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Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer
- maukdaddy 16y agoI love the pauses to blog and tweet about the game. And not a single glance at HN?
- ugh 16y agoThat game is from the Minecraft guy [1], here is his blogpost [2]. [1] http://www.minecraft.net/ http://www.minecraft.net/ [2] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/998637682/minecraft-alpha-v1-0-17-03-finland-and-metagun http://notch.tumblr.com/post/998637682/minecraft-alpha-v1-0-...
- daychilde 16y agoI just wanted to present a warning about Minecraft: That game is distilled binary crack. I have lost a couple of entire days to the damned thing, and I only purchased it a couple of weeks ago. So just be careful if you try it out. I'm a recovering Minecraftoholic.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- traskjd 16y agoOff topic, but I also purchased it and just don't get it. Or is that part of the appeal? I can't decide since I do spend time with it but more trying to work out wtf I'm meant to do :-)
- daychilde 16y agoIf you're not meeting any monsters, check in the options and change from "Peaceful" to another mode. Beyond that - there aren't really any goals. It's a huge sandbox. However, there may be some depth you're missing: - There are some 'toys' to play with - minetrains, for one. You can build tracks and minecarts - unpowered and powered. - If you dig deep enough, you can get redstone, which can be used to simulate electrical circuits. There's a whole thread on the Minecraft forum with basic constructs like OR / AND / XOR / etc - people have built things as complex as a twelve-hour clock (although it doesn't keep time accurately because there's no way to synch time - but it is as close as could be made and does function in the sense that it accurately counts 60 seconds, 60 minutes, twelve hours...) - I also saw a turing machine being worked on, as well as a few other similar devices. VERY complex stuff, considering. - People have developed cannons The more basic activities include finding caves and exploring them... But there's some great silly stuff - like you can make a saddle and go ride pigs. Is any of that stuff you've missed that sounds interesting? I hope so. I suppose it's a game that might appeal more to younger folks - but as a 35-year-old, I love it. But I always loved SimCity, Simutrans (a freeware transportation simulator. Disclaimer: I'm the "Benevolent Dictator" of the International forum, and provide much of the hosting)... I also played GTA:SA, but not really the official missions - I just drove around and made it my own sandbox... Flight simulators... All in all, I don't so much like games as I do simulated environments... so Minecraft is right up my alley.
- MartinCron 16y agoHere we have one of those multi-talented programmers I keep talking about. The same programmer did the code, high-quality sprite illustration, and even the music to the youtube video (which was pretty good, and matched the nature of the time lapse video). I am inspired by this. I'm going to do this the next time I work on a game. Has anyone used time-lapse screencap software they can suggest?
- clistctrl 16y agoTo me the really impressive part is his ability to stay attentive. He never strayed away, starting surfing the web etc.
- benologist 16y agoYeah I'd really have to be disconnected to pull that off heh.
- MartinCron 16y agoI was impressed by that too, although I did see a quick twitter check in there at least once. I'm sure I would do my best to appear attentive when working on something like this, limiting my twitter/facebook/hn browsing to my iPhone/iPod/laptop.
- TheEzEzz 16y agoAwesome. I'd love to see a meatspace time lapse on the side, or in a small box-in-box.
- Gimpson 16y agoI think that watching a five minute video like this of my day before I went home would be more motivating than reviewing my Rescue Time statistics.
- raquo 16y ago^^^ Free startup idea
- paraschopra 16y agoI'm pretty sure someone's on it by now. This definitely looks like a killer idea.
- mitchellhislop 16y agoHow about watching this with a rescuetime output on it (so, watching what you are doing and a scoreboard of rescue time for that snapshot of time)? That would really lead to me kicking my own ass more for productivity
- natep 16y agoAs 'erik' pointed out, there is already an open source program for this. I'll be installing this tomorrow to check it out. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630247
- binarysoul 16y agoThis is an interesting idea.
