benzor

It's indeed sad to see. Game networking techniques have been known for multiple decades and yet still haven't made their into any of the major publicly available engines (notably Unreal and Unity). What gives?

As a game dev of 10+ years myself, I have a few theories:

1. Multiplayer networking is the "secret sauce" that creates moats/barriers to entry for incumbent studios. Think Rocket League or Fortnite or StarCraft 2. The tech exists, it's functionally well understood, but hard to implement at a high level of quality. Why not keep it to yourself? There is more money in holding onto your game revenue monopoly than trying to sell the network tech.

2. Game genres differ greatly in their networking needs. Rollback is great for fighting games but that's about it. StarCraft uses delay based deterministic lockstep. FPS games use (typically) ad-hoc server authoritative state syncs with client side prediction. Other complex games use full determinism with rollback, sending only inputs over the wire. Some cheapo indie games using client authoritative models (open to cheating but easy to implement, arguably fine for coop games). There are even more variants and blended approaches but you get the picture: there is no one size fits all approach and many are mutually exclusive so it's harder to package into an engine as a comprehensive solution.

3. Networking a game properly involves very leaky abstractions. It is impossible to write gameplay code for a networked game without understanding the nuance of the network model. This makes it substantially harder to develop the game, and this hurts the major game engines' marketability, with both major players Unity and Unreal guilty of selling themselves as "look ma no code required" solutions. Similar to point 1, not worth the money to sell this.

I don't see a great way out of this unfortunately. The only good networking middleware I know of is Photon and they're not exactly an easy to use product either. Hopefully we see better open source tooling in the future.

Double Stallion Games | Senior Systems Programmer | Montreal, QC, Canada | Fully-Remote/Hybrid/On-Site, your choice | Full-Time | http://dblstallion.com/

We're a small (~25 people) independent games studio, currently developing CONV/RGENCE: A League of Legends Story, in partnership with Riot Forge. We are looking to hire a senior developer focusing on systems, tools, asset pipelines, and networking tech to help develop our next unnannounced title. We are currently a Unity/C# shop but switching to Unreal is on the table, and regardless of your specific expertise if you have a good amount of gamedev experience we are interested.

Some of the many perks of joining our team: 4 weeks vacation minimum, flexible hours, all working modes supported (WFH or on-site or hybrid), zero overtime, full health insurance, a dynamic team with a no-bullshit culture, work directly with the founders and contribute high-impact work, plenty of career growth opportunities as our team scales up, etc.

To apply, please visit; https://apply.workable.com/dblstallion/j/B9500DC831/ (or send me an email directly)

We don't need any understanding of AI/ML in government to effectively regulate the autonomous vehicle industry. Design an appropriate set of tests, make companies run the gauntlet, only approve the ones that pass. The test criteria is simple: does this software meaningfully and statistically significantly reduce the risk of accident/harm/death compared to the average human driver? Add caveats and conditionals as you wish for conditions/weather etc. but it's fundamentally a black box test with no knowledge of technical internals required.

I agree with your point that government regulation is fundamentally reactive to private sector innovation, hence lagging. That being said, this particular issue of autonomous driving has been a hot topic for the better part of a decade now and I would like our governments to tackle it.

It's really quite sad that the regulation of autonomous vehicles been so slow to come along. Public roads are filled with other drivers, passengers, and pedestrians that did not consent to be a part of a large scale beta test for partial driving automation that could fail at any time. I believe this is a case where self driving software should be default illegal until proven safe. Most companies in this industry, thankfully, seem to be moving carefully and rolling out their products conservatively; Tesla seems to think "move fast and break things" is an appropriate motto for 5000 lbs projectiles on public roads.

Interesting factoid: the human brain processes sound faster that sight [1]. The difference cited in the paper below is roughly 40 ms, which is small in an absolute sense, but compared to the relative time tolerances we are discussing here in this parent article, it's huge!

Naturally this effect cancels out if all competitors get the same visual cue, however it's still to the benefit of athletes and fans to want quicker reaction times:

- Shorter overall reaction times means faster races means better records

- The standard deviation of reaction times is smaller for sound than for sight, which means the reaction time is more fair to all

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456887/

This is an excellent answer and took the thoughts right out of my mind.

To elaborate a bit for GP: No I would not have classified early stage Google or Facebook or Amazon as "perpetually unprofitable tech" because, frankly, they clearly weren't. All 3 of these companies had strong, obvious moats that enabled them to preserve pricing power. All 3 of these companies had a small handful of initial cap raises and have grown entirely via Free Cash Flow ever since. The fact that all 3 of these companies continue to operate with staggering profitability decades later confirms this. (You can of course debate the ethics of having such a moat, antitrust etc., but you cannot deny it's there.)

