I was hoping that someone in the comments talking the paper down would have published a paper or have had relevant publications of their own to point to. You know, meet the lads halfway sort of thing.
So what I’m left with to judge instead is anonymous online commenters vs. the publication of 2 prestigious universities. Whose word do I take on this? Decisions, decisions.
You can swap LM out with Web3 out with NFT out with Crypto in this case.
Very anecdotal but of the people I know in game studios who are tasked with engine work, and people who make a killing doing FPGA work for HFT firms, both camps shook their head at Casey’s HMH thing. Uniformly I do not know of a single professional developer of this sort of caliber who looked at HMH and thought it looks great. Quite the opposite. I think they found his approach and justifications unsound as it would instil awful practices of premature unfounded optimization and a disdain for normal library code in favour of hand-rolling your own half-baked implementations based on outdated trivia. I agree with them on the basis that HMH exposed an unprepared and inexperienced audience to something that has to be regarded with utmost care. For this, I refer to Jonathan Blow’s presentation of “a list is probably good enough” as an antidote. I think JB’s recommendations are more in line with actual practices, whereas Casey just raised red flags uniformly from here-and-now engine devs shipping multi platform games.
I have not watched Handmade Hero, so I can't offer any comments any their comments based on factual claims about the software. A few things though:
I am not linking to handmade hero, I'm linking to a separate project of his (his performance aware programming course) that is actually aimed at being an educational piece.
I lied, I will comment on one factual piece. "normal library code in favour of hand-rolling your own half-baked implementations based on outdated trivia." Yes, that is the whole point of the series (not the characterization as half-based and outdated trivia). The point was to show how to build a game (and its engine) from scratch to as big of a degree as possible. The avowing of library code is the point, to show what it takes to build engines rather than call a library so that the industry has more people who would even attempt doing such a thing.
Equally anecdotally, based on available online information, he worked for a long time on core technologies at RAD Game tools, a company which essentially every gamer, expect maybe pure mobile gamers, has purchased a game that used their technology. It may be possible that he acts (or acted in HMH) based on outdated trivia and favoured premature unfounded optimization, but I find it hard to believe based on the content of his I've engaged with and his track record.
Casey's a fundamentalist, in the religious extremist sense. Just as a theologian might have something to learn from the most extremely devout, so it is that there is valuable information in Casey's proselytizing.
But you should no more follow Casey in form and function than you would any other fundamentalist.
While gesturing at religion and saying he's a fundamentalist is an easy rhetorical technique, it doesn't add much. Yes good resources do exist, but they are few and far between. The number of new undergraduates from cs or software engineering who learned to think in the ways needed to make low latency applications are a rounding error based on my experience with them. Most forgot it, weren't taught it well, or never saw it at all. They are more worried about learning the syntax of the current hot framework rather than on anything even resembling "Avoid copies, never allocate, keep the hot path local".
The religious comparison is also a telling one given the state of the industry; for we aren't the theologian, we're the common folk looking for someone or something to follow in order to write better code.
Who are Casey's alternatives? Gesturing the cppcon as a learning resource has "read research papers to learn about a field" vibes. They can be highly informative and worth the effort, but not for beginners.
Who are Casey's contemporaries? If he's a fundamentalist then the atheists are nowhere to be seen by the beginners. Instead we have agile ceremony shamans, clean code bible missionaries, tdd doomsday cults, oop/rust/haskell/etc. zealots, a thriving megachurch industry of Lambda schools, and the mother of all cargo cults masquerading as web dev.
Agree there are not enough performance zealots. Modern architectures are almost magically fast if you get all of the tiny invisible things that kill your performance sorted out correctly. The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.
Performance is surprisingly often a feature. When things become instantly fast, instead of horribly slow, new opportunities are suddenly feasible for a lot of things.
> The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.
It is sad, doubly so since the things you need to get within an order of magnitude of what your hardware can do aren't the arcane assembly and "premature optimization" boogeymen students picture. Forget the 10x engineer, going from the 0.0001x engineer to the 0.1x would be a massive improvement and it's low hanging fruit.
They're simple things: have your code do less, learn what good performance should be, understand the hardware and internalize that the point is to program it, and use/build better tools (e.g. perhaps your programming model is fundamentally flawed if it essentially incentivizes things like the N+1 Selects Problem).
> Performance is surprisingly often a feature.
Performance is, unsurprisingly, often a missing feature in most software. Every day I need to boot up Teams I feel we stray further from Moore's light.
The whole point of Handmade Hero is to make everything from scratch as a learning exercise, so using third-party libraries would be counter-productive.
Nice article but sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the state of linux audio drivers, or the state of linux text rendering.
It’s very easy to see when FreeType is used because it just looks off in a few, but significant ways. I’ve used it with and without Harf. DirectWrite has been a joy by comparison.
I never had particular issues with Linux or Windows, but I have to say that I was surprised at how bad my MacBook looks when connected to an external 1080p monitor. I know Apple wants you to buy one of their fancy high resolution monitors or whatever, but it was so odd that one with a 1920x1080 resolution would look so bad. Even toggling the hi-dpi setting in BetterDisplay didn't help much.
