programmers-off-topic

[regal ingot]

speaking of beverages in the UK...
I was unfortunate enough to have one of the new non-pyramid PG Tips bags just now. Does anyone over there actually like the new blend? Any suggestions for a brand that's similar to the old PG Tips (that I'll be able to find in the US either locally or on Amazon)? I've seen Builders available locally, and saw some recommendations for Yorkshire .

[sand frost]

Is this about tea?

[regal ingot]

yes

[sand frost]

I’m not picky enough to have good advice, unfortunately

I buy loose leaf online from taiwan sometimes, but it sounds like you want tea bags?

[regal ingot]

yeah, loose-leaf is more work than I want to do in the morning before I'm caffeinated. (the cleaning up part where it inevitably sticks to whatever straining mechanism you're using)

[crystal wren]

Yorkshire is definitely a solid default option!

And this is about the easiest to clean loose leaf brewing device I've ever had:

[cinder karma]

I have a soft spot for trader Joe's English breakfast

I primarily drink Chinese loose leaf green tea

And we don't use a strainer

We just let the tea leaves settle to the bottom

[devout vault]

One of my brothers calls himself a tea snob - he only likes loose leaf. (He imports a bunch of different kinds)

[cinder karma]

And then just occasionally drink a leaf

[devout vault]

(He has dozens of different kinds)

[cinder karma]

(And knows the optimal brewing temperature for each?)

[devout vault]

(I guess?)

[fleet wren]

I'm a sucker for good Chinese green tea - have a bag of gunpowder and Jasmine pearls

[cinder karma]

My rule for Chinese green tea is that if I can read the label i don't want it

(Kidding)

[rain apex]

i like the leaf water they serve at this 1 buddhist temple in my hometown

no idea what brand maybe they just yoinked it off the mountain

[regal ingot]

I feel like my first-thing-in-the-morning tea brewing methods would be disrespectful to any decent green tea. And I also prefer black tea, but dumping boiling water on the green tea wouldn't be doing it any favors.

[sand frost]

I definitely also just let the leaves settle to the bottom

It works pretty well for the black tea I got

I drank some of this this morning and I liked it but as I mentioned I’m not that picky

[crystal wren]

Bergamot oil... so essentially Earl Grey?

[sand frost]

Maybe? I’m sort of a heathen so I don’t really know what earl grey is made of exactly

Also this was hotel tea from the hotel my parents stayed in last week

But it was a nice hotel so this seems like good tea?

[regal ingot]

bergamot oil is the defining characteristic of Earl Grey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Grey_tea

[sand frost]

I mostly drink plain black tea when given a choice so i don’t drink much earl grey

[safe dragon]

I thought earl grey was plain black tea so I am also a heathen

[devout vault]

https://build-your-own.org/blog/20240813_css_vertical_center/

[safe dragon]

oh they just mean to regular display elements

[rotund violet]

We've had vertical centering since Flexbox started being supported in all browsers circa 2016 or so, but okay...

[devout vault]

Shows how out of touch I am with front end web development

[safe dragon]

I'll probably still be using flex and grid absolutely everywhere regardless for the other reasons

[rotund violet]

I guess a lot of cough web devs found Flexbox too difficult, so they tried to make it simpler.

Well, the article does acknowledge most of that, to be fair. Just kind of a clickbait title.

[primal shore]

This is so cool lmao. I should lurk here more often

[fleet wren]

(psst, this is the wrong channel. You want #making-mods-general)

[final bronze]

OH

Thank 😅

[wise marten]

Has anyone used Better Junimos MOD?

[lethal walrus]

#modded-stardew

[wise marten]

thanks

[weary plume]

I think I got it to match the style of the other two logos fairly well.

[pliant snow]

not only do i have a different zigbee dongle than I thought i did, but I then bought a second wrong one because I thought the first was corrupted

[safe dragon]

third time's the charm

[pliant snow]

[sand frost]

I tried some dandelion & burdock and my family's review was "this is like weird root beer..." It was interesting, but I probably won't buy any more. We also tried Irn Bru, and it got similar reviews but with a slightly different flavor. One thing that seems weird is that all the sodas here have artificial sugars in them, I assume due to some kind of regulation about sugar content.

[cinder karma]

Huh

[crystal wren]

Weird root beer is fair! Like a vaguely floral root beer I'd describe it?

Also: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-if-your-drink-is-liable-for-the-soft-drinks-industry-levy

[sand frost]

Interesting…seems like most manufacturers chose to use sugar replacements rather than pay the levy

[violet gale]

(as someone who worked in an office of like, 4-5 people max and it was incredibly hostile, how actually hostile is it for women in devops?)

[safe dragon]

my sister never seems to have had a problem but maybe that's luck

there pretty much are no women in the development department where I work though so no personal experience...

[rain apex]

you are gonna be outnumbered wherever you go but most people arent raging misogynists and just want you to get your code changes in on time

[safe dragon]

I think you might get a shitty joke every once in a while due to not being a guy...

we used to have a female product owner and it did always feel a little... different with how some people acted around them even when it wasn't necessarily toxic in any way

I feel like some guys just don't know how to talk around women somehow even though the answer is generally "the exact same as you would otherwise"

[violet gale]

yeah that's fair, i didn't want my (1) toxic office environment to blot my course of wanting to go into security infrastructure but i also wanted a confirmation

[rain apex]

as long as you are enjoy doing the code, you can just get up and leave if the work place sucks

[violet gale]

(i will never again be a tier 1 devop for a workout company ever again)

[rain apex]

that part far more important than little things like gender

[safe dragon]

I work in retail software. It might be about as drab as a it gets

[violet gale]

i'm fighting between "continue school because gamedev was far more interesting" and, "get a job in security because it pays the big bucks"

[safe dragon]

I am still the youngest person in the development department by like 8 years

well game development environment aren't known to be less toxic at least...

[violet gale]

oh i meant more in terms of like, small dev or even solo opting because i just have to have something to work on? (i kinda have a cushy life right now and it won't actually be all that important if i make my own money or not )

[safe dragon]

lucky

[rain apex]

if u like school and can stay in school then might as well

i did not like the school so i got out asap

[violet gale]

honestly only reason why i opted to security was, "get that first salary check and pay off loans in one go"

i do like it, minus the math, i'm dumb as heck

but this is my last semester of math i think? i already know that i have to deal with actual matricies in code but that'll come when it comes

[safe dragon]

in game development yeah

won't find many matrices in most other software development fields

[violet gale]

well my husband is in civil engineering and he's been begging for me to learn CAD

[safe dragon]

that's another field entirely

[violet gale]

"make my life easier, you do devops, let me tell the calculator in english"

yeah i know

shakes fist

[rain apex]

just go work for epic games ez

do unreal engine dev

[violet gale]

i definitely do not want to work for an actual game company

i don't have one of those ~i'mma make it big as an indie dev~ thoughts though, it's more along the lines of, "i need something to focus all of this energy into where i won't get interrupted by coworkers" kinda idea, which defeats the purpose of working in security, if it weren't for the fact that 1 professor fueled that fire by making us program a safecracker my very first semester

i am forever changed

[sand frost]

CAD is fun but very little like programming, as someone who does a bit of both

[raw pelican]

So my personal github has portions of my IRL name on it, but when putting mods up, I have to include the github and I don't know if I want to dox myself like that. Do I make a separate github account for mods? Or do people use their screennames for interviews and stuff?

[rain apex]

my github is on my resume

[raw pelican]

I have yet to use it for professional purposes so it's just been slowly building up a portfolio so I don't know how people usually use it in terms of which part of their online persona to show.

[fleet wren]

My GitHub username was made by a 12 year old me and I use it to this day
But you should do what feels most comfortable to you (including if you want your personal and professional stuff separate)

[raw pelican]

Ok, I will swap it to my username.

[safe dragon]

I use a screen name for my github though it's not the same name I use for anything else really

never used it on my resume though

I don't think my current employer would know what github is

[raw pelican]

My current employer doesn't care because SQL writing is not my primary responsibility, but my dream job prospects would want it. But all I have on their now is my stardew stuff, some R apps that I need to refactor, and Euler Project examples so not huge.

[cinder karma]

It's interesting because my mod stuff is under a different github

[safe dragon]

the only project i have that genuinely has anything of interest in it is privated lmao

I might be one of the few people who likes sql and doesn't understand all these strange attempts at trying to replace it

[rain apex]

yes tables r great

[raw pelican]

The meme dream is that a prospective employer looks at my github and says "oh wow you made X mod? I play that one!" and hires me on the spot.

And I love SQL, it's great for what it does and very simple to write and troubleshoot compared to some others.

[safe dragon]

I understand the value of document stores, nosql etc btw I mean the (usually) cloud services that build their own funky little querying language which they then translate into sql for you

[fleet wren]

"Mongo DB is webscale"

oh gods that video is 13 years old

[raw pelican]

Ok I really liked PSQuery, the Scratch-level tool where you didn't have to know SQL, just logic, click the fields you wanted and do your joins through a dropdown and it would write it for you. That's how I got started.

[safe dragon]

we do use mongodb at work technically but only for what is essentially big json blobs that can vary a lot in their contents

[rain apex]

would love to have access to actual relational db at work

[safe dragon]

there's a million libraries out there that try to do the sql writing for you which I almost always end up being annoyed by at some point

it can be fine for months

they're a good way to do things though if you just don't know SQL

but a pretty significant part of my current job involves Stored Procedures still so I write a lot of actual SQL code

[raw pelican]

PSQuery was good because we also had a PL SQL option you could paste your stuff into and have a no-timeout run option and write more complex stuff. If it was just PSQuery it would get frustrating with how limiting it can be.

[safe dragon]

yeah almost all ORMs include some kind of escape hatch where it allows you to write raw sql

it's a necessity

One query I have in one of my personal projects rn would be either impossible or drastically slower when constrained to some ORM cause it does a lot of funky stuff

[raw pelican]

R is funny because it's essentially a bunch of relational databases in a trenchcoat so the dplyr addon got made to do SQL on all of it.

[safe dragon]

I have used R though that felt less like programming and more just like stringing a bunch of equations together

call some function to do k-means clustering

I am not a data analyst/scientist though. I'd assume the actual profession goes a fair bit further

was a very easy course tbh cause it was mostly done by math students for whom it was essentially an introduction to programming

[raw pelican]

The R courses I've been in have been much less programming, geared towards non-programmer science types, which is great because it's an easy A but not great because I can't get as fancy or get pushed.

Feel like I'm coming at it from the opposite side, a technical person dipping into biology.

[safe dragon]

I did have 1 course on writing simulation software though which was primarily taken by math and physics students that was anything but easy

I had no idea what was even going on anymore by the second lecture

I ended up just not even doing the midterm and quitting

like 10 minutes into the first lecture he was explaining funky matrices that we could apparently pull an insane amount of information out of

as someone who barely understands basic linear algebra I was not in the right course

[sand frost]

GitHub makes it somewhat annoying to have 2 accounts, on purpose. Not impossible but I got fed up and merged everything (though none of my professional work is public)

[safe dragon]

my professional work is in azure devops repos

that are very much private

I don't think they're even legally allowed to make it public

I also don't want them to cause it would not help my resume

nightmarish codebases other than 1

I mostly worked in asp.net webforms today

I wouldn't wish webforms on my worst enemies

[raw pelican]

current job doesn't use github for work and I can't put any of my SQL since it's owned by the company so that's annoying. Otherwise I guess I don't care if a company sees that I have personal projects for games and dumb math problems.

[safe dragon]

if they do care and think that's a negative that's probably not a great place to work anyway

[raw pelican]

https://projecteuler.net/about if you get bored and want to code some math and loops.

[sand frost]

My work would be fine with it; my only concern would be the vast internet connected on this end

[safe dragon]

I know project euler... it's often recommended to people who like advent of code(like me) but are more mathy

[sand frost]

But I think it will be fine either way

I’ve seen project Euler as well, never got into it

I have a decent amount of math in my life so it isn’t going to scratch any itches for me, but I have friends who got really into it

[raw pelican]

There's some people who do the problems in assembly which is very funny, but most go for C or python.

[safe dragon]

I try to avoid math when I can. Ignoring like... financial math cause that's a significant part of my job but that's really mostly just regular multiplication/addition etc just with an added layer of constantly dealing with the dreaded thing that is rounding errors

[sand frost]

I do pretty straightforward stuff for work, though it occasionally comes in handy to know a lot of math. Mostly I do math as a hobby.

Teaching kiddos

[raw pelican]

To me it's an easy way to build a portfolio of "here's how I do some functions, what my code looks like, how elegant/messy I get" without having an actual project to show off.

[safe dragon]

I have a bunch of public advent of code repos which I suppose serve a similar purpose if anyone looked at them

my hobby stuff rn is building a website that allows me to organize and view the files that are on my home server

[sand frost]

If I decide to take a hard left into CS I suppose my mod code serves that purpose

[raw pelican]

In a few cases I built custom functions because I just didn't know a function existed that did what I wanted so there's a "first draft" and "refined" set.

[rain apex]

i want to find some excuse to write a interpreter again

[safe dragon]

I have not written anything like that since uni

even then the closest was a c# to some stack machine code compiler

an extremely simplified version of C# I should say

C# if you pretended there was nothing more to the language after the tutorial "what is an array"

[rain apex]

my reason last time was "i gotta replace this horrible exec if im gonna expose this to public api"

[sand frost]

Driving in the UK is like roundabout exposure therapy

[safe dragon]

compared to the US I assume

roundabouts are absolutely everywhere in the netherlands

[thin estuary]

not quite everywhere in Poland, but a lot of them

[safe dragon]

just my 8 minute bike ride to high school back in my home town had 3 different roundabouts

though it's 2 now I think cause one of the roads was completely changed making a roundabout useless

[sand frost]

Yep lol

The roundabouts are very stressful because all my instincts about them are the wrong handedness

[safe dragon]

any crossing in the UK is a dangerous nightmare for me

driving on the left side of the road...

[sand frost]

The left side thing is fine on the highway, and it’s fine on smaller roads, but the roundabouts are really stressful

[safe dragon]

for me it's all from the perspective of a pedestrian/cyclist cause I don't drive

I love roundabouts

[pliant snow]

roundabouts are slowly becoming quite popular here. 10 years ago they were very rare, but they're now all over

i drive through I think three on my way to work now

[sand frost]

The most stressful part is that the locals get really pissed off if we try to go slowly

People will honk and swerve around us when we carefully pull into the roundabout and take our time looking around

So it feels like we’re careening around these mazes from hell

[pliant snow]

i mean, yeah its probably frowned upon to stop in the roundabout

[safe dragon]

how is the roundabout even large enough to swerve around you

I have not experienced a whole lot of roundabouts with more than 1 lane

[sand frost]

No, this is on the on-ramps

Not in the roundabout

The on-ramps often have two lanes though sometimes uh people just imagine an extra

[safe dragon]

the secret 3rd lane

[sand frost]

An extra when there’s only one lol

[safe dragon]

I guess we do have a bunch of 2 lane ones though the two lanes serve different purposes

[pliant snow]

we have some two lane roundabouts, but the right lane is for if you actually want to go right, then the left lane if you want to go out one of the other exits

[safe dragon]

yeah

my hometown has what people called the "botonde" aka the bone roundabout cause it's essentially a bone shaped roundabout with a circle on each side of the highway it serves as the entry/exit point for

[cinder karma]

I love roundabouts

[safe dragon]

apparently it's called a bowtie in english

[cinder karma]

I hate cloverleaves

[safe dragon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowtie_(road)

I like botonde more

a more accurate drawing on the dutch wiki page

I like it though drivers were very confused when it was first installed

I think it was just a regular intersection on both sides with traffic lights before that

the only time I've ever seen congestion there since the roundabout was one time when the highway it connects only had 1 lane due to repairs

[sand frost]

I think the thing about roundabouts is also that usually I can’t see where I need to be going until it’s right on me

If it’s an intersection, I can usually see in all directions

So navigating roundabouts involves a lot of really fast reaction times

[safe dragon]

without satnav I remember them being pretty rough

[sand frost]

Even with navigation apps, they say shit like “take the 4th exit” and never say things like a) how many exits are there total b) what’s the landmark to look out for

So often I’m frantically counting exits as I drive

Where I used to live in Boston, the options for roundabout exits are like 3 to 6 exits, so the 3rd exit might be a right turn or it might be nearly straight across

And of course the words the navigation apps say generally have little to do with the physical signs visible

[safe dragon]

I think my dad's satnav gives a general direction with the instruction

6 exits is rough though

that's a hefty roundabout

[sand frost]

We just went through one here in the UK that had 6

Though maybe some of those weren’t real exits

The map had 6 spikes sticking out for sure though

[safe dragon]

they're only exits for the imaginary 3rd lane

[sand frost]

There’s stuff like this everywhere here

[cinder karma]

Discover copilot in SharePoint!

(Sigh)

[rotund violet]

That's kind of like saying "discover dog doo in this here dumpster bin".

[cinder karma]

I mean

[devout vault]

For what it's worth re: resume, stardew mods is apparently a big part of how I got my current job

[cinder karma]

(Finishes the thought 40 minutes later.)

"Could copilot make SharePoint worse?"

Or are we already at the singularity

[rain apex]

but u can just put stardew valley dev on resume

[rotund violet]

When it comes to SharePoint and anything else in that ecosystem, we're definitely at A singularity, though I don't think it's the singularity Mr. Kurzweil was thinking of.

