![](https://media.kbin.social/media/67/97/679755e35440795ae6844bc5bece4567caf038c741b7c8679abaf4169020ff44.png)
![](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/fwrQkf9edg.png)
Fuck tankies.
Keep the banner.
Hello!
I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.
Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!
As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.
Fuck tankies.
Keep the banner.
Agreed. Fuck tankies.
Tankies have really been doubling down the last few days. I hate that this place is infested with them - and it seems to be growing as they start to scare sane people away.
There’s been multiple waves to Lemmy.
Early 2020: Lemmy’s creators make a post on /r/communism, announcing Lemmy and offering to set up an instance for the subreddit to migrate onto. This instance becomes Lemmygrad (which is still run by Lemmy’s founders/the people who also run Lemmy.ml).
Mid 2020: Federation comes online for Lemmy. Lemmy’s founders make a post to /r/Linux, advertising Lemmy and getting people to join. This is the wave I was in, originally, but the folks from wave 1 scared me off.
Then there were a few other waves. I wasn’t around for any of them, but I know in late 2021/early 2022 Beehaw was created. I believe Beehaw split off from Tildes, which is another Reddit clone run by a former Reddit admin (who also made AutoModerator).
Then, in May 2023, we saw the first wave of people coming over from Reddit. As the other person mentioned, there were really multiple smaller waves… usually corresponding with an announcement the Reddit admins made. The blackout gave the biggest wave.
Since the start of July, it’s largely petered back. A lot of the folks who are diehard anti-Reddit are here, but until Reddit fucks up again it’ll probably quiet down.
Reddit will fuck up again, mind. Digg didn’t die instantly, either - it was a slow, drawn-out death.
The only correction I would make is that Kbin does let you follow communities from other instances (even Lemmy instances).
Until a couple weeks ago, it would show local magazines first… but if you dug deep enough, after all the local magazines were listed it would start listing remote communities across Lemmy/Kbin.
It’s changed very recently to always sort everything by subscriber count, with an option to toggle between local magazines and everything on the threadiverse.
As far as “I tried to go to posts I knew existed but weren’t showing up” - like everywhere else on the fediverse, someone needs to follow that content first. So the reason why they saw their Mastodon content is because someone followed their Mastodon account from Kbin. When they searched for things that didn’t appear, it’s because nobody on Kbin was following those accounts.
If they searched the full @username@instance.social
and hit “follow”, then future posts would appear in the microblog tag and be searchable.
A lot of users push for Discord. Very few (comparatively) push for Lemmy/Kbin.
I was a mod of a 500k+ subreddit. We wound up basically being forced to make a Discord a few years ago because users wanted one so badly. It wound up becoming more active than the actual subreddit itself, and has a bigger mod team (most of whom aren’t even mods on the subreddit, just Discord).
Yeah, I can’t find the source I originally read it from (I think it was on the KDE subreddit from a KDE dev there), but they gave a talk about it recently. I’ve only skimmed the talk but they do speak pretty heavily about KDE collaborating with Valve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0
Steam Deck honestly convinced me to move my desktop over to Linux.
I’m still dual-booting, but I only go into Windows if something struggles too much over Proton (looking at you Satisfactory). I’ve been daily driving KDE Neon for about 2 months without issues.
Plasma is a great desktop environment, too. Usually the desktop environments were what chased me away - GNOME was slow sometimes and always felt… off, Cinnamon doesn’t like multiple desktops despite claiming to, with the maintainers refusing to even acknowledge the problems, XFE is… XFE, and historically Plasma was always super crashy and bloated.
Valve’s been funding the KDE guys to make Plasma better and it really shows. Plasma feels like a modern desktop that can compete with Windows directly - and honestly beats Windows with how bad Windows 11 has become. (Last time I was in Windows it took the Windows 11 Start Menu a full 20 seconds to open - but don’t worry, it had time to serve me an ad for Xbox Game Pass.)
Threads can’t be in the EU unless it’s federated, basically. It’s likely Facebook/Instagram will adopt federated protocols as well. Facebook has to allow interoperability on their platform.
Lemmy doesn’t have this feature, but Kbin does. Kbin fixes a lot of the issues with Lemmy.
I swear by Doc Martens.
They’re painful at first but once you break them in they are incredibly comfy and last years. I’ve had my shoes for a decade now without issues. They’ve been with me from my first customer service job, all the way through college and into my current desk job.
It’s about time for a new pair but these guys have seen it all.
Beehaw has very strict moderation, like a traditional forum. They want a small, closed community where they can look out but nobody else can come in. (They’ve even mentioned they would switch to an allowlist if it could be made one-way.)
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had easy sign-ups and Beehaw said the ease of sign-ups were responsible for a lot of trolls and bad actors. So Beehaw defederated from both those instances until they made sign-ups harder.
Lemmy doesn’t have this feature, but Kbin does.
On Kbin, you just go to https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.world (or whatever instance you want to block) and you can block it. You can also follow an instance it if you want to see every single post from every single community on an instance for some reason.
