6 ms·

Trackmania Nightmares

89 points by luu 2y ago

ctippett 2y ago
> Many projects don’t really talk about this. Instead you see a nice README that explains how to do things, but that README that doesn’t reflect the human pain and suffering it took [to get working] This resonates.
taspeotis 2y ago
Some context about why http://hallofdreams.org/posts/trackmania-1/ http://hallofdreams.org/posts/trackmania-1/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nevster 2y ago
"Oooh Trackmania, I play that every day, what nightmare tracks are they talking about? Deep Dip 2?" <clicks link> "Oh, that's not what I was expecting..."
anytime5704 2y ago
This makes me feel better about wasting the last 2 days debugging a failed unit test that was due to duplicate dependencies (with different versions). expect(mockDynamoDBClient).toHaveReceivedAnyCommand(); // passes expect(mockDynamoDBClient).toHaveReceivedCommand(UpdateCommand); // fails Received number of calls: 2 Expected number of calls: >= 1 Expected command: UpdateCommand Received commands: - UpdateCommand - UpdateCommand I thought I was taking crazy pills.
- asztal 2y ago
  This has happened to me multiple times with AWS SDK V3 (and other packages like react, cassandra-driver, etc.) and while there are ways to avoid it, it's not entirely simple to prevent. Sadly, the most robust solution is often to use duck typing, e.g. instead of checking if the error is an instance of ResourceNotFoundError, check if error.code equals "ResourceNotFound" which works even if there are multiple library versions present. This is especially the case if you're writing a library that might be provided an instance of an AWS SDK v3 client, as it could be a different version. I've been doing this stuff for 20 years so I'm used to it, I just feel bad for the novices.
  - anytime5704 2y ago
    Shit, I've been working for 10 years (but only a few months with these tools). I actually considered the looser validation when I discovered that toHaveReceivedAnyCommand() worked, but, ultimately decided there *had* to be something wrong with my setup and I refused to leave it to hit someone else. Shame the AWS SDK doesn't communicate the actual error in a more human readable way. I was legitimately questioning my sanity and/or the validity of the library for a minute there.
lmm 2y ago
> Perhaps the best lesson is this: you just need it to work. On your machine. For now. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough to let you do what you actually want to do. And that's how you end up with the kind of trail of flakiness that brought them so much trouble. Disappearing tutorials and deprecated plugins are a result of this kind of attitude. A lot of this honestly sounds like "skill issue" - they're trying to do a cascade of things that is multiple layers of unsupported, and a lot of the problems are ones they've made for themselves (e.g. why not set it up on a local machine first, get your setup steps working there, and then put it on your headless machine, rather than having to deal with Xvnc at the same time as everything else? Why not use a working computer and OS instead of buying a new one?). But also this is what doing real work, especially research, tends to look like. The stuff that is hard is rarely the deep mathematical parts, it's the ops rough edges.
- ehnto 2y ago
  You might be getting a downvote for trivializing the issues I think, but there is definitely something to be said for stacking the deck against yourself when it comes to debugging. I focus a lot on reducing iteration time to keep devs efficient, and the largest part of that is making sure debugging can happen locally, so you can test your changes or step through the code with a debugger. If your setup doesn't allow that because you have inimitable third party APIs, enterprise data or hosting restrictions for example, you will see a significant cost in development speed, and tricky problems become massive delays. Also it's unpleasant to work so hamstrung by the tools, and unhappy devs leave.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    > I focus a lot on reducing iteration time to keep devs efficient, and the largest part of that is making sure debugging can happen locally, so you can test your changes or step through the code with a debugger. I think people don't realize how big of a deal this is. I hate that not being able to run and debug your project locally (without crazy mocking) is becoming the new normal these days.
- gwern 2y ago
woolion 2y ago