[cinder karma]

Focus, for a site meant for sharing files, it often takes me two or three tries to upload something

[sand frost]

I found that whatever government version we were using didn’t have a progress bar for uploads

Uploading anything bigger than about 2GB would just silently fail

[rotund violet]

Just two or three tries? You must have had a professional installation done.

[gaunt wadi]

@pliant snow I am happy to report that switching to an SI Labs based zigbee dongle works out of the box with my motion sensor/buttons are still working. Didn't even need to upgrade the firmware

Texas Instruments? More like Texas NotWorkingStruments

[pliant snow]

I am also happy to report that I too received my replacement dongle today and it is working much better than the old one, although i did have to clear out my config and repair everything, else it was crashing at launch

[gaunt wadi]

Wow same and same

We were probably touching our dongles at the same time

Is that too much? You decide

Living my zigbee dreams rn

[pliant snow]

My old one had terrible lag, but this seems snappy

I did upgrade the firmware tho

[gaunt wadi]

Dare I upgrade the firmware????

[pliant snow]

Dun dun

[gaunt wadi]

No it works fine

I'm not sure what upgrading would even do

[pliant snow]

Theres some ember driver that may or may not be recommended that required a firmware upgrade, so i figured why not

[gaunt wadi]

in other spicy news, I have discovered that protonmail non-sieve filters which move messages to spam and then mark them as read have a bug where they don't mark them as read

i have informed support

[pliant snow]

its so nice to press a button and have the zigbee respond instantly...

such luxury..

[gaunt wadi]

yeah! 😄

I got ikea zigbee switches, and zigbee bulbs for the one spot I can't put a switch, removing all of my old wifi devices

it's nice

[pliant snow]

I've got

lets see now

17 zigbee items connected to the server now

9 light switches, 4 plugs, 2 ikea buttons, a motion sensor, and an air quality sensor

i do have more plugs im not using atm tho

[gaunt wadi]

neat!!

what light switches do you have?

[pliant snow]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Q4F43HT
They're not cheap, and I think they've actually raised the price since I bought them (or they were on sale)

yeah thats more expensive and says its used, im not sure thats quite the same listing

[gaunt wadi]

📝

I will move to switches when I own a house, or desire to mess with electrical wiring

[pliant snow]

im just renting here but I put them in. It's about the extent of my knowledge lol

the plugs are really nice though, and then you can control lamps and whatever while still being trivial to install

[gaunt wadi]

yeah

i've made other illegal modifications but i'd rather not break anything electrical; also much cheaper

[pliant snow]

I wonder if there's a good outdoor light sensor, it would be neat to have the lights come on at a certain darkness level

[gaunt wadi]

the best one was replacing the shower head with my own; so much better

[pliant snow]

im so tempted to swap out the thermostat but I don't trust myself with that and I haven't seen one i like

[gaunt wadi]

There surely is, hmmm now I want to do this rather than using the sunset state, as sunset doesn't equate to brightness well

[pliant snow]

Mine just come on at a certain time of day, I don't even have sunset state lol

[gaunt wadi]

thank you for ushering me into this beautiful zigbee world

[pliant snow]

its so much nicer than the wifi hell all the big name brands are pushing

https://www.amazon.com/THIRDREALITY-Multi-Function-Illumination-Adjustable-Brightness/dp/B0C9LNXYLL
hmmmmmmmmm

[crystal wren]

I just want powerline ethernet bulbs that run on the lighting circuit. Is that too much to ask!?

[safe dragon]

yes

[cinder karma]

I want to murder SharePoint

On top of being bad it is a resource hog

(I'm literally not even doing anything with SharePoint rn. It's just making my laptop's fan run like it is trying to take off.)

[cinder karma]

Someone please tell me why Microsoft made two versions of everything

What is this "outlook (new)"

[fleet wren]

Skype flashback intensifies

[rain apex]

new coke

[safe dragon]

I don't understand office

I tried so hard to install office 2019 on my mom's pc but Microsoft kept yelling at me about office 365

[fleet wren]

Microsoft's strategy for Outlook is too much for the mortal mind to comprehend

[safe dragon]

I'm still not sure if I did it right

[fleet wren]

(aside from the mortal minds that worked on Google's chat apps)

[safe dragon]

my mom's pc had some company version of office installed and every attempt at trying to install 2019 would break or just do nothing cause of it

my mom's retired so it didn't even work anymore

I tried to remove it but even that was an arduous task cause it somehow just kinda came back when I'd install 2019

I eventually found out there was some random other application office for businesses or something that I had to uninstall first

[rain apex]

what does ur mom need office for

[safe dragon]

word for the work the does for the local bridge club she is part of

excel cause she makes spreadsheets for the games she plays

she was a math professor

[cinder karma]

Oh my Frick Microsoft

Excelllllll

[safe dragon]

yes

[cinder karma]

(I wrote 5e-6 in a cell and tried to drag it down to duplicate that value in multiple cells

It went "5e-6,1,2,3")

[safe dragon]

lmao

[exotic night]

Hey, is there any documentation about the multiplayer network protocol from this game?

[rain apex]

you want #making-mods-general , but the answer is "no go look at them decompiles"

[cinder karma]

Vscode in the browser is surprisingly weak

(I'm being lazy. I should just pull the repo. But I was like two quick changes....fifteen minutes ago.)

One thing I miss from visual studio

Sure it was a hog and kept crashing, but the refactoring was amazing

Meanwhile I'm like "okay, VSC in browser, plz rename a variable?"

[safe dragon]

depends on the language a lot

well idk about the web version I've never used it

[strange rock]

Me chaining together null-coalescing & safe navigation operators like I'm some kind of fancy Morse code enthusiast
var containerPairs = (Game1.currentLocation?.Objects?.Pairs ?? Enumerable.Empty<KeyValuePair<Vector2, StardewValley.Object>>())

[strange rock]

And if/when you figure it out, the community would love you for writing said documentation

[rain apex]

i didnt figure it out bc it's a bunch of reflection shenanigans

using it is not that hard though, there are a bunch of Net<Type> fields and u pick the one u want

[cinder karma]

I find it unhelpful for python

Is there a plug in to make me less mad

[strange rock]

Doesn't it do a lot of the grunt work for us? I'm about to do some inventory/storage manipulation and I really hope I don't have to manually push anything over the network

[cinder karma]

Sometimes I want to do basic bitch shit like "please take this if statement and invert it" and make the computer do it

And it won't.

Y'all are on topic

Shoo.

#making-mods-general

[strange rock]

Jerk computer. That is some kind of- phobic, I'm sure of it

Oh, um, hey, how about that duck-typing

[safe dragon]

everything in vscode happens through the extensions

[strange rock]

(I can be on topic)

[safe dragon]

it doesn't come built in with a python LSP

you'd have to install one

[pliant snow]

no u

[cinder karma]

I installed one!

[safe dragon]

I don't have to install one... I don't write python code

[cinder karma]

The Microsoft one

[pliant snow]

i barely need to, but i still keep one installed at work, yet all it mainly does is crash and yell at me

even tho i dont have python code open

[gaunt wadi]

lsp? more like no you pee

[pliant snow]

nup

[safe dragon]

incredible joke thank you

[gaunt wadi]

you're welcome

[rain apex]

i think pylance is alright

[gaunt wadi]

green beans pin it thanks

[rain apex]

my problems come entirely from stupid vendor specific python interpretors

[safe dragon]

my problems come from the python as a language itself

[gaunt wadi]

my problems come from capitalism

[safe dragon]

[pliant snow]

mine are mostly my own doing

[gaunt wadi]

you'd think so but actually it's all capitalism in the end

that's how they get you

[safe dragon]

I introduced the world to capitalism

Is capitalism responsible for the bad workaround I just wrote for an issue I didn't feel like dealing with rn?

[safe dragon]

glad it's not my fault

[merry musk]

psst...hey guyz 👋 can you peeps tell me where to learn the standard version of Java..i need it for a class

[safe dragon]

I'm not even sure what the standard version of Java is

knowing corporate environments they're rocking Java 8 or something still

[safe dragon]

been interesting watching my colleagues become increasingly annoyed by each other

passive aggressive messages in public slack channels

[crystal wren]

Lacking any additional context, I think we have to assume Java 1.0 is the standard version of Java.

