Notices by Simon Carter (bbbscarter@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@sinbad @wolfr @dormouse759 just realised that might have sounded rude. Just in case; I’m the old man, and I do believe DVDs are better.

@sinbad @wolfr @dormouse759 Agreed. Also:

“Next week on ‘Old Men Shouting At Clouds’ - why DVDs are actually better than streaming”

@dormouse759 I agree with @sinbad. Sure, all icons are digital abstractions based. The original abstractions were built upon real objects, so there was a physical ground truth representation.

Then we built a new abstraction upon that, which tidied up the rough edges.

20 years on we’re ~15 abstractions down, and the reference ground truth is probably somewhere around iteration ~10. Unless you know what that is, it’s like trying to understand French when all you know is Latin.

@sinbad @kr4ft3r @runevision yup, exactly that. I’ll be honest, it’s still the most intuitive coordinate system for me, even though I know better - for many 3D games you do the initial map editing top down, like it’s a board game, and then raise/lower things.

@sinbad @runevision @kr4ft3r I think Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper and Fable were all the same coordinate system as UE. The thinking was indeed “it’s just top-down 2D, but you can also zoom in and out.”

@sinbad @djlink @idbrii indeed, you have to make space for the new things by aggressively evicting old knowledge. My new keybindings came at the expense of the Battle of Hastings, and I've got some new ones that I'll probably have to sacrifice the ‘For Mash Get Smash' aliens advert jingle for.

@idbrii @sinbad @djlink can also heartily recommend the ergodox; I’ve been using the ergodox-ez for years, and it has a no-led option. https://ergodox-ez.com

I recently discovered the key switches are easily swappable, which I’ve found handy for trying different configurations.

@djlink @idbrii @sinbad fair. For my personal use I rarely use function keys, and when I do I hold a combo key with thumb/pinky and press the number keys. But indeed, that might not be enough if you use function keys a lot.

The lovely thing is how configurable it is. You can set it so that you have a toggle key that makes the number keys always function keys, until you toggle it off again; or so that holding down a number key triggers a function key; etc.

I’m looking into creating a small desktop GUI tool using something modern and cross platform.

So many of the tutorials assume you’re creating a business web app, and want to use an opinionated framework. “Obviously you want to use MVC/MVVM/Reactive/DI/virtual DOM/Providers/Notifiers/State management.”

No, I just want to hook a few buttons to fiddle with some data structures, thanks.

@sinbad bah, that’s a shame.

@sinbad for game development, I’m increasingly of the opinion that we still don’t have quite the right language, and that our lives would be so much simpler if we did.

It’s frustrating because somewhere in the overlap between Go, Swift, C# and Nim, all the pieces are there.

@sinbad indeed - I think it only came out in the last month!

Hmm, the new Obsidian web clipper is very good. I’ve tested it on a couple of tricky sites, and it has coped admirably.

https://obsidian.md/clipper