a1studmuffin

Nice try Satya.

Floating-Point Determinism | Random ASCII - tech blog of Bruce Dawson https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/floating-point-determinism/

The short answer to your questions is no, but if you’re careful you can prevent indeterminism. I’ve personally ran into it encoding audio files using the Opus codec on AMD vs Intel processors (slightly different binary outputs for the exact same inputs). But if you’re able to control your dev environment from platform choice all the way down to the assembly instructions being used, you can prevent it.

The Instapak stuff I’m thinking of was basically medium sized bags that acted like a heat pack, where you break something inside the bag to combine two chemicals then shake it, which makes it expand and harden quickly.

I think the stuff is called Instapak expanding foam. Personally I think I’d remove the GPU and any mechanical drives to play it safe, but I’ve had a PC shipped to me before fully assembled with Instapak around the GPU (no HDDs, only SSDs) and it was fine. Ideally ship it in the original box for the PC case.

I’ll go against the grain here - I’m still rocking an unmodded Ender 3 Pro from 2019. It sits in my garage now as a tool for functional prints, though I’ve done the odd articulated print for kids.

I generally only ever use black or white PLA. I pretty much never calibrate it any more now it’s set up. I just don’t see the need to upgrade. Yes, it’s slower and louder than newer 3D printers and there’s no web interface, but the dimensional accuracy and quality is there for 99% of functional prints.

My friend has a Bambu Lab P1S and for fine detail it’s definitely higher quality, so if you’re designing micro parts (eg. PCB housings) I’d go with something newer, but if your functional prints are going to need around 0.05-0.1mm accuracy, an older 3D printer will do the job just fine.

I imagine they’re dirt cheap on the second hand market right now. Might be worth trying one before diving into something more expensive?

Edit: forgot to mention, the only time I get a failed print is when I give it something stupid to attempt, like with no supports. This will be the learning curve with any 3D printer and getting used to how slicers work. You’ll eventually build an intuition around this workflow, but I don’t believe the choice in printer will matter here - correct me if I’m wrong folks.

If you’re looking at collaborating in game jams, you’ll find it handy to have some Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot under your belt. Don’t worry about becoming an “expert” at any of them, just do a few intro tutorials and read the starter docs on each.

But also, a lot of programming languages exist simply because a programmer really wanted to write a programming language.

35 years! It’s almost unheard of to be at a single game company for so long.

Yeah that sounds about right - VST is such an awful standard, and is only made worse by all the copy protection nonsense that companies pile on top of it. I wish there was an open standard that was cross-platform, portable and used PGP encryption for standard licencing, but alas, it’s too late for that.

I’m quite surprised Ableton haven’t released a Linux version yet. They would have had to do some of the legwork to stand up Ableton Push.

I’d love to see these complexity results compared against humans for a laugh.

Yeah I think at this point we can slap a 1 in front of that badboy and call it a day. Though as an engineer I also appreciate starting from 0, ha!

I don’t read reviews, I’m not on social media (except here) and I don’t participate in online discussions about my games. At least that’s the principle I try and live by, I’m only human. And running my own studio meant having to break those rules anyway. Oh well.

Truthfully, it doesn’t bother me that much, and it gets easier the more it happens. Not everything is for everyone, and either people are respectful in their critique (which you can learn from to hopefully get better next time) or they’re disrespectful (in which case you can pretty much ignore what they’re saying as online trolling).

Also when you’re at a bigger studio, your contribution to the game is much smaller anyway (1000s of devs), so you feel less personal about the feedback.

As I’ve gotten more experience, I actually feel like ANY type of feedback is good feedback - it means people are playing your game! There will always be a vocal minority wanting to rage and vent, and you can just take their volume level as an indicator of how well your game has captured your audience’s attention.

I’ve been in games over two decades - everything from AAA to VR startups to running my own indie studio. I feel like I can probably answer your question.

There’s definitely a class divide within the industry based on your discipline. If you’re a software engineer, you have much greater leverage than artists/designers etc. when it comes to compensation, and you’ll likely be treated better in general.

Especially at larger studios, if you’re good you will generally be looked after. Sure, you might earn more working for one of the big five in tech, but you’ll probably be less interested in the work.

You should expect to move around pretty often - it’s rare (but not unheard of) for people to stay at one company for most of their career.

There have been some pretty rough seas over the years too - post-covid layoffs, and a fairly large series of layoffs in the early 2010s.

I’m guessing 30% of my time has been spent on games that never released. The first time was soul-crushing. But after that, I realised I needed to focus on enjoying the journey Instead. The game releasing was just a nice bonus.

I wouldn’t change my career for the world. I love working with other creatives (I’m actually friends with many of my colleagues), and I’m genuinely passionate about what I do. I think you just need to be the right personality type for it. If you’re someone who can’t set boundaries for yourself easily (switching off after hours), it can burn you out, usually by your own hand.

Most burnout I’ve seen has not come from studio heads demanding people work insane hours (though those rare situations always make the headlines), but instead comes from people’s inner drive to be a reliable colleague and do amazing work. I think that’s a side effect of being passionate about the work.

Is it a good career? I’ve certainly loved it and feel like I’ve been well-compensated, but your mileage may vary. But don’t believe the hype of the vocal minority who say it’s an industry full of abuse and bad wages. There’s some shitty things that happen for sure, and some jerks running studios here and there, but I think that’s more to do with late-stage capitalism than games itself.

Reminds me of: https://youtu.be/4R4uTrA1vQ8

It wouldn’t surprise me if this decision was more about external conditions than internal ones. They’ve got the money to burn, and are likely forecasting an insane number of sales, so timing it to ensure a more favourable global economy seems believable to me.

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of switching, if Google still get to harvest all your data?

Isn’t this asking for trouble with spam, bots etc?

If it is, get ready for the subscription plan.

I have no mouth but I must scream