raysan5

CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like Unreal or Unity for their games (or that's what lot of people think) because d

gtallen1187

"A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept"

01/13/2012. From a lecture by Professor John Ousterhout at Stanford, class CS140

Here's today's thought for the weekend. A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y-intercept.

[Laughter]

cpursley

PostgreSQL is Enough

• Simplify: move code into database functions
• Just Use Postgres for Everything
• PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
• Postgres is eating the database world
• Hacker News discussion

Background and Cron Jobs

jamesmacwhite

Converting mkv to mp4 with ffmpeg

Essentially just copy the existing video and audio stream as is into a new container, no funny business!

The easiest way to "convert" MKV to MP4, is to copy the existing video and audio streams and place them into a new container. This avoids any encoding task and hence no quality will be lost, it is also a fairly quick process and requires very little CPU power. The main factor is disk read/write speed.

With ffmpeg this can be achieved with -c copy. Older examples may use -vcodec copy -acodec copy which does the same thing.

These examples assume ffmpeg is in your PATH. If not just substitute with the full path to your ffmpeg binary.

Single file conversion example

luismts

Git Commit Best Practices

Basic Rules

Commit Related Changes

A commit should be a wrapper for related changes. For example, fixing two different bugs should produce two separate commits. Small commits make it easier for other developers to understand the changes and roll them back if something went wrong. With tools like the staging area and the ability to stage only parts of a file, Git makes it easy to create very granular commits.

Commit Often

Committing often keeps your commits small and, again, helps you commit only related changes. Moreover, it allows you to share your code more frequently with others. That way it‘s easier for everyone to integrate changes regularly and avoid having merge conflicts. Having large commits and sharing them infrequently, in contrast, makes it hard to solve conflicts.

joaopizani

# the following two lines give a two-line status, with the current window highlighted
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}[%{G}%H%? %1`%?%{g}][%= %{= kw}%-w%{+b yk} %n*%t%?(%u)%? %{-}%+w %=%{g}][%{B}%m/%d %{W}%C%A%{g}]'

# huge scrollback buffer
defscrollback 5000

# no welcome message
startup_message off

cb372

(This is a translation of the original article in Japanese by moratorium08.)

(UPDATE (22/3/2019): Added some corrections provided by the original author.)

Writing your own OS to run on a handmade CPU is a pretty ambitious project, but I've managed to get it working pretty well so I'm going to write some notes about how I did it.

gtallen1187

"Scar Tissues Make Relationships Wear Out"

04/26/2103. From a lecture by Professor John Ousterhout at Stanford, class CS142.

This is my most touchy-feely thought for the weekend. Here’s the basic idea: It’s really hard to build relationships that last for a long time. If you haven’t discovered this, you will discover this sooner or later. And it's hard both for personal relationships and for business relationships. And to me, it's pretty amazing that two people can stay married for 25 years without killing each other.

[Laughter]

> But honestly, most professional relationships don't last anywhere near that long. The best bands always seem to break up after 2 or 3 years. And business partnerships fall apart, and there's all these problems in these relationships that just don't last. So, why is that? Well, in my view, it’s relationships don't fail because there some single catastrophic event to destroy them, although often there is a single catastrophic event around the the end of the relation

ncmiller

This is the process I followed on my Fedora 23 host machine to build a small/minimal vanilla Linux kernel and test in Qemu (based on this blog post). This will provide a safe sandbox in which to test kernel changes, and is generally faster than developing natively on the host machine. Qemu will boot the kernel image directly in the emulated system.

Install required build tools on host machine

sudo dnf install ncurses-devel kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc gcc-c++ git qemu openssl-devel glibc-static

Prepare a working space for kernel development

nickloewen

This is a plain-text version of Bret Victor’s reading list. It was requested by hf on Hacker News.

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Highly recommended things!

This is my five-star list. These are my favorite things in all the world.

A few of these works have had an extraordinary effect on my life or way of thinking. They get a sixth star. ★