SolarLune's recent activity
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Comment on Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS in ~games
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Comment on Reducing the friction of publishing online? in ~tech
SolarLune (edited )LinkI feel you - I looked at Eleventy and tried working with Hugo, but it felt rather complicated for a simple portfolio site I wanted to create, and while themes are great, working and customizing...I feel you - I looked at Eleventy and tried working with Hugo, but it felt rather complicated for a simple portfolio site I wanted to create, and while themes are great, working and customizing them felt like an entire other layer of technology to learn.
So, I just ended up going with Pandoc for the simplest and easiest approach.
I write my site in Markdown, using VS Code. I use a build script to use Pandoc to turn the Markdown files into HTML while referencing a CSS file. Currently, the build script is just:
pandoc -c site.css -s index.md -o index.html pandoc -c site.css -s caseStudy.md -o caseStudy.html(Now that I think about it, I should upgrade this script to use the html files in the directory rather than handcoding the paths, but that's not particularly important at the moment.) I then use reflex to run the build command whenever any markdown or CSS files change. Finally, I run the Live Server VS Code plugin so it hosts a live preview of my webpage - whenever the HTML files are built, it will auto-refresh the browser preview.
From there, I just upload it to my web hosting service when I'm ready.
That's basically it, and does basically everything I need, giving me a nice, auto-refreshing preview of my website. It allows me to focus on writing the content and making easy-to-see tweaks to styling, and re-use common elements across sections or pages.
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Comment on What game, in your opinion, has the best graphics? in ~games
SolarLune LinkI think a lot of games nowadays look fantastic, to the point where it looks like a movie, or an anime or a cartoon (DBZ Fighters / Guilty Gear, Hi-Fi Rush, for example) or whatever. No Man's Sky...I think a lot of games nowadays look fantastic, to the point where it looks like a movie, or an anime or a cartoon (DBZ Fighters / Guilty Gear, Hi-Fi Rush, for example) or whatever. No Man's Sky really does a great job of selling you on real-life FTL space travel - the feeling of flying into a black hole in that game is unparalleled, truly. The execution of these art styles can be fantastic, but as an independent game developer myself, I personally find more interesting what developers did when constrained under primitive technology like the PS1, N64, and DS. (EDIT: Really, every console generation had stand-out games, not just those in the early days of 3D, but that era was rather interesting, both for 3D, and for higher-resolution 2D games on PS1 and N64.)
It seemed like those eras afforded you just enough tech for game artistry to be able to execute a cohesive artistic direction effectively, and even have some extra for convincing extra effects like lighting or ambient occlusion, even without having anything approaching the technology to actually do it.
For example, there were a lot of PS1 games that looked fantastic, even going by today's standards, like Vagrant Story or Megaman Legends. Maybe the technical aspects were primitive, but the shots chosen in cutscenes and the fake lighting in Vagrant Story are still, in my opinion, incredible, and Megaman Legends had excellent clean texture work. It was particularly of note for the characters' faces in cutscenes, even with different, perspective-incorrect faces for particular angles, which really pushed the characters' ability to emote and "look good". The inability to actually have a full 3D model for a face meant they had to use texture mapping effectively for faces, and the restrictions allowed their artistry to come out in full force.
That's what I think, anyway.
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Comment on Unity reveals plans to charge per game install, drawing criticism from development community in ~games
SolarLune Link ParentIndie game developer communities (/r/gamedev comes to mind) tend to dissuade people from writing game engines because "writing a game engine is a full-time job, just like writing a game is a...Indie game developer communities (/r/gamedev comes to mind) tend to dissuade people from writing game engines because "writing a game engine is a full-time job, just like writing a game is a full-time job. If you want to make games, you probably want to start with a full game engine already and then go from there; otherwise, at the end of development you'll just have a really cool game engine, and won't actually have made the game."
There's some wisdom there, as writing a game engine can indeed be a prolonged and somewhat difficult task, and if you're writing a game at the same time, there will always be a temptation to work on cool stuff for the engine instead of working on the actual game. That said, a lot of game developers prefer to make games in code, where the line between writing a game engine and writing a game using a gamedev framework is blurred.
Some people tend to think of game engines as "the thing that powers a game", but there's more nuance to game development than that. A game engine generally has a UI where you move stuff around (like Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, etc), but a game framework, while generally lacking a UI, could still be considered as "largely powering your game" as it handles the lion's share of the nitty-gritty middle-code that you wouldn't want to have to mess with yourself (like platform-specific input handling through a generalized API).
I think most of the advice is to turn people away from rolling literally everything themselves (including windowing, input, rendering, physics, audio playback, sound effects like delay or reverb, shaders, lighting, porting, etc), but most people probably won't do that and would just use a framework to make their game, which is easier, more realistic, and accelerates the process of development a lot.
TL;DR: People might "mock" gamedevs for writing their own engines because its seen as a waste of time. However, game development need not use a common engine or framework, and using these tools, even ones designed to save time, only makes sense for as long as they're helping you and actually saving time.
Apparently, people have gotten The Finals the run on Proton Experimental recently, so it would seem Embark is doing work on that front to get the game to be playable on Linux as well.
I think Linux is the obviously superior choice for handheld gaming - Windows, with its mouse-focused UI, is simply not made for handheld gaming. SteamOS does a far better job at giving a console-like, gamepad-focused user experience.
As the second part of your comment, I think Pro workflows would be nice, for sure, though I think it has to start with Wine or Proton to enable compatibility and software alternatives - Bitwig or Renoise as a Linux-friendly alternative to Ableton or ProTools, Blender for Max and Maya, etc.
As users get to use those programs and make higher-profile creations, and the communities get bigger alongside Linux as a whole, then maybe the pressure would push those pro companies to add Linux builds to their software. I don't think it would be possible to get them to add Linux builds otherwise, though - I don't think it would be profitable enough at the current stage.