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Jonathan Blow found it convenient to represent all assets in a large number of text files, to enable merging. For instance he'd have one text file per entity on

Jonathan Blow found it convenient to represent all assets in a large number of text files, to enable merging. For instance he'd have one text file per entity on a map. The game and editor could read either this or the compiled binary version.

Aurornis 4mo ago
Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.
- rootlocus 4mo ago
  He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
  - Aurornis 4mo ago
    I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base. He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it. I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.
    - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
      I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.
      - somenameforme 4mo ago
        Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.
        cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.
        Aurornis 4mo ago
        There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day. His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games. This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 Jonathan Blow: > It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.
        wredcoll 4mo ago
        Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.
  - klodolph 4mo ago
    IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in. I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
  - troupo 4mo ago
    And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend". Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
    - rootlocus 4mo ago
      To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point. 1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/ https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
      - bogwog 4mo ago
        I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.
    - Matl 4mo ago
      Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers. Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous. They're good at demos, I give them that.
      - duttish 4mo ago
        There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"
  - Fraterkes 4mo ago
    I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      I have only seen Casey's writing in the whole "why is the terminal so slow" debacle, but he was a massive jerk in that. He was right! But still a jerk.
      - Jare 4mo ago
        I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things". Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.
- Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
  He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
pton_xd 4mo ago
How do you merge changes to a texture, mesh, audio file, etc?
LugosFergus 4mo ago
You really can't merge binary data, such as textures, meshes, audio, etc. It doesn't matter if you base64 encode the data and stuff it in a text file: it's a jumble of data (assuming this is the implication of what Blow did).
- gmueckl 4mo ago
  Tools that support non-destructive editing workflows could in theory provide limited diff and merge capabilities on their internal graphs pf non-destructive operations. E.g. Photoshop could in theory merge two files where unrelated layers have changed. But nobody is actually implementing this because it would be lots and lots of work.
  - KingMob 4mo ago
    Yeah, it's a cool idea, but for proprietary formats, it's much harder for outsiders to do, and the original companies just don't see it as something they should take care of. My gut says there's too many changes that couldn't be cleanly merged anyway, so they think it's not worth the bother. (And they might be right.) At least for code, I know people have attempted format-aware, structural diffing for a while. The Lisp communities tried a few times, because s-exps are trivial to turn into trees. None became the standard diff tool, though. However, modern tools like difftastic used tree-sitter to bring a lot of language-aware diffing to the masses. - https://docs.racket-lang.org/sexp-diff/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/sexp-diff/index.html - https://github.com/michaelw/mw-diff-sexp https://github.com/michaelw/mw-diff-sexp - https://github.com/lambdaisland/deep-diff2 https://github.com/lambdaisland/deep-diff2 - https://fazzone.github.io/autochrome.html https://fazzone.github.io/autochrome.html - https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
superdisk 4mo ago
He uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.
flohofwoe 4mo ago
That's fine for database-like meta-data (e.g. game entity properties), but not for images, videos or audio files. Just writing those as hex dumps into text files doesn't make them any easier to merge.

Aurornis 4mo ago

Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.

rootlocus 4mo ago
He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base. He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it. I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.
  - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
    I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.
    - somenameforme 4mo ago
      Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.
      - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
        That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.
      - Aurornis 4mo ago
        There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day. His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games. This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 Jonathan Blow: > It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.
        wredcoll 4mo ago
        Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.
- klodolph 4mo ago
  IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in. I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
- troupo 4mo ago
  And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend". Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
  - rootlocus 4mo ago
    To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point. 1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/ https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
    - bogwog 4mo ago
      I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.
  - Matl 4mo ago
    Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers. Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous. They're good at demos, I give them that.
    - duttish 4mo ago
      There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"
- Fraterkes 4mo ago
  I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    I have only seen Casey's writing in the whole "why is the terminal so slow" debacle, but he was a massive jerk in that. He was right! But still a jerk.
    - Jare 4mo ago
      I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things". Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.
Wowfunhappy 4mo ago
He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

pton_xd 4mo ago

How do you merge changes to a texture, mesh, audio file, etc?

LugosFergus 4mo ago

You really can't merge binary data, such as textures, meshes, audio, etc. It doesn't matter if you base64 encode the data and stuff it in a text file: it's a jumble of data (assuming this is the implication of what Blow did).

gmueckl 4mo ago
Tools that support non-destructive editing workflows could in theory provide limited diff and merge capabilities on their internal graphs pf non-destructive operations. E.g. Photoshop could in theory merge two files where unrelated layers have changed. But nobody is actually implementing this because it would be lots and lots of work.
- KingMob 4mo ago
  Yeah, it's a cool idea, but for proprietary formats, it's much harder for outsiders to do, and the original companies just don't see it as something they should take care of. My gut says there's too many changes that couldn't be cleanly merged anyway, so they think it's not worth the bother. (And they might be right.) At least for code, I know people have attempted format-aware, structural diffing for a while. The Lisp communities tried a few times, because s-exps are trivial to turn into trees. None became the standard diff tool, though. However, modern tools like difftastic used tree-sitter to bring a lot of language-aware diffing to the masses. - https://docs.racket-lang.org/sexp-diff/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/sexp-diff/index.html - https://github.com/michaelw/mw-diff-sexp https://github.com/michaelw/mw-diff-sexp - https://github.com/lambdaisland/deep-diff2 https://github.com/lambdaisland/deep-diff2 - https://fazzone.github.io/autochrome.html https://fazzone.github.io/autochrome.html - https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

superdisk 4mo ago

He uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.

flohofwoe 4mo ago

That's fine for database-like meta-data (e.g. game entity properties), but not for images, videos or audio files. Just writing those as hex dumps into text files doesn't make them any easier to merge.