Apos's recent activity

  1. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
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    I've been using it since 2016 though I used XNA before that around 2013. If you just want to get started quickly, check out their 2D tutorial. It's really high quality. What I like about MonoGame...

    I've been using it since 2016 though I used XNA before that around 2013. If you just want to get started quickly, check out their 2D tutorial. It's really high quality.

    What I like about MonoGame is that it's real C#. You don't have to fight an editor or layers of abstraction. If you want to create a quick little game, you can have all your code be in a single file if you want. How the code is organised is completely up to you. Using MonoGame makes you become a better coder.

    The MonoGame community is really nice. There are people that spend hours helping others that are stuck. It's also inspiring to see what everyone is working on. It feels like the early Internet.

    The MonoGame project is rather conservative, it's really rare that the API breaks between versions. This means that it's rather trivial to support a game over many years. (Also this means that 10+ years old tutorials are still relevant.)

    Overall I'd say go for it. The cost of entry is really low.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
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    I participated in a local gamejam as a team with 3 other people two weeks ago. (We were 3 programmers with 1 guy also doing the music + sound effects, and 1 graphics artist.) We had 40 hours from...

    I participated in a local gamejam as a team with 3 other people two weeks ago. (We were 3 programmers with 1 guy also doing the music + sound effects, and 1 graphics artist.) We had 40 hours from start to finish.

    Today they announced the winners and my team got second place which gave us a prize of $1k. That was pretty awesome considering I pretty much forced (joke) the others to learn to work with MonoGame on the spot. Our artist had never worked on a game before but she was a beast. Our composer had a sort of synthesiser keyboard which was really cool.

    MonoGame is a code first approach to making games unlike something like Unity that provides a visual editor. (Though I personally find it a lot easier to work with than Unity. You don't tend to fight MonoGame the same way, it mostly stays out of your way.)

    The theme for the jam was "ship" so we made a sort of space invader-based game where you have to defend earth from aliens. Each wave, you can spend your money to build a town. The buildings were a house to get more HP, a mining rig for passive income, a bank to get paid more per alien kill, a windmill to shoot faster, a cannon that can auto shoot.

    The balance wasn't perfect but we finished the game loop, had a fully functional menu with keybind options and credits, no game breaking bugs.

    In total, 17 teams participated in that gamejam. It was crazy because 40 hours is already short but the rules also required us to make a trailer and a document to explain the game, the way we created it, etc.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on One Piece | Season 2 official teaser trailer in ~tv

    Apos
    Link Parent
    I find the power level to be quite well balanced between the important characters. There are also characters that achieve great stuff with only their wits or unexpected circumstances, so that...

    I find the power level to be quite well balanced between the important characters. There are also characters that achieve great stuff with only their wits or unexpected circumstances, so that bypasses a lot of the power creep.

    There's an episode that's not part of the story called "One Piece Fan Letter" which does a great job showing what the world looks like for regular people.

    Anyway I'm so glad that they pulled off the live action. Seeing the show come to life is truly amazing.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on One Piece | Season 2 official teaser trailer in ~tv

    Apos
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    The second season comes out on March 10. The actor that does Sanji has been releasing some behind the scene videos.

    The second season comes out on March 10.

    The actor that does Sanji has been releasing some behind the scene videos.

    5 votes

  6. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
    Link Parent
    I mostly tested locally. Here is one I just uploaded: ProjectCore. It's an older game from a gamejam I did a while ago. The theme was "Change is good" so I made a tower defense game where you can...

    I mostly tested locally. Here is one I just uploaded: ProjectCore. It's an older game from a gamejam I did a while ago. The theme was "Change is good" so I made a tower defense game where you can move your towers and the paths also move. The towers have a reset mechanic when you move them which allows you to micro them so that they shoot faster.

    The controls might be a bit hard at first. You can right click to place towers down initially. To move them, you can left click on a tower, then left click somewhere else.

    There are 3 types of towers. You can switch the type of a tower by left clicking one and then using the keys 1, 2, 3.

    To go switch faster, you can instead use the columns of the keys. For the first tower, the keys are Q, A, Z. The second is W, S, X, etc.

    The game starts slightly slow and the difficulty ramps up as more and more paths are added.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Toy Story's villain is a lie in ~movies

    Apos
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    I found this YouTube channel the other day after watching Pluribus. His analyses have been really interesting so far. He always brings new ideas that I haven't considered before that show movies...

    I found this YouTube channel the other day after watching Pluribus. His analyses have been really interesting so far. He always brings new ideas that I haven't considered before that show movies or series in a new light.

    I rewatched Toy Story 1 during the holidays and this video completely flips the story on its head. I had read some discussions about it the other day, since Toy Story 5 will be coming out next summer, and the fact that Sid becomes a garbage man came up, but I didn't think too deeply about it. iirc it was brought up in a negative light. I like this new framing that Sid sees value in trash. It closes his arc quite well. For him, things have value even if they aren't in pristine conditions.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
    Link
    I've been making MonoGame libraries for a few years now. They help me create games much faster. Built on the same API as MonoGame, there's now KNI that allows building games for the web. This week...

