cloudmike
Joined 17 years ago
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595
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87
Member since
Nov 5
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
I mentioned fast hot reload because your original comment complained about compilation speed, and some people might not know you were referring to the speed of compiling your custom Luau integration in C++ (which is also fast for me, personally).
Sounds like the Discord I mentioned is technically the Roblox discord. The #luau-lang and #luau-lsp channels are where I lurk.
Comment · 1 year ago
I use Luau with my Unity game for all gameplay code (60k+ loc so far). I agree the docs could be improved, especially for custom integrations. The new type system + LSP aren't great together yet either, and I've been a little worried about the direction since zeux left the team.
But otherwise I really like it. My Luau code hot reloads almost instantly while the game is running, and my C++ project compiles quickly when I update it. I like that it provides sandboxing if you want to support modding. And there's an active community of people on the official Discord, which is better than nothing.
Comment · 2 years ago
Some friends of mine played Descent competitively, and I was amazed to learn about so-called trichording: to maximize your speed, you need to press multiple keys at the same time to travel along all 3 axes at once, e.g. forward/right/up. The best players zip around the map diagonally.
I always assumed this was a bug-turned-feature, like skiing in Tribes. When I saw the repo just now, I looked for clues, but didn't spot any related comments around the line of code where this ultimately happens:
https://github.com/kevinbentley/Descent3/blob/142052a67d4318...
Comment · 3 years ago
I use Luau in my games and tools [1], and I recommend it. While I can't speak to transitioning to it from Lua, since I didn't do that, I can say that it's fast, stable, sandboxing just works (important for your use case), and it's very well supported and regularly updated.
For context, I first started using Luau as an experimental hack by integrating it with Unity. I mostly just wanted fast and simple hot reloading. I found myself writing more and more of it, and now I'm writing most of my code in it.
VS Code support is pretty good via the luau-lsp language server [2]. Type support for certain code patterns isn't great yet, but there are RFCs to improve this.
They're also quietly working on native code gen and JIT support, e.g. this PR from a few hours ago [3].
Overall, recommended! You're not crazy.
[1] https://twitter.com/kineticpoet
Comment · 3 years ago
Finger snapping is fascinating too. I always assumed the sound happens when your finger rubs quickly against your thumb. But it’s actually after that, when your finger strikes the fleshy part of your thumb. You can verify this by blocking your finger from striking your hand.
So it’s actually more like finger clapping. The “snap” part just lets you build energy for the “clap” part. Maybe obvious to some but I amazingly only learned this later in life.
Comment · 3 years ago
My emotional journey with Val having just learned about it today:
Oh neat, a new systems language, probably nothing but let's take a peek. Docs look legit. Hmm some thoughtful ideas in here around ownership. Syntax makes sense. But is it different enough to justify its own existence? Who makes it?
Oooh, Dave Abrahams is working on it. We crossed paths at Apple and I remember his Crusty talk about Swift [1]. It was great, loved the strong opinions, but Apple sadly removed it years later because it had some outdated advice. Wait, he's at Adobe now? So is this an Adobe language?
Conclusion: keep an eye on it, will watch the linked talks, wait and see.
[1] edit: I found the Crusty talk! "I don't do Object Oriented!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3zo4ptMBiQ
Comment · 3 years ago
A friend of mine is making a new city-builder called Metropolis 1998 [1]. If you're into SimCity 2000 specifics, you might also enjoy his dev updates where he posts about his pixel graphics engine, custom pathfinding for agents/cars, etc.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/
(his subreddit is called Archapolis but he recently changed the name)
Comment · 3 years ago
When I started making a game [0] last year, first thing I did was write a little Unity script that takes a screenshot of the opening scene, counts current lines of code using CLOC [1] (for fun, not as a true measure of anything), and occasionally renders it all out to an image file.
With that I'm able to create some pretty fun time lapses of progress. I've been doing this at an arbitrary milestone, whenever my Luau [2] LOC surpasses C++ by another factor. This post reminded me I'm overdue for another now that Luau > 3x C++ LOC.
I find it rewarding to look back at my progress. I'll share in case it's interesting for you too [3].
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2168330/Helmscape/
[1] https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc
[3] https://twitter.com/kineticpoet/status/1619508466212831232
Comment · 3 years ago
The most remarkable thing about "Bret Victor's vision" is how different people have interpreted what his vision even is. His ideas are multi-faceted, so they inspire in several important directions all at once, e.g.:
- "what if" feedback loops (crudely, "live programming")
- direct manipulation (an old idea but beautifully captured in his projects)
- making logic feel more geometric / concrete
- visualizing and manipulating data, especially over time
- humane interfaces (putting "computing" into the world around us, but without AR)
- etc.
Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.
So as others have pointed out, the only person who may be fully attempting Bret Victor's vision is Bret Victor with Dynamicland. You may also be curious to check out Humane [1] which is a hardware startup founded by ex-Apple people. They're rumored to be shipping a projection-based wearable device this year. This device could potentially be a platform for people to experiment more in the direction of Bret Victor's vision.
[1] http://hu.ma.ne
Comment · 3 years ago
It's great to see you applying the latest tech to this idea.
We got pretty far with this a few years ago using more basic ML/NLP. The app was called Moatboat: https://twitter.com/moatboat/status/1082425681210859520
The area I think is most exciting (and in need of more innovation) is using natural language to create (and modify!) the actual simulation / rules / behaviors. Our approach was to map language outputs to actions that could be chained together using Goal Oriented Action Planning plus an Entity Component System. The user's verbs / prepositions / etc. would add layers of goals, each of which would enable or disable certain behavior components when triggered.
More details here for anyone interested: https://medium.com/@mikejohnstn/whatever-you-say-happens-2fa...
Directly generating source code from natural language would be a fun alternative approach to try today.
Comment · 3 years ago
Seeing a masterful Rothfuss excerpt right next to its lesser, AI-generated counterpart (in a sibling comment) gives me pause, today.
Comment · 3 years ago
As others have mentioned, "making software programmable" isn't really landing for me.
In the tradition of borrowing terms from the games industry (where we often see early popularization of good ideas), I wonder if "modding" could be a helpful addition somewhere in your marketing.
This seems to have worked for the term "multiplayer", though "moddable" probably isn't as widely appreciated yet.
https://twitter.com/kineticpoet https://store.steampowered.com/app/2168330/Helmscape/