andolanra)

andolanra commented on Game Development Post-Unity computerenhance.com/p/gam... · Posted by u/generichuman

Sure, but at the time they showed real interest in becoming a mainstream game engine, showed some cool advanced projects, and had a few years to try out, why did the give up if there was hype?

andolanra · 2 years ago

I'm not sure what "cool advanced projects" you're thinking of, but to my recollection, there was very little in the way of finished work created with the original Blender Game Engine. There were two game efforts associated with the Open Movie Projects: Yo Frankie! (associated with Big Buck Bunny) and Sintel The Game (associated with Sintel.) The former had something like a proper release, but the latter only ever got a few alpha releases before being abandoned: neither was terribly impressive except inasmuch as a demo of the technology, and to my recollection, neither inspired much hype. (The Wikipedia page for Yo Frankie! says dryly, "The game was noted by the gaming press," without any further elaboration, which does not speak to massive amounts of excitement or hype.)

Since then, aside from some interesting bits of work that didn't actually make shipping games easier, the engine really languished. My understanding is that a big part of the reason the engine was removed was that it made work on other parts of Blender more difficult, and that dispensing with the (little-used) engine in favor of the (increasingly popular) modeling tool was clearly a net benefit to being able to develop Blender, especially since the mantle of "open source game engine" had been taken up by other competent projects like Godot.

So yes, they may have at some point aspired to becoming a "mainstream game engine", but there's more to that effort than just aspirations and demos. (And at the same time, the fact that the BGE faltered doesn't mean that other open source game engine efforts would necessarily face the same fate.)

It's probably also worth saying that people have forked the game engine and you can still use it: the forked version is called UPBGE, and there are people out there trying to make it work. By and large, though, the Blender project seems to point people at projects like Godot, with the idea that a focused game engine is probably better suited to modern games than something that strapped a game engine onto a piece of modeling software.

andolanra commented on Game Development Post-Unity computerenhance.com/p/gam... · Posted by u/generichuman

readyplayernull · 2 years ago

10 years ago everyone believed Blender would become the new Unity, but it didn't, it's too difficult to make games with Blender, no one even mentions the idea or recommends it anymore, although its 3D editor is highly used and improved during the years. For Godot to become the favorite indie game engine they must focus on making its workflow straightfoward and simple. On the tech aspect Godot seems like Unity 5.

andolanra · 2 years ago

Nobody mentions the idea or recommends it anymore because the game engine was removed from Blender entirely back in 2019, in favor of purpose-build game engines like Godot: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/R...

andolanra commented on Leaving Haskell behind journal.infinitenegativeu... · Posted by u/mpereira

chubot · 2 years ago

This part is interesting:

A good concrete example here is a compiler project I was involved in where our first implementation had AST nodes which used a type parameter to represent their expression types: in effect, this made it impossible to produce a syntax tree with a type error, because if we attempted this, our compiler itself wouldn't compile. This approach did catch a few bugs as we were first writing the compiler! It also made many optimization passes into labyrinthine messes whenever they didn't strictly adhere to the typing discipline that we wanted: masses of casts and lots of work attempting to appease the compiler for what should have been simple rewrites. In that project, we eventually removed the type parameter from the AST

which also seems to conflict with this:

Using data structures indexed by compiler phase is a good example of a “fancy type-level feature” that I've found remarkably useful in the past.

Both of these sound like the "AST typing problem" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114976

which I admit I'm a bit skeptical of, because the problem is type safety, and not the compiler's actual algorithm or actual performance.

But I guess the first one is for syntax trees, and the "trees that grow" paper (linked in the article) is for back end passes? Does that change the problem so much?

I'm not experienced with back end passes for compilers, but I personally don't see the problem of using either a Map<AST, ExtraInfo> or a nullable field.

I just hacked on a toy codebase that had the Expr<void> and Expr<T> type safe solution, and it's interesting. But my first impression is that it causes more allocations and makes the code a bit longer.

---

I guess another way to justify the Map is that it's like math -- a "typing relation" is an association from expr to type, so a map or multi-map seems natural to model it.

andolanra · 2 years ago

The former is referring to representing an AST using a GADT in order to include the typing discipline of the target language in the host language. For example:

  data Term t where
    Num :: Integer -> Term Integer
    Bool :: Integer -> Term Integer
    Add :: Term Integer -> Term Integer -> Term Integer
    IsZero :: Term Integer -> Term Bool
    IfThenElse :: Term Bool -> Term a -> Term a -> Term a

With this AST, you can express well-typed programs like `Add (Num 2) (Num 3)`, but the Haskell type system will stop if you express an incorrectly-typed program like `Add (Num 2) (Bool False)`.

