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Re: The End

#271
JoshParnell wrote:
Sat Mar 02, 2019 4:13 pm
[a lot of words]
Everything there sounds amazing, Josh!

But make sure you take your time with all this. Starting a new job can be really stressful without adding all that on top. We've been waiting, we can wait a bit longer for you to get things ironed out.

Cheers!
:thumbup: :D
- The Snark Knight

"Look upward, and share the wonders I've seen."
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Re: The End

#273
Thanks for the news, Josh. Happy to hear your life is « normalizing ».
And remembre that everybody is soooo much smarter in hindsight....

Flatfingers wrote:
Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:10 pm
As for LT, I suspect you've made a lot of people very happy -- in a strange sort of way -- that you don't see anything inherent in either the LT engine so far or the vision of Limit Theory The Game that would prevent making something very close to that game with that engine. That's been a key concern for a while now: is the LOD AI or market stuff just too hard for anyone to do? Or is it more a matter of how much persistence can be poured into that work? From your comments, it sounds like it's more a matter of accumulation of effort... which means the dream of LT-the-game is still within reach. That's going to inspire a lot of people, I think.
This is not a logical conclusion from the situation, in my view.
Josh has done an engine which makes possible to have many spaceships flying and with collision detection and so on. With amazing graphics. This is a great achievement in itself.
But until now, and Josh confirms it with ‘the number of features still missing’, there is still nothing of the living universe done. There is therfore absolutely no confirmation that a living world with LOD AI and so is within reach.
We are therefore still in the dark about it - not within reach...
Of course, it is always possible at a certain level, but the high level that Josh was aiming remain very, very challenging.

What I would be extremely interested in is a discussion of Josh, e.g. in a series of dev logs at irregular intervals when he feels like it, of the state of his reflections to deals with the core features of LT like AI, economy, LOD, etc... that would be so mighty interesting to see what a smart mind had as ideas (even incomplete or if ultimately not working).
Image
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Re: The End

#274
Hmm. I think it's fair to say that what anyone else might make of LT's existing code won't be the exact game Josh would have built had he, mostly by himself, been able to do it.

And I'm inclined to agree that building a game close to Josh's vision would indeed be "very, very challenging."

But I don't think either of those puts a game that's reasonably close to what Josh had in mind out of reach, which was my point. It was Josh's comment (as I understood it) that the limits on making LT were primarily personal, not technical, that leads me to conclude a good game with the spirit of LT is at least possible. Not easily made! Just possible.

It's hard to say for sure until the code is released. But for now, I don't think it's crazy to hope that a team of skillful folks with time to spare may be able to make a playable game out of the foundations that Josh (and Adam and Lin) laid.

And if I'm wrong? I'd rather fail as an optimist than never have tried at all.
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Re: The End

#277
I know this is late but I had a long time to think. I missed the Kickstarter, which I still regret. If I had the chance to go back in time, I still would. I had also backed other games. Some I still wait for, others released. I am actually glad you made the decision, as difficult as it was, to say that you are not able to deliver.

Another game I waited for did deliver a finished game. I think I put down like $150 and I was so excited to play it...but it was so different than what was promised. The graphics were outdated, the design different, and I honestly played it for a couple of hours before realizing that I got suckered out of money for a game that was constantly talked about as being AAA quality leading up to release. I think even today, the developers have not made any comment about this complete deviation from what I feel we’re a lot of things that I expected and that made me angry and determined to never back them again.

They didn’t have the courage to say “You know what? We can’t deliver what we promised. We apologize to everyone but we don’t want to deliver a half-complete, low-quality piece of work, just to say we finished.”

Josh Parnell, you had the courage to say what you wanted to say. I wish others did. I know this sucks for you in more ways than maybe we will ever know, but know that you didn’t force an incomplete pile of garbage on us that could forever tarnish your career. I know I posted on this forever ago but it was probably just some generic statement. This is how I feel.

I’m glad I met everyone here, I still feel the urge to pop onto IRC, or see Talvieno and his GF for lunch or a drink. I never would have met you guys if I wasn’t here.

Thanks for everything.

~Charley
    Image "Everyone needs to have their avatar's edited to have afros." -Charley Deallus
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    Re: The End

    #281
    Having written games - then yes - I KNOW - but what I shared was just an FYI just in case the horse was ever gotten on again. I liked everything Josh was trying to achieve and sometimes it can take just one little jigsaw piece to fall into place to help see things in a different light.
    Post

    Re: The End

    #282
    Hal wrote:
    Wed Mar 27, 2019 7:48 am
    Having written games - then yes - I KNOW - but what I shared was just an FYI just in case the horse was ever gotten on again. I liked everything Josh was trying to achieve and sometimes it can take just one little jigsaw piece to fall into place to help see things in a different light.
    Cool, but is it good for making a space game similar to the scope of the Limit Theory engine?
    How does it work with PCG?

