Impossible

Joined 15 years ago

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Comment · 4 years ago
Pico-8 isn't super accessible as a game making platform, although it is a very accessible programming introduction platform.

HN tends to over use "boilerplate" as Pico-8 has zero boilerplate and is super minimal. Your post is no exception. Core gameplay code is not boilerplate and Pico-8 is not a game engine in that sense.

Playdate has Pulp, which does include built in collision, dialog systems etc and is inspired by Bitsy. Pulp has it's own (optional) scripting language and is specifically designed as an accessible game making tool. Even the Playdate Lua and C SDKs have more gameplay functionality than pico-8 though, including a simple game object model, collisions, animation, etc

Comment · 4 years ago
I always have a desktop computer and mostly can only do real work on desktop (graphics/VR/game programmer). Laptops are nice for portability so I always try to have one or two available. Because of my role my jobs have always provided one in the office, but I keep a personal one for gaming and side projects/learning.
Comment · 4 years ago
All of these are used in the wild at various companies. Maybe these companies are entirely staffed by subpar engineers, but FAANG style whiteboarding is extremely gameable, especially if you know someone in the inside already, but even if you don't and leetcode enough.
Comment · 4 years ago
I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)
Comment · 4 years ago
The platform is still web, even if it's not using HTML and CSS. The success of figma has lead to a lot of start ups targeting the web as there main platform, but using WASM (C++ or Rust) and WebGL (soon WebGPU). This makes sense in creative tools, I think. We're also starting to see tools that run on the server and stream video to the browser.
Comment · 4 years ago
Having worked at Facebook and seeing where they are headed I think the HN numbers are way off and this poll is mostly "what company does HN hate the most" not which is most likely to decline. Hating FB as a company is fine, and FB as a product is probably likely to decline, but they are as OP mentioned significantly better at shipping new product than any other company listed except Apple. Facebook's biggest challenges are not owning a real platform (platform holders could hurt them) and having lots of serious competitors. These are real problems, but I think their ability to fast follow can put them in #2 for a lot of different categories they care about.

Netflix has a lot of room to grow in new markets, gaming and possibly other types of media. I think they can continue to produce good content and I think some smaller players that are locking content to their own services might return to Netflix in the future (like Microsoft, Sony and EA are now all back on Steam)

I don't think any of these companies is in serious threat of decline, but out of all of them Google seems most stagnant.

Comment · 4 years ago
Nanite doesn't do any rendering on CPU and does a lot of work that is traditionally done on CPU (culling) on GPU. Nanite does use a software rasterizer for most triangles, but it runs on GPU.
Comment · 4 years ago
This is one of the main advantages of using a lower level library like Vulkan or DX12. Higher level APIs like OpenGL and DX11 do a lot of work for you, but that work can result in extra allocations that you can't control, starting driver threads, extra resource transitions, etc
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
When I worked on Call of Duty (~7 years ago) almost all of our source images were TGA. The runtime format that almost all games use are various block compressed formats (BC7, ASTC, etc) and usually these are grouped in some kind of package/archive format (although engines are moving away from that in order to stream at the asset level) and lz4 compressed on disk.

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