[cinder karma]

Nah

The standard version of Java is two sugars and creamer

[pliant snow]

the only thing we do know is that the standard version of java isn't the one oracle wants you to use

[lethal walrus]

it's always fun how oracle java says 1.x, but openjdk just says x

[safe dragon]

why does oracle even have a different java

wow

apparently java 8 is in fact still supports as an LTS release

maybe I was right

despite java being at 22 at this point

oh there lies my answer too

oracle still provides support for java 8

which you gotta pay for

[pliant snow]

i think oracle has the once java, and all the rest of us are using the different one lol

[safe dragon]

gotta love programming languages with competing versions that aren't fully compatible with each other

which other languages have that

python I suppose has a billion variants but there's only one main one right, ignoring python 2

[pliant snow]

yeah i think only the main interpreter is the canonical one

C/C++ has at least 3 very popular compilers

[safe dragon]

gcc, clang and... what's the last one

[pliant snow]

and a million sort of popular ones

msvc

[safe dragon]

oh right

I forget that exists

javascript has a lot of implementations but they all have to follow essentially the same spec

[pliant snow]

yeah they're supposed to follow the same specs, how much they actually do in practice is the question

[safe dragon]

and with a lot I mean 3

oh it's definitely a mess

much like css

css used to be worse though

[devout vault]

Don't miss the days of -moz-* and -webkit-* (and etc.)

[safe dragon]

I guess javascript is the only language I personally use that has multiple competing implementations

I still used a -webkit thing once which for some reason fixed a layout despite being in chrome

I don't question it

[pliant snow]

oh yeah the old -moz crap

Go has I think two major compilers

[safe dragon]

already?

[pliant snow]

there's one in gcc iirc

[safe dragon]

haskell has a few though I think pretty much everyone uses ghc

[pliant snow]

lua has its nonsense

[safe dragon]

this is actually a significantly more common thing than I thought

[pliant snow]

they're working on a Rust one for gcc too i think

its basically just C# that doesnt lol

[safe dragon]

elixir also only has 1 implementation...

developed pretty much entirely by jose valim

who somehow next to that is a major contributor to like a billion other repos

people who push out several commits every single day of the week for several different projects scare me

people who just have a green contribution graph

[pliant snow]

the graph at my job wouldn't even be all green

[safe dragon]

I see a few days of rest

[gaunt wadi]

does anyone use it tho

[pliant snow]

it asks on Arch which i want when I need to install something for Go, but I'm not sure even I use it lol

[gaunt wadi]

how do you install things for go

[safe dragon]

I'd assume it's a package you have to build first so you'd need go to do it

[gaunt wadi]

it's never asked me

[pliant snow]

I think it asks for AUR stuff maybe

lets see

oh nvm it doesnt ask

idk why i saw it

[gaunt wadi]

ian lance taylor hacked into your computer and asked you pretty please use gccgo

[safe dragon]

was able to hack into your pc but didn't just install gccgo himself

[pliant snow]

the illusion of choice

is gcc go bad

[gaunt wadi]

he's nice about it

literally no idea, also compilers are so complicated it'd be very hard to label it as just bad

iirc, it was the original compiler before they started compiling go with go

nowadays there isn't much reason to use it

[pliant snow]

support the underdog

[gaunt wadi]

the language compiler bootstrap process is very interesting

when starting from scratch they do something like compile go version x using gccgo, use go version x to compile recompile go version x, then use that to compile the target version

or something like that, I don't remember the exact steps

x used to be 1.4 or something ancient for the longest while, but I think it's now 1.17/something pretty new

[safe dragon]

I'll compile go by hand

[cinder karma]

One instuction at a time

[gaunt wadi]

see you in 60 years once you're done with fmt.Println("hello world")

the real problem is you have to compile the entire runtime, and that bad boy isn't small

[safe dragon]

writing some machine code that functionally achieves the same thing would be a lot simpler

[gaunt wadi]

yes

[pliant snow]

would it

[safe dragon]

presumably printing something to stdout isn't the most difficult thing in the universe in machine code

I mean it'd still suck

[gaunt wadi]

I remember needing to write machine code by hand in school and I think printing to stdout was basically just storing the string in your program and then calling the right syscall

[safe dragon]

but better than an entire runtime

[gaunt wadi]

it would be orders of magnitude easier than an entire runtime, yeah

[safe dragon]

how does the machine code know which text encoding to use...

[pliant snow]

ive written game boy machine code by hand, but nothing actually practical

[safe dragon]

I have not written machine code by hand

[pliant snow]

I assume it's using whatver your locale is

[gaunt wadi]

it's fun as a treat but not practical

[pliant snow]

so probably utf-8

which would just be ascii

[gaunt wadi]

does the kernel even know what unicode is

unrelated, the linux kernel produces 60 CVEs per week

[safe dragon]

I found out one of the major annoyances of the LSP spec is that microsoft made it so it uses UTF-16 encoded strings

[gaunt wadi]

i've heard complaints on mastodon that they're too lax on what counts as a CVE, but that's still a lot

[safe dragon]

some of the CVEs I've dealt with at work have been non-issues

[gaunt wadi]

there are currently around 1000 known memory safety problems in the kernel too, you can see them all on a fuzzing test dashboard somewhere

[safe dragon]

very exciting

[gaunt wadi]

yeah the impact of all of these probably isn't huge

but it's interesting

[safe dragon]

I also have around 1000 memory problems

[gaunt wadi]

download more ram

[safe dragon]

download more ram

yes

we set C# to treat most warnings as errors and every once in a while some CVE breaks our compilation cause the c# compiler checks for them and shows them as warnings

[devout vault]

I've written some powerpc by hand for a mod for Kirby Air Ride. (And the obligatory MIPS during my college attempt)

[gaunt wadi]

gotta dip, i leave you all with this

[safe dragon]

kirby air ride

[gaunt wadi]

i just wanted to say gotta dip for the first time in my life

[pliant snow]

kirby air ride, Gods gift to us mortals

[safe dragon]

good luck cat

[devout vault]

One day I might actually make more than a little progress on my KAR clone attempt

[pliant snow]

the second best glider

[devout vault]

[pliant snow]

well thats a bold claim actually

i'd have to think

[devout vault]

(It's actually pretty bad competitively, but it's my favorite)

(Yes there's competitive KAR)

[pliant snow]

oh i dont doubt it

i was in a kirby mod server for a time that was basically just KAR focused

[devout vault]

I wonder if it's the same one I'm in right now

[pliant snow]

it used to have a pic of kirby in a cannon i think

[devout vault]

Apparently it is, I see messages from past-you in the search

[pliant snow]

hehehehe

[devout vault]

They hold tournaments with cash prizes occasionally now

[pliant snow]

i should rejoin, see whats new

[safe dragon]

kirby air ride 2

[pliant snow]

pretend i didnt abandon my project 10 years ago

[devout vault]

I WISH

But that's why I have my KAR project that's totally gonna get somewhere

[safe dragon]

of course

just like all of my projects

[pliant snow]

oh its just a kirby air ride server officially now

[devout vault]

Yepppp. Some of the other modding channels are still there

I don't know how active they are, I have them muted

(And also the entire netplay/competitive section)

[pliant snow]

have they added a second city trial map yet

otherwise im not interested

[devout vault]

There was someone working on it

I haven't heard progress in a while though

I did make a gecko code so you can swap stages with the press of a button... but that requires someone to make a second stage

[pliant snow]

what have these modders been doing for the last 20 years if not making more city trial

[safe dragon]

horse armor

[devout vault]

A lot of the more knowledgeable people aren't there anymore from what I understand. Some of the code for the "hack pack" is just... lost, only found in the patched ROM now

I found the .dat files for the new stages but I couldn't find a video of it

Maybe I can get it running really quick

[rain apex]

So is Kittycatcasey Ride meant to be compatible with existing KAR mods?

Or more like a fan game/spiritual sequel

[devout vault]

Fan game, though it's not gonna be kirby-themed

For copyright reasons and all

[crystal wren]

Casey Air Ride... CAR.

[devout vault]

Also apparently I don't have KAR set up on this computer?

[devout vault]

I have to install nodejs to make a vscode extension? Eww

I guess it makes sense though

[lethal walrus]

It's electron and javascript so does make sense

[fleet wren]

Deno/Bun time?

[safe dragon]

make your own Javascript runtime

[cinder karma]

"Next calibration date: Dec 31 1970"

[cinder karma]

NI annoys me

[rotund violet]

I don't see the problem. They're just informing you that, should you ever travel back in time, you'll need to recalibrate the device.

Anyone had experience with System.CommandLine?

[safe dragon]

didn’t know it existed

[rotund violet]

Ah, seems to be in a funky state right now, probably not a good time to get into it. https://github.com/dotnet/command-line-api/issues/2338

[safe dragon]

wouldn’t be a dotnet library without being in a funky state

[thin estuary]

i've been using it in my mod loader for Cobalt Core

[cinder karma]

The documentation for this unrelated thing is an example xml file

[rotund violet]

Having seen the page and video I just saw, I think it's best to wait and just use something else like Spectre for now. But I'm curious anyway, how's your experience been with it? And are you using the "full" API or the DragonFruit thing?

[thin estuary]

never heard of DragonFruit before

https://github.com/Shockah/Nickel/blob/master/Nickel/Framework/Nickel.cs#L30-L126

i assume i could have done this better, the lib has some kind of model mapping built-in, but i didn't use it

[rotund violet]

It's part of that library, seems to be the simplified version that lets you write a Main method with typed arguments but only supports one command.

