NickPollard

55 ms·

481.
by NickPollard 16y ago
That's definitely a factor, but he's still remembered. It would have been easy for the programming to have been ignored and Carmack to have been overshadowed by Romero, but that didn't happen. Amongst game programmers, we certainly pay more
482.
by NickPollard 16y ago
I wonder how many people will correctly spot which one the missing apostrophe is - I used to get it wrong quite a lot, as it's slightly counter-intuitive.
483.
by NickPollard 16y ago
Plane would be quicker, my Dad used to commute (weekly) from Southampton to Edinburgh. It's about 40minutes by air. It would great to have something compute the 'fastest possible travel' from A to B, including as many types of travel as pos
484.
by NickPollard 16y ago
Each fix might be an easy port by itself, but if there's tons of them then maintaining developers to run through integrating all of them, making sure they work, individually and with each other, is not a trivial task. Andy Rubin stated that
485.
by NickPollard 16y ago
Defensive programming is not always the correct assumption though.
486.
by NickPollard 16y ago
Interesting link, but it seems (to me) to make a mathematical mistake in that it assumes the drop-off factor (a) to be greater than 1 (in that it assumes 2a >= 2), when at the top it asserts only that a > 0.
487.
by NickPollard 16y ago
And in the Presidential election too, Gore out-polled Bush in the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College vote.
488.
by NickPollard 16y ago
I hadn't made up my mind the day before the election because none of the parties strongly represented my views on a wide range of policy areas. In some cases I agreed with one party, in other cases with another. Therefore I have to weigh up
489.
by NickPollard 16y ago
I assume when referring to productivity benefits you are actually referring to ease of learning? Command shells have huge productivity benefits if you know how to use them, their Achilles heel is that it takes quite a while to get used to a
490.
by NickPollard 16y ago
He was being sarcastic. His point was that people should stop being so narrow-minded as to exactly what they expect to see on HN and get away from the sometimes formulaic waves of articles about whatever the buzzword of the day is. Rather t
491.
by NickPollard 16y ago
I've been playing the Beta for several weeks, I think the longest I've waited for a game has been about 20 seconds, and apart from the initial few placement matches (to enable it to rank you at the beginning), they've all been reasonably cl
492.
by NickPollard 16y ago
Unfortunately in legal situations, it's often the letter of the law not the spirit of the law that carries weight. It's been pretty obvious from the beginning that Apple wanted to block Flash, but not, say, Unity. I think they'll find it ha
493.
by NickPollard 16y ago
It's an argument against using accessors for the sake of using accessors. It's important when learning any technique (and this goes not just for programming) to understand why that technique makes sense in this situation, which means that
494.
by NickPollard 17y ago
Does it really need confirming? Even if it's not a true story for this guy, something like it will have happened somewhere I'm sure. How many people must have run into Sergey Brin, or Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak at some point when they were
495.
by NickPollard 17y ago
I completely agree; too many underestimate the importance of UI. In fact I once did too, and used to scorn Apple products as just being 'the same as everyone elses with a nice UI'. I was completely right, but I missed the point - UI is such
496.
by NickPollard 17y ago
He was referring to game consoles, for which you _can_ use other languages to compile down from, so they are less restrictive than the iPhone.
497.
by NickPollard 17y ago
Exactly this - the points he makes in the article are all correct, but they're all related to monopoly. His point is merely 'Anything that prevents others making better products is good for me'. That may be, but it's bad for the consumer. I
498.
by NickPollard 17y ago
As an Englishman, I'd say 8 fingers. Then again, I'm also quite pedantic, I figure some people would definitely say 10, but I wonder if it's a transatlantic thing.
499.
by NickPollard 17y ago
I've worked on projects that use threads before, but this week I started actually writing threaded code myself for the first time on a pet project (real time ray tracer). I understand much of the theory but without practice it's hard to kno
500.
by NickPollard 17y ago
Raytracers are fun. Tonight I'm hopefully going to start threading my (slow) real-time raytracer. I've never done threading before, and I'm very interested in seeing how the performance plays out, what strategy I should use to optimize cach
501.
by NickPollard 17y ago
I don't have any experience to back it up, but I'd say go for the technologies you want to use: Good programmers can learn a new language pretty quickly, whereas knowing whatever is language du jour doesn't make you a good programmer. Hirin
502.
by NickPollard 17y ago
For those interested in learning, Epic now provide the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) for free to those who wish to use it in non-commercial capacity. This means that whilst you can't sell anything you make with it, you can get your hands on
503.
by NickPollard 17y ago
He was (and I believe still is) their main webmaster, last I heard he was particularly focused on the WoW website. He often goes by the name 'Nebu' (short for Nebuchadnezzar).
504.
by NickPollard 17y ago
I work for a major worldwide game developer, and our project currently uses Lua for a lot of dynamic scripting and behaviour control (the rest of the game is in C++). I've been pushing for a higher usage of it, as it allows a lot more runti
505.
by NickPollard 17y ago
One thing you could try is sending review copies to game journalists on the web - I'm not sure which ones are best for iPhone or mobile games, but these days most have at least a passing interest. If you can cold-email some of the reviewers