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There's nothing like having kids and other commitments to sharpen one's focus and make timekeeping a thing of perfection.

I note the older students (40+/50+-year-olds, with families, etc) getting their work in way ahead of schedule whilst actively participating in discourse, moreso (dare I say) than the significantly younger ones in our cohort.


A good place to start: The Art of Game Design By Jesse Schell.

https://www.schellgames.com/art-of-game-design/


> 5.) Creating video games is extremely labour-intensive, which is why there are so few Free and Open Source ones

If you mean free as in "gratis", then there are loads of free games available online.

E.g. https://itch.io/games/free (468,224 results)

...and that's just one site. There are free games on Steam, and free games on aggregator sites like Kongregate and its ilk.

If you mean free as in "libre", then sure, there are fewer games. But, frankly, most game code bases I've seen is a complete mess. Might as well just start your own from scratch ;-)


> E.g. https://itch.io/games/free (468,224 results)

...and how many of them are a simple prototype-grade stuff made over a weekend or so at something like a game jam?

Not trying to throw a shade - I've personally contributed to elevating that number myself :)

(also, bunch of them aren't really gratis, but only have some gratis component - itch.io doesn't distinguish these cases when filtering)


This has been posted once before in 2018.

I'm genuinely curious to know what everyone's opinion is of Eco. (finance noob here)


> Instead, try approaching people who are speaking in groups of two.

I would advise to check body language first. If the duo are facing each other head-on, don't interject. If they're turned slightly outwards, like they're observing the crowd whilst talking, go for it.

I've had a couple of intense conversations broken up like this by someone standing there awkwardly, but then you also don't want to make them feel bad by telling your conversation partner "I'll finish the story later <turn> Hi!", etc.


This is helpful as it has three very useful examples for people who want to learn social skills.

1.) The tactic is action, action, count and action. Greet the couple, smile, count (“and one and”) and move on. That’s enough time to give someone an out. The tactic is not “stand there silently and stare.”

2.) Part of having social skills is knowing when and where to have intense conversations. If you choose to have an intense conversation at a place where people mingle, that’s really not very helpful.

3.) Again, most social skills are about giving people an out. If someone is standing there awkwardly, have some compassion. Ask yourself if you’re having the conversation in the right place and be kind. It sucks to be that awkward person standing on the fringes. Our job as nice adults is to make them feel incredibly welcome, even if it means having our intense conversations in private.



I wonder if it will feature Chocolatiers [0] as a mini-game...

0. https://www.proudlion.co.uk/product/chocolatiers/6476


Hi Walter, thanks for your time!

Do you play many games nowadays? Which ones?

What do you think is going to be the next big gaming breakthrough? Or the next big genre/theme? (E.g. for economics, it was F2P/IAP, never of which I'm a fan of. Also, city building + survival is really big right now.)


The itch to write a better language & compiler than anyone else is more compelling!

But I am attracted to full motion simulators that would, say, enable me to drive an F1 car without risk or much investment.


If you're into that, I highly recommend you looking up Force Dynamics (a friend of mine) for high quality affordable driving simulators that are really close to actually driving the Real Thing (TM)

https://www.force-dynamics.com/


It's sad that we still don't have an idea how to produce high g-forces in a simulator.

The feeling of going with a car through a turn at 2g is incomparable to the simulators we have. Never mind F1 cars that can corner and brake at up to 5g.


It can be done, you'd just need a big playground for the machine - about the size of an F1 track!


With enough money you can actually go to such a “simulator”. There are these guys that run older F1 cars on tracks. The teams provide pit crews and everything else. If you can afford it, definitely a nice hobby!

I got to drive a car with aerodynamic downforce only once and it’s super impressive to feel how it works better the faster you go. Cornering with 2g is also pretty nice.


Sounds like a blast! I took a couple performance driving courses on a racetrack with Formula Ford racers. Scared me pretty good, but I had a fantastic time.

Fear, though, is what kept me from getting decent lap times. With a simulator, that is no barrier.


I wonder if there's a way to magnetically or electrically stimulate the organ inside our ears that feels accelerations.

Then we would solve this, and also provide more immersion for flight simulators.


Don't forget this very important design issue of motion systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttCXkfjnvvc

Some motion systems are simulating the 'motion' of the car, when they should be simulating the 'forces' on the driver.

For example sustained acceleration to the left because of heavy cornering should generate sustained tilt, so you feel heavier to the left.

The only issue is that the max acceleration that can be simulated is 1G. So a larger acceleration is either clipped or all accelerations are scaled.

My favourite concept is this one: https://www.yawvr.com/


Whenever I hear "fixed point arithmetic", it reminds me of the jittery graphics on PSX.

Can't find a more official source than Reddit, but here goes:

> It's because the position of each polygon's vertex (corner) is only calculated at a very low precision. Once the polygon moves (or the camera) the vertexes will stay at the same point, until they're closer to the next and suddenly "jump" to the new position without transition. Newer graphics hardware could interpolate smoothly here with more in-between states (that's where all the talk about "floating point precision" came from in graphics).

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bkedc/heres_a_quest...


The “jitter” of PSX graphics is caused by a number of factors: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/5021

Incidentally, the Nintendo 64 also used fixed point numbers in RDP graphics instructions, but did not exhibit the same visual artifacts as the PlayStation.


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