[thin estuary]

i only use it for the initial Main anyway

no runtime commands

[rotund violet]

So, probably actually good for your use case. Not so good for what I'm trying to do.

[thin estuary]

i did start work on Nickel before that issue you linked was posted, though

[rotund violet]

I only found it by accident myself, was literally on the nuget confirmation screen when I dug it up.

Though I'm sure the beta is fine if it's working for you. I'm just less keen on it now, like buying a new car one week before the next year's models come out.

[thin estuary]

oh yeah, agreed

[devout vault]

Visual Studio extensions have to be written in .net Framework? Sad

[safe dragon]

I don’t think I’m even using any visual studio extensions other than the vim one and resharper

oh and our company wants us to start using sonarcube which I’m dreading

can’t wait to be told a method has too high a complexity cause it has a nested if statement

split everything into meaningless small methods that serve no purpose other than to be called from a specific other method

[rotund violet]

I'm the weirdo that never liked ReSharper.

There seem to be some stock extensions already installed with VS. Test adapters, MSIX stuff, Live Share, etc.

How could VS extensions not use .NET Framework? I mean, what else would they be?

[rain apex]

anyone used docfx before? for C# doc generation

do i need to do something special to have it build with net 6 jk it doesnt want to build for net8 eithre

[devout vault]

.Net Core :((((

[safe dragon]

I like the refactoring tools it comes with but I do not like how it slows visual studio down to a crawl

vs is already miserable enough without it on large projects

at least they recently introduced asynchronous typing so resharper doesn’t block you from typing anymore

[rotund violet]

Yeah and that has sort of been my experience with all or at least most JetBrains products; slow, slow, slow.

Probably comes off as elitist re: ReSharper and isn't intended that way, I just found I never really got much use out of the particular kinds of refactorings it did, and it comes at a cost both in terms of both price and performance.

[devout vault]

I give up on this VS extension, I can't get the syntax highlighting or the language server to work

I'll just use vscode for content editing

[fleet wren]

minirant: mind boggling that whitespace ignore isn't the default settings for GitHub diff (ok maybe there's an argument for it not being default, but still it's 2024, we all have autoformatters) is hidden behind a tiny checkbox/button

[safe dragon]

we had some funky situation for a while where some developers at work had the editor set to CRLF line endings and others LF line endings

and we’d constantly get warnings that files were formatted using one of the other

without whitespace ignore we might’ve actually figured out who was doing it…

[supple ether]

By default git normalizes to lf though

Even if they were inconsistent you wouldn't see it in the repository unless they deliberately disabled that for some reason

[safe dragon]

idk tbh

it’s visual studio + azure devops

all I remember is that it was an issue

and then went away

[sonic mirage]

When we make a new repo at work we add a .gitattributes that makes it so Git treats all files like binary so that line endings aren't messed with. We have far too much of a variety of platforms and frameworks and thing that we support for clients to have it mess with any files. Too many instances of it breaking files because we didn't go and explicitly define that file or file extension as being a binary file so that it wouldn't mess with it.

Something like * -text last I looked

[thin estuary]

…doesn’t that break diffing?

Have fun doing any conflict resolution

[crystal wren]

And MSBuild extensions/custom tasks needs to use .NET Standard 2.0, I believe?

[thin estuary]

Yeah

[fading nymph]

Was thinking about making a 1 to 1 version of stardew in VR once I get enough for another computer. But I wonder how I can make it legal ya know. Like making it so your required to have stardew to play it but idk how I would approach that idea. Anyone got any ideas?

If you know of any solutions that would be awesome.

[safe dragon]

the only legally recognized way would be to get contractual agreement from CA that you can create and publish it

[fading nymph]

I was thinking of a more less direct approach. Theses these guys that make VR ports for older games like doom and half life. And what you do is you have to buy the game and put the games contents to be albe to play it. I was wondering how I can do that with my 1 to 1 creation. That way you have to buy the game. And there ain't no way of booting the game without stardew. Plus I don't have to go though hoops with CA for months just to get started.

I was more wondering how I can do that

[pliant snow]

Doom has an open license, so the source code has been made accessible to everyone, so that's perfectly legal to do. I'm not sure about Half Life. What do you envision the game will look like? Do you want to remake the entire game using 3D assets, or some sort of pseudo-3D effect like a 3DS? The former would basically require you to remake the entire game from scratch, while the latter is also a huge amount of work, but more doable. Games like Doom have the advantage because they're already in 3D, so they can be adapted to VR more readily

[lethal walrus]

Half-Life: Alyx is a 2020 virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter game *developed and published by Valve. *
unless you mean another half life in VR game?

[rain apex]

maybe you can do what portmaster ppl did?

https://portmaster.games/detail.html?name=stardewvalley

so you are required to have the game files from a legal place

i am struggle to imagine stardew in VR though

[fading nymph]

It is a huge amount of time for sure. Remaking the entire game. Taking the original assets and remaking them in 3D. I know this is gonna take a while but with my blender and godot knowledge. I can do it. It's more of a dream idea I wanna chip at.

[pliant snow]

Portmaster is just running the linux version of the game isn't it, it's not even using an open engine or anything

[fading nymph]

Half life as in the og half life

[lethal walrus]

it's got a bit of harmony iirc

over the original game

[pliant snow]

Why not make your own game then? It can be heavily inspired by SDV, but after all that work and effort, it seems better to have something you'd completely own and could profit off of rather than something that will be legally dubious

[fading nymph]

Ok I'll look into it. Oh I know it will my friend but as long as I don't stress myself put I'll get though it.

[rain apex]

yea if you are remake game in 3D and using none of the og game's asset then just make your own story-of-seasons-like

[fading nymph]

I could but I really want it to be 1 to 1.

[rain apex]

stardew doesnt have any claim to that genre

[pliant snow]

I think you'll receive a Cease and Desist from the good people at ConcernedApe LLC at some point then

Time to update to the iOS beta

what could go wrong

[fading nymph]

I think it's a little diffrent if you need to buy the game. But it's definitely still possible for that to happen absolutely. And if it does well others don't need to have it and I can enjoy it for myself.

I'm mostly making it more for me anyway. I just want people to enjoy it aswell. But if CA get in the way then whatever

It's mine to keep.

[fading nymph]

I'll look into that thank you.

Wow that actually might be the solution. Thanks again chu/e

[fleet wren]

There's a fan made HL2 VR mod on Steam

[fleet wren]

vaguely speaking it depends on the rights holder, but if you make it free, requires the original game to work, and doesn't pass it as your own work, most rights holder don't care
there's VR mods for Skyrim HL2 (as mentioned), and dozens of other games

[lethal walrus]

ah

[rain apex]

Wait I'm psure skyrim vr is official

[fleet wren]

oh woops it is

[fleet wren]

I tried it in the past, but then almost frew up during the boat segment. And I have pretty sturdy VR legs (like "rocket jump in VR" kind of legs)

I heard they made it better, but I haven't tried

[devout vault]

I worked on that once as a mod, it was fun. I couldn't get the eyes working properly since I was doing it with openvr directly and didn't really know what I was doing

The 3D part was manageable besides assets

[rain apex]

I could never VR I get motion sick with shaky cam movies sometimes

[safe dragon]

I'd like to try VR someday

but without having to spend any money on it

the VR trial headsets at electronics stores always seem to be broken

[rain apex]

Do u have those VR arcade things

[safe dragon]

idk if we have arcades anywhere in general

[rain apex]

[safe dragon]

there's definitely no arcade in my city

[rain apex]

There's a few around where I live but I never gone into one

I think you just pay some amount of money and they let you play beat saber for couple hours

[safe dragon]

there seems to be a "VR amusement center" but they seem to focus entirely on parties

children's bday parties specifically

there does seem to be 1 normal arcade but the photos are all of gambling machines?

stuff like cranes and the things you drop coins into that would then shift other coins

there's apparently a Warhammer 40k club

there's a VR escape room?

[rain apex]

VR pachinko

[fleet wren]

but you're the ball

[safe dragon]

Rolling motion and all

[fading nymph]

That's what I figured but I ain't a lawyer so I just took it for a grain of salt.

[fading nymph]

As a mod huh. Interesting

I'm sorry about your eyes man.

[rotund violet]

Without knowing details, it's not necessarily the game's fault; the most common cause of motion sickness in VR is actually low FPS. 60 isn't good enough for VR, you need 90; and since each eye is separate, it means you need beefy enough hardware to actually run at 180 fps. Unless you can consistently hit that, then the head tracking isn't accurate and barfing ensues.

[crystal wren]

What I really want to try personally is any inside-out tracking VR headset, because I might have been spoiled by only ever having used the Vive and Index.

[rotund violet]

Similar, my first forays were with Vive and Rift. Wasn't that thrilled with either, mind you, it's the sort of thing that's really exciting for about 5 minutes until it dawns on you that you're thrashing around in a room wearing a dorky headset.

