No Category | The Less Interesting Times

2021/12/23 Useful C# Features (or “Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Could Use in Unity”)

1. Tuples & Discards! Tuples is something more dynamic languages like JavaScript have been holding over the more static languages for a while. It allows you to do more with less action (higher level ones, that is). While tuples have existed in C# before as a class of their own, they are now getting a proper implementation. It basically makes a complex variable/object without having to predefine it using a class or a struct. You can even use it to return more than one element from a method(!!!). Unfortunately, the Unity editor doesn’t support handling those kinds of returns yet but they are still useful inside your scripts. Discards are those underscores you see in the example below. It allows you to deconstruct a tuple and discard the data you don’t want, only keeping what you actually need in its own named variable. 2. Pattern Matching! Pattern matching allows you to test a runtime type in an if or switch statement and then convert it to that specific type all in a single statement! It also increases the power of switch, allowing you to do a lot more with less and create much more complex testing blocks. 3. Local functions Local functions is currently one of my favorite features in C#. You could already create functions inside functions by assigning a block into an Action or Func variable but now you can just define an anonymous function and not worry about what returns or not returns a value or where Continue Reading →

Posted in IT, No Category, Programming by Eran with comments disabled.

2021/11/28 News: Average User has no Concept of How Much Game Dev Costs

Recently, some clueless joe on Twitter said he will pay 10,000$ to the person who adds a multiplayer aspect to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If he was going to donate to a modder who was working on it, that would have been fine but it seems like he was thinking that he could hire someone to do something like that for that kind of money. Here is a long, detailed response to this which you should read but here’s the summary: 10,000$ would pay for about two work months of the average+ programmer. Also, networking is hard. The hardest networking challenges in gaming usually arise in fighting games because they usually need to be exactly per pixel and per frame accurate and, probably over distances where network traffic takes more time to go back and forth than it takes pro players twitch reflexes to react. You can see how important this is if you go back and read about the network woes of Street Fighter V. Now, the demands of a PvE, open world, action RPG would probably be a lot less strict but these are still difficult problems. Especially if you’re talking about tacking on something like this onto a game that was definitely not designed for it. You want a more current example? On the one hand, Battlefield 2042 is out now and it’s buggy as hell. On the other hand, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is also out and it’s much better. Probably because the team is backed Continue Reading →

Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.

2021/11/16 Activision-Blizzard Proving Again That They Just Don’t Care

Activision Apologises and Removes ‘Insensitive’ Quran Pages from Call of Duty: Vanguard. Seriously? I mean, really? I did my basic Arabic studies and I know that the Quran (like the Bible and the New Testament) is Islam’s holiest tome and they do take it very seriously with how you treat iconography. But even if you didn’t know that disrespecting the Quran would whip up Islamic people into some kind of rage, imagine what it would feel like to you (or your more religious friends/family members) if there were pages of your religious texts on the ground where everyone is expected to walk. Or, because you’re one of the hugest game companies in the world who want to sell your games to as many people as possible, have some freaking sensitivity consultants.