I went to the beach. The water was very cold, but I made a sandcastle.
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Alrecenk
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Creator of the World Fabric game engine, Narball, and Portal Foxes TD. Interests include cartoons, cute animals, and complex algorithms.
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Joined November 18, 2022
Current Game::
pronouns:
anything is fine
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Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
It's also my birthday, and that's got me thinking about time spent. I could have done the meaningless tech work and lived deliciously, but I bought my time instead and learned and built things. Maybe one day I'll get paid for it, but it was never about that. I'd make that choice again. Why am I vacationing like I wouldn't? I set up a development PC and got my friends to set up debuggers for Narball already. I patched my engine once already while here. I've been joking that I'm a workaholic, but I really shouldn't. It's a better way to live. I'd rather be working than driving an hour to walk up a pretty mountain.
I've been on a trip for a few days, hiking in cool places, seeing sights, drinking great coffee, and eating at nice restaurants, and it all feels very empty. It reminds me of an essay I read once in defense of bad coffee. When you drink good coffee you talk about coffee, when you drink bad coffee you talk about life. We've barely said anything worth saying in 3 days.
I'm on a plane going on a trip that had a technical glitch on the runway so they turned the plane off and on again. They say it's fine now, but if you never hear from me again, I died how I lived: at odds with faulty software.
I just pushed v0.093 of #Narball that reduces CPU usage and improves control responsiveness. Narball at 60fps with 200 balls now uses less CPU than the task manager. #gamedev #optimization
Replying to
@munroe@dice.camp
@munroe@dice.camp I said "might". The game is basically a tech demo for the networking engine, so I've got to mention it somewhere. It's at the bottom. Almost nobody reads the entire store page on a free game.
I'm getting people popping in to #Narball, but it's always one at a time. I've tried to make this game more accessible than my last one, but there's still one requirement to play: friends.
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Now, I just need to make like a dozen more portrait shorts and maybe people will pay attention to me?
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Might as well do Instagram reels too. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYDFlKIP0fy/
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
I put that little ad on YouTube shorts too, and it already has more views than anything else on the channel. So I guess this is the strategy. Narball is well-suited to short form content in that it creates a lot of derpy moments that can be immediately understood. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_vC92Zfvsg8
I made a #tiktok account to promote #Narball. I find the format of an infinite scroll of random short videos very unpleasant, but supposedly that's where I have the best chance of being seen. @worldfabric5@www.tiktok.com
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
I was recording for short form promotional content at the time, so I was going all out and getting it on tape.
Them (in my head) : #Narball is a silly game with no skill.
Me: *Wins 1v3* . #indiegame
My game Narball is now available for free on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4404880/Narball/ #indieGame #videogames
I started a FAQ for #Narball . It's releasing on #Steam in just two days! https://steamcommunity.com/app/4404880/discussions/1/837249543665991444/
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
When I carried Wanda out to her grave she was still warm, still soft. The only thing different was she wasn't squirming to get away. Usually I need to take her some place and she doesn't want to go. This time she needed to go, and I didn't want to take her.
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Wanda has passed away.
Replying to
@susankayequinn@wandering.shop
@susankayequinn@wandering.shop A friend of mine asked me to review some fiction they had written that turned out to be 75% AI slop. I'd never seen their writing before, so I went through it line by line pointing out weird phrasing and flow mistakes to help them learn to be a better writer and was super pissed when I realized it was AI. They had hand edited a lot of the super obvious tells out, but it was still really unpleasant to read and I was trying very hard to be nice and constructive since they were new to writing. Two hours of my life I'll never get back.
Wanda is sick, and I don't know if she's going to make it. I've been force feeding her hay powder slurry, but she hasn't eaten on her own going on 4 days. She's been fighting and hiding from me while I try to keep her alive, but it's clear she's getting weaker.
Replying to
@mathemagical@mathstodon.xyz
@mathemagical@mathstodon.xyz No, I don't know anything about tropical geometry. I just knew that quaternions are geometrically equivalent to 3x3 orthonormal matrices, matrix multiplication is not commutative (the problem), matrix addition is, log and exp exist on matrices, and so I figured there had to exist such an operation for quaternions as well, and it turns out it's not that difficult to compute (unless the AI has lied to me, I haven't verified it experimentally). Well, it's still trig functions, but it's not iterative.
Replying to
@mathemagical@mathstodon.xyz
@mathemagical@mathstodon.xyz Yeah, I started with a lie group, but if I use exp(log(A)+log(B)) as a commutative stand-in for the multiplication operation then I think it's a proper algebra. Still a lot of trig functions, but I can make the matrices behave properly. Also, If I only use real numbers in the key and query matrices and then replace the dot product with a more generic angle difference function that generates reals then I only have to raise quaternions to real powers. No quat^quat is ever required. Also rotatary position encoding is trivial because it's all already rotations 🤣 .
Replying to
@munroe@dice.camp
@munroe@dice.camp Well, unless you can provide a real-world example of optimizing the residual of the Euler-Lagrange equation, I'm gonna keep talking to the bot.
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Mastodon loves to hate #AI, but it's hard to overstate the impact of feeling like you've been heard when you're accustomed to not being heard.
