Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!


  • I’d love to see a Linux distro attempt to implement a migration wizard for Windows users. Do all the heavy lifting for them, including walking them through what personal data and accounts they want to migrate across, creating a bootable USB installer, then running said installer and copying across their data for them. Maybe even detect and install any apps they’re using, or suggest FOSS alternatives. In practice I imagine this would be a nightmare to try and implement effectively, but it’d be pretty cool to see.





  • It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.



  • I think it’s a step in the right direction, though it will be interesting to see where the boundaries are drawn. Does YouTube count? What about gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite?

    Edit: On further reading about this, I’m changing my mind. I can’t see how this would be implemented effectively without some kind of age verification. Unless it’s a meaningless Steam-style “What’s your birthday?” question, that makes it far more troublesome for everyone’s privacy. I can’t see how it would get off the ground after so many Australians have had their data stolen already.





  • The way I implemented this strategy was to make sure I had a single cigarette and lighter on me at all times. I named the cigarette, which psychologically helped prevent me from smoking it. I stuck that out for a few months until a friend smoked it in desperation. At that point I felt confident I’d quit because I wanted to, not because of random circumstance.