Ten Out of Ten
In the gaming spheres, scoring is, for some reason, a really big deal. People often go to shaming campaigns if the game they really loved gets a 7 out of 10. First of all, that’s stupid. 7 out of 10 is pretty good. For me, it means mostly fun with a few caveats. 5 is not atrocious but decent if it weren’t for some flaws that should have been fixed. Then there’s the 10 out of 10, also a very fought over score. Because it looks so final. It’s saying, this is the best there is and can ever be. The point is, it’s not. 10 out of 10 is the best that reviewer thinks things can be right now. But then something new comes along that is better. So, consider this: Every time something gets full marks, 5 stars, 10 out of 10, it actually makes every previous 10 out of 10 in their category slightly less 10-ish. It might still count as a 10. If you go back to it at that time, it might be 9, comparatively. That doesn’t diminish its original value. It just means the scale has been expanded. This is true for anything that is an infinite game. A finite game like a school test can have a 100 and no more. But in art, the game is never over.
Posted in Gaming, Philosophy, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Unity Tidbit: WaitUntil, WaitWhile
If you’ve been working with Unity for any sort of while you’ve probably used Coroutines before. They’re not exactly the bread and butter of using Unity but they’re like the jam or honey you put immediately after. You’ve probably used a lot of “yield return null” to wait for the next frame before resuming execution? I bet you even have used a “yield return null” loop to check a predicate every frame before continuing. I’ve done it myself. I’ve even written a repeating coroutine helper that uses null to check a predicate before running a given action. Well… stop that. Recently (and by ‘recently’, I mean at least a year) Unity now has two new conditions you can use in coroutines: WaitUntil and WaitWhile and they do exactly what you think they do. Just use any of these two instead of your usual “yield return” and put in a function (even a lambda) that returns a boolean then the coroutine will handle the checking by itself. It’ll check every frame if the predicate is fulfilled and will break if it is or isn’t, respectively. The underlying code this represents is exactly the same like you wrote yourself before but now your code can be a lot more elegant. You’re welcome.
Posted in IT, No Category, Programming and tagged C#, Programming, Unity, Work by Eran with comments disabled.
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.
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.
Portugal just became nicer to employees
Portugal recently passed a law they fondly call “Right to Rest”. It contains various measures to help employees have a better work-life balance such as the ability to work remotely when you need to take care of a child or companies contributing to household bills when an employee is working remotely a lot. But the nicest thing about it is indeed the ban on contacting employees after work hours. I’m guessing there is a stipulation about emergencies or people like server administrators and doctors who are supposed to be on call but the fact it’s enshrined in law is just amazing. Kinda makes me want to move to Portugal. :)
Posted in High-Tech, IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Far Cry 6, PETA, and are Games Educational?
Recently, PETA criticised Ubisoft for including a cockfighting mini-game in their recent franchise title Far Cry 6. And that got me thinking about what is ok or not ok to include in a game. I completely understand why Far Cry 6, which occurs in a Cuban-esque island country called Yara, includes that aspect. Cuba, a country under heavy sanctions, makes due with whatever they have at hand. And, as far as entertainment goes, while cockfighting is a horrible practice in your regular western-aligned countries, it is not exactly frowned upon in Cuba. So, Far Cry 6 appropriating this symbol for immersion purposes is understandable. On the other hand, I also completely understand why PETA would criticise this. Far Cry is a very popular franchise. At the time of writing, it has sold poorer than its predecessor but that still puts it above 10 million units moved. That’s a lot of people being exposed to this segment, engaging with cockfighting in a way that might be unhealthy in the future. In the game itself, you do play the cockfighting mini-game in a fighting game style, as a animal encouraged to viciously peck, rip, and tear another animal, both of which were probably forced into this against their will. So, think about that 13-year-old kid who just got his hands on the new, popular AAA title all their friends are playing and this is the first time they sees something like cockfighting. If that’s the first time they engaged with that sort Continue Reading →
Posted in Gaming, Humanity, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
I had a conversation with Riku Nuottajärvi
This might not mean a lot to a lot of people but it’s something I am very much enthused about! The story is Matt Mercer tweeted about that music track in a game that just breaks you. I said it’s the Yehat Theme Music from Star Control II. Then Riku Nuottajärvi liked that tweet and I lost it a bit. And he answered me! That’s the person who wrote a lot of the music that accompanied me through the nineties. So, I’m keeping this as a memento. :)
Posted in Art, Gaming, Geekdom, No Category by Eran with comments disabled.