    I'm not sure if this is a discussion for here, and if needs to be moved into it's own thread, then the mods can help there.
    As I don't want to derail this thread from the topic at hand.
    Thanks.
    YAY PYTHON \o/

    In Josh We Trust
    -=326.3827=-
    Post

    Re: The End

    #283
    FormalMoss wrote:
    Thu Mar 28, 2019 3:03 am
    Hal wrote:
    Wed Mar 27, 2019 7:48 am
    Having written games - then yes - I KNOW - but what I shared was just an FYI just in case the horse was ever gotten on again. I liked everything Josh was trying to achieve and sometimes it can take just one little jigsaw piece to fall into place to help see things in a different light.
    Cool, but is it good for making a space game similar to the scope of the Limit Theory engine?
    How does it work with PCG?

    I'm not sure if this is a discussion for here, and if needs to be moved into it's own thread, then the mods can help there.
    As I don't want to derail this thread from the topic at hand.
    Thanks.
    It may need to be moved yes.
    And for the scope of LT, nothing short of a custom engine would really cover all the points.
    Sure Josh could have started with Libraries for physics, sound, graphics, the basics. But in the end, it would have all fallen down anyway, because the simple scope of LT is fucking massive.

    And that's all there is to it.
    For a single developer, I'm damn impressed by how far he did get.
    And once what he did get done is released, I know I'll be fiddling with it.
    °˖◝(ಠ‸ಠ)◜˖°
    WebGL Spaceships and Trails
    <Cuisinart8> apparently without the demon driving him around Silver has the intelligence of a botched lobotomy patient ~ Mar 04 2020
    console.log(`What's all ${this} ${Date.now()}`);
    Post

    Re: The End

    #285
    Now that this project is dead and buried, and all forum discussion seems to have stopped, I felt like making what may very well end up being the last post here! ;-)

    Not that I'm expecting anyone to read it, but I felt like pointing out there's nothing wrong with what Josh did in the end.

    (*) Implement basic functionality in C for speed. Check.
    (*) Use the fastest available scripting language (Lua) for the rest. Check.
    (*) Use Lua cleverly to make sure it JITs properly, and so it doesn't need to use its crummy garbage collector. Check.

    That's EXACTLY how a project such as this should be tackled. There's nothing wrong with making your own engine for a project such as this, where you don't need super realistic graphics, and where you really need a *lighter* engine than the commercial engines out there. It's in fact exactly the right approach!

    The only thing Josh did wrong, was taking too long to figure out the right way to approach the project. He wasted YEARS on dead ends. First he implemented his own scripting language (an incredibly bad idea!). Then when he finally realized he wasn't going to get the speed he needed from it, he translated all of his scripting code to one of the *slowest* scripting languages in existence (Python), in the vain hope someone would make it run fast enough with a JIT (which is a seriously difficult proposition, because the nature of Python precludes a lot of optimizations and makes JITing it ridiculously hard to do well).

    In short, Josh wasted too much time on dead ends that he could (and really should!) have known were dead ends from the beginning, if he had just taken a sober look at things and done some proper research before enthusiastically starting to write code.

    It's no big secret that designing and implementing a FAST scripting language of your own is a major challenge, and will take many YEARS of effort all in itself. It's not a viable way to get a game done, so he should have just said NO! to this idea as soon as it popped into his head.

    It's no big secret Python is a slow language that can't be JITted well either, he should have put in a day of googling to find the fastest scripting language from the beginning. There was never any need to even consider Python for this game engine, so that was even more time wasted on a guaranteed dead end.

    Add to this all the happy experimentation with tooling, and inventing cool infrastructure to build even better tooling, and Josh was in trouble. Big trouble. The fact his vision for the actual game was vague and constantly morphing didn't help either, and so the project was doomed.

    I'm just writing this to set the record straight in the end: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way he eventually chose to do it, and the half-baked engine that resulted may turn out to be very useful for others once it is open sourced and finished. Josh struggled with making the right technical decisions for a long time, and would have been greatly helped by taking some advice from someone more experienced. He did figure it all out by himself in the end, he just ran out of time and money before getting very far on the actual game.

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