The "Trees That Grow" paper, on the other hand, is about reusing the same AST but gradually adding more information to the nodes as you progress through the compiler. For example, you might want to start with variable names being raw strings (so that a term corresponding to `lambda x: lambda x: x` looks like `Lam "x" (Lam "x" (Var "x"))`) but eventually replace them with unique symbols so that shadowed names are non-identical (so that under the hood it looks more like `Lam 1 (Lam 2 (Var 2))`, although in practice you'd want to keep the old name around somewhere for debugging.)

One way to accomplish this is to introduce an explicit type-level notion of compiler phases, give your terms a type parameter which corresponds to the phase, and use the phase to choose different representations for the same nodes:

  data CompilerPhase = Parsed | Resolved
  
  data Expr (phase :: CompilerPhase)
    = Lam (Name phase) (Expr phase)
    | App (Expr phase) (Expr phase)
    | Var (Name phase)

  type family Name (t :: CompilerPhase) :: *
  type instance Name Parsed = String
  type instance Name Resolved = Int

Using this example, an `Expr Parsed` will contain variables that are just strings, while an `Expr Resolved` will contain variables that are integers, and you can write a pass `resolve :: Expr Parsed -> Expr Resolved` which just modifies the AST. (This is a toy example: in a real compiler, you'd probably want to create a new type for resolved variables that still keeps a copy of the name around and maybe some location information that points to the place the variable was introduced.)

andolanra commented on Ruby's hash is a Swiss-army knife akshaykhot.com/ruby-hash-... · Posted by u/software_writer

Klonoar · 2 years ago

The inverse here - specifying {} directly - does not at a glance imply a default value is being constructed.

(Or perhaps it does and this is just some Ruby-ism I'm not exposed to)

andolanra · 2 years ago

That's kind of the point of default values, though. If you wanted to make a change to the method and you want it to break to alert you to all the calls, then you can add a keyword without adding a default value for it.

    def foo(kwargs = {}, frob:)
      kwargs
    end

andolanra commented on Ruby's hash is a Swiss-army knife akshaykhot.com/ruby-hash-... · Posted by u/software_writer

andolanra · 2 years ago

Since Ruby 3, the automatic coercion of keywords to a hash—the second example underneath "Passing Hash to Functions" in this post—is considered a legacy style and is generally frowned upon in new code. That is to say, code like the second call to `foo` here:

    def foo(kwargs = {})
      kwargs
    end
    
    foo({k: 1})  # ok: passing hash argument
    foo(k: 1)    # ok: keywords coerced to hash

One of the strongest arguments for avoiding this sugar is that it makes the code more brittle in the face of future changes. In particular, in the example above, if we add a new keyword argument to `foo`, then any call which omitted the curly braces will break, while calls which used them will keep working fine:

    # added a new keyword arg here
    def foo(kwargs = {}, frob: false)
      kwargs
    end
    
    foo({k: 1})  # still ok: `frob` defaults to false
    foo(k: 1)    # ArgumentError: no keyword: :k

This is touched on in the blog post describing the extensive changes made to keywords in Ruby 3: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/12/12/separation-of-p...

andolanra commented on Tuple Space (2014) wiki.c2.com/?TupleSpace... · Posted by u/paulgb

colonwqbang · 2 years ago

No offense, but how is it an advance? Who needs a wiki that can't be edited? (If I'm mistaken about this, maybe someone can educate me)

andolanra · 2 years ago

If you know git: a federated wiki works like that. To make a federated wiki work like a traditional wiki, you can think of there as being a "canonical copy" which you can clone, make edits, and then use a 'pull request' process for incorporating those edits back into the original. But you also don't need to have a single source of truth: you can, for example, have a group of people—say, students studying for a class—who are building their own wikis, and among each other they can copy in pages, make changes, copy changes back, and so forth, all building a web of things. In the same way that git can replicate a subversion-like workflow but also introduces the possibility of different workflows, a federated wiki can replicate a traditional wiki but also has a number of workflows it can accomplish.

andolanra commented on An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games... · Posted by u/Macha

kubb · 3 years ago

Thanks for your detailed response, it's excellent and so kind of you to give me such detailed suggestions. I feel I have to check out every single one of these systems. I only knew Pathfinder and Dungeon World.

I like the idea of the OSR systems with small rulesets. So I'll check The Black Hack first. Do you know about any systems like this one that have been published under the Creative Commons license?

andolanra · 3 years ago

The other one I mentioned—Maze Rats—is licensed as CC BY 4.0, so that might be a good place to start! (The Black Hack is licensed under the OGL 1.0, which unfortunately means it's not immune to the whole mess that this thread is about, but I'm hoping that a lot of the creators who put stuff out under the OGL 1.0 either come up with a new license that's not associated with WotC or relicense their stuff under something like a CC license. I guess we'll see!)

andolanra commented on An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games... · Posted by u/Macha

kubb · 3 years ago

At this point I'm hoping for some names of high quality open source high fantasy RPGs with a lot of content ready to jump in and play.

andolanra · 3 years ago

It depends on what you're looking for! I'll give just a handful here, but I'm happy to expand if you have a specific follow-up questions to these.