We're not quite at that "full spectrum" SAO-tier VR that'll let you escape the uncanny valley.

[devout vault]

Functions in CSS (well, Sass)? What https://sass-lang.com/documentation/at-rules/function/

[lethal walrus]

it just precalculates them in the compiler

i assume?

[safe dragon]

correct

browsers don’t know what sass is

sass is compiled to css during your build process

[devout vault]

Back in my day, we didn't have build processes for web /s

[safe dragon]

there’d still be functions but just stuff like calc and color-mix

for true functions in your css you gotta do the good old nasty feeling hack of injecting it with javascript with a bunch of eventlisteners

did have to do that recently for a layout for work

only way I could figure out how to make the layout they wanted to work was to insert a grid-row property through javascript

definitely done worse

much worse

thsi one at least felt pretty robust

built some infinite looping scrollable menu a few months ago too without help of third party libraries and that was a nightmare

[rotund violet]

calc is pretty awesome though, SASS has no way to do "100% minus 2 ems"

[pliant snow]

Governors website is secretly scss i compiled into css once then never touched the original again lol

[safe dragon]

we used scss for a few months till we all realized we never actually used scss features and were just writing regular css

scss was the only reason we had a dependency on node so we just took the css and deleted scss from the project

felt so good to remove

[rotund violet]

I've had the same thing a few times. I think 90% of what SCSS used to be really important for was just variables, and now regular old CSS has those.

So the only thing it adds is stuff like components, which often end up being more trouble than they're worth to maintain.

Nowadays we just throw a bunch of variables into a theme file, write vanilla CSS around it and call it a day.

[safe dragon]

yeah variables are pretty crucial

I thought I'd use tailwind for this project but I've felt no need for it

just using plain css

all I am actually using is component scoped css

but even that's coming to css proper kind of with @scoped

[rotund violet]

I tried Tailwind (via Skeleton) on one project and concluded it would be a net negative on future projects. I just do not like seeing a dozen "utility classes" tacked onto a single HTML element, with all the irritating fanboys insisting that "it's totally not the same as inline styles for <list of obscure and pointless technical reasons>". It took decades to get everyone on board with the principles behind specificity, and implementations of it, and Tailwind would have us just throw it all away, because "look how simple it is!"

So many things boil down to the same principle IMO: writing code is not hard. Reading code, and maintaining and scaling code, is hard. Tailwind and other utility frameworks make the easy part slightly easier and the hard parts much harder.

[cinder karma]

What's Halo

What is Cortana in Halo

[rain apex]

Cortana halo is like Navi but with boobs I think

Better reception than Navi tho

[cinder karma]

Hey I found Casey's knitting channel

[devout vault]

Haha

[cinder karma]

Teach me two color brioche decreases!

[robust anchor]

after modding for so long I wanted to goof off and try my own programming for the first time... I know it's not super impressive but as someone with ZERO coding experience I'm proud haha. also sorry for the grainy 2 fps video

[pliant snow]

yo thats neat

is it in some engine?

[supple ether]

gamemaker is a great place to get started if you can afford the heinous price tag! one of the best codeless tools out there

[supple ether]

you can see in the window title bar that it's made with gamemaker

[pliant snow]

what is this, a window title bar for ants

[robust anchor]

It's definitely not codeless lmfao

fwiw I bought it a LONG time ago

[supple ether]

it's got the drag and drop and a visual level editor. you very much can make full games with no code in game maker

[robust anchor]

I used the coding GML version which is like C# for dumb people

[supple ether]

I first got into coding with drag and drop, then GML. but this was back in the gamemaker 7 & 8 days before yoyo went corporate and nuked the old site

like 2007ish maybe?

gamemaker is a great place to start and I would recommend it more often if it wasn't so fucking expensive and had a more versatile toolkit

[robust anchor]

Isn't it free now if you don't publish?

[supple ether]

idk I bought studio and then gave up on it because it never progressed past being a horrible mishmash of unfinished systems. ALso I hated dealing with the file sandboxing

I use godot now

[robust anchor]

But yeah, I'm having a lot of fun :3 I didn't even try drag and drop, I figured it would be really limiting

[supple ether]

it's pretty flexible! but GML is definitely better

[robust anchor]

I'd like to learn to program in unity or godot one day but I feel like that would be less fun hahahah

[supple ether]

godot is loads of fun!

you can do c# with it, but it also has its own python-like scripting language that should feel relatively comfortable if you're used to GML

the only real learning curve is kind of wrapping your head around the whole node system, which is AMAZING once you get used to it, but really different from a lot of other engines

unity I have no experience with

[robust anchor]

Maybe I'll have to try it one day!

[devout vault]

Woooo GM7 gang

Meanwhile for one of my games, I spent the past couple days writing a load-from-xml system (and a load-from-almost-css for styling)

(This one is in MonoGame, not Godot)

[supple ether]

I have been debating trying to make a game with just mono but I think I would really miss godot's animation toolkit

[devout vault]

I find the "multiple visitable locations that are always there" thing cumbersome with Godot, having to do the whole viewport thing

(The CSS was kinda lazy, I parsed it with two regexes)

[supple ether]

yeah there's definitely stuff that godot is not well-suited for, and highly data-driven games is one of them

[devout vault]

I think you can do it if you embrace the Resource system... but at the same time, then people have to get Godot and pack content themselves I think?

And if you want to make a plugin system where they can use your stuff during editing but package only theirs at the end, it's cumbersome (when I tried it before at least)

[supple ether]

in theory I think you could load resources from json with newtonsoft, but you'd almost certainly be better off using godot's native serialization

[devout vault]

I like newtonsoft better than Godot's json classes

But those are more designed for gdscript

[cinder karma]

....I came very close to asking why you didn't use serde

[supple ether]

lol

[devout vault]

Hehe

There is a rust Godot binding I think

[supple ether]

also I mean .tres/.res not godot's json lib

there is!

[devout vault]

I was gonna look at https://github.com/Godot-Languages-Support/godot-lang-support but it's not updated for 4

It still has VisualScript

This throws me back, I used AngelScript ages ago

(For yet another moddable game project that never went anywhere)

[supple ether]

it's surprisingly difficult to make a good modding engine, even if it's first party

[devout vault]

I've got a set up that works decent for this project I wrote the UI loading stuff for. It works similar to SMAPI

Except I'm using zips instead of folders

(Probably should support folders for development time)

[supple ether]

for a long time I've been wanting to write a custom serialization lib designed specifically for games, with graceful failure for missing types and minimal file sizes

[devout vault]

I wrote a very basic CP-like ages ago for this (no tokens or anything, just basic actions - in json)

I'm tempted to switch to the thing I wrote for SpaceCore though

[supple ether]

the idea was that the file stores a manifest of types and fields that it uses, mapped to indices, and then the data itself stores the reference index and size for the corresponding field and type (to reduce repetition and bloat, and allow skipping of unidentifiable types with no fallbacks) . Then on the game side, it would generate an intermediary foreign -> local index map from the manifest, and use a combination of delegate arrays and source-generated switch statements to handle the actual deserialization, to negate the need for reflection and dictionary lookups, while being able to handle types added at runtime

[robust anchor]

I wonder if there's something like Yarnspinner for Unity but for Godot

[supple ether]

it's enormously convoluted though and would require a ton of work to implement

[supple ether]

there's several

if you're using the C# version, there's also an addon that integrates Ink with Godot

[robust anchor]

Ooh I love that

Chatterbox is so fun to mess with in GML

[devout vault]

Ink looks interesting

I'd like a system that works well with, like, i18n type stuff though

Might need to write something custom

[supple ether]

Ink seems very cool, the main downside to it is that all of your ink text gets compiled into a single json file, so you can't do deferred loading on large games

[robust anchor]

I modded the game Exocolonist for a while and I like that Crochet/yarnscript is basically exoscript

[supple ether]

I've never heard of it, but I'm guessing it's a story-driven game?

[robust anchor]

Yup! It's similar to Disco Elysium kinda

Amazing game

Full name is I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

[supple ether]

I like narrative games but I don't play them as often as I ought to

Night in the Woods my beloved <3

[devout vault]

Yeah, I love a good story

[robust anchor]

Night in the Woods is lovely

[devout vault]

I remember hearing about Project Fluent at one point (for i18n) and that seemed interesting, but dunno how I'd integrate it with any sort of dialogue system that currently exists (in a convenient way)

[supple ether]

yeah it's kind of a tug-of-war problem

the more you put logic in code, the easier it is to translate, but the harder it is to actually write dialogue scripts

I have yet to see any system that neatly solves both

[devout vault]

I'm thinking some sort of tool that you can write in a language normally, and it'll spit out a "script" with the text replaced with i18n key references

And then probably use the tool to fill in other translations too

[supple ether]

yeah having an extra mediating layer like that is probably the best way of doing it

[devout vault]

Not sure if I'd end up making it standalone or tied specifically into the game engine for better feature support

[rotund violet]

y tho

[devout vault]

Why not

[rotund violet]

I mean, is there an audience of people who want to make games in Godot but really want to use Rust for it instead?

