anton mikhailov

I've made a live calculator to easily play with computations, formulas and plots. youtube.com/watch?v=zIYxNQ… Builds for Windows / Linux / Mac in thread.

Maybe it's just me, but the biggest "problems" I face in solo development are usually psychological problems (motivation, focus, confidence, starting, finishing etc). So I'll take a hit on "goodness" in order to get any improvement on those metrics (which I think pays back in overall quality). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has a great discussion of this (though it's toward the end).

@antovsky "Own is better than Good" is living rent-free in my head today. Maybe the cross-product is reversed but I can just fix it. Maybe my arena has a ridiculous edge case but I will just fix it. The motivation drain of just hitting 'accept' on or is extremely relevant. I'd even venture to say that once you do hit it's often the beginning of the end.

@darkhoodrebel @allieum256 More like 15yr old and it's actually @mmalex 's quote with my addendum to it, but yeah :P

It has it's places and usecases, but for me working solo it induced more headaches than it solved problems. Code readability, abstractions over abstractions, slower compilation times and so on. I learned a simplistic "dumb" code style that I can read and understand at first glance works better for me. To quote @antovsky: "Code like a 5 year old with 30 years of experience" (hope I got the quote right lol) Tho this does not mean I don't use more modern stuff, for instance I really like the type safe std::format/println stuff, and in some cases templates just make sense, no dogma - I just pick what works for me, but over all the code looks more like C I guess, structs-only, public by default, explicit types, prefering fixed sized arrays and so on..

oh my... considering to ditch Jolt and switch to Box3D for the project. The Jolt integration in my engine works well but it brought in a lot of AAA complexity and features I don't need for such a simplistic lo-fi game. And it's modern C++ does not align well with my code style🤔

@swarnimarun @wookash_podcast @nicbarkeragain Oh I see, no, same game, new chat :)

@antovsky @wookash_podcast @nicbarkeragain So another new game?

Super secret game announcement from the two legends @antovsky and @nicbarkeragain To match all three timezones the stream is 6am EU (me), 9pm US West (Anton) and 3pm Aus (Nic) youtube.com/watch?v=RY59NK…

Fun times streaming some Instructobots development right now since I've got the week off, join the discord if you wanna follow along :) discord.gg/cTxDdzwyw9

@swarnimarun @wookash_podcast @nicbarkeragain Nope! The Handmade Expo talk is here: youtube.com/watch?v=ibN3t5… This chat with Wookash is Brand New Instructobots (TM) Content

@wookash_podcast @antovsky @nicbarkeragain It's the same one from the Handmade network conf right?

@fernandp @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast No but sure going to have to now! 😅 Or maybe shouldn't 🤔

@antovsky @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Have you played Gladiabots? gladiabots.com

Come see a sneak peek of the game @nicbarkeragain and I have been working on! We're also doing a live podcast with @wookash_podcast about it tomorrow :) If you have any questions about the game/tech just reply here, and we can try to answer live on stream 🫡

That's some dedication! <3 I figured part of our job would be to wake Wookash up but at this rate I think he's gonna be more awake than us. Gonna have to bring the A-game.

@yosp @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast We shall polish it up to be worthy then! 🙏 Looking forward to showing it :)

@antovsky @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Either will be fine, I play those all the time :D

@yosp @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Can't say no to that! Would you prefer a rough "prototype" or a proper "first playable"?

