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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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I just checked. 32 GB is now $13.50.

Though, really, physical drives (flash is catching up!) are still pound-for-pound way more efficient in dollars-to-GB.

You can get an 8 TB hard drive, on sale, for <$150. That's:

$150/8*1024 = 0.01831054687 $/GB. (vs 0.421875 for that flash card I cited.)

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“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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Yeah, I still prefer my magnetic hard drive for many reasons. The speed is good enough for me and I have had drive last me a decade or more.

I currently have a 2TB drive I recently upgraded to. I still have my 500G drive in my system as a secondary drive, not used as much, but still operates just fine.

I think I paid about $100 (Canadian, which is even cheaper in USD) for it, so no complaints.

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“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Quote:

The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.

Pet peave: That's full of crap. Neurons don't behave anything at all like bits. Bits are discrete. Neurons are the opposite. Neurons connect (simplified) "everything to everything."

The brain's speed is also incredibly slow compared to a CPU. But because neurons are parallelism on crack, it doesn't matter.

An FPGA is a much better analogy for a brain, and they've been working on commercail "neural net FPGAs" for the last decade or two.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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[dbl post]

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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I just had to share this here. I watched this on Facebook ("True Facts") and just about died laughing. :)

video

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“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Those true facts videos are some of the BEST online/on YouTube. 10/10

Reminds me of the GI Joe PSA's. Released on YT... in 2007. Holy crap.

video

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Arvidsson
Member #4,603
May 2004
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Seems factorio is getting rid of allegro. Too bad.

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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Seems factorio is getting rid of allegro

I can't say it's surprising.

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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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They're doing a lot of niche/edge-case stuff that Allegro isn't for. They're using lots of shaders and special pipeline stuff... for a 2-D game of all things.

It doesn't sound like porting was that hard.

They're also using SDL for everything except graphics. That's interesting. Can you setup SDL without a window context?

But yeah, once you've got a project with multiple full-time programmers going for YEARS you can afford to strip out a helper library and rewrite it from scratch and purpose-built toward your requirements. It's what every AAA studio does. As I've mentioned before, Andrian Courreges does great write-ups about rendering engines:

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2017/12/15/mgs-v-graphics-study/ (contrast many of his write-ups of other games)

And basically, most AAA studios (not using pre-built engines) have INCREDIBLY different rendering engines and pipelines built from scratch. On every level (mathematically, academically, whatever) they're completely different, and how they solve "the rendering question" depends entirely on what their target platform is, and what special effects they want to focus. It's not "make it better", but "make water 10% better than the competition" or "we need better sunbeams." And every bit is moved around with the target architecture (typically a console) in mind to maximize every bit of memory and CPU bandwidth available.

Which is why AAA games run better on lower hardware than 99% of indie games. PUBG runs like piss (even using the pre-canned Unreal engine), while GTA V will run on netbooks with integrated graphics.

Quote:

Over the course of the last 5 years, we have hacked a lot of custom enhancements and optimizations into Allegro.

Sure would be nice if they bothered to submit that upstream. ::)

Also the technical issues they listed... were nVidia's fault for breaking DX9. That's pretty stupid to blame on Allegro. DX9 reported 32x32K textures as max size on newer cards, but DX9 only actually supports 16x16K apparently, and yields black textures. How the !@$! is that Allegro's fault?

The other one they cite is a pre-Windows 10 RivaTuner statistics server being run on Windows 10, crashes Factorio. Using the wrong version of a videocard overclocking software breaks Factorio. omg rly???

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=20534&start=20#p136115

Again, WTF are they bitching about? I'm not taking this like some Allegro fanboy. Their logic simply doesn't follow.

They say Allegro is "limited" because it runs on Direct X 9 (and equivalent OpenGL version). Except that's a bonus in some cases because older harder can still run it. And proof:

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=57419&start=80#p340701

They're basically confirming everyone who can't run OpenGL 4.1 is fucked. There will be no backwards compatible / older DX9/OGL support.

For a 2-D game, that's an incredibly high bar to set for hardware. ::) I'm not saying DX9/OpenGL 1.x is good. But straight to 4.x is a huge jump. You don't have to pick the newest version simply because "it's the newest". It's not like installing a new version of a compiler. Older hardware won't run it.

A GeForce 400 is only DX11 compatible. It came out in 2011. All GeForce 3xx and earlier are only DX11. That leaves a LOT of laptops and OEMs !@$!@'d over.

Hell, look at Steam's hardware survey. Tons of people don't even use 1080p yet!

