there is a balance to be had here. oftentimes people make their own corner of the code because they are afraid, or their superiors are, of the scope of work which is actually about 3 hours of consistent work with good discipline and not the 17 years they imagine.
millions of lines of code itself is a code smell. some of the absolute worst code i have to work with comes from industry standard crapware that is just filled with lots of do nothing bug factories. you gotta get rid of them if you want to make it more stable and more reliable.
however... i often see the problem, and its not "don't do this obvious strategy to improve qol" its "don't use that bullshit you read a HN article about last week"
i'm not from silly valley, but its the dominant voice here.
some of my downvotes are from bad tone, overreaction, hyperbole... some are because of the silly valley culture not realising they are a bunch of deluded maniacs, or just producing absolute garbage products.
its mostly the former.
as for demographics... well, i'm a single data point, but HN has a wide reach. its why a lot of us are here imo.
hopefully i stop getting trouble for reposting things verifiable in the public record that other people spoke about in 2018, and not being banned for supporting capital punishment, a thing legal in the US, the native state of the brand.
Good. This is exactly what I've been complaining about for decades now...
I also have my own engine although it needs some refurbishment. I've never quite found the time to polish it to a point where it can be sold. It also runs on tiny old devices, although if you limit yourself to desktop hardware, that means anything from the last 30 years or so. It also has a design that allows it to load enormous (i.e. universe scale) data by streaming with most often an unperceptable loading time... on the iPhone 4 in about 200ms you are in an interactive state which could be "in game".
Unity and Unreal are top-tier garbage that don't deserve our money and time. The bigger practical reason to use them is that people have experience and the plugin and extension ecosystems are rich and filled with battle tested and useful stuff.
bespoke big company engines are often terrible too. Starfield contains less real world data than my universe app, but somehow looks uglier and needs a modern PC to run at all. mine runs on an iPhone 4, looks nicer and puts you in the world in the first 200ms... you might think its not comparable but it absolutely is, all of the same techniques could be applied to get exactly the same quality of result with all their stacks and stacks of art and custom data - and they could have a richer bunch of real world data to go with it!
>Unity and Unreal are top-tier garbage that don't deserve our money and time. The bigger practical reason to use them is that people have experience and the plugin and extension ecosystems are rich and filled with battle tested and useful stuff.
Both are effectively magical sandboxes where platform support is someone else's problem.
Unity is still pretty great, but it's chained to a company that has no real business plan to sustainability.
Unreal is okay, but developers aren't using it right. For any bigger project you should customized the engine for your needs. Or at the very least spend some time to optimize.
i've been doing this for decades and my bedroom work had never done anything but put unreal and unity to shame. from top to bottom i can not understand the ignorance of their design from a simple "a programmer is making this" standpoint, it comes from a legacy of "a rookie wannabe with too much money had a good shot and too much promotion"
unreal is fucking awful, its a masterclass in how to not make:
* components
* hierarchies
* visual scripting
* networking
* editors
* geometry
* rendering
* culling
* in-game ui
* editor ui
* copy-paste
* kinematics
* physics integration
* plugin support
* build system
its just a tower of mistakes i learned not make before i dared to even enter the industry
it is fantastically and incredibly bad.
unity is a bit similar but they add c# complexity to the mix and in the beginning that was a much bigger disaster, especially going with mono. .NET was an enormous misstep by microsoft and remains so, although it improves over time they could have just not gotten it so incredibly wrong to start with.
i could go on.
i definitely blame the developers. of the terrible tools, i couldn't make that badly at most points in my career including the super early days in some cases.
they are also hard to fix because of the staggering depth of the badness.
if you would like more specifics feel free to poke, its more about not typing a wall of text than the cognitive load of knowing better, which is around zero.
oh... and the garbage collection is garbage that enables incompetents to make more garbage. never needed or wanted it. i had one hard memory leak to deal with in my life in native code. and a fucking zillion in their shit fest.
EDIT: i shit you not, it has not learned my first lessons from being an 8 year old trying to draw mandelbrot sets in qbasic.
If you can legitimately make a better engine in your basement, that's just as easy to use then please open source it. If it's in a high level language with types ( C#, Typescript, Haxe, Java) I'll personally donate 100$.
Both Unity and Unreal have cost billions to make.
Godot is cool, but GD script isn't fun( in general I hate learning a programming language for a single framework, dart is the last time I do that) and C# support is still ify. Godot tries to do everything Unity can, but can't do them particularly as well. The community is also a cult.
I've tried Godot like 3 times and it always feels like janky Unity.
During the Unity drama every single game dev post on Reddit would get a bunch of comments saying you should switch to Godot.
An open source game engine that doesn't accept PRs and is basically ran by 3 people.
Neat.
Personally my dream engine would be Haxe + an editor + docs + Web Assembly/Native/Mobile support.
But engines are very hard and expensive to make. For my current project, it's so text heavy I realized I'm better off just using React/HTML/CSS.
The game is meant to be played in a website, but it's going to be open source so you can run it locally if you wish.
most of the feedback i'd want to give has already been given though... e.g. the attack charging confused me a bit until i worked it out by inference.
the animations are probably the highlight of this for me. they add some character nicely. adding more elements to show the attacks in progress beyond the colour changes would be a nice way to improve this.
i would suggest removing 0 from the rng for the math problems. occasionally you can get 0 + number which feels like a cheat almost. also maybe forcing the numbers to always be in double digits for the addition problems? he seems to be aware how to do this from looking at how the divide by zero is avoided.
another small thing would be to disable new input whilst the attack sequence is running... although again others have mentioned that.
----
overall this is impressive and interesting to see. i taught myself to write code starting when i was 8 using qbasic and its help file, then starting with visual basic when i was 11 and C when i was 12 - it was a different time, and different tools with different challenges, but i think any early start is helpful, especially if you have to work things out for yourself.
this game reminds me of some of my own early efforts, although rather than wrangling the complexity of a modern browser environment and language, i was wrangling with the lack of documentation and learning materials for logic, maths and graphics.
today i am the technical director of a games company with a cv littered with AAA, mobile and VR games. if your son eventually decides to choose this sort of career, i expect this kind of early work will pay huge dividends.
We hit divide by zero in testing, so he guarded against that.
He needs to think more about "hardness" of a question and what that means. Right now, multiply/divide are considered "more hard" but that's not actually quite correct given the implementation of divide.
Appreciate the feedback! I'm not sure if games are his future, but it's a great stepping stone at the current age as the output is shareable with his friends!
if you want more of a challenge try a compiler compiler that can compile itself... :)
i got pretty far with this myself, although it doesn't work for weirdo languages like Python that need an exceptional lexer. i keep meaning to revisit this problem, since the tools in this space are pretty much non-existent or trash quality.
By the way, I dislike the term “compiler compiler”, because that’s not really what it does. I like “parser generator” for tax/bison, and “lexer generator” for flex.
millions of lines of code itself is a code smell. some of the absolute worst code i have to work with comes from industry standard crapware that is just filled with lots of do nothing bug factories. you gotta get rid of them if you want to make it more stable and more reliable.
however... i often see the problem, and its not "don't do this obvious strategy to improve qol" its "don't use that bullshit you read a HN article about last week"
i suspect this is one of those.