Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 8, 2015

Filed under: Personal 70 comments

The only reason this post exists is because the previous posts are dangerously negative and I hate to have that much bellyaching sit on top of the site for too long. So… yeah. Let’s talk about some positive stuff:

Thanks for all the advice about Windows 8 hotkeys. That smoothed out a lot of annoyances.
Also thanks to the advice to “check your drives”. I’d read that Windows 8 users would never need to check drives because it would all be automatic. But sure enough, once I found chkdsk it turned out two important drives were a mess of scrambled crap. Fixing them solved my speed problems, my problems getting Steam to work, and the ages-long restart times.
The screenshot at the top of this post if from a programming project I had to shelve when I began working on Good Robot again. It yielded some interesting lessons. I’ll get back to it eventually.
Daylight savings time is still stupid. I know I say this every year. Twice. But it’s true.
Sorry about that last bullet point. I know I promised this post was going to be positive.
Kinda bummed I missed PAX East this year. I guess that’s not very positive either.
This is harder than I thought it would be.
The previous point wasn’t a complaint, was just an observation. So it shouldn’t count as negativity.
We’re going to talk about Good Robot this week. No but for real this time.
I have a special love for programs that just live in their directories and don’t need to be installed. FileZilla.(FTP client.) Foobar. (MP3 player.) VLC. (Media player.) Audacity. (Audio editor.) Thanks to developers who make sure their software is a good guest on my system.

Not much left of the weekend, but enjoy it anyway. I’ve got work to catch up on.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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My First Hour With Windows 8

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 6, 2015

Filed under: Rants 293 comments

 An Evening of Failure and Stupidity 2: Stupid HarderPrevious Post

Next PostWindows 8, A Broken Monitor, and Other Things That are Strange 

Apologies for two days of ranting. But it’s either this or nothin’, because this is my whole life right now. Also, writing about this is amazingly therapeutic. If the post becomes overwhelmingly bleak or angry, return here to the top and look at the kittens until you feel better.

Here we go, I shove the Windows 8 install disk in and…

During install, a bright red line appears, right down the middle of the monitor. I’ll come back to this later, but just bear in mind that while all of the following is going on, I’m also trying to find out what this red line is and why it’s there.

It asks me what drive to put Windows 8 on. Crap. I have four physical drives, some of which are broken into multiple partitions. For whatever reason, it’s not showing me the VOLUME LABELS, but only the drive and partition numbers. I could understand if these were drives from a foreign OS, but aside from the one Linux partition it’s all Windows. Since the installer is about to NUKE a drive, it’s inexcusable that it doesn’t give me a way to SEE WHAT I’M DOING.

Deep breath. Okay. I know the old Windows Partition was 250GB. And here’s a partition about that size. And it’s drive zero. This is clearly it, but I’d feel so much better if I had a way to make sureLooking back, I could have booted into Linux and figured it out from there. You know, if I didn’t mind doing everything all over..

Let’s do this.

(Hum showtunes while the files copy.)

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My First Hour With Windows 8”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 An Evening of Failure and Stupidity 2: Stupid HarderPrevious Post

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An Evening of Failure and Stupidity 2: Stupid Harder

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 5, 2015

Filed under: Rants 201 comments

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No, this post is not a repeat. It’s a sequel.

OH MY GOSH these notifications are getting on my nerves. Windows update keeps popping up in the corner, telling me I need to update. So then there’s this break in my workflow where I have to mouse down there and hit the teensy-weensy ‘x’ to make the bubble piss off for another random interval. But if I miss, then I click on the bubble and instead of the bubble going away I get a popup window telling me about all the stupid shit Windows has for me to worry about. I could swear I turned these stupid notifications off.

So now on top of all the other crap I have to do, I have to ALSO find that setting and reset it to “I’m an adult and I know what I’m doing. I’m a busy man and I’ll do my upgrades on my timetable, not yours, Windows. You asshole.” (I think it’s actually labeled something else.)

At some point it downloaded some of the waiting updates. So now I get a popup, “You have downloads waiting to be installed.” So I dismiss that and INSTANTLY get another one telling me about updates NOT downloaded.