- pcestrada 16y agoCan anyone discern what tools he was using? I know the IDE was Eclipse. And Paint.net for the artowrk. He had something really cool for the sound effects, but I couldn't tell what it was. It's a fun little game with some neat ideas: http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/ http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago> He had something really cool for the sound effects, but I couldn't tell what it was It's sfxr: http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
- Luc 16y agoThis is a great portfolio idea, actually! The guy doing this is a pro, but this is within reach of people just starting in the business. Someone straight out of college applying as junior programmer with a video like this would move to the top of my pile (were I hiring, which I'm not). This video shows off a sense of initiative, a love of games, talent, and a knack for getting things done under time pressure. Nice!
- est 16y agosee also: Flash programmer in 48h http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtZNylG74M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtZNylG74M
- dstein 16y agoClearly I spend way too much time switching between my code and mindlessly browsing the internet.
- nostromo 16y agoI was going to comment here, but I should get back to coding...
- Aetius 16y agoWhat software is good for time lapse recording on Windows?
- kd5bjo 16y agoYou can play his game from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=398 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview... 172 people each wrote a complete game last weekend, and you can play all of them from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&etype=compo http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview... .
- b0b0b0b 16y agohe has a multimonitor setup
- albemuth 16y agoI admire the guy's focus, he checks twitter once for like a minute and goes back to work
- kgo 16y agoAm I the only one who thought this was going to be like those Meth PSAs? Where we see how the programmer's physical condition decays?
- salemh 16y agoI thought so as well.
- paulitex 16y agoHe really did that all without a search engine or looking at any API docs?? Maybe it's just cause I'm not a games programmer, but that's insane. How does he know what he's programming to?
- Gormo 16y agoWas he even using any APIs other than audio and basic graphics and keyboard/mouse IO functions? It's still pretty impressive if he implemented his own sprite class from scratch and built a game with it in 48 hours.
- mcgraw 16y agoExperience. Code with an API long enough and you're pretty aware of the tools at your disposal. At this point you're not learning new stuff. Finally, this likely pales in comparison to what he is typically used to doing.
- icey 16y agoEclipse has autocomplete and documentation built in as well, right?
- mcgraw 16y agoAutocomplete is there. Also you have the ability to create your own micros that you can use to build skeletons (like a function, or a loop). I'm not sure about itegrated docs. You'll probably get a brief pop-up (hit-or-miss), but nothing like XCode's inline docs.
- ckuehne 16y agoFYI: Docs are fully integrated and appear for example together when moving through the list of autocomplete suggestions. Very similar to XCode's inline docs. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl and every function call, class definition and so on becomes a link to the source code defintion of that function or class, respectively. Such are manifold possibilies for tool support in statically typed languages.
- joshu 16y agoThat's not "a" video games programmer. That's Notch.
- daten 16y agoIf you're like me and still have no idea who "Notch" is.. http://www.mojang.com/notch/ http://www.mojang.com/notch/
- swah 16y agoI wonder if he gets into editor wars online. Heh.
- grizzydot 16y agoThe main takeaway for me is don't get into long coding sessions. Test often.
- amih 16y agoI really admire this achievement in such a short time. I should study the source code and learn from this. Soon I will resign from work to start bootstrapping my business and will take a look at the source code.
- DrewHintz 16y agohttp://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1898 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1898
- ScotterC 16y agoThis has inspired me to do screen lapses of myself working at home. Get some feedback on my own working style and get data on my methods and goofing off.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arohner 16y agoHas anyone tried the game? It's almost completely unplayable. I get about ~1 FPS. (OSX 10.6, Chrome) EDIT: appears to work fine in FF
- albertzeyer 16y agoExactly the same here.
- pmb 16y agoIt's a chrome bug. Or a Chrome/Java/OSX combo bug. The game plays fine in Safari or FF.
- bd 16y agoWorks very smooth for me (Win 7, Firefox 3.6.8). <rant> As a sidenote, this difference of experience highlights a big problem with rich web applications. You get so high variance in performance depending on a particular combination of hardware, OS and browser that you are virtually predestined to fail hard for some non-negligible part of your userbase (unless your application is so trivial that even on the worst possible platform it would still work ok). I know, this problem existed with classical games all the time. But there, gamers pretty much came to terms with "hardware requirements" (needed to play the game at all). With web, expectations are for some reason different. It used to be quite expected and acceptable to buy new GPU/CPU/RAM to play a particular desktop game, yet it seems like too much work just to fire a different browser and copy & paste URL. I know I'm guilty of this myself, despite being developer and regularly working simultaneously with multiple browsers. And it's just going to get worse as performance spread will widen, both on low-end (more people accessing web through mobile devices) and on high-end (as HW acceleration slowly comes to new generation of browsers). </rant>
- necubi 16y agoExcept that this isn't a rich web application--this is a java applet.
