Hacker News: glenneroo

New comment by glenneroo in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

glenneroo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 22:42:11 +0000

See this video: https://youtu.be/dVWkPADNdJ4?t=19m10s

Taken from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47825155

Obviously not every game is doing that level of styling, but often a lot of stuff might still be happening when a game is "paused" for various reasons e.g. aesthetics, or handling input for pause menus, which usually offer you the ability to change all the games settings, e.g. video resolution, volume levels, etc. and also provide you with audio/visual feedback when you make choices, which requires keeping the audio engine running as well as rendering to the screen @ 60 fps.

New comment by glenneroo in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

glenneroo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:36:11 +0000

It depends. If you are using `yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(x)` then the coroutine keeps running when you set TimeScale to 0, but that's usually a feature and not a bug, since it lets you potentially use them when paused (since async/task C# stuff was usually been a bit sketchy, though it's definitely better now).

Some more info here (and in general about pausing in Unity): https://gamedevbeginner.com/the-right-way-to-pause-the-game-...

New comment by glenneroo in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

glenneroo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:20:38 +0000

Nintendo, like all other platform-owners (e.g. Meta/Quest, Sony, Microsoft) is VERY strict about games released on their platform and have very strict requirements before anything is allowed to be sold with the Nintendo label. I very highly doubt they let devs NOT implement the pause ability. AFAIK you can't just OS-pause a game and expect it to run fine when it resumes, there are soooo many systems at play: animation, physics, sound, input, etc. that need to be cleanly stopped/resumed that I doubt it's as easy as just OS-pausing.

New comment by glenneroo in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

glenneroo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:13:29 +0000

And if you pause sound in Unity using AudioListener.pause = true, which is supposed to make life easier, but ends up being useless if changing settings/clicking buttons has audio feedback, or changing the volume has audible feedback to tell you how loud, or you allow to change voice style, and on and on.

Repeat that for every system - all those edge cases for each system can waste a lot of time and energy.

New comment by glenneroo in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

glenneroo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:51:58 +0000

Too bad they didn't ask any VR developers. It's truly another beast, especially if you're developing with Unity for the Quest platform, since setting TimeScale to 0 in Unity effectively disables the physics engine, which means things like hands/controllers no longer work, which then breaks one of the requirements to even be able to release in the Meta store (handle pause state). The workaround used by Half-Life: Alyx (as told to me by the Hurricane VR developer when I asked years ago how to deal with pausing) is to clone your hands and disable/delete all physics-related stuff (e.g. Rigidbodies) on the new "paused" hands. If you are using laser pointers, then you'll also have to switch those out as well. If you have any active effects, particles or objects that obstruct the player's vision and/or visibility of the pause/resume UI, then you'll want to either disable those out or at least dim them substantially so the player can interact with the resume button e.g. with a laser pointer. You might also want to adjust the lighting to indicate that the user is paused.

Outside of VR, Unity offers a nice "AudioListener.pause" to pause all audio, but if you have any sound effects in your pause menu like when a user changes a setting, those no longer work, further requiring more hacky fun (or just set it to true, and ignore user-complaints about no audio on menus when paused).

On top of that, you have things like Animators for characters, which also have to be paused manually by setting speed to 0 (TimeScale = 0 doesn't seem to do it). Some particle systems also don't seem to be affected by TimeScale. If you have a networked game then you also have to (obviously) send the pause command to clients. If you have things in motion, pausing/restarting the physics engine might cause weird issues with (at least angular) velocity so you might have to save/restore those on any moving objects.

New comment by glenneroo in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

glenneroo — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:52:26 +0000

FTFA: it will run on upcoming Motorola devices as well.

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:28:58 +0000

According to this, he's mostly right: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/people_with_credit...

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:47:49 +0000

Weird, I googled around and I see every bank has their own limits, and all banks I could find claim a 30-100k or no limit at all.

Whatever LLM duckduckgo is using says 10k and ability increase as more transactions are made (to increase trust) - but it's probably using outdated data.

When did you try this? I'm guessing more than a year ago.

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:53:42 +0000

True, thanks for reminding me that this is about CC replacements :)

But I honestly don't know many people with a CC here, and those who do (myself included), we don't have the same advantages/disadvantages of a CC: no points, no "free" miles, no interest and no possibility to rack up debt like in the US since Visa automatically deducts the full amount from my bank account at the end of the monthly billing period.

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:17:41 +0000

With debit cards or cash like everyone else?

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:40:05 +0000

Uhm, the EU already has free instant SEPA transfers? I use it regularly, sadly not all EU banks support it (smaller ones sometimes have issues and have to resort to standard oldschool 2-day transfer, but they are also free).

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:38:18 +0000

Yeah but now we have instant EU-wide SEPA transfers for free, so it's not all stupidity! Also it took years to implement - banks are slow at implementing new tech. WERO is still very new, if it takes off, eventually banks will hopefully support it.

New comment by glenneroo in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

glenneroo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:35:18 +0000

The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).

New comment by glenneroo in "LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick"

glenneroo — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:51:14 +0000

Hallucinations are IMO a hard wall. They have gotten slightly better over the years but you still get random results that may or may not be true, or rather, are in a range between 0-100% true, depending on which part of the answer you look at.

New comment by glenneroo in "Linux Kernel Explorer"

glenneroo — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:40:39 +0000

Love this! Small bug but when changing files, it doesn't reset to position 0 in the file (at least on Firefox on Win11).

New comment by glenneroo in "Linux Kernel Explorer"

glenneroo — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:37:27 +0000

I love your UDP packet flow tool, kudos for making that! I've always wondered how packets move through an OS. Also interesting how many gotos I see all over the place, even though everyone says "goto is the devil". Then again maybe this code was written long before that "proverb" came into existence.

New comment by glenneroo in "Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit"

glenneroo — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:23:23 +0000

If they actually cared, they would just block VPNs. Valve does this when you try to create an account.

New comment by glenneroo in "Steam Frame"

glenneroo — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:43:36 +0000

I am currently adding passthrough mode to my game (DodgeALL) to spawn portals on your walls letting you dodge things coming out of the walls. Planned release within the next month (in time to enter in the Meta VR competition). A friend of mine made a game (Loop One: Done) that is Factorio-lite which lets you build infinite factories in your flat, which is loads of fun.

New comment by glenneroo in "Steam Frame"

glenneroo — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:09:58 +0000

That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.

New comment by glenneroo in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

glenneroo — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:28:15 +0000

I've read from several supposed AI prompt-masters that this actually reduces output quality. I can't speak to the validity of these claims though.