BFett wrote:Flat, I believe you were one of the backers who had access to the prototype. Can you tell us more about the demo that Josh had running and possibly how it would compare with the prototype from 2012?

Flatfingers wrote: Some quick technical notes:

• I saw a snippet of the Lua code -- it's as clean as LTSL was. If LuaJIT winds up working, it will be a fine modding language.awesome
• Freakin' garbage collection, man.Is this a good thing or bad thing, I can't tell?
• Josh was not exaggerating when he said his system procgen had produced a beautiful system. Wow.Any screenies?
• The combination of contrasting nebula/star colors, and the lighting model for nebulae, will make your eyes very happy.I'm already happy, how much more happier can I be?
• Screenshots do not do these nebulae justice. Videos do not capture what they look like in person. Wait till you see this.No screenies?
• As Josh was showing me the star system, the exhibitor in the next booth over spoke up to praise it. Woulda loved to have seen Josh's face at that moment

Flatfingers wrote: 2. On pictures... it did occur to me. But once we got to talking, I just plain forgot to ask!

I'm more of a words guy, anyway.

Flatfingers wrote:
...snip

For the kind of dynamic, massively simulated and yet highly responsive world that Josh requires to make the game he wants, there was never any responsible option but to design and build it from scratch. It's just an unfortunate fact that this is Really Hard To Do. But I've never known anyone with Josh's level of programming capability. I think he can do it.

...snip

Poet1960 wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:
...snip

For the kind of dynamic, massively simulated and yet highly responsive world that Josh requires to make the game he wants, there was never any responsible option but to design and build it from scratch. It's just an unfortunate fact that this is Really Hard To Do. But I've never known anyone with Josh's level of programming capability. I think he can do it.

...snip

Great post, but I think this is what most people tend to either forget or never consider. What he is trying to do is extremely difficult, and if he manages to actually pull it off, which I think he will, this game is going to rock the space game world.

DWMagus wrote:Oh people aren't forgetting to consider that. People know it's a very difficult task. What most people wanted was communication a little more frequently than once every 4-6 months.

Glad Josh has broken that streak recently though and is on the forums as well as getting out to conventions.

JoshParnell wrote:I certainly can't tell what the output will be, but for sure this would not pass the gauntlet of 'is it really random' tests...I can almost understand what it does and that's not a good sign Still no idea what floatFix is though. I see INT_MAX and a high power of seven in there though, which I'm not particularly fond of (why not primes?) But anyway. Probably better than rand()'s LCG.

FWIW Mersenne starts (typically) with ~624 loops of state 'twiddling' based on the seed immediately when it's constructed, so you get a good distribution right off the bat.

// *Really* minimal PCG32 code / (c) 2014 M.E. O'Neill / pcg-random.org
// Licensed under Apache License 2.0 (NO WARRANTY, etc. see website)

typedef struct { uint64_t state;  uint64_t inc; } pcg32_random_t;

uint32_t pcg32_random_r(pcg32_random_t* rng)
{
    uint64_t oldstate = rng->state;
    // Advance internal state
    rng->state = oldstate * 6364136223846793005ULL + (rng->inc|1);
    // Calculate output function (XSH RR), uses old state for max ILP
    uint32_t xorshifted = ((oldstate >> 18u) ^ oldstate) >> 27u;
    uint32_t rot = oldstate >> 59u;
    return (xorshifted >> rot) | (xorshifted << ((-rot) & 31));
}

ticki_ wrote:Just read the PCG paper. That was ... surprisingly good. Probably the best CS paper I've read so far.

Silverware wrote:

DWMagus wrote:Oh people aren't forgetting to consider that. People know it's a very difficult task. What most people wanted was communication a little more frequently than once every 4-6 months.

Glad Josh has broken that streak recently though and is on the forums as well as getting out to conventions.

This, if Josh posted once a week, during that entire period, and told us what his issues were, then I doubt anyone would care all that much about the late delivery.

Veedrac wrote: rng paper