So! If you don’t have much experience in programming, you DO NOT want to write your own engine. Period.
“I wrote my own game engine” is the kind of thing you’ll see masters/doctorate computer science students (or crazy industry veterans) do. While it may be possible to write a simple text-based game that only uses the command line, it gets complicated fast.
There are some libraries out there like PyGame which let you set up “toy” games quickly (in Python), but no shipping game is going to be built entirely in PyGame.
When you’re out applying for jobs in the industry, having a studio you’re applying for say “We built our own engine” in 2023 is a red flag. There are multiple battle-ready game engines that have made thousands of games. Most places want to build games in either the Unreal Engine (C++) or the Unity Engine (C#). There is a third one I should mention - Godot - which is a flexible FOSS game engine. But most places use Unity or Unreal.
There is so much that goes into making a game engine. Not only are you making a game, you’re making a tool that lets you make a game. You’re making stuff that can read model and animation data. You’re making something that can handle a bunch of different input methods. You’re making something which needs to calculate lighting and collision, parse images, run scripts, save and load data, multiplayer games need a full networking model with local prediction, correction, and latency mitigation, etc.
By definition, making your own engine is untested. You are going to run into issues, whether you have 1 person or 1000. What starts off simple quickly balloons as you want to do more than just show white text on a black screen. Something like Unity has had a bunch of production games (like Hearthstone) use it and find all the issues already so you don’t have to. There is literally zero reason to make your own engine today.
I myself work at a AAA game studio, as a programmer. I’ve worked on the Battlefield series in the past, although it’s not what I work on now.
Let me give you the advice I wish I had 15 years ago, when I was starting out: think small. It is far better to have made 10 projects in 1 year than 1 project in 10 years. The only way to “make it” as an indie dev is to be incredibly talented, incredibly lucky, and have an incredible amount of funding. Even supposed “one-man teams” like Toby Fox had help making their games; it is very difficult to make a game with 100 people working on it, let alone 1.
Make small toy projects that you can do in a weekend. Drop it if you spend more than 2 weeks on it. Don’t be like me where I spent years working on a dream project that I never got in a good spot to show to anyone. When I talk to people now, when I talk to interviewers or coworkers, I don’t really mention my white whale of a dream project I never finished. I mention the little games I made for gamejams, the ideas I had and how I played around with them.
It is so much more impressive to show an interviewer an active GitHub and a bunch of free games you’ve put on itch.io. I’ve literally gotten jobs because of it, but it took me years to realize I was doing the wrong thing and needed to pivot.
With that rant out of the way. C++ is industry standard. Any programmer will need to know C++ inside and out. Even if you don’t work in it directly, you’re almost guaranteed to be working with something that works in C++. But C++ is a hard language to learn.
If you have taken a programming class already, I’d recommend Unity. Unity isn’t as common as Unreal, but C# is easy to learn and somewhat similar to C++ (not that similar, but a lot can carry over). It is code, though, so you need to know syntax.
If you’ve never taken a programming class before and you’re self-taught, then I’d actually recommend Unreal. Unreal has “blueprints”, which is a visual scripting language. This means you don’t need to know the syntax of what you want to do; you just grab nodes and connect them together. It’s very easy to understand and intuitive, and it helps you build the foundation you’d use if you ever delve into the code side. You can make a whole game in blueprint, without touching code - the game won’t be huge and mega-performant, but it’ll be relatively easy to make and doable by a single person working on a very small project.
Bear in mind that there are other disciplines in game development other than programming as well. That’s sort of the best part about making your own stuff - you have to learn to do everything, from art to design to programming. Designers typically aren’t expected to know much about code, but they are expected to be creative, collaborative, and intuitively know what makes something a fun game to play. If you find out that programming isn’t for you but you still really want to get into game development, making all these tiny projects is a great way to exercise your design muscles as well.
Yes, they are still in restricted (read-only) mode and redirecting here.
(Psst… a lot of people broke the rule.)
It was also supposed to only apply if you explicitly went to the subreddit. If you just saw a post in your feed you didn’t have to make a post yourself.
But the rule makes the community very very active in a place where there’s otherwise not much activity.
/r/196 was a popular sub on Reddit, about 500k subscribers. A lot of them were dedicated users who were very active and had recognizable usernames.
196 was one of the first major subs to shut down and point everyone to the fediverse. It helps that 196 was very LGBTQ-friendly and Blahaj.zone is also very explicitly LGBTQ-friendly, so it was a good match.
196 creates a lot of content because their “rule” was anytime you visited the sub you had to leave an image, whether it was a repost or not. This also works very well for a nascent fediverse where not a lot of OC is being made yet.
Thus 196 was pretty much in the perfect position to become one of the biggest places on the fediverse.
You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?
Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you’re leading an angry rant with “put someone else’s poop in your butt”.
And then when you say you’ve been banned from multiple sites and it’s all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think “this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else’s poop in your butt.”
I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?