Pretty sure water was just a teleporter? You may be thinking about the mirror effect? I think that was a kind of a portal effect. You had to make a large empty section behind each mirror that was used by the engine to render a mirrored copy of things in front of the mirror.
You could make some weird impossible geometries by just superimposing sections. Two sections could occupy the exact same coordinates, but movement and rendering were done across edges shared by sections and did not care about if there was some other section in the same space. As long as there was never a way to see those sections at the same time.
A teleporter is just a portal that you can’t see through.
> You could make some weird impossible geometries by just superimposing sections. Two sections could occupy the exact same coordinates, but movement and rendering were done across edges shared by sections and did not care about if there was some other section in the same space. As long as there was never a way to see those sections at the same time.
Pretty sure water was just a teleporter? You may be thinking about the mirror effect?
That's what they just said? They didn't mention the mirror effect? The mirror effect was done with duplicate geometry? It occupied the overlapping space of what was behind it? The build engine also didn't have vertical levels.
Shadow Warrior (Build) did have some room over room stuff. But IIRC it still leveraged offset sectors like Duke's water. FWIW some modern Doom ports appear to have this as well, at least with levels that support it.
I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.
Sweden had a series of disasters like that in recent years. A few months ago one region tried to switch from their old healthcare system to something delivered by Oracle, but quickly had to roll back to the old system.
In 2021 an expensive system for schools in Stockholm was so bad that some parents got together and wrote an open source app to not have to use the bad official UI.
The java 4k contest was fun (make a java applet game that is at most a 4096 bytes JAR, including all assets the game needs). Unfortunately I only discovered it shortly before it shut down (when no browsers supported java applets anymore). I did enter one year and it was not by coincidence that was the only time in 40 years of hobby-gamedev that I shared a game I made with people online.
It was a lot of fun to try to squeeze a game into 4 kB but I can definitely also admit that part of it was being able to use the extreme limit as an excuse for making things simpler and not have to worry about the game being ugly or not having sounds or not having a title screen and all the other 90% of stuff that would have been expected to turn it into a complete game.
I play around a bit with TIC-80. Some say it is just an open source PICO-8 and I guess it is to some extent. I paid for both but I have not spent as much time with PICO-8. I like that TIC-80 supports quite many different programming languages, but maybe PICO-8 does as well these days? There is no super obvious reason to use one or the other, so I go with the one with free source code.
Real retro gamedev is tempting, but it is difficult to find a real console that were heavily restricted while also being convenient to develop for. The fantasy consoles cheat a bit in being restricted like some early 1980's hardware while running code like some 2010's game engine. It's like the best of both worlds, but also a bit boring compared to writing something actually limited to what some old console could do.
I never was a big fan of Lua and that was something that kept me from looking closer at Löve, but a few months ago I discovered fennel (Lisp-like that transpiles to Lua) and that you can use that to write Löve games.
The "absolutely minimal Löve 2D fennel" repo was useful to me as I found the other templates a bit bloated (but possibly those are more useful for real-world projects beyond small experiments?):
I did find that startup-time was bad for Fennel om some very low-end devices, or when running even a small game using LoveDOS in DOSBox, so I set up my test-projects to pre-compile the fennel-code to Lua as part of building the .love-files and that solved that problem.
For Android you can also install the stand-alone LÖVE Loader app that can open .love files to play. Some games on itch.io comes with a .love-download (in addition to platform-specific executables), but I guess they can sometimes be extracted from other games too.
The .love-files, if provided or if they can be extracted from a game, are also useful on desktop, for playing the games in an operating system (like FreeBSD) that the game's developer did not provide binaries for.
The stand-alone app is also a fun way to do some gamedev on an Android phone. The .love file is just a ZIP, so it can be easily created from termux.
If I understand the distinction correctly, I run llamafile as a backend. I start it with the filename of a model on the command-line (might need a -M flag or something) and it will start up a chat-prompt for interaction in the terminal but also opens a port that speaks some protocol that I can connect to using a frontend (in my case usually gptel in emacs).
I have a somewhat common firstname.lastname@gmail.com and others with the same name use it pretty often. Surprisingly often it seems as if sites allow accounts to exist without email confirmation. I estimate at least 50% of the accounts out there that use my gmail is actually not me, and I like the idea of anyone trying to make sense of that data, if they can even guess that I am the Firstname Lastname that the address belongs to.
I’m in a similar situation and hadn’t thought of it that way. My take on the email I receive is that they fall into one of these categories: a) genuinely intended for me (and not spam), b) spam, c) genuinely intended case of mistaken address (they forgot to include another character), d) someone using mine as their throwaway (site sending verification email), and e) someone using mine as their throwaway (no verification process, ergo not altogether different from spam).
Where I am, it is official government agencies that seem to not verify email (and send me sensitive documents meant for others with the same name — a chore to call and ask them to correct their stuff regularly, sigh)
Any comercial sites - dating, gambling etc. end with verification attempts
You could make some weird impossible geometries by just superimposing sections. Two sections could occupy the exact same coordinates, but movement and rendering were done across edges shared by sections and did not care about if there was some other section in the same space. As long as there was never a way to see those sections at the same time.