[devout vault]

Dunno

[rotund violet]

PF is very good btw. But it is sorta designed more for professional translators than your typical random mod translator who might have some trouble with some of the ICUish syntax.

[supple ether]

you might be surprised!
from what I understand though, the main reason is so people can write performance-intensive components in rust (like, say, a large-scale voxel engine) and then use gdscript for the lighter, less-critical scripting

you could also just use c/++ for that but shrug

[rotund violet]

Right, makes more sense if it's to make some small components in Rust and push them over WASM or something. I guess I had it backwards, thinking "use Godot engine but write all the code in Rust".

[rain apex]

a few years back my fren wanted to make autochess in godot

[supple ether]

you could do that too, but why on earth would you

[rotund violet]

That was the nature of my original question, yes.

[rain apex]

i only got as far as implementing the grids and a* pathing before the project wilted from lack of activity

[supple ether]

yeah sorry that was meant as rhetorical, I was agreeing with you

[supple ether]

doesn't... godot already have a native nav system

[rotund violet]

Pathing is where indie games go to die.

[rain apex]

does it

[devout vault]

It didn't use to

[rain apex]

this was back in godot 3

[devout vault]

Or it wasn't good I think?

[supple ether]

oh maybe

[rain apex]

they add it in 4 maybe?

i believe i had to use a extension

so it wasnt rly me making it

[supple ether]

no it was definitely in 3, but it might've been crappy. I didn't really look at it until 4.0

[rain apex]

i think it had like, non grid based pathing

but we were making grid cus yknow, autochess

[supple ether]

yeah

[rotund violet]

I had to look up autochess and after reading the description... I still have no idea what they're talking about.

[rain apex]

basically it's a rts that plays itself

and your input is where your goblins stand before the autoing start

[fleet wren]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_battler

[rain apex]

it started off as a dota2 mod

but the league version (teamfight tactics) is more popular atm

[rotund violet]

Yeah wiki didn't help much either. It's like trying to read a foreign language. Probably got something to do with the fact that I know nothing about deck builders or mobas.

[rain apex]

the meat of the game is the meta portion of gambling for better units

you gotta become good at knowing what comp you ought to go for in a game

and when to go all in with ur money

i am not good at this shit

[fleet wren]

I used to play lots of Dota Underlords, but when Valve more or less pulled the plug so did I pull out

[fleet wren]

simply speaking, you basically build a deck of cards, every turn you pull a few 'cards' and place what you have in your hand on a board against the enemy's units, and they fight each other

[rotund violet]

How would you even use non-grid-based pathing on a grid-based game? One of the issues I very quickly ran into was that physics do not play nice with grids, and the only pathing I can think of that's not grid-based would be collision-based?

[rain apex]

Well u can't, that's why I got a separate a* pathing extension

[fleet wren]

the grid is only for the initial placement, once the round starts the units then move freely, find the nearest enemy and beat each other up

[rotund violet]

Oh, the "it" was the engine, I get it

Thought your game was the "it" when I read the comment.

[rain apex]

My game is non existent

[rotund violet]

...the game you were working on, then.

[rain apex]

I do think it'd be nice to revive it one day but 1) it's not my idea I was just help fren 2) it was going to need 9001 graphics

[rotund violet]

Is that some kind of art style or just a random number meaning "a lot of sprites/models and neither of us are artists"?

[rain apex]

The latter yea, since autochess is mechanically not that hard after the initial AI and character entity stuff

But it's driven by having large pool of units

[rotund violet]

Right. And I guess they're supposed to be animated as well.

[rain apex]

And also neither of us can music either

Solo indie game devs r modern renaissance wo/men tbh

[rotund violet]

I'm kinda hoping that if I can get everything but the art (engine, maps, AIs, music & sound, etc.) then the art will somehow fall into place. Probably too optimistic, but it's been known to happen.

Funny, we have a hundred artists (pixel and otherwise here) and a hundred devs who can't do art and none of them ever really want to collaborate. I wonder what stars have to collide for actual indie teams to form; it obviously happens because the games come out.

[devout vault]

Going back to the dialogue stuff earlier but Yarn Spinner does look really interesting

[sand frost]

I mean, I think there has to be a pretty high degree of trust/vision alignment for teams to work

[supple ether]

that second one is the real killer

[cinder karma]

I didn't read any of the previous convo

This is the first line I see

[sand frost]

It’s not impossible but generally telling two strangers “collaborate now!” gets you the kind of results that group work in school does

[rotund violet]

That's what I mean though, I never see it happen and yet it clearly does happen.

[cinder karma]

heads back out

[supple ether]

there've been plenty of collaborations between artists and coders on here before

[devout vault]

There was one time I started working on a game with some modders but it was around the time I got really depressed

[sand frost]

I mean I’ve slipped both Atra and Casey small pieces of pixel art

[devout vault]

So that didn't go anywhere

[cinder karma]

I have no clue what yarn spinner is but I'm assuming a wheel

[sand frost]

But I can program so maybe that doesn’t count 😛

[devout vault]

I've talked about it with another modder more recently but we're both working on other stuff right now

[cinder karma]

I will not be convinced otherwise

[devout vault]

I was about to link you what it is

But if you won't be convinced, well

[rotund violet]

Definitely unusual for people to do both code and art.

[supple ether]

atra too deep in the fiber arts

lost in the proverbial sauce

[rotund violet]

(Maybe in theory also unusual for music, but I've actually seen that more often for some reason)

[supple ether]

I think because it's easy to imagine a game based around visuals or mechanics, but less so around music and sound

[rotund violet]

And yeah of course I would never think of just telling two randos to collaborate, I'm just openly wondering why more of them don't form organically.

[supple ether]

they're important components but not usually the centerpiece

[cinder karma]

(I don't know about the amount of art that goes into a video game but I sure can do the occasional vector graphic)

I think it's a volume thing tbh

[rotund violet]

I dunno, I think people don't give enough credit to the audio. I can scarcely imagine a game like Chrono Trigger or FFVI without the amazing compositions in them.

[cinder karma]

As for music, just about everyone I know plays at least one instrument

(I can play piano. And flute.)

[supple ether]

#programmers-off-topic message

[devout vault]

Not meeeeeeeeee Oh wait, I play the (computer) keyboard, does that count? /s

[rotund violet]

Was art the centerpiece to those games, though?

[supple ether]

audio can make or break a game but it's mostly invisible

[rotund violet]

It counts if you've somehow rigged it up like a MIDI keyboard.

[rain apex]

Beyond just skills there needs to be a big leader person I feel

[supple ether]

same with game design, level design, and UX design

[sand frost]

I think that making the kind of big intensive mod/game almost inevitably takes long enough that Life gets in the way

Not entirely inevitably!

But nearly so

[rain apex]

A lot of modders here tend to stay in their lane and just do what they are capable of for modding

[sand frost]

I can’t commit to any project with a timeline and goals because my life is too exhausting/chaotic

[rotund violet]

See, that's how I imagine it needing to work in most cases when members aren't aligned on vision, but it doesn't seem to be necessary in every case.

[sand frost]

And many modders explicitly enjoy working without a deadline

Which is super fun and cathartic (for people with deadlines in their lives) but uh there’s a reason real projects have deadlines

[rotund violet]

I think a lot of us would be happy to find "occasional contributions" collaborators.

Especially since a lot of us don't have endless hours to invest in our own personal projects anyway.

[cinder karma]

🫂

[sand frost]

Everything I’ve done for Atra and Casey has been because I had like, an hour free and their idea was fun

[regal ingot]

people enjoy the whizzing sound they make when they fly past?

[rain apex]

Yeah but do u want to wrangle a dozen randos while still doing your own stuff

[worn remnant]

for me, audio does make or break a game. sound design is such a huge part of how a game feels to play (responsiveness of controls is another do-or-die feature)

[sand frost]

Mine have been whizzing a lot yeah…

[rotund violet]

Yeah, it really does. I've played so many modern RPGs and AAs and somehow they never feel right. And usually when I seriously think about what's lacking, it's the music and other audio.

The art is solid. The gameplay is decent. But the fun, the emotion, just isn't there.

[cinder karma]

I don't know, sudoku has great audio design.

[rain apex]

Anyhow I look forward to making enough money to retire in 20yrs and then making one of those excel sheet trade route simulation games I am fond of

[rotund violet]

lol, so can I count on you to test my mod when it's done?