- 16y ago
- albertzeyer 16y agoI seem to miss such contests most of the time and only hear about them when they ended. I would love to attend to some, just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win). Where would be a good source for such competitions? Another fun competition I read about was the Super Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8 The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already. Another fun competition I have heard about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading this is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to have clean, elegant and intelligent code, as less obfuscated as possible. :))
- joeld42 16y agoThere is a gamecomp mailing list that sends out announcements of the LD contests. It is extremely low-traffic, basically only compo announcements (thrice yearly): visit this to subscribe. http://www.gamecompo.com/mailing-list/ http://www.gamecompo.com/mailing-list/ The TIGSource "Competitions" forum is a great resource. http://forums.tigsource.com/ http://forums.tigsource.com/ They host the occasional compo there, and they usually have a thread mentioning most other compos before or as they occur. ps. I participate in some of these under the name 'jovoc'.
- albertzeyer 16y agoI started to collect some links here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3561301/overview-and-news-of-about-coding-competitions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3561301/overview-and-news...
- orph 16y agoTime lapse for his 2009 entry, Bunny Press: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abyL33Z6Z5I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abyL33Z6Z5I
- 10ren 16y agoSource code: http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/metagun-source.zip http://www.mojang.com/compo/metagun/metagun-source.zip (linked from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=398 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview...) I compiled (yucky) with (after unzip + mkdir build): javac -cp build src/com/mojang/metagun/{entity,level,screen,}/*.java -d build/ cp {src,build}/com/mojang/metagun/screen/exposition.txt jar -cf app.jar -C build . -C res . You need some html to run an applet; App.html just needs this: <applet code="com.mojang.metagun.Metagun" archive="app.jar" height="480" width="640"></applet> Run with: appletviewer App.html New to me (but probably standard to game writers) is: using a png to represent all the maps combined (like 10x10 maps), with each pixel's color representing a game tile type (eg. yellow for oil drum, purple for portal cube, red for spikes, green for signs etc). This representation is really cool, because it looks like what it represents (an isomorphism): you can "see" the level in a png editor, even though what you're seeing is not the actual level. Another aspect of how the data representation drives the game, is that there are no explicit arcs between game screens - instead, the screen design allows your character to walk off-screen, then that point enables you to transition to the next screen. I guess it's the most obvious way to do it: it's as if you are zoomed into a particular section of the 10x10 maps, and then you can move to adjacent maps. Maybe it's just that I've spent too much time with nodes and arcs recently :-), expecting logical concepts to be explicitly specified, instead of implied by the design. Anyway, there is no sequential index to get to a particular screen; you have to follow the path. Or you can look at that png. eg, the final boss screen is at xLevel=3, yLevel=10 (you can initialize those values in GameScreen.java; and you need to change the player start location too, because now it's not derived from the previous screen: change the last two args in the following new Level line, from 0,0 to 10,10).
- Ogre 16y agoI've seen the bitmap to level trick used before, but most "normal" (not developed under severe time constraints) games would eventually have a level editor implemented alongside the game. Personally, I'd be more likely in this situation to implement it as a text file and edit it with emacs picture-mode. I've also heard of some bitmap-as-data atrocities. A colleague who worked with an engine from a certain well known single player RPG described how bitmaps were used in that engine to control animation states. Like, if walking and getting hit, which animation takes priority. There are as many ways to implement that system as there are game developers. For some reason this developer elected to store those matrices as BMP files, and edit them using a paint program. The bitmap as level trick is a great shortcut for prototyping and rapid development, perfect for this contest. But I can't imagine the thought process that led to using one for animation data.
- palish 16y agoWhat program did he use to record himself programming?
- ajuc 16y agoThat's what I need to not procrastinate when doing my game - record myself.