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I went from 🤔to 🤯 in the last 3 seconds

fun nerd-out time: when I implemented the player shadows, I implemented proper solar zenith/azimuth angles based on the same calculations I knew from my satellite imaging days But, just like relief shading in maps, I had to set the world to be in the southern hemisphere so that the shadows cast to the south, which is where your brain expects thing to go when the sun is overhead. it just fits the (fake 2D) perspective better Aside from that, the sun angles also drive the day/night LUT cycle, in theory we can have seasons affect the shadow angles too (not implemented), and recently, our talented artists and graphical programmers have added sun glare using that angle data, which makes things look very scenic at certain times of day So it turns out some weird fixations I had from past careers came in handy. And therefore I encourage everyone to just fucking geek out about hyper-specific technical aspects of their games

If anyone's interested in what I've been up to, and what an MMO made in Gamemaker running inside Discord looks like, we're live over in the Discord Town Hall server for two weeks. You can play the game directly from inside Discord

So, I was tasked to track down why one of our quests wasn't completable. The vendor was out of stock on cakes, which was needed for the quest After some investigation, it turned out someone had forgotten to set the restock period on the item, so only 1 cake was ever and would

aw yiss, it's us. a full MMO running inside Discord Activities

fix bugs caused by AI coding tools

thought I'd be smart and ask ChatGPT to make a flow chart from a description. Didn't go as planned

we need a word to describe "person you chat a lot to online but don't know their real name and only recognize by their screen name/profile picture"

my father-in-law is a web dev. He is insanely gifted. We were looking at a website like this together years ago and I asked him how we could build it today. I will never forget his answer... "We can't, we don't know how to do it"

interestingly it does if you ever do cross-language interop data objects with automatic case-translation. rule for converting from camelCase to snake_case is: any capital letter gets an underscore placed before it That means: userId -> user_id ✅ userID -> user_i_d ❌

having zero technical debt is a charisma trap: looks good, but is not. the whole point of deliberately incurring any type of debt is to be able to get somewhere faster in exchange for incurring a small amount of maintenance cost. Too much debt, and you won't be able to get anywhere quickly because your maintenance payments exceed your means. It's the same with mortgages, financing your car, startups raising VC money. As long as it's carefully managed and at an appropriate level, you end up moving faster Any argument that a separate team should just follow up and clean up can be countered by: what if that team increased velocity by worked on internal tools, or new features instead? Besides, it's toxic to establish an engineering culture where individual programmers are not accountable for the long term viability of their work. This sort of "throw it over the fence to others to maintain" leads to all sorts of irresponsible behaviour and poorly written code

did you know: you can fit a whole MMO into Discord Activities Something we're working on. Because we're already making a browser-based MMO, it just slides into discord activities with relatively minor modifications (funnily enough, all CORS and browser security policy-related)

I want one of these to track down those mosquitos fucks in my room at 2am

I heard you all liked node graphs This is our MMO's quest system / dialogue editor / cutscene editor. It executes like a program and performs logic, does branching dialogue, and can puppet NPCs and the players around The fun part is that this executes on our gamemaker servers.…

holy shit, XBox was originally called DirectX Box

we need a word to describe "person you chat a lot to online but don't know their real name and only recognize by their screen name/profile picture"

I went from 🤔to 🤯 in the last 3 seconds

thought I'd be smart and ask ChatGPT to make a flow chart from a description. Didn't go as planned

interestingly it does if you ever do cross-language interop data objects with automatic case-translation. rule for converting from camelCase to snake_case is: any capital letter gets an underscore placed before it That means: userId -> user_id ✅ userID -> user_i_d ❌

having zero technical debt is a charisma trap: looks good, but is not. the whole point of deliberately incurring any type of debt is to be able to get somewhere faster in exchange for incurring a small amount of maintenance cost. Too much debt, and you won't be able to get anywhere quickly because your maintenance payments exceed your means. It's the same with mortgages, financing your car, startups raising VC money. As long as it's carefully managed and at an appropriate level, you end up moving faster Any argument that a separate team should just follow up and clean up can be countered by: what if that team increased velocity by worked on internal tools, or new features instead? Besides, it's toxic to establish an engineering culture where individual programmers are not accountable for the long term viability of their work. This sort of "throw it over the fence to others to maintain" leads to all sorts of irresponsible behaviour and poorly written code

holy shit, XBox was originally called DirectX Box

So, I was tasked to track down why one of our quests wasn't completable. The vendor was out of stock on cakes, which was needed for the quest After some investigation, it turned out someone had forgotten to set the restock period on the item, so only 1 cake was ever and would

this experience saved me when I locked myself out of an Airbnb room in my underwear without keys or phone managed to log into my Airbnb account using the PS4 in the living room, and message the host for help also slacked work while I was in there to say I'd be late UX sucked

guess we doing orbital lasers now

I want one of these to track down those mosquitos fucks in my room at 2am

fun nerd-out time: when I implemented the player shadows, I implemented proper solar zenith/azimuth angles based on the same calculations I knew from my satellite imaging days But, just like relief shading in maps, I had to set the world to be in the southern hemisphere so that the shadows cast to the south, which is where your brain expects thing to go when the sun is overhead. it just fits the (fake 2D) perspective better Aside from that, the sun angles also drive the day/night LUT cycle, in theory we can have seasons affect the shadow angles too (not implemented), and recently, our talented artists and graphical programmers have added sun glare using that angle data, which makes things look very scenic at certain times of day So it turns out some weird fixations I had from past careers came in handy. And therefore I encourage everyone to just fucking geek out about hyper-specific technical aspects of their games

fix bugs caused by AI coding tools

specifically what this is is ignoring unnecessary details and applying the appropriate abstractions. Those things take experience I think most people can only keep a few concepts in their head at once. that doesn't really get better as you gain experience. You're still only…

GML, because the language/runtime implements adjustable epsilon and it's set to 0.00001 by default

I heard you all liked node graphs This is our MMO's quest system / dialogue editor / cutscene editor. It executes like a program and performs logic, does branching dialogue, and can puppet NPCs and the players around The fun part is that this executes on our gamemaker servers.…