@antovsky @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Let me play your game, if it is good, I'll promote it on my channel :D

@yosp @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Hi Shu! Been a long time! Good to hear from you :)

@antovsky @nicbarkeragain @wookash_podcast Hi Anton! 👋

@cmuratori I just watched your chat with Marc about random item selection, and you were mentioning the Proper way to handle the mod. Here's the impl I use, which is nabbed from the PCG paper and I believe has a full proof there: INLINE u32 u32To(RNGSTATE_REF rng, u32 max) { /* This code is adapted from: pcg-random.org, basic generator C file (pcg-random.org/downloads/pcg-…) The loop is guaranteed to terminate if the generator is uniform. The chance of this loop re-rolling is roughly proportional to the range For small ranges up to say 1024, the chance is around 0.00002%, or 1 in 4 million. For medium ranges of say 2^16, the changes is around 0.002% or 1 in 66 thousand. So it's safe to say for "most" cases, it will return without actually looping. */ u32 threshold = -max % max; for (;;) { u32 r = rngAdvance(rng); if (r >= threshold) return r % max; } } (code is from github.com/antonthefirst/…) Btw, the "random score" method that Marc is showing is really great to use on the GPU or other highly parallel implementations where you want to do something statelessly (and from the perspective of of each item, at the cost of potentially re-generating the scores for neighbors (rather than reading them back)). I use it for quirky cellular automata to do neighborhood locking around random cells.

If you were ever curious about how 6DOF tracking works or what it takes to take "an idea" all the way to "product", this stream is for you :)

It is going to be an inspiring week for programmers in Vancouver. I'll live code with Grain DDL in front of an audience at Handmade Network Expo hosted by @handmade_net at 10 sharp, with video published for everyone later. Live coding on a language you implemented is a type of performance art only a programmer can pull off. Going first means I get to hang back and watch demos from @antovsky, @nicbarker, @gdechichi, Leddoo, @starfreakclone and @struc_ture afterwards. Let's go.

This Saturday I will be talking about fred at the first Handmade Expo! I will be revealing some very exciting work I've been doing on the editor along with some insights into the tech behind it. HM folks are cooking! @antovsky @nicbarker @gdechichi Leddoo @struc_ture @frogtoss

@nafonsopt Good point ;) For all that other software you'll write yourself by hand :)

@antovsky A way to control your versions

If you have a file browser and a way to kill processes, what more do you really need 🤔

Time to get real technical yalls. Come see what it's like to implement a 6DOF tracking library with less memory than an image from your phone.

@LubaRaphael Especially important for matrices or colorspaces or any kind of "space" conversions!

Related naming advice: when you have conversion functions between „thing“ and „stuff“, name them „thing_from_stuff“, not „stuff_to_thing“. That way the types & names line up nicely: a_thing := thing_from_stuff(my_stuff). And you can find all the ways to create a „thing“ easily.

This is the only "sane" and durable way that I've found to use LLMs so far. I actually quite like using it for this purpose, but unfortunately even here I've found it can hallucinate false knowledge after a while, and after you get past the bare basics. I was pretty disappointed when this first happened because I was quite enjoying it.

Vibe learning with AI is awesome. I write the code while AI patiently answers my many questions. I wonder with so many hating on AI generating code - do they miss out on actually learning new topics from AI? As a solo game dev without a game engine, there is a lot that I don't know and have never made before despite having worked in the field. Signed Distance Fields font rendering is one of such system. After grilling AI for a bit of why my fonts didn't look as clean as professional games do, I learned about SDF fonts. It's not something I ran into before or even knew as a way to make the fonts look better. It wasn't necessary in my pre-AI career. But once I understood the technical process the implementation was easy. One key to that understanding was grilling AI on many details of the process. It's something you would usually only get by working closely with an engineer highly knowledgeable in the task. If you didn't have such an engineer near you pre-AI, the fallback was digging through blogs and papers and stitching some understanding from that. I am finding that AI coding is mostly useless, but turning AI into a patient teaching assistant has been amazing for me for the last two years of working on the game. If you already come with a ton of experience to sniff out nonsense you can guide it along and cross examine it until you get the information. Learning from AI is like having access to an experience engineer who is very drunk. Do you need to carefully watch every word? Yes. But if you have enough patience and experience you can extract a tremendous leaning value from it. Vibe coding is the fake promise that managers are preaching but the real objective value for the last year has been vibe learning.