I had to move my system to a new SSD with more space, mostly because the great Python venv system makes it that each project takes up between 5Go and 30Go of disk space, so having 224Go was not enough anymore. Nvidia driver didn't install properly so second reboot was to a black screen. Thankfully after some fiddling with packages it worked again. Then the old ways I loaded up ssh-agent didn't work anymore, so it took a few logouts to find a new one. I tried to recompile my CV, but somehow Latex dependencies all changed names, so I had to track down missing packages. Then it still would not compile because the names of the fonts had changed. Configuring the font line was frustrating as xelatex and pdflatex did not expect the same line, and both crashed on a different error that did not lead to an easy solution. When I tried some game on Steam, it just crashed without an explanation. After checking ways to boot it from the CLI -- which is unsupported but search results lead to partial solutions to that problem anyway -- I found that it was possible to add a DEBUGGING argument to the proton command. Searching the error lead to simply find that some lib was missing (actually the challenge was in finding the proper error to search for). I'm the most amazed at this one since this is not in any way "developer software", but a standard user one, for which at least 1 hour of pain would have been removed by an optional dependency. I'm cutting down the list but it took days to solve every single broken thing. By coincidence I watched "how to prevent the collapse of civilization" by Johnathan Blow. His point that nobody is surprised anymore that everything breaks and is bugged, it has become the baseline expectation.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  What projects are you working on that take 5GB of venv size? My venvs are under 1GB. What I would consider a large automation framework is ~150MB.
  - psyonity 2y ago
    Torch, SciPy, numpy and opencv combined get close to (or over, with transient dependencies) 1GB. When you use Conda instead of venv, the amount of cuda packages grow even more if you're unluckly. It's all way too big.
  - probably_wrong 2y ago
DarkNova6 2y ago
For me the primary takeaway is: > doing the devops/sysadmin parts of a project is a huge upfront drain. > Many projects don’t really talk about this. Instead you see a nice README that explains how to do things, but that README that doesn’t reflect the human pain and suffering it took to figure out that the path for your Steam directory depends on the version of Proton you have. You can look at our final instructions (less than three hundred words) and compare it to the literal five months of trying to get things working; that ratio probably isn’t unique to us
probably_wrong 2y ago
I think the real lesson here is how bad the state of support has gotten. Whenever they tried to reach someone they were forwarded to people who don't know what they're doing, to forums where no one answers, to dead Reddit threads, all while hinting that paying extra may solve their issue. Imagine a world where you call Verizon and the person on the phone knows what port forwarding is, or where you write on an official Discord channel and someone from the team replies with a fix.
jacobgorm 2y ago
Too long, didn’t read.
mooiedingen 2y ago
I understand your strugles. However i think that instead of bloatbuntu an arch based solution would be "less hassle" the aur has several solutions for steam in various ways and for me to get trackmania running all it took was a yay -Syyu steam launch steam install trackmania and play. I think when it comes down to doing custumized projects like this arch based distro's seem to be less troublesome in some way or there are packages in the aur that greatly help with customized stuff, alternatively, the heroic games launcher also has trackmania. I think server based distro's are less "flexible" for custom projects like this under the hood it is all GNU+Linux but i think arch offers more flexibility for customizations. And tbh isnt any harder/unstable/or anything else they say than any other distro. Certainly if you are allready familiar with gnu+linux. I would even recommend arch for beginners. Because of the flexibility and the aur. however i wont say there wont be any struggles to get it working the way you want to since i have had similar "problems" in the past and i think that that will always be to some degree and you will only learn to solve them faster by experiencing more of them. But as you gain experience it will improve. it is also a case of knowing what will work and what not. I know that i will always make a python venv instead of a conda one because the conda envoirments are doomed with torch, cuda and glibc and conda envoirments seem to get bigger in size as well however my venvs range from 10 to 30gb as well certainly for something like a comfyui with a ton of custom nodes requiring their depencies. I understand your struggles and congratulate you on your accomplishments and thank you for sharing your experience since it gonna be helpfull for someone sometime.
PoignardAzur 2y ago
> What’s the problem? Trackmania 2020 is available on Steam, so just install it through Steam and use Lutris. The problem, just like in the Xvfb section, is that there’s a middleman: Steam opens the Ubisoft Connect Launcher, which itself opens Trackmania Every single time Ubisoft comes up in an article, I'm reminded how much I despise that company.