I believe they don't even try to do hinting or sub-pixel rendering, where were key to Windows' crisp font rendering on low resolutions all the way back on Windows XP.
I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll be dead before Linux fonts look good. That’s true of many Linux features, actually. “Public” software is the quality of most public infrastructure, sadly, and smells vaguely of piss.
I sincerely doubt the big HFT firms use anything of Fowler’s. Their optimizations are down to making their own hardware. LL is very context dependent and Amdahl’s law applies here.
Since you’re the GPP author - as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews, I wish your comment was the article.
pg just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms. There’s nothing to discuss because there’s nothing thought provoking in there.
I am however glad it spurred you to write something worth reading (again).
> It’s a nonsensical word salad of half-baked conjectures and aphorisms.
I found this article excellent and definitely thought provoking, and I am just wondering how can someone read that and come out with a bad impression like that?!
I think articles like TFA are a big reason why so called "obstinate" people exist to begin with. Look at the incredibly harsh judgement it passes out on them. At one point it stops just short of directly calling them stupid.
The simple fact is people want to be good. People are afraid of being wrong. They are afraid of failure. They look for the one deep truth that will guide them and protect them from wrong. Once they believe they have found that truth, is anyone surprised that they cling to it?
TFA would have you believe these fears are irrational. Just keep at it, right? Just power through the judgement of your fellow humans. But it is not irrational. Nor is it stupid as TFA seems to imply. The simple fact is if you put yourself out there, there will be consequences. You will be judged.
I sent some code for an idea I had to a mailing list. At some point someone called it "schizophrenic". Maybe to you this is literally nothing, just an innocuous comment that promptly slides off. However, for a long time I actually thought I was insane for thinking and imagining the things that I did. I have to make an effort to suppress thoughts like that to even so much as write this comment on this website. So for me that was a particularly harsh judgement. I don't think I'll forget the moment I read that word until the day that I die. I will certainly never show my face there again.
It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance. Succeed, and it actually leads to the judgement of your naysayers instead of you. They are quite literally judged by history as wrong. Such judgement is even observed in TFA, look at how the so called "obstinate" are singled out for being stupid failures. Such is the nature of humanity.
> It takes a certain audacity to put yourself out there. It takes a certain sociopathy, a certain arrogance.
I am sorry but you are taking things far too seriously. People have always had to "put themselves out there", it's part of living in a society rather than as a hermit. If you don't pull your weight in a tribe, others, not just you, may literally die, every hand counts. Others expect you do that, justifiably. Being judged is always going to be part of living in a society. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing! Learn to take criticism well. Some word someone said shouldn't affect you so strongly. Perhaps that was said by a 13 year old that doesn't know any better. Or by someone suffering from serious mental illness who finds some solace in trying to get other people on the internet disturbed.
Being judged as stupid is of course very harsh, but it's also not wrong sometimes. Do some people behave stupidly sometimes?? Of course they do, we all do. That doesn't make us bad people, and we shouldn't despair because we believe we have been categorized as stupid: we should definitely consider whether it's a fair assessment given the circumstances, and try to do better next time. Very smart people can, and do, behave stupidly, specially when talking about religion or politics. Even smart people can say the most stupid things. I think no one is very smart or very stupid in every context, there's always a context where you'd look totally stupid even if you're Albert Einstein. Imagine Mr. Einstein trying to hunt in a jungle in Africa. Even with practice, he'd probably never get good at it. His very way of thinking, very scientific and evidence driven, what we consider intelligent, would get him eaten in no time over there. What count there is being fast thinking, acting on instinct... that's how you survive there, and that's what you would count as "smart" if you lived there.
Anyway, hope some of what I say here helps someone :).
> as someone who recently published a Steam title and has glowing community reviews
Congratulations!
> pg just doesn’t do it for me.
For me, he's hit or miss. He has a writing style that tries very hard to boil things down into very simple terms while also approaching subjects that are deep and complex. Often the result is so oversimplified that it misses the mark.
But I do believe pg is thinking deeply about this stuff and there's often insight in his writing even if the narrative ends up too simple and self-satisfied for my taste.
I remember when this was first announced and they were in a super alpha stage but making progress. If I remember right their team also got research/indie funding. For awhile it seemed to be ahead of 0AD which was using some weird JavaScript interpreter thing for its scripting. Gives me shudders thinking about it when I read the code for the first time.
The early 3D RTS years of Dark Reign, Earth 2015, eventually Warcraft 3 really lit a fire under peoples asses to try to make their own. It was magic to see, but the fire has unanimously died down with the genre.
This has been the running meme since mid 2000s. You have to see that Glest, 0AD and Spring RTS are in some ways anomalies.