    I've been making MonoGame libraries for a few years now. They help me create games much faster.

    Built on the same API as MonoGame, there's now KNI that allows building games for the web. This week I ported all my libraries to KNI and they all worked on the first try. It's pretty cool to have all my games instantly work in a web browser.

    I'm participating in a local gamejam next week so it should be fun to toy with this tech. I can write one codebase and release games on many platforms. The current platforms that I have tested are Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, web.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on Eric Barone makes a $125,000 donation to the MonoGame project in ~comp

    Apos
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    Eric Barone is the creator of Stardew Valley. MonoGame is a C# library that allows you to create your own game engines. Here's a (not complete) list of games made with MonoGame:...

    Eric Barone is the creator of Stardew Valley. MonoGame is a C# library that allows you to create your own game engines.

    Here's a (not complete) list of games made with MonoGame: https://monogame.net/showcase/. Some of the bigger ones include Terraria, Stardew Valley, Fez, Carrion, Bastion, Celeste, etc.

    Other places where this was posted:

    13 votes

  12. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
    Link
    I've been working on my shape rendering library. snip It's a library that can render shapes in MonoGame projects along with other XNA derivatives like KNI and FNA. Recently I added gradients fills...

    I've been working on my shape rendering library. snip

    It's a library that can render shapes in MonoGame projects along with other XNA derivatives like KNI and FNA. Recently I added gradients fills which took quite a bit of research. Behind the scene, it uses signed distance fields.

    I'm adding new features so that I can use it next month in a local gamejam that I'm participating in.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Who can name the bigger number? in ~science

    Apos
    Link Parent
    Another one that gives me a similar vibe is https://prog21.dadgum.com/. I was so sad when he decided to stop posting. I still didn't find another blog like that except maybe the one in the OP.

    Another one that gives me a similar vibe is https://prog21.dadgum.com/. I was so sad when he decided to stop posting. I still didn't find another blog like that except maybe the one in the OP.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Who can name the bigger number? in ~science

    Apos
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    Found this article by mistake a while ago while coding my infinite canvas drawing application. It's not exactly what I was looking for but it brought me to a place that I'd never have expected....

    Found this article by mistake a while ago while coding my infinite canvas drawing application. It's not exactly what I was looking for but it brought me to a place that I'd never have expected.

    The question is simple but I think it quickly takes a philosophical turn.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Gimp Tutorial for Idiot? in ~comp

    Apos
    (edited )
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    As a programmer, I love GIMP, it feels like it's designed exactly for my use case where other tools aren't as precise. For drawing shapes, if they are all the same, you can do your selection and...

    As a programmer, I love GIMP, it feels like it's designed exactly for my use case where other tools aren't as precise.

    For drawing shapes, if they are all the same, you can do your selection and use the Stroke Selection button (icon that's in the bottom right) in the Selection Editor. After you stroke for the first time, clicking that button while holding shift will repeat the same stroke. That should allow you to do a different selection and then shift click it for a faster workflow.

    Oh btw, every item in a menu should have a hotkey even if one isn't shown. For example, let's say you want to merge two layers, you can right click the top layer and hit W. iirc in the past, the letter to click was underlined, I don't know if they removed the underline but everything in the menus should have a button.

    Otherwise, you can generate the shape in an external program and paste it in GIMP.

    You should really view GIMP as an image editor where you work with existing images instead of as a drawing application.

    Edit: Looks like what I'm talking about is called an accelerator or an access key and you can see the underline when you hold alt and then navigate in the menus.

    Edit2: For every element that you hover in the user interface, you can hit F1 to bring up context appropriate documentation.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Keynote - Blender Conference 2025 in ~tech

    Apos
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    They had a lot of interesting talks throughout the conference: Keynote — Blender Conference 2025 Compositing 5.0: Powerful yet Simple — Blender Conference 2025 Inside Blue Zoo's R&D: Building a...

    They had a lot of interesting talks throughout the conference:

    3 votes

  19. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Apos
    Link
    I've been working on a shape library using SDF math. (Essentially math that point towards the edge of the shape, allowing you to know when a pixel is inside a shape, a certain distance from the...

    I've been working on a shape library using SDF math. (Essentially math that point towards the edge of the shape, allowing you to know when a pixel is inside a shape, a certain distance from the border, etc.)

    I finally added gradient fills which was a bit of a rabbit hole.

    https://github.com/Apostolique/Apos.Shapes

    This allows creating games without any sprites, or it's really useful for creating debug tools or various visualizations.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on One Piece | Season 2 first look in ~tv

    Apos
    Link Parent
    There's a new anime adaptation that's currently being worked on called The One Piece. snip. It will be made by Wit Studio (Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga, Spy Family, etc). They released this...

    There's a new anime adaptation that's currently being worked on called The One Piece. snip. It will be made by Wit Studio (Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga, Spy Family, etc). They released this behind the scene video: 『THE ONE PIECE』 Behind The Scenes of Production. I have high hope for that adaptation.

    They'll be remaking the whole thing from the start and it's supposed to be seasonal instead of every week.

    1 vote