[supple ether]

I mean for the most part I'm down to do c# stuff for people as long as it's not something crazy in-depth, I just feel like usually either you get someone who's never done any modding being like "yeah can you make a mod that makes it so I can hire NPC farmers who do farming for me" or it's just other c# people throwing around ideas for things they want to do themselves.
I rarely hear anyone saying "yeah I have the art and json for this but I need a bit of c# for it to work"

[rain apex]

Yes I'll turn off chests anywhere in favor of your mod

[rotund violet]

I rarely hear anyone saying "yeah I have the art and json for this but I need a bit of c# for it to work"

That seems weird, doesn't it?

[rain apex]

That's just a testament to how good content patcher is

[rotund violet]

Although now that I think of it, there are a lot of people who kind of tiptoe around that, just saying "I don't want to learn C#" but stop short of asking for help.

[supple ether]

oh absolutely. what I mean by it being invisible is that it's not something most people are thinking about, unless it's something truly exceptional

[supple ether]

maybe next time we have a modjam it should be a teams-only one

get people to group up and try new things for fun

[devout vault]

Boooo

(Good idea)

[rain apex]

Wow why are you forcing me to experience college group work trauma

[devout vault]

(But it's easier to do stuff solo)

[sand frost]

In completely unrelated news, I now have a shower curtain!! And it’s sparkly!!

I got the rainbow sparkly one

[rotund violet]

I suppose I should pay more attention to the quid-pro-quo. Programmers like myself should be more proactive in reaching out to the ones making really good art but not getting anywhere with their own ideas.

[supple ether]

it is easier to do things solo, but it's also very rewarding to get outside your comfort zone and collaborate with other people

[rain apex]

More seriously mod jam would have to last longer than usual if collab I feel

[rotund violet]

(I don't know anything about these modjams, but sounds like a good idea to me.)

[devout vault]

Yeah, I've enjoyed working on S&S with Desty

[rain apex]

How long were they before?

[supple ether]

bakeoff was a hot mess but it was a lot of fun to make

[devout vault]

I can't remember how long the one I won was

(I don't have contest winner role because I left the server for a bit)

That's the one I made Surfing Festival for

[supple ether]

yeah for sure. like a week minimum

[cinder karma]

Cute!!!!

[devout vault]

I need to get a pretty shower curtain, my current one is just white

[cinder karma]

Can't you ask for it back?

[rain apex]

Would you want ppl to sign up as groups or randomly pair ppl off

[supple ether]

man I need one of those

mine is just plain blue

[devout vault]

Ah, here's where I won: #bulletin-board message

[sand frost]

I got the target $10 one

[supple ether]

sign up as groups definitely. random pairs sounds like a bad time waiting to happen.
I think you could have like a looking-for-group thread though

[devout vault]

@ atra good idea, I should do that eventually

[sand frost]

If you want opaque shower curtain, then you’ll have to find something nicer probably but I’m very pleased for $10

[rotund violet]

Doesn't the fancypants 1.6 badge override all others anyway? Nobody would see your contest-winnership.

[devout vault]

It's the thought that matters

And by thought

I mean role

[worn remnant]

counterpoint: allow people to sign up to be assigned to a group (randomly or by staff). it might be fun to find yourself on a team and have to do something outside your wheelhouse

[supple ether]

true!

[sand frost]

I think both having a thread for finding people and “I’m feeling lucky” could be nice

[devout vault]

What if you get a team with people you don't get along with 😛

[rain apex]

Then you got the full college experience

[sand frost]

Then you weren’t feeling lucky enough

[worn remnant]

i would have that be separate from the choose-your-own-teams category, though

[rotund violet]

Random group assignment can have people dropping out when the work is voluntary, if they're really opposed to the direction of the project.

[cinder karma]

Theorizing another jam?

[rotund violet]

Not saying it would happen often, but personally I prefer the idea of people being able to either choose teams or choose ideas.

[sand frost]

In theory the jam thing is something that i think would be nice to do again (and indefinitely onwards)

[supple ether]

yeah the idea is a teams-only modjam

[sand frost]

In practice, ask me in 3 weeks how the new job is going

Maybe 4 weeks

How many weeks does it take to develop habits?

[rotund violet]

One way to get semi-randomized teams without ending up in "conscience issues" could be to have the projects and team sizes listed but anonymize the members during signup.

[cinder karma]

You'll be great!!!!!

[rotund violet]

Positive or negative?

[sand frost]

Any kind of normal daily rhythm

I guess that would be positive?

[rotund violet]

I remember reading that bad habits can form in less than a week, good habits take about 6-8.

[sand frost]

By averaging, we can see that neutral habits form in 3-4 weeks

[rotund violet]

Though "bad" and "good" are obviously relative, I suppose "good" is really a label for "something you want to do but aren't already predisposed to doing".

[rain apex]

Is this about adjusting your circadian clock

To sleep wake at different time

[sand frost]

Nah, certain parts of my new job kick in next week

[cinder karma]

(You'll do great!!!)

I believe in you

[rain apex]

Yeah it'll be fine u r a Dr. after all

[rotund violet]

As long as we're being math nerds, I feel obligated to point out that there are probably many more bad habits than good habits, making the average much shorter.

[sand frost]

I think it should be a function of the goodness/badness of the habit

It might not be linear, but since I’m an engineer everything is linear

[rotund violet]

Hmm... so there are more bad habits, but their badness is of less magnitude than the goodness of the rarer good habits?

Plausible. I think I'm gonna have to bust out the ol' spreadsheet.

[sand frost]

No, what I mean is that any given habit has a time T(goodness of habit) to form

So a hypothetical true neutral habit takes 3-4 weeks

A slightly good but not very good one would take 4-6 weeks

A slightly bad one 1-2 weeks

[rotund violet]

So a truly self-destructive habit could form in mere seconds.

[sand frost]

There might be some philosophical issues at that end, yeah

In particular, any infinitely bad habits we all already have

If we’ve done them at all, I guess

[rotund violet]

I'm seeing asymptotes on this graph.

Definitely non-linear.

[sand frost]

Maybe it’s broadly linear if you assume the badness of a habit is strictly bounded

The fact that habit requires doing a thing at least once could do a lot of work

[rotund violet]

There's certainly only so much badness you can do to yourself... but what about habits that are bad for other people too? Or good, for that matter. Could be several orders of magnitude apart.

[sand frost]

Yeah, the lack of an objective measurement of goodness is an issue

[cinder karma]

(We can argue that getting back into a habit is easier than starting one.)

Although I've given up on "only two cups of coffee/day" lol

[sand frost]

Oh no

I’ve been drinking one coffee a day due to jet lag management

[rotund violet]

Definitely is easier to return to a habit than form a new one.

Strangely, I've honestly never felt the need for more than one cup. I can't function without that one, but add another and it just feels tweaky.

[cinder karma]

One of my coworkers saw my instant coffee IN brewed coffee trick and asked if I ever got evaluated for adhd

No. I just survive off caffeine

[devout vault]

So much coffee

[sand frost]

That sounds fascinating but a little horrifying

[devout vault]

^

[sand frost]

I’ve done tea and coffee

[devout vault]

I've never had coffee

[sand frost]

Tea brewed with coffee as the liquid

And some extra hot water

[rotund violet]

That also sounds a little horrifying, gotta say.

[cinder karma]

.....huh

[sand frost]

This was because the work coffee machine at the time would have too much caffeine for me to have more than one cup, but it would dispense half a cup

[cinder karma]

Yeah that sounds like it would taste weird

[sand frost]

Half a cup is kind of sad, so I would augment with hot water

The hot water/coffee mixture is way too watery, so I fixed that by brewing tea with it

Black tea and coffee go totally fine together

Lemon ginger tea and coffee definitely do not, as my (now) fiancé found out

[cinder karma]

See I do that by accident every like third month

And I don't like earl grey in my coffee

[sand frost]

(We weren’t dating at the time, but he heard “coffee-tea” and decided he had to try the abomination without stopping to listen to the instructions)

[cinder karma]

Now I have to try this

[rotund violet]

As someone who has his own grinder, this talk is all utter heresy.

[worn remnant]

when i'm at home and can be fussy about my coffee, i have two a day. on the road, anything goes and i will drink coffee at almost any opportunity

[sand frost]

When I started grad school, I bought coffee filters because I knew you needed them, but I didn’t have a coffee machine

So I used hair ties to hold the coffee filters in a mug

And then made coffee that way

[worn remnant]

w h a t

[rotund violet]

You can do that. That's all a drip coffeemaker really does anyway.

[sand frost]

Which is somewhere in between horrifying jank and single cup brewing snobbery

[rotund violet]

You just have to pour very slowly.

[sand frost]

I think hair ties are particularly nonstandard

[devout vault]

(Off-current-offtopic: Yarn compiles into a form that wouldn't be great for modding, so I'd probably want to compile at runtime )

[rotund violet]

Well yeah, but I assume the hair ties didn't contact the coffee.

[sand frost]

I didn’t pour slowly, I let it steep for a bit and then removed everything