joeyjojo (u/joeyjojo)

joeyjojo commented on 3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine · Posted by u/seanisom

seanisom · 2 years ago

Interesting! Had never heard of it before, will check it out. The point of Haxe seems to be as a meta-compiler to generate code for a bunch of different languages/compilers? The same spirit of the Wasm dev experience but without the runtime.

Text / fonts is very much on the roadmap! For input and audio I would have to think through the scope.

joeyjojo · 2 years ago

> The point of Haxe seems to be as a meta-compiler to generate code for a bunch of different languages/compilers?

That's basically correct, although there is also a cross platform runtime called Hashlink but is unsupported by Kha.

https://hashlink.haxe.org/

joeyjojo commented on 3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine · Posted by u/seanisom

seanisom · 2 years ago

> Currently it is the low level, cross platform layer that is the most complex and the biggest hurdle towards making a game engine viable

I couldn't agree more. My goal is not to simply build "a better game engine", but to make this kind of low-level tech accessible at a higher level and with much better dev tools to a broader class of developers and applications

> Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform

This gets into my motivations for building a company - larger companies have the resources to build moats, but often can't quickly realign themselves to go after novel technical opportunities. It's not either / or - both models exist for very valid reasons.

joeyjojo · 2 years ago

I am glad people are working on it!!

Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha

Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.

I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon. It really suggest taking a look at the graphics2 (2d canvas like) api.

For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.

joeyjojo commented on 3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine · Posted by u/seanisom

doctorpangloss · 2 years ago

> If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.

But why wouldn't I "just" use Unity?

I agree with you. Nobody cares about the platform specific details anymore, and people are willing to pay a little bit of money for an end-all-be-all middleware. I have gone my whole life not paying attention to a single Apple-specific API, and every single time, someone has written a better, more robust, cross-platform abstraction.

But Unity is already this middleware. I already can make a whole art application on top of Unity (or Unreal). People do. Sometimes people build whole platforms on top of Unity and are successful (Niantic) and some are not (Improbable). You're one guy. You are promising creating a whole game engine - you're going to get hung up on not using the word game engine, but that is intellectually honest, it is a game engine - which a lot of people 1,000x better capitalized than you have promised, and those people have been unable to reach parity with Unity after years of product development. So while I want you to succeed, I feel like a lot of Y Combinator guys have this, "We make no mistakes, especially we do not make strategic mistakes." It's going to be a long 3 years!

joeyjojo · 2 years ago

There absolutely is a need for a robust cross-platform rendering/multimedia solution, more in a similar vein to SDL than Unity or Unreal. The offering of Unity, Unreal, and perhaps Godot is just abysmal when considering that for all of the man hours put into the game development space, that is basically all we got. There should be hundreds of viable cross platform game engines catering to a wide variety niches that continually stretch the bounds of what a game actually is and how it can be represented. Game libraries such as Monogame, Heaps, Raylib, Love2D, etc just wouldn't be that popular if Unity and Unreal are the be all and end all. Adobe Air was once a popular choice (a very large number of top 50 app store games were built with Adobe Air) and I'd wager still would be if it didn't collapse under its technical weight.

Currently it is the low level, cross platform layer that is the most complex and the biggest hurdle towards making a game engine viable. If it wasn't so insanely complex, and the technical barrier towards making your own engine is reduced, the tired cliche of "don't build an engine" wouldn't hold as much weight, and it opens the doors to building a bespoke, fit for purpose engine for every game you create. Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform that facilitates a rich ecosystem of tools.

joeyjojo commented on The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002) joelonsoftware.com/2002/1... · Posted by u/skm

avgcorrection · 2 years ago

> Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doesn’t arrive.

The argument is disqualified at this point. The whole world is a leaky abstraction because <freak meteor hit could happen>. At this point your concept is all-encompassing and in turn useless.

There are assumptions: this computation will finish eventually [assuming that no one unplugs the computer itself]. This does not make things leaky.

There are leaky abstractions I guess but not all are. A garbage collector that can cause memory errors would be leaky. I don’t know anything about garbage colletors but in my experience they don’t.

Then someone says that a garbage collector is leaky because of performance concerns (throughput or latency). That’s not a leak: that’s part of the abstracting away part—some concerns are abstracted away. To abstract away means to make it something that you can’t fudge or change. To say that “this is implementation-defined”. An abstract list is an abstraction in the sense that it has some behavior. And also in the sense that it doesn’t say how those behaviors are implemented. That’s both a freedom and a lurking problem (sometimes). Big reallocation because of amortized push? Well you abstracted that away so can you complain about it? Maybe your next step is to move beyond the abstraction and into the more concrete.

What are abstractions without something to abstract away? They are impossible. You have to have the freedom to leave some things blank.

