Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

@Queso2469

Game programmer, designer, director; retired quadball player; antimeme; radical descriptivist; antilabel; Moose;

Working at Muse Games. Directed Embr, worked on Wildmender and Guns of Icarus, Making new secret stuffs

Opinions are everyone else's

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24691/9/2024, 1:36 PM

Kelly @ohthesetrees

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen1/9/2024, 3:42 AM

as unity slowly vanishes, and unreal continues to breed unease in pursuit of the least sound impulses of tim sweeney, i sort of think valve could nigh-effortlessly clean up here and make the world a somewhat better place.

just shit out source 2 with source code access and an extremely permissive license and forget about it. approach support the way valve always has: mostly don't do any. this is perfectly competitive with every engine besides unreal. nobody trusts a big company, but everyone trusts valve not to make any sudden movements. and there should be more than one viable general option for game dev.

#game dev thoughts

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in reply to @joewintergreen's post:

JP @vectorpoem1/9/2024, 3:45 AM

I don't think trust in Valve is necessarily good considering their unique position of power, but yeah they're kinda the closest proxy to id circa the late 90s, except their tools situation is worlds better. Regardless yeah they absolutely need to release that shit. People would add Linux editor support in like a weekend.

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen1/9/2024, 3:47 AM

Yeah, "trust" as it applies to Valve imo means trust in what other companies would regard as incompetence - you can count on them to just sit there doing nothing for decades at a time, and that's kinda what you want at this point

Amy Dentata @amydentata1/9/2024, 10:03 PM

yeah in this landscape, stability is a viable alternative to trust

it's suzy @trashbang1/9/2024, 3:48 AM

Seriously. The things I value most out of id Tech 4 are A) source code access and B) the fact that shit doesn't arbitrarily change. A stable version of Source 2 that satisfied those conditions would rocket to the top of my priorities to learn.

izzy @bruxisma1/9/2024, 9:23 AM

In one corner we have Unreal using Hungarian Notation. In the other we have Source 2 also using Hungarian Notation.

I am reduced to ash, my pleas for a sane naming convention echo across the cosmos, unheard by any living creature with a conscious :eggbug-pensive:

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen1/9/2024, 10:16 AM

as opposed to...what

izzy @bruxisma1/9/2024, 10:50 AM

Just naming the variable for what it does?

Do we need to prepend every bool with a b and every integer with i, every float with an f and every class with C, or a T if it's a template? It's 2024, we've had tools to give us inlay hints for half a decade, and mouse over hints for 20. It's not 1994 anymore. We can have nice variable names. The future is now

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen1/9/2024, 10:58 AM

Oh, I thought you meant you didn't want vars named after their purpose or some shit. I dunno, I work in unreal and don't name my vars like that but can't imagine minding either way really. Imagine you are a loose lily floating down an amber river

@darryl @darryl1/9/2024, 2:54 PM

The thing that drives me nuts about Hungarian notation is that it was a good idea that was then broadly implemented with casual disregard to the original purpose and motivation. It was supposed to encode information that wasn’t present in the type system. If your language knows that a variable is an integer then you don’t need that i…but you might want a f or something to identify that it’s a set of flags, and this continues to be an idea worth considering in most common strongly-typed languages!

I don’t care if someone does or doesn’t use Hungarian notation. I mostly don’t. But the common pattern of “interesting idea applied too broadly without understanding the intent” drives me bonkers (and I’m not implying you’re doing this; you just accidentally activated this rant, I’ll leave now 😄)

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen1/9/2024, 11:07 PM

Haha, agreed!

v @v211/9/2024, 9:35 AM

it's a genuine threat to their business model! they sell games, people have to make the games in order to sell them, but the two big engine makers are off being distracted by... other things and aren't really focused on the whole "make an engine to make games with" part.