89 points by luu 2y ago

> Many projects don’t really talk about this. Instead you see a nice README that explains how to do things, but that README that doesn’t reflect the human pain and suffering it took [to get working] This resonates.

taspeotis 2y ago

Some context about why http://hallofdreams.org/posts/trackmania-1/ http://hallofdreams.org/posts/trackmania-1/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nevster 2y ago

"Oooh Trackmania, I play that every day, what nightmare tracks are they talking about? Deep Dip 2?" <clicks link> "Oh, that's not what I was expecting..."

anytime5704 2y ago

This makes me feel better about wasting the last 2 days debugging a failed unit test that was due to duplicate dependencies (with different versions). expect(mockDynamoDBClient).toHaveReceivedAnyCommand(); // passes expect(mockDynamoDBClient).toHaveReceivedCommand(UpdateCommand); // fails Received number of calls: 2 Expected number of calls: >= 1 Expected command: UpdateCommand Received commands: - UpdateCommand - UpdateCommand I thought I was taking crazy pills.

asztal 2y ago
This has happened to me multiple times with AWS SDK V3 (and other packages like react, cassandra-driver, etc.) and while there are ways to avoid it, it's not entirely simple to prevent. Sadly, the most robust solution is often to use duck typing, e.g. instead of checking if the error is an instance of ResourceNotFoundError, check if error.code equals "ResourceNotFound" which works even if there are multiple library versions present. This is especially the case if you're writing a library that might be provided an instance of an AWS SDK v3 client, as it could be a different version. I've been doing this stuff for 20 years so I'm used to it, I just feel bad for the novices.
- anytime5704 2y ago
  Shit, I've been working for 10 years (but only a few months with these tools). I actually considered the looser validation when I discovered that toHaveReceivedAnyCommand() worked, but, ultimately decided there *had* to be something wrong with my setup and I refused to leave it to hit someone else. Shame the AWS SDK doesn't communicate the actual error in a more human readable way. I was legitimately questioning my sanity and/or the validity of the library for a minute there.

lmm 2y ago

> Perhaps the best lesson is this: you just need it to work. On your machine. For now. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough to let you do what you actually want to do. And that's how you end up with the kind of trail of flakiness that brought them so much trouble. Disappearing tutorials and deprecated plugins are a result of this kind of attitude. A lot of this honestly sounds like "skill issue" - they're trying to do a cascade of things that is multiple layers of unsupported, and a lot of the problems are ones they've made for themselves (e.g. why not set it up on a local machine first, get your setup steps working there, and then put it on your headless machine, rather than having to deal with Xvnc at the same time as everything else? Why not use a working computer and OS instead of buying a new one?). But also this is what doing real work, especially research, tends to look like. The stuff that is hard is rarely the deep mathematical parts, it's the ops rough edges.

ehnto 2y ago
You might be getting a downvote for trivializing the issues I think, but there is definitely something to be said for stacking the deck against yourself when it comes to debugging. I focus a lot on reducing iteration time to keep devs efficient, and the largest part of that is making sure debugging can happen locally, so you can test your changes or step through the code with a debugger. If your setup doesn't allow that because you have inimitable third party APIs, enterprise data or hosting restrictions for example, you will see a significant cost in development speed, and tricky problems become massive delays. Also it's unpleasant to work so hamstrung by the tools, and unhappy devs leave.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  > I focus a lot on reducing iteration time to keep devs efficient, and the largest part of that is making sure debugging can happen locally, so you can test your changes or step through the code with a debugger. I think people don't realize how big of a deal this is. I hate that not being able to run and debug your project locally (without crazy mocking) is becoming the new normal these days.
gwern 2y ago

woolion 2y ago

I had to move my system to a new SSD with more space, mostly because the great Python venv system makes it that each project takes up between 5Go and 30Go of disk space, so having 224Go was not enough anymore. Nvidia driver didn't install properly so second reboot was to a black screen. Thankfully after some fiddling with packages it worked again. Then the old ways I loaded up ssh-agent didn't work anymore, so it took a few logouts to find a new one. I tried to recompile my CV, but somehow Latex dependencies all changed names, so I had to track down missing packages. Then it still would not compile because the names of the fonts had changed. Configuring the font line was frustrating as xelatex and pdflatex did not expect the same line, and both crashed on a different error that did not lead to an easy solution. When I tried some game on Steam, it just crashed without an explanation. After checking ways to boot it from the CLI -- which is unsupported but search results lead to partial solutions to that problem anyway -- I found that it was possible to add a DEBUGGING argument to the proton command. Searching the error lead to simply find that some lib was missing (actually the challenge was in finding the proper error to search for). I'm the most amazed at this one since this is not in any way "developer software", but a standard user one, for which at least 1 hour of pain would have been removed by an optional dependency. I'm cutting down the list but it took days to solve every single broken thing. By coincidence I watched "how to prevent the collapse of civilization" by Johnathan Blow. His point that nobody is surprised anymore that everything breaks and is bugged, it has become the baseline expectation.

BossingAround 2y ago
What projects are you working on that take 5GB of venv size? My venvs are under 1GB. What I would consider a large automation framework is ~150MB.
- psyonity 2y ago
  Torch, SciPy, numpy and opencv combined get close to (or over, with transient dependencies) 1GB. When you use Conda instead of venv, the amount of cuda packages grow even more if you're unluckly. It's all way too big.
- probably_wrong 2y ago

DarkNova6 2y ago

For me the primary takeaway is: > doing the devops/sysadmin parts of a project is a huge upfront drain. > Many projects don’t really talk about this. Instead you see a nice README that explains how to do things, but that README that doesn’t reflect the human pain and suffering it took to figure out that the path for your Steam directory depends on the version of Proton you have. You can look at our final instructions (less than three hundred words) and compare it to the literal five months of trying to get things working; that ratio probably isn’t unique to us

probably_wrong 2y ago

I think the real lesson here is how bad the state of support has gotten. Whenever they tried to reach someone they were forwarded to people who don't know what they're doing, to forums where no one answers, to dead Reddit threads, all while hinting that paying extra may solve their issue. Imagine a world where you call Verizon and the person on the phone knows what port forwarding is, or where you write on an official Discord channel and someone from the team replies with a fix.

jacobgorm 2y ago

Too long, didn’t read.

mooiedingen 2y ago

I understand your strugles. However i think that instead of bloatbuntu an arch based solution would be "less hassle" the aur has several solutions for steam in various ways and for me to get trackmania running all it took was a yay -Syyu steam launch steam install trackmania and play. I think when it comes down to doing custumized projects like this arch based distro's seem to be less troublesome in some way or there are packages in the aur that greatly help with customized stuff, alternatively, the heroic games launcher also has trackmania. I think server based distro's are less "flexible" for custom projects like this under the hood it is all GNU+Linux but i think arch offers more flexibility for customizations. And tbh isnt any harder/unstable/or anything else they say than any other distro. Certainly if you are allready familiar with gnu+linux. I would even recommend arch for beginners. Because of the flexibility and the aur. however i wont say there wont be any struggles to get it working the way you want to since i have had similar "problems" in the past and i think that that will always be to some degree and you will only learn to solve them faster by experiencing more of them. But as you gain experience it will improve. it is also a case of knowing what will work and what not. I know that i will always make a python venv instead of a conda one because the conda envoirments are doomed with torch, cuda and glibc and conda envoirments seem to get bigger in size as well however my venvs range from 10 to 30gb as well certainly for something like a comfyui with a ton of custom nodes requiring their depencies. I understand your struggles and congratulate you on your accomplishments and thank you for sharing your experience since it gonna be helpfull for someone sometime.

PoignardAzur 2y ago

> What’s the problem? Trackmania 2020 is available on Steam, so just install it through Steam and use Lutris. The problem, just like in the Xvfb section, is that there’s a middleman: Steam opens the Ubisoft Connect Launcher, which itself opens Trackmania Every single time Ubisoft comes up in an article, I'm reminded how much I despise that company.