On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 20:17:39 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> At the end of the day, it's the game mechanic that really matters. I
> mean, that's the whole reason you're playing in the first place, right?
> If I just wanted to watch a bunch of video clips, I'd be on youtube
> instead.
>
>
> T

Yup. What is the most played game among redditors ?
Minecraft !

On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 20:55:58 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> The problem is, code review is a full-time job if it is to be done
> properly. Often it just deteriorates into a side-job: senior coder A
> reviews junior coder B's code, but coder A has a pending deadline that
> week and has lots of complex code issues to tackle, so there's no time
> to read through everything that coder B wrote. So just glance over it
> briefly, if there are no blatant problems, approve it.

Actually, a good code review should last about an hour, no more. Studies show that in average, the great majority of problems are seen in this hour, which is the point of diminishing return. Moreover, it's not useful to have the code reviewed by more than one person. What that means is, the change reviewed cannot be more than 300-400 lines long, else, the change is probably too big anyway.
But what's important is, the reviewer must be up to the task.

> It gets worse if senior coder A himself doesn't have a good grasp of
> good coding practices, but got to where he is because he's just very
> good at last-minute patchwork hacks that makes everything "work".
> Seniority gives him code review rights, but he's really not qualified
> for the job.
>

If the Senior programmer doesn't have good coding practices, then the entire exercise is counter productive. So basically, code riew must be done by trusted persons. That means about one out of five developers in a team.

> Problem is, good coders are hard to come by. It's even harder to
> distinguish between coders who succeed because they practise sound coding principles, and coders who "succeed" because they're good at hacking things at the last minute to make them work.
> T

Yeah, in the end, it's a question of trust.

On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:18 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 07:24:48PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Sean Kelly" <sean@invisibleduck.org> wrote in message news:mailman.1942.1334874732.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>>> On Apr 19, 2012, at 3:20 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>>>> Yea, pretty much. With a few exceptions (Splinter Cell 1 though...3 or 4, and some Japanese stuff), I see the mainstream industry as mostly a "Pixar-wannabe high-def-animation factory" these days. They don't care about gameplay anymore, just storytelling, animation and emulating Hollywood.
>>> 
>>> I've switched from calling those games to calling them interactive cinematic experiences.  Some are actually enjoyable from a story perspective, but overall I think they're an evolutionary dead end for the game industry.=
> 
> Wasn't that all the hype in the early days where games like that were called "interactive movies"? I remember Wing Commander was one of those (or at least, it tried to be). But at least there was actual *gameplay* going on in WC (you actually get to fly a spaceship and shoot enemies down), as opposed to just point-and-click, choose-your-own-story, see-how-many-permutations-of-the-same-old-video-clips-you-can-get.

I don't see many parallels between Wing Commander and modern cinematic games.  WC was really a campaign-oriented space combat game, while in modern cinematic games the gameplay feels bolted on as an afterthought.  The difference in Wing Commander was that the game had RPG elements as well, so there was a lot more up-front story than most other campaign-oriented games.  Actually, Jagged Alliance was one of the best games in this vein, as the depth of simulation was really staggering even by today's standards.

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.1984.1334953116.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
> [...]
>> I'll take another game with a "Save the princess" backstory, or even *no* story at all, over a game driven start-to-finish by a less-than-spectacular story any day. Hell, it's much better replay value like that anyway: Listening to the same story over and over really kills replayability.
>
> Especially when said story tries SO hard at being convincingly emotional but totally falls flat, because it's the 150th time you're playing the game and you've found out and exploited a dozen plot holes and game sequencing bugs that allow you to trigger game events out of sequence, so that the video clips just seem totally out-of-context.
>

Yup

>
>> Does anyone care why MegaMan's trying to defeat Wily? Or his "emotional growth and struggle" while doing it? Hell no, they just enjoy doing it.
> [...]
>
> Exactly. Any "emotional growth and struggle" can only be emergent from the game mechanics, not from a railroaded "you have to do things this way 'cos that's how you're supposed to" plot dreamed up by some script writer

Exactly.

>
> At the end of the day, it's the game mechanic that really matters. I mean, that's the whole reason you're playing in the first place, right? If I just wanted to watch a bunch of video clips, I'd be on youtube instead.
>

Exactly again.

>
> T
>
> -- 
> The problem with the world is that everybody else is stupid.

And another "exactly" ;)

(Hmm, I guess this was a useless response...)

