PixelProf

joined 2 years ago
[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 26 points 2 years ago

It depends what "From Scratch" means to you, as I don't know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about...

  • Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
  • Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
  • Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they're more general purpose and you'll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting "Making the game", but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
  • Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images... that same as previous, but you'll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you're new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here's a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you'll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it's a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I'm a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn't have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there's lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they'll often run slow, they'll take more time to get started on a project, and you'll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you'll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you'd like, but similar caveats to previous; there's likely a low ceiling for the quality you'll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I think this is an important thing to be aware of. I 100% get and understand the need to reinforce self-worth outside of what's traditionally pushed. But that's not the whole story, and I don't see much on the other side of it.

It's when you get that anxiety/depression cocktail alongside things, unable to find the motivation to do the things you need to do to feel adequately drained, or unable to do the things that adequately energize.

It's when you fall flat and feel horrible, not because of a corporate agenda, but because real people depended on you and you couldn't show up.

It's when you took the advice, and followed your rhythms of the day, and stopped going against your mental grain.... and then you missed your work deadline, or messed up your work and screwed someone over, or accidentally estranged family members, or didn't get that medical treatment you needed.

It's really important people don't tie up in the self-worth of productivity and corporations - it's really easy to prioritize those because we're told all of our lives that they're worth prioritizing - and that leads to us ignoring our own needs... But unless you're very fortunate, work and productivity are needs, and finding ways to exert energy in a healthy (and often relaxing!) way is important.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

My cynical guess is that's what they're hoping the community will do ("like lemmings, I tell you!" - spez, probably) to drive higher traffic numbers before some announcement or meeting.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I really think it's important to not see Lemmy as one singular community, or a lot of important use cases will go ignored.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

Not the OP, but in Canada at least, I think you would legally be expected to because common law is (as far as I'm aware) very nearly marriage and is entirely implied by time living together in a conjugal relationship. It might be provincial to determine the actual property laws, though.

I don't have a firm opinion here, but I think the key difference in your case is that a conjugal relationship has some expectation of... Oh I don't know, mutuality? A landlord tenant relationship is a lease agreement. If your roommate didn't sign any kind of lease agreement, they might have a legal case to just not pay you and suffer no consequences (I don't know), but they're not in a conjugal relationship, so there's also no implication of shared ownership.

Without signing lease agreement and being in a conjugal relationship, I think there is a pretty fair case that expecting shared ownership is a fair assumption.

That all said, it's also really up to the individuals to figure that out early, and the deception in the meme suggests that the agency to have that discussion wasn't available, and that's really the part I find problematic here.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

That and expropriation/eminent domain, etc. Even if you pay your taxes, if the government needs it, they have processes to take it.

I'm not saying it's an inherently bad thing, but it's another one of those important things to realize is already present if anyone wants to argue for/against certain government reforms.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 years ago

I certainly used to, and used to think it was essentially gender neutral, but again - in certain contexts like a male dominated classroom, the women/nb students could easily feel excluded by it. Outside of that, I also recognized my trans friends had a lot of thoughtless people intentionally misgendering them on the regular just to be mean, and finding small ways to reduce that reinforcement felt better than not. It was also surprisingly not that tough for me to adopt the more neutral language, so if it's a subtle help with no skin off my back it just seems very win-win.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 23 points 2 years ago (11 children)

I know it's controversial, but moving away from "guys" when I address a group and more or less defaulting to "they" when referring to people I don't know.

They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I'd never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn't state pronouns.

Switching away from guys was natural, but I'm in a very male dominated field and I'd heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with "Guys", so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Only when it's intentionally censored and trained to react in a particular way. When it's not, you remember it was trained on random internet content.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 26 points 2 years ago

Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.

If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

Conversely, if smart watches with accurate health monitoring become cheap and commonplace it might drastically improve health outcomes by motivating people to see doctor's when needed for subtle heart issues that would otherwise go unchecked.

[–] PixelProf@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, just posted another comment, but I have my bottle flipping trick. If it's upright before the afternoon, I didn't take it. I take it, and flip the bottle upside down. Then if I see the bottle upside down after noon, I flip it upright.

I still have days where I need to try to mentally piece together, "Did I drink water? How thirsty was I? Was I really thirsty, and just drank to hydrate and NOT take my pill or did I drink to take the pill and forgot to flip it? Did I take it and just forget to eat? How much have I been singing on repeat this morning?"

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