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

MOST PEOPLE currently only have 1 GB of VRAM videocards! (!??!) And 14.53% of people are still using 1366x768! (typically a laptop)

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Just because I have a 4K screen, I don't assume my players are all going to have one. ::)

p.s. And I'm actually a big fan of Factorio.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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MOST PEOPLE currently only have 1 GB of VRAM videocards! (!??!) And 14.53% of people are still using 1366x768! (typically a laptop)

Hah, that's the resolution of most computers monitors in the so called lab at the school I graduated from last year. Pretty sad. I couldn't live without 1080P anymore.

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
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Guys, what are some good, affordable (like < $200) phones? I have an ancient Huawei Android somethingoranother, and it's practically unusable now. I need something that'll do texts, calls, and do data and GPS well (my current phone freezes when I try to use mobile data).

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Get a used one eBay.

Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7/...

I just upgraded to a used Moto Z and I actually like it better. It's got more cores. The cores are slower than the S5 but it's still way faster with more cores and more RAM.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Peter Hull
Member #1,136
March 2001

I just read that Microsoft are going to buy GitHub. What do you think of that?

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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If that happens GitHub will be ruined, but probably a new company will replace it. There's already GitLab which is open source. It might be just the move needed for GitLab to gain traction.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Then again, it's not like magically shut down / ban all the open source stuff. That'd be PR suicide. Literally everyone in the industry knows what Github is.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Microsoft's formula isn't to just suddenly lock things down. Their formula is to try to profit from things by any means necessary. Which usually means purchasing awesome software that people already use and love and neutering it so we have to pay again for what they already have. They seem incapable of actually maintaining software without breaking it and losing features. Until it's basically garbage, everybody stops using it, and they abandon it and purchase the new replacement.

Append:

Microsoft allegedly has purchased GitHub. Their tactic is basically to purchase competition in a sector and erase it so that they can redevelop an inferior solution that everybody is stuck with. Considering Microsoft's shady past I imagine this should bring fear to any teams that have proprietary code stored in GitHub since Microsoft will have access to it now. It shouldn't really be a real threat to the open source world though.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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bamccaig said:

Their formula is to try to profit from things by any means necessary.

No, it's not. ::) Their evil is Extend, Embrace, Extinguish. Which plenty of companies are currently doing, with the lesser end being Microsoft.

- Github runs on git. Git isn't owned by Microsoft.

Meanwhile, all the "Extra stuff" that makes Github so great... is Github only. (All the social networking/graphs/github-only content) So they've already done with Extend part.

It'd be INSANELY EASY to migrate from Github for most people (if they don't mind losing/migrating issue tracker, comments, etc.) The actual code is git. And git will can literally transfer to another domain in like, two terminal commands.

I'm not saying I trust Microsoft at all. But they've mostly lost their protocol wars. They have ZERO market penetration in phone OSes, gave up, and made Outlook and Office apps for iOS and Android.

The area where'd I'd actually be worried with EEE, is them porting into Linux. Which is, in my opinion, an incredibly one-sided relationship where Microsoft benefits from Linux, and Linux gets nothing.

But there's plenty of a-hole companies like that. For example, nVidia is the devil. They benefit from GPL/GNU/FOSS projects and give nothing back to the open-source nVidia drivers.

And Google, and Amazon are the new devils. They're constantly fighting each other by removing support / changing API's, to break each other's home device (Alexa, Google Home, etc).

And besides Github is already a bunch of a-holes, so Microsoft buying them won't magically make them bigger a-holes.

So I'm not worried until I see more news, and more evidence of wrong doing.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
avatar

I still remember when they bought TrueSpace... and then killed it.

In other news, GOG.com has Xenonauts FREE until June 6th. Looks like a nice isometric game.

https://www.gog.com/game/xenonauts

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“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Gideon Weems
Member #3,925
October 2003

Too bad about Factorio. And maybe too bad about Allegro's license? SiegeLord and others put a lot of hard work into Allegro. The least they deserve is code contributions.

GitLab is basically a drop-in replacement for GitHub. Their servers were flooded yesterday by a 250,000-project exodus.

dthompson
Member #5,749
April 2005
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+1 for GitLab. I moved all of my projects there a while back.

I'll admit their public instance (gitlab.com) is still having some teething issues, but is becoming much more reliable. The built-in project planning tools, CI and free private repos are all very good features.

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MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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I noticed that Bitbucket showed signs of people scared of the deal as they had a HUGE spike in imports on their service.

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Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Xenonauts is really fun. It's a remake of X-Com 1 and improves the interface in every way. You can move units around at the same time until an enemy unit is spotted, so it's not a boring-as-hell turn-based game.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
avatar

Geez, all you guys do anymore is talk about games. Do you ever wonder how many hours of your life you've spent playing video games? Do you think maybe one day you'll look back and regret all the other things you could have been doing instead? Personally I hardly play video games at all anymore. Certainly not any consoles. Not much for PC gaming either, as everything is online. I don't watch TV either. So I guess I'm just hoping that all the time I've invested in programming will pay off in the form of an income.



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