I had a thought, "Can I use unit quaternion multiplication and exponentiation to create a matrix algebra I could build an attention transformer with?". I don't have any people around anymore to even pose such a thought experiment to, so I conversed with my local copy of Gemma4:26b . Long story short: probably. It would have some benefits, but it's impossible to remove the trig from the multiplications during training so it would be hell to train at any interesting size. #generativeAI #AI #gemma4 #math
There are a handful of known issues I should address before Narball releases, but I just can't find the motivation. I've been working on Narball for like 8 months, and that is too long for such a simple game. Don't get me wrong, it's a really fun game to play for a few hours with friends, but I've been playing it for months debugging time manipulation code. I can fix these minor annoyances with the interface when/if someone else notices them.
Replying to
@Beldarak@mastodon.gamedev.place
@Beldarak@mastodon.gamedev.place My first thought is: it must be working on someone or why would they keep doing it? But maybe it's just new people all the time trying the same scam because it's so easy now with the AI bots. At least on Discord I do get a few real people who play my game. I don't think I've gotten anything legitimate at my company email.
Replying to
@Alrecenk@peoplemaking.games
Over half the people who join my Discord try to sell something, and I have to ban them. I post anywhere (besides Mastodon) and I get people trying to sell me access to their exclusive something or other. All I want to do is get people to enjoy this thing I worked hard on and am giving away for free, but how could I ever be heard in this environment? It must be even worse for anyone who actually exists in the public awareness.
Now that #Narball has an official #Steam release date approaching I'm getting hella #phishing emails. Would I like free help getting the word out? Absolutely. Do I trust anything that comes through any of the official contact info available on Steam? Nope. I can tell the links don't go where they say they go. Not sure who thought it was a good idea to put subdomains at the front. If any of these emails are real, I'll never know because this state of things is too depressing for me to check them all.
Two weeks until the release of #Narball. I thought about doing some pre-release influencer marketing, but I don't think I will. They'd just be playing with each other if they could find games at all. Exclusivity is kind of against the ethos of #WorldFabric anyway. I think I'm just gonna stealth drop it and see what happens. I can do streamer outreach after its out, and then they'd be able to play with their fans. I designed a whole new asynchronous event architecture to make sure weak PCs on crappy connections would get the same quality experience as the best hardware, prioritizing elites for release would be incongruous. #indieDev
Replying to
@bisonrimant@piaille.fr
@bisonrimant We don't normally allow wooden sculptures in the apartment, but I'll make an exception because he looks very polite.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social
@BetaCuck4Lyfe @Daojoan Yep, but I'm arguably better off than I would have been if I had stayed in academia. Getting the silicon valley money is harder now than it was then though. Anyway, the point was I got passive income, but getting it was anything but passive.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social
@BetaCuck4Lyfe @Daojoan I got free tuition in my master's degree by working as a teaching assistant. I taught intro to programming and computational photography. Then I worked at Epic Systems as a research assistant to pay for one year and then I got a grant from the university one semester, and then I also took a 10k loan in my last semester. I actually completed the coursework for a PHD but dropped out without finishing my thesis because I lost research funding. I paid off the loan working at Epic systems after graduating. I got hired to work on YouTube search about a year after that. That's where I saved 75%. Among other jobs. It was not easy.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social
@BetaCuck4Lyfe @Daojoan It wasn't at the same time. Read it again.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social
@Daojoan I live on passive income. I got it by pursuing an advanced degree, getting really good at what I do, and then working 60 hours/week for someone else while saving 75% of my income for several years, which I used to buy index funds. I wish I could say I provided meaningful value during that time, but that'd be a stretch. I'm trying to do meaningful work now, but it doesn't pay well, hence the living on passive income.
Replying to
@mhoye@cosocial.ca
@mhoye@cosocial.ca That's why I keep making devlogs and open sourcing stuff, but I've yet to find colleagues that listen to me for free. Not that I'm advocating for the chatbots. They don't understand most of what I say either.
Replying to
@necrophcodr@layer8.space
@necrophcodr@layer8.space It was a const &. No pointers need to be involved. Just needed to remove the & to get a copy and fix my bug, but I had to realize a const element with no pointers could change first. It's probably undefined behavior given compiler optimizations around const references.
Replying to
@jssfr@zombofant.net
@jssfr@zombofant.net Yes, I'm building a PVP game called Narball in the engine. There's an open play test session tonight, anyone is welcome: https://peoplemaking.games/@Alrecenk/115878722310726060
The short answer is that behavior collapses into something that looks like normal lockstep with rollback at close range, and you'll get jumpy movement when rollback happens like you would in other games without the time warp. Most of the weird edge cases are also helped by the minimum event duration. There's a minimum amount of time between when an event runs and when the output can be read, so that takes over when objects get really close. Events get queued up and have to wait if several try to run at the same object at the same time. It can cause a desync if they pile up so much that they exceed the history kept in memory, and that's just up to the developer to avoid.
Replying to
@JessTheUnstill__dup_3370@infosec.exchange
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange I've been making an open source game/metaverse engine that automatically syncs arbitrary C++ code over the internet in a way that hides latency better than anything I'm aware of, and it's asymptotically more efficient too . The engine is rough right now, but it works so well already, and I really feel like it's a bigger deal than my viewing stats would suggest. https://youtu.be/g52nosxz4cY