Apologies for some hastily chosen examples. I think the point still stands if you consider the following companies: WeWork, Lyft, Snapchat, Pinterest, Dropbox, Slack, Casper, Lime, Peloton, Beyond Meat, Wayfair, Zillow.

More generally speaking, take a look at Goldman Sachs' Non-Profitable Technology Index:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsRVCiMXIAE7xlA.png

There's some nuggets of truth in here, but I am disappointed that this article sidesteps what I feel is the most important reason for startup success in 2020: easy and abundant access to cheap capital.

- Interest rates are at all time lows, borrowing is cheap

- The Fed's balance sheet is at an all-time high. The economy is flush with cash, particularly the investor / VC class

- This excess cash creates an (arguably artificial) wealth effect and drives an appetite for risk

- Large unicorn startups that are perpetual money losers continue to operate only because they are effectively subsidized by regular capital raises. Look no further than all the Silicon Valley darlings such as Uber, Netflix, AirBnb, Tesla, and so on. All of them would cease to exist without continued capital injection from secondary share offerings or VC raises

- These companies achieve growth and put pressure on the competition by offering their services below the real cost that would be needed to achieve profit, hence driving huge share price growth

- This share price growth attracts new investment from the momentum-chasing crowd, increasing appetite for subsequent secondaries, and then the cycle repeats

I don't mean to be cynical, but it's hard to see this ending well for some of the nouveau riche. Tech has been a great avenue to riches by offering real innovation in some cases, but the article's error-by-omission really gives the wrong impression.

You and GP are arguing two different things and are both right.

GP's claim is that Tesla would not be profitable without regulatory credit sales: this is true. Tesla's profit for 2020 is $721M and its credit sales for 2020 are $1.58B, just over double. It's fair to say that, were those credit sales to fall to zero, Tesla risks losing its profitable status. Here we're effectively discussing net profit margin for the company as a whole.

Your claim is that Tesla's automotive gross margin on car sales is 20%. This is also true, but only includes COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), so car parts and assembly costs. It does not include other expenditures such as CapEx or R&D. 20% sounds great (and it is), but when we look at the net profit margin, $721M of profit on $31.54B of revenue gives only a 2.2% net profit margin which is not as impressive.

It's therefore rather unfair to say that GP's claim is a misconception, it's actually perfectly true.

I too am skeptical (but happy to be proven wrong) about Honda's L3 claims. I think the "automaker optimism" is really just referring to Tesla loudly claiming they "will hit L5 this year" every year since 2015 while continuing to struggle. I don't see other automakers making such aggressive promises, thankfully.

They mention in the article that the smell is produced synthetically (presumably for this exact reason).

Please try refuting the ruling on its reasoning instead of peddling conspiracy theories.

Your claim relies entirely on the veracity of Tesla's safety report. Unfortunately I am inclined to mistrust any such vehicle safety claims directly from Tesla's own website. There is a conflict of interest in that they are incentivized to publish the most favorable numbers. We should be rightly cynical and rely only on numbers from an independent third party, as we would normally do for other companies with a less favorable reputation. Until we have such independently verified stats, we can't take those claims at face value.

I agree that anyone who feels uncomfortable with Tesla's ADAS should simply turn it off. But don't you think it's unfair for the company to place an unfinished product in the hands of a consumer and pass off the risk-management responsibility to them? Tesla's cavalier attitude towards autonomous vehicle safety is concerning to me. They seem to adopt the "move fast and break things" approach, whereas teams like Waymo and Cruise are releasing things in a slower and more controlled manner. And not coincidentally, they've have far less accidents that way.

As with most investing questions, keep in mind that the instrument (i.e. the way you place your specific bet) matters just as much as the actual sector.

Crypto, marijuana, self-driving, take your pick: you could totally nail the sector choice and still lose a lot of money if you make a wrong bet. Trade carefully, and diversify...

You could try A/B testing the demand for 2 different products / websites with Facebook ads.

You'll need:

  - A small amount of money for the ad campaign itself (e.g. $50-$100)

  - A compelling image (buy a stock photo, or get a graphic designer to whip something up)

  - Some compelling copy (one liner for your pitch)

  - Some time spent tuning the ad targeting to focus on your target market (or your best guess of who those people are)

I know Facebook isn't exactly popular on HN right now, but I suggest them because their ad targeting is probably the most precise at the moment.

This is great. A no-nonsense, modern take on healthy nutrition. It's simple (no more food groups, portions, etc.), and actually healthy (e.g. not catering to the dairy industry with a daily glass of milk recommendation, pizza is not a vegetable, etc.).