If you're interesting in something very D&D-like, there's obviously Pathfinder 2E[1], which builds on the same D&D skeleton but has a much sharper and cleaner approach to grid-based tactical combat. However, I'd also suggest looking at some of the games in the OSR ("Old School Renaissance") space. Games like The Black Hack[2] or Maze Rats[3] provide a much smaller set of rules which are easy to adapt to other adventures: the goal is that you can take adventure modules for effectively any existing D&D-like game—including both present and past versions of D&D—and run them with little overhead.

Something pretty different mechanically but which is quite compelling in that space is Torchbearer[4], which is based on the underlying Burning Wheel[5] system but made significantly simpler (and shares a lot of those simplifications with Mouse Guard[6] except it's, well, not about sword-wielding mice.) Torchbearer is a great dungeon-crawl-focused system that can really capture grit and difficulty in a way that's a lot of fun, but it's also the kind of game where you can get a total party kill not just by a dragon but also by running out of food and torches, so expect a grimy tough game out of it!

If you're looking for something even further afield, I'd suggest taking a peek at Dungeon World[7], which borrows the core mechanics from indie darling Apocalypse World[8] but applies them to a traditional D&D milieu: that said, I'd actually start with Homebrew World[9], which streamlines and clarifies a lot of the rules, but it might require Dungeon World itself to get a handle on how to run the game. Games inspired by Apocalypse World—sometimes called Powered by the Apocalypse games—definitely play a bit differently—they tend to be a bit more "zoomed-out", e.g. combat being resolved in a fewer high-level rolls rather than playing out a full sequence of six-second slices like D&D—and they aren't to everyone's liking, but I think they're worth trying.

I'm also going to plug my personal favorite tabletop game, Blades in the Dark[10], which is not a traditional fantasy game (although people have adapted the the rules to more traditional fantasy, c.f. Raiders in the Dark[11]) but which I think is super compelling. It's about criminals in a haunted Victorian-ish setting doing odd jobs, and builds a system that's top-of-its-class for doing that, including mechanical support for heist-movie-style flashbacks and a lot of systems designed to let you do risky moves and narrowly avoid failure from them. Some of my absolute favorite TTRPG moments have been in Blades games.

Any of that sound interesting? Want other examples or directions?

[1]: https://paizo.com/pathfinder [2]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/255088/The-Black-Hack-S... with the open content collected at https://the-black-hack.jehaisleprintemps.net/ [3]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/197158/Maze-Rats [4]: https://www.burningwheel.com/torchbearer-2e-core-set/ [5]: https://www.burningwheel.com/burning-wheel/ [6]: https://www.mouseguard.net/book/role-playing-game/ [7]: https://dungeon-world.com/ [8]: http://apocalypse-world.com/ [9]: https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2019/05/homebrew-world-v15... [10]: https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel [11]: https://smallcoolgames.itch.io/raiders-in-the-dark

andolanra commented on An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games... · Posted by u/Macha

kubb · 3 years ago

Sure, but do any of them have the quality and polish to replace DnD?

andolanra · 3 years ago

Absolutely and then some! I personally would argue that D&D itself—5E in particular here—is actually a fairly middling tabletop game. It's held back by a lot of historical cruft because even new editions end up being forced to stick to decades-old design decisions for the sake of tradition. A simple example here is the distinction between ability scores and ability modifiers: this is an old D&D-ism and trying to remove it sparks complaints about how it's "not D&D", but it's frankly some unnecessary complexity and other tabletop games lose nothing by dropping scores and just using modifiers.

Apart from the core design, D&D is also pretty middling as a product. Being a DM for D&D is hard—a fair bit harder than running many other tabletop games—and the book are at best a so-so resource: there's a lot of extra prep and careful balance that rests on the DM's shoulders, and doing it right means either falling back part-and-parcel on adventure modules or doing a lot of careful tuning and reading forums and Reddit threads. In an ideal world, the core books would include everything you need to know, but in practice the best DM advice is outside the core books (and sometimes even contradicts the books themselves!) Many other games don't have this problem.

To be clear, I don't think D&D is a bad game, but plenty of other games out there have clearer core designs, better presentations, easier-to-grasp rules, and overall more polish.

andolanra commented on An Open Letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games... · Posted by u/Macha

kubb · 3 years ago

We need a table top system on GPL or a similar licence, with a full universe and lore. Do you think YC would fund a startup to build it up?

andolanra · 3 years ago

There are a truly massive number of RPGs out there with a wide variety of open licenses, especially the various Creative Commons licenses. The indie RPG sphere is massive and includes tabletop systems that range from "mild variations on the core D&D formula" to "almost fundamentally alien approaches to doing structured role-playing". D&D has long-standing brand recognition and cultural cachet, but it hasn't been the only player in this space for decades.