At 2/7/17 10:06 AM, MSGhero wrote: I'm also on the job hunt. President Trump's order to stop hiring for government positions kinda fucked several of my prospects, so I need to apply to more. Haven't heard back from any yet, but I'm hoping I get a flood of calls soon.

Good luck! Yeah I've been off the grid for some time. Been kind of busy with non flash related stuff. I still get notifications now and again regarding this thread so im not totally out of touch. Nice to see people still hang out. Kind of weird to see everyone all grown up now.

At 2/7/17 05:40 AM, slugrail wrote: I'm in my last year of uni and will hopefully find some sort of job soon (plzpray4me)
At 2/7/17 10:06 AM, MSGhero wrote: Graduating with a masters this semester

Congrats, both of you!

not sure if I should undertake honours and would love a bit of advice or personal anecdotes in the field of job hunting and graduate opportunities.

I went to a startup right away, and I loved it, easy entry and organic growth in responsibilities. After 3 years I hated it, though, and left. There's a site specifically for startup job listings

At 2/7/17 10:56 AM, Luis wrote: Kind of weird to see everyone all grown up now.

Speak for yourself

At 2/7/17 10:56 AM, Luis wrote: Good luck! Yeah I've been off the grid for some time. Been kind of busy with non flash related stuff. I still get notifications now and again regarding this thread so im not totally out of touch. Nice to see people still hang out. Kind of weird to see everyone all grown up now.

There was this one offer I got that sounded great and relevant, but it was unpaid and a startup. They talked big game about their product breaking the industry but said nothing about what it actually was. I needed to be passionate, and if I performed well I might be allowed to join the venture.

I remembered when you said unpaid jobs are the devil and said no to them.

At 2/7/17 09:54 PM, MSGhero wrote: There was this one offer I got that sounded great and relevant, but it was unpaid and a startup. