Random game thought: I’ve been thinking about a game controller with three joysticks, but I can’t come up with a good enough reason to have the extra one. Two joysticks seems to cover everything, right? Have we reached peak game controller? What could we map to a third stick? The closest to a good reason I could think of would be radial menus, but you can easily do those with a modifier and one of the other sticks right? #gamedev
I think the root is my problem is I'm generating floats from n-m. I needs it to be blazing fast and it can't use any libs because I need 100% consistency across platforms.
Although Return to Monkey Island didn't ship with Dear ImGui, we used it extensively during development. Without a doubt the single greatest debug tool/lib I have used.
Today I learned about a new way to implement a freelist for an object pool in a GDC presentation from 2010... Instead of an intrusive linked list to track free elements, it stores the list of free (and used!) in a "roster". The length, "partition", keeps track of the first free handle in the roster.
No mentions of generations. It was trivial to add. A few cool things about non-intrusive data structure:
I tried to complete the DazzlerII video card and it’s very close to working: it responds to CP/M and executable code, but isn’t displaying what is expected. Hardware issue, software issue or compatibility issue? Does it require a Z80 or should an 8080 suffice? All good questions.
@grumpygamer Hey. I wanted to goof around with DeloresDev, but this (the development version of the engine) 404s: https://thimbleweedpark.com/deloresdev I was following the instructions on GitHub, in case those are outdated.
It fascinating to see filmmakers’ personal tropes over time. Both Mad Max (1979) and Fury Road (2015) feature gang members pole vaulting onto moving fuel tankers.
@grumpygamer My favorite voice actress in Final Fantasy 14, Siobhán Hewlett, just said in a livestream that if she could choose a game to work on, it would be Monkey Island. And she would voice the whole cast of characters xD
Knobscape: The design space of control knobs you've built into your game. So you can tune it non-destructively as you get more information about gameplay.
High level game design is as much about designing the appropriate knobscape as it is about designing the moment-to-moment gameplay. Get the knobscape right and you'll eventually get the the gameplay right. Get it wrong and you'll never converge.