A ridiculous amount of these RTS games will not make any impact to the genre, of the few which are released. I surmise that a company like Petroglyph knows that all too well by now and they have a proven track record of shipping things. Grey Goo may have been boring as hell but the work they all put into it, I’ll stomach it and play it. Great music by Frank Klepacki as always. And titles like Stormgate which I believe have ex-Blizzard people attached often have a diva like quality that entombs them. Artillery (the game that Day[9] was attached to for example) was hyped, overhyped, and then gone. And many other of this sort. I forget the name of the Myth series remake, but that made it all the way to beta before being shuttered.
It’s always a great year for RTS games, except it never is. We get the occasional release of some Company of Heroes shlock sequel, maybe a Cossacks or a Sudden Strike or whatever, but the last big RTS title was in 2010: Starcraft 2. And starcraft 2 is by communal investment dead as most of the serious players migrated back to SC1.
The little puff of wind we got from Planetary Annihilation and Ashes of the Singularity made zero dent on the genre. Very few people bothered to play these games. Most action you’ll see today is on SC1 and AoE. Remakes, demakes and remixes of the old days.
You could argue that for multiple genres! Is today's Call of Duty not just a remix of mechanics created decades prior?
Total War, Anno, etc. Highly successful series with new and coming releases with many mechanics evolved and built upon the classic RTS formula.
> As a genre, RTS is dead.
It has shrunken, I would consider it far from dead. There is a limiting factor when we consider the classic RTS formula, it's essentially PC only. Many genres work across consoles as well or were adopted to work there as well. eg. Aim assist in every console FPS. Mobile doesn't work either, touch + classic RTS doesn't mix. RTS has thus a limited audience it can appeal to. But dead it is not, Steam's player counts for Strategy --> Real Time Strategy speak for themselves.
Shrunken and dead basically mean the same thing here, and again that term shrunken was traditionally used, along with “RTS games are too difficult” and other reasons as to the whys. There is no growth potential and at that point you’re losing players faster than you’re gaining them. It’s a dead genre by all accounts. AoE2 remastered/AoE4 will prop it up in the same way that SC2 propped it up a bit.
Unless I’m wrong it seems like steam thinks dota 2 is an RTS game, which makes any stats around these things very suspicious.
I mean it's definitely a niche, though we're finally seeing indie Starcraft-descended RTSes trying to expand that (there were many other attempts, but generally in other subgenres): Zerospace, Immortal, Stormgate, Battle Aces.
Unfortunately, most of the other attempts to expand the RTS playerbase were incredibly wrong-headed. Almost all of them were obsessed with simplifying the genre to appeal to more people, but in making the game easier to play they also made it less interesting, which is why it's the big traditional RTSes (SC1, SC2, AoE2, AoE4) that have the biggest playerbase, and therefore the most total casual players.
> This has been the running meme since mid 2000s. You have to see that Glest, 0AD and Spring RTS are in some ways anomalies.
Those aren't the games I'm talking about.
> A ridiculous amount of these RTS games will not make any impact to the genre, of the few which are released.
That's true of any genre. There are notable FPSes every year, but for every one of those, there's probably fifty random ones hardly anyone's ever heard of.
> It’s always a great year for RTS games, except it never is.
AoE4 seems to have done well for itself, it has a stable and decently high player population on Steam. But yes, most of them fail or sputter out.
> the last big RTS title was in 2010: Starcraft 2.
If your bar for 'big' is SC2 then the only big RTS title ever was SC2, since it was definitely the biggest budget and most anticipated. Most of the golden age RTSes were made in a couple years with moderate-sized teams on moderate-sized budgets. Hell, Brood War came out in the same year as Starcraft 1.
> And starcraft 2 is by communal investment dead as most of the serious players migrated back to SC1.
Not even close to true? Korea moved back to SC2 a long ass time ago, and Blizzard abandoned SC2, but it still has community support.
> Most action you’ll see today is on SC1 and AoE.
No, the biggest RTS is SC2. But after that, BW, AoE2 and AoE4 are the next biggest.
I know someone who was in a PhD program for 10 years in Europe, without graduating. After year 6, it got very difficult for the university to legally employ him, and after year 9, it was simply impossible and he lived on his savings, but was still allowed to use his old office.
European PhD programs generally assume you already have a Masters in the subject so they skip most of the grad level courses and they typically don't do things like rotations either. You have a lab and some project to start on day 1. It's still overall faster to finish in Europe but the difference isn't as extreme as it sounds, assuming you do go for the Masters first.
Australia too. But difference is you at least get paid (albeit a small stipend) in our countries, I think US the student pays tuition or has to also undertake seminars etc.
My doctorate was essentially; run studies for 2-3yrs, write up papers for submission, smash them together with an intro and general discussion, graduate.
Same, basically. In fact, in the UK the requirements were low enough that after my first paper published a year into my PhD (in theoretical quantum physics) my supervisor was like: "I consider this enough for graduation, now you can work on whatever you are interested in"
So what I’m left with to judge instead is anonymous online commenters vs. the publication of 2 prestigious universities. Whose word do I take on this? Decisions, decisions.
You can swap LM out with Web3 out with NFT out with Crypto in this case.