Sigh. Fine. Just to stop this constant irritation I’ll do the damn update. Just about the time I settle back into work, Windows popups up agin because OF COURSE it needs to reboot. I can either reboot now, or it can pester me until I give in. Fine. Get it over with.

So Windows goes quiet for a long time, like Deep Thought except really, really unlike Deep Thought, if you see what I mean. Then it blue screens, reboots, and is dead.

Shit!

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Evening of Failure and Stupidity 2: Stupid Harder”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Ideas about a new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 4

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 4, 2015

Filed under: Programming 104 comments

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We finally get to the good stuff. The discussion below contains a lot of the reasons I wanted to do this write-up in the first place.

Link (YouTube)

1:00:00 Let’s Make an Array Type.

Yeeeessss.

This might seem trivial to a lot of people. This is basically just a fix for the std::vector<int> name; problem I discussed earlier in this series. We use arrays everywhere in our code. We’re constantly building lists of data. C++ offers tons of ways to do this, and somehow they all suck.

The lazy way:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ideas about a new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 4”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Experienced Points: So You Want To Be a Game Developer?

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 3, 2015

Filed under: Column 93 comments

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My column this week is some advice to the young people considering a career in AAA videogame-making.

Something I really wanted to put in the column:

A couple of years ago I saw an ad for Full Sail University or one of the other game colleges. It said something like, “80% of graduates find a job in the industry within a year!” I was dumbfounded. Given the cost of going to one of these places (the price of a house and a couple of the most valuable years of your life) those are horrendous odds. The cynic in me read that as, “1 in 5 of the people who come to our school find the whole thing was for nothing.” I would never risk two precious years of my life on anything that risky.

I didn’t put it in the column because I can’t find the source anywhere. The game colleges apparently no longer offer post-grad placement info beyond, “We will help you!”

Also the anecdotes suggest a system where the college develops a relationship with a studio (stuff owned by EA, usually) where they just send them waves of grads who will work crunch-mode hours (80+) for months on end until they burn out, at which point there’s another wave of grads chomping at the bit, waiting for their turn at living the dream. So even if the placement rate was 98%, it would still be a horrible gamble, since leaving the industry in disgust and disillusionment is arguable worse than not getting a job at all. The actual success rate – the number of people who find good jobs with hours and pay that allow for a normal life – is probably really tiny.

But I can’t begin to back any of that up, and I didn’t want to build a point around a single barely-recalled data point. I mean, I can’t back any of it up, but I tried to stick with stuff that’s more or less accepted as common knowledge.

Also: If you DO work in the industry then please tell your story. If it was awesome, say so. If it was horrible, say so. Young people are making life-changing decisions and the only information we have are the gushing promises of game colleges and the occasional “development hell” scandal. Your story might change someone’s life.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Diecast #95: Final Fantasy XIV, NOLF, Spore

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 2, 2015

Filed under: Diecast 109 comments

 Diecast #94: Wolfenstein, Planet Explorers, Evolve, DestinyPrevious Post

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Hosts: Shamus, Josh, Chris, Rutskarn, Mumbles.

Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #95: Final Fantasy XIV, NOLF, Spore”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Diecast #94: Wolfenstein, Planet Explorers, Evolve, DestinyPrevious Post

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A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 3

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 1, 2015

Filed under: Programming 105 comments

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The annotation continues…

Link (YouTube)

39:00 Exceptions Are Silly.

Exceptions are where you run a bit of code, but you sort of leave a note for the program, “If anything goes wrong, jump to this bit of code and spit out such-and-such message.” Here is the video Blow mentioned, which talks about why exceptions are such a mess.

My experience with exceptions is pretty limited. In my professional work, we used a large codebase that began life in 1994 as vanilla C. Somewhere around 2000-ish we migrated (in fits and starts) to C++. So I didn’t even have a chance to use exceptions until 2000, and we didn’t really have a lot of need for them. Our software was pretty mature and we already had all the error handling we needed.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 3”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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