What changed things for me was reading an short online book-style series about learning HTML/CSS from the ground up. It introduced everything from first principles, and had an approach where they explained why things were the way they were. They didn't just give you their "top 10 ways to center a div" and ask you to leave. I read the whole thing in an afternoon and it changed the way I think about web development. For the life of me, I can't remember what the book was called. If anyone's read something similar I'd love a reference, it was a while ago now and I'd still like to reference it. I specifically remember them saying "display: block is like a word document, and display: flex is like how you'd expect things to work," which illuminated a lot for me, not just about the display property, but generally about the way HTML & CSS were designed.

Quick fact about the way the interactivity is done, all of the code for it is in this blogpost.js file: https://aaaa.sh/creatures/blogpost.js, which is only about 100 lines long. Each block has a list of scripts that it pulls from like so:

and then there's a set of script tags with those ids. I figured it was a nice solution!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Deeply interesting tech, or otherwise.

When I took my first programming class at RIT, visualizing the stack, variables, and pointers was one of the first classes we had. It's one of those beginner diagrams that I feel like everyone is familiar with. But I can understand that there are programming domains with equivalent complexity which don't require that base knowledge. I apologize if I came off as elitist.

Edit: Going through this author's website, it seems like a lot of their posts are about rediscovering low-level programming concepts through Zig. Like this article, where they discover you can't compare strings directly, and you have to use memcmp:

https://www.openmymind.net/Switching-On-Strings-In-Zig/

They claim that they blog because they "find that [they] retain things better when I write about them." No problem with that. Just a little odd to see on the hn front page, I suppose.

You are correct: I definitely agree that not all gamedevs should be making stuff from scratch, but I also think that Unity is a little too much. There's a good middle ground somewhere slightly above raylib.

My argument is that the promotion of engines that live near this middle ground is blocked by education: people who want to be able to sell long courses to the people who look up "how to make a video game."

I've never played the game, but my understanding is that Slay the Spire largely impresses on a design and artistic front, not a technical one. Its engine requirements were not based on feature set or code quality, but on what developers knew. So they probably picked Unity because it was ubiquitous. Education starts the problem, and then devs who need something common they care hire for continue the problem. I don't blame devs for this, it's the right choice to make and obviously Slay the Spire is great, but I am saying that this is a force that drives down the quality of game engines.

My argument was mainly about these more generalized engines, like raylib, 'Tramway', or Source.

The Half-Life and Morrowind engines are in a unique situation where they're put together by enthusiastic programmers who are paid to develop stuff they think is cool. You end up with minimal engines and great tech, suited to the needs of professional game developers.

This seems like something that sits in between a raylib and a Unity. I haven't used it, but I worry that it's doesn't do enough to appeal to amateur programmers, but it does too much to appeal to the kind of programmer who wants a smaller engine. I could be very wrong though, I hope to be very wrong. Seems like the performance here is very nice and it's very well put together. There's definitely a wave of developers coming out frustrated from Unity right now. As the nostalgia cycle moves to the 2000's, there's a very real demand to play and create games that are no more graphically complex than Half-Life 2.

Anyway, great project. Great web design. Documentation is written in a nice voice.

I often see explainers for programming algorithms or concepts and want to boot up a JS scratchpad to mess around with the ideas, so I can get a better feel for the material. In this format, the scratchpad is built-in and ready to go.

I figured the HN crowd would appreciate the format & and the content.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42594955

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

https://github.com/scrtwpns/mixbox/blob/master/shaders/mixbo...

I don't have time to whip up a demo, but it seems like it's pretty well optimized and it looks really nice in the examples. Great work from these folks.