So what Spolsky is effectively saying is that abstractions are abstractions. That looks more like a rhetorical device than a new argument. (Taxes are theft?)

EDIT: Flagged for an opinion? Very well.

joeyjojo · 2 years ago

I suppose it should be considered where the abstraction actually exists. If the abstraction exists in logic or mathematics (ie. a triangle is a 3 sided polygon) it probably doesn't make much sense to consider the ramifications that thought occurs in a physical brain that can fail. On the other hand if the abstraction is physical (ie, hardware), then the fact that it is bound by physical law is obviously implicit. Software encompasses both physical and logical abstractions, so you need to pick a lens or perspective in order to actually view its abstractions.

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

muchwhales · 2 years ago

Just to give some perspective: Without prior graphics programming experience, I was able to write a simplistic 3D engine (VERY simple, but enough for my purposes) in a week or two. I somehow assumed that it was just an impossible thing to do and so I've never tried, until recently. It turned out to be much easier to get something going than I could've imagined.

It's true that Unity and other engines offer tons of features, but most indie developers probably won't need them, and by the time they do need more than the basics they'll have so much experience that they can easily implement what's missing in their own "engine".

We're also seeing some interesting developments in this space with WebGPU, which is what prompted me to finally give it a try in the first place. I've never used OpenGL before and I was still able to get by (more or less), after failing miserably to complete the Vulkan tutorial...

If nothing else, I can only recommend people at least think about whether they really need Unity/Unreal and consider that there are disadvantages as well as advantages when using them.

joeyjojo · 2 years ago

Also, for even things like physics there are many simple ways to do things. Take Towerfall's arcade physics for example[1]. In under 100 lines you can create the basis for your platformer game. Sure, it's not just pluggable into other pre-existing solutions, ie tile maps, but at least you aren't endlessly hacking all over the place to tweak Unity's physics into submission to get the controls feeling right for your simple 2d game. There is a massive wealth of gamedev knowledge that doesn't seem utilised to its potential because existing engines want sell their pre-canned solutions. I think what the gamedev scene needs are more tools like LDTK[2], with more thought given to how such tools could interop, and a better selection of low level rendering libraries (like Monogame and Raylib) with very robust cross platform support and dead simple build systems (or none at all).

I use a very obscure library called Kha[3] and it has by far and away the best performance for 2d rendering that I have encountered. It is amazing what you can do with just a very basic immediate mode ui library called Zui[4]. I think it is shitty advice to say that you are either building an engine or game. This advice would be applicable if you are building a general purpose game engine, not the highly specific and bespoke engine used for you own game. Your game and your engine are basically the same thing and you take many shortcuts, make many compromises, and build out a rough and minimalistic "editor" used just by your small teams (or yourself) to get the job done.

[1] https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p... [2] https://ldtk.io/ [3] https://github.com/Kode/Kha [4] https://github.com/armory3d/zui

joeyjojo commented on As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena thehill.com/opinion/natio... · Posted by u/graderjs

m3kw9 · 3 years ago

Same here it’s always always like that as if the ufo has an earth camera detector, I fathom it may still be technically feasible if they are advanced enough. This would explain why nobody has had a clear picture taken of an UFO.

/sarcasm

joeyjojo · 3 years ago

I have wondered if the UFOs specifically exist in a plane that will always be at the edge of our awareness. They aren't so much moving through physical space, but though our collective consciousness. Similar to how a physical person may temporarily exist in your mind, a UFO may temporarily exist in the physical space, and attempting to "capture" them is like trying to control a dream.

joeyjojo commented on As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena thehill.com/opinion/natio... · Posted by u/graderjs

PaulRobinson · 3 years ago

This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me.

To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying.

The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day".

The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared.

And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors".

No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds.

Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously.

The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war?

It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this.

And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous".

However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades.

If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely".

What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that?

What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"?

The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site.

Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".

It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now.

Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".

joeyjojo · 3 years ago

It just seems to be the same guy going on the podcast circuit talking about the Tic Tacs, and all I see is a video with a black blob in the centre. Have you got any links to back up your claims about all these people telling their stories?

joeyjojo commented on JSON Hero: Enhanced JSON structure visualization jsonhero.io/... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack

sorenjan · 3 years ago

They have a VS Code extension.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero...

joeyjojo · 3 years ago

It just opens your json in a publicly accessible page at https://jsonhero.io/

joeyjojo commented on JSON Hero: Enhanced JSON structure visualization jsonhero.io/... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack

stevage · 3 years ago

I'm not really clear on what the value-add is here. When is one needing to "visualise" JSON in this way, without editing it? Does it really help that much?

Generally I just open in VS Code, reformat and use search etc.

joeyjojo · 3 years ago

I could see a tool like this being really useful on my web game projects, where I would like artists/animators making contributions.