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 06:40:39PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message news:mailman.1984.1334953116.4860.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
[...]
> > The problem with the world is that everybody else is stupid.
> 
> And another "exactly" ;)
> 
> (Hmm, I guess this was a useless response...)
[...]

lol... well, that quote was supposed to be ironic / self-contradictory / self-fulfilling. Sorta like "People tell me I'm skeptical, but I don't believe it!"


T

-- 
Philosophy: how to make a career out of daydreaming.

On 20-04-2012 15:16, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Actually when I read Singularity papers I keep thinking to myself that D
> could
> be Sing#. In the sense that both share many common features.
>
> Thanks for the xomb link.
>
> --
> Paulo
>
> "Alex Rønne Petersen" wrote in message
> news:jmr1vd$1m25$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> On 20-04-2012 08:43, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Well, C# can also be real systems programming language, see Singularity.
>
> No, this is actually a common misconception.
>
> Singularity does *not* use plain C#. It uses Sing#, which is an
> extension of Spec# adding message-passing, compile-time reflection, and
> safe manual memory management features. Spec# is a version of C# heavily
> based on design-by-contract (I'd argue its DbC is far superior to D's in
> fact).
>
> Plain C# out of the box is not useful for systems-level programming, and
> especially not in a kernel.
>
>> And native code compilers are also available (Bartok, Mono AOT, NGEN).
>>
>> D names itself a system programming language, but I am yet to see any OS
>> coded on it. Without system programming examples, it becomes just another
>> application level language.
>
> https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb
>
>>
>> On the other hand I confess this is a very hard task, as most of systems
>> programming
>> languages that manage to exist as such (PL/I, Ada, C, C++, Mac Pascal),
>> did so because
>> there was an OS vendor that made use of them.
>>
>> Now that I mention this, does anyone know if D is being used as research
>> language in any operating system department in some university? I
>> remember
>> there were some posts about it long time ago.
>>
>> What I see going for D in terms of language features:
>>
>> - scope
>> - compile time metaprogramming
>> - mixin as a kind of macro mechanism
>> - inline assembler (this one might be a bit debatable)
>> - delegation via subtyping
>> - all available implementations compile straight to native code
>>
>> --
>> Paulo
>>
>>
>> "Nick Sabalausky" wrote in message news:jmpphn$20s9$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp@progtools.org> wrote in message
>> news:jmpl39$1oa1$1@digitalmars.com...
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> just wanted to announce that Sony has finally made the new Playstation
>>> Vita SDK available, as we were discussing some months ago.
>>>
>>> http://www.playstation.com/pss/index_e.html
>>>
>>> The gamming industry seems to be slowing moving to C#. Would we still
>>> be able to convince developers to move to D instead?
>>>
>>
>> Yes. I suspect that the movement to C# is somewhat of a compromise due to
>> the fact that C/C++ has been the *only* real systems language usable for
>> most gaming systems. Obviously, something better than C++ is needed, and
>> thanks to the moronic VM/interpreted obsessions from the last decade
>> or so
>> that rendered most new languages impotent, there was no real
>> alternative to
>> C++. So, I suspect, that's why they made the compromise of going with C#.
>>
>> But D is *real* systems language, unlike C#. And frankly, it beats the
>> snot
>> out of C#. I'm not just saying that subjectively as D fan: Five years ago
>> (if not less) I considered C# and D tied as my favorite languages. But
>> the
>> more I used both, the more I got fed up with C#'s dumb limitations and
>> MS's
>> disinterest in addressing them, and the more I liked D.
>>
>> If D can't be made to attract game devs away from C++/C#, then I'll loose
>> what little faith I have left in mainstream games development.
>>
>
>

There's no doubt that D gets very close to being able to replace Sing#. The thing is just that Sing# was designed, from day one, to be OS-agnostic, i.e. compile to plain machine code, and to only rely on the very small HAL in Singularity.

-- 
- Alex

On 20/04/12 05:42, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> This is interesting. We use C++ at Facebook all over the place, and gainfully.
> If we were to use C, we'd have major difficulties with e.g. containers. The
> thought of using a hashtable in C... ouch.

Out of curiosity ... how much D do you use? :-)

Am 20.04.2012 19:43, schrieb Sean Kelly:
> On Apr 20, 2012, at 8:09 AM, SomeDude wrote:
>>
>> IBM has largely contributed to the development of the eclipse environment. In fact, it started as one of their products, Visual Age, that they open sourced, and this move was very successful.
>
> Eclipse started as VisualAge?  No wonder I hate it so much :-)  That was a powerful IDE, but utterly impenetrable.

Not really.

The first Visual Age was for Smalltalk, then IBM created Visual Age versions for C++ and Java.

But they were not sharing much code, so when the time came to rewrite
Visual Age, Eclipse was born.