Compare it to this: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/archived_proje...

As a native French speaker from Quebec, I can tell you it's much more common in France, so if you went to school in North America that might explain it.

Good point on the 20-20-20 rule. There's an add-on for Firefox which I use for this below [1]. It launches a (rather invasive) fullscreen popup reminder every 20 minutes. Far from perfect, but better than using a loud timer or relying on your distracted brain!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/eye-strain-pr...

My apologies: turns out the delay is only in Canada for TSE listed stocks and does not apply to US exchanges such as NYSE, NASDAQ, etc.

I agree with the spirit of your post ("make sure you actually want what you say you want"). But I wouldn't go so far as to say that you need to swear off relationships. Anecdotally, I (M) have found someone (F) who is just as serious as me about saving money, and we're very happy together.

In order to repeat finding someone like that, I'd suggest the following: open yourself up to all dating channels (in-person, online, Tinder, etc), make yourself visible, and be honest about your objectives. If you don't wanna be too direct about your frugality, you can casually name drop Mr. Money Mustache as a personal hero and anyone with similar interests will get the hint. Then once actually dating, aggressively cull anyone that doesn't meet your money-saving criteria.

As you might expect with all things dating, this is time-consuming, difficult, and discouraging at times. But if you're reading this, you're technically minded and you already understand that it's all just a numbers game, and success is just a matter of time. Adopt a systematic approach and you'll get there eventually

To end on another positive anecdote: I've met at least a handful of female candidates that are equally frustrated with the average guy not being seriously able to save money. So when you finally find the right person, the relief is mutual and it kicks off the relationship on a strong positive note.

Hang in there and good luck.

Nope, 15 minute delay like almost everyone else.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-stock-market-data-delayed-by-20...

I work in the games industry. There are plenty of problems to go around, but I'll pick just one:

Discoverability

In the "good old days" where 2 people could make a video game, odds are that just shipping something guaranteed you'd make money. But that's no the case anymore now that 1000+ apps come out every day on iOS / Google Play. Of course most of those are crap. But you could be making a great game that caters well to a particular audience or niche, and yet you might still fail just because no one can find it or really just be aware of its existence.

The "simple" answer to this is marketing. Hustle your way to some visibility, partner up with some publishers or some platforms holders, and get as many eyeballs in front of your game as possible. However this effort is very close to being "zero-sum." Either you win and get your promo art banner at the top of the app store, or someone else does, but you can't both get it. It's less obvious when it comes to PR and having articles or game review written about you, but it's still there: with so much noise now on the internet, it's hard to generate a meaningful signal.

The harder solution is being tackled by the app stores themselves. Steam, iOS, etc. have all been improving the way games are presented in their stores. There's more focus on specific genre features, more flash sales, more suggestions based on what you already play. It's a decent effort but I don't think it's enough yet.

What can we do about it? Not sure. Algorithms that try to discover what you might like based on your previous purchases are nice and all, but most of my favourite gaming experiences were surprises that came out of genres I didn't expect (e.g. Rocket League), so this can only go so far.

Double Stallion Games | Senior Gameplay Programmer | Anywhere/Montreal, QC, Canada | Onsite/REMOTE | Fulltime | http://dblstallion.com/

We're a small independent games studio, currently comprised of a single dev team but looking to grow. Our most recent games are mobile (iOS, Android, etc.) but our next one is PC and console (PS4/Xbox One).

We're looking for a senior gameplay programmer. A generalist would be the ideal candidate since there's all kinds of systems, UI, and AI to put together, as is the nature of a small team. We develop in Unity and C# so ideally we want someone who's comfortable with that, but anyone who is smart and willing to learn is great too.

To apply, please visit: http://dblstallion.com/jobs

I can't speak for the mods, but I for one am in favour of highlighting the revenue numbers, provided they're accurate.

And on a meta-point, I appreciate the effort, honesty and transparency you put into IndieHackers, it's a great resource for me.

I completely agree that a minimum typing speed makes a huge difference.

That being said, the code output bottleneck is usually my brain and not my hands!

If you haven't heard, patio11 is the original creator of Bingo Card Creator [1], which is both an excellent example for your purposes, and as a bonus he's helpfully shared many useful lessons from it on his blog [2].

[1] https://www.bingocardcreator.com/ [2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

FWIW, I've deliberately kept my Nexus 5 on Android 4.4.4 and it runs as well as the first day I bought it 2.5 years ago. Multi-day battery life, no compatibility issues (because no OS updates), all the latest apps still run on it, etc. Not to mention it was an affordable phone even when it was brand new. Very happy with it overall; I can easily see it lasting me another few years.