--
Paulo

Just noticed that Microsoft is planning to start using C# for systems programming as well

https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=76831

Who knows what they are planning to do...

On Saturday, 21 April 2012 at 00:09:24 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
> On 20-04-2012 15:16, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Actually when I read Singularity papers I keep thinking to myself that D
>> could
>> be Sing#. In the sense that both share many common features.
>>
>> Thanks for the xomb link.
>>
>> --
>> Paulo
>>
>> "Alex Rønne Petersen" wrote in message
>> news:jmr1vd$1m25$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> On 20-04-2012 08:43, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> Well, C# can also be real systems programming language, see Singularity.
>>
>> No, this is actually a common misconception.
>>
>> Singularity does *not* use plain C#. It uses Sing#, which is an
>> extension of Spec# adding message-passing, compile-time reflection, and
>> safe manual memory management features. Spec# is a version of C# heavily
>> based on design-by-contract (I'd argue its DbC is far superior to D's in
>> fact).
>>
>> Plain C# out of the box is not useful for systems-level programming, and
>> especially not in a kernel.
>>
>>> And native code compilers are also available (Bartok, Mono AOT, NGEN).
>>>
>>> D names itself a system programming language, but I am yet to see any OS
>>> coded on it. Without system programming examples, it becomes just another
>>> application level language.
>>
>> https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb
>>
>>>
>>> On the other hand I confess this is a very hard task, as most of systems
>>> programming
>>> languages that manage to exist as such (PL/I, Ada, C, C++, Mac Pascal),
>>> did so because
>>> there was an OS vendor that made use of them.
>>>
>>> Now that I mention this, does anyone know if D is being used as research
>>> language in any operating system department in some university? I
>>> remember
>>> there were some posts about it long time ago.
>>>
>>> What I see going for D in terms of language features:
>>>
>>> - scope
>>> - compile time metaprogramming
>>> - mixin as a kind of macro mechanism
>>> - inline assembler (this one might be a bit debatable)
>>> - delegation via subtyping
>>> - all available implementations compile straight to native code
>>>
>>> --
>>> Paulo
>>>
>>>
>>> "Nick Sabalausky" wrote in message news:jmpphn$20s9$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp@progtools.org> wrote in message
>>> news:jmpl39$1oa1$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> just wanted to announce that Sony has finally made the new Playstation
>>>> Vita SDK available, as we were discussing some months ago.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.playstation.com/pss/index_e.html
>>>>
>>>> The gamming industry seems to be slowing moving to C#. Would we still
>>>> be able to convince developers to move to D instead?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes. I suspect that the movement to C# is somewhat of a compromise due to
>>> the fact that C/C++ has been the *only* real systems language usable for
>>> most gaming systems. Obviously, something better than C++ is needed, and
>>> thanks to the moronic VM/interpreted obsessions from the last decade
>>> or so
>>> that rendered most new languages impotent, there was no real
>>> alternative to
>>> C++. So, I suspect, that's why they made the compromise of going with C#.
>>>
>>> But D is *real* systems language, unlike C#. And frankly, it beats the
>>> snot
>>> out of C#. I'm not just saying that subjectively as D fan: Five years ago
>>> (if not less) I considered C# and D tied as my favorite languages. But
>>> the
>>> more I used both, the more I got fed up with C#'s dumb limitations and
>>> MS's
>>> disinterest in addressing them, and the more I liked D.
>>>
>>> If D can't be made to attract game devs away from C++/C#, then I'll loose
>>> what little faith I have left in mainstream games development.
>>>
>>
>>
>
> There's no doubt that D gets very close to being able to replace Sing#. The thing is just that Sing# was designed, from day one, to be OS-agnostic, i.e. compile to plain machine code, and to only rely on the very small HAL in Singularity.

"Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp@progtools.org> wrote in message news:pgxiucaflhldzhfmgipl@forum.dlang.org...
> Just noticed that Microsoft is planning to start using C# for systems programming as well
>
> https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=76831
>
> Who knows what they are planning to do...
>

Between that and turning JS into desktop language for Win8, isn't their plan obvious? They plan to increase bloat!

The optimizations in Win7 were just an accidental result of an email glitch that blocked communication between the managers and developers. They aim to rectify that oversight as...efficiently...as possible: Hence, VM for systems work and JS for apps.

The only reason they didn't go with JS as their new systems language is because that requires more work, so it's delayed until Win9.

...Either that or their HR drones screwed up the job posting, which based on my experience with HR people seems entirely plausible. They probably got confused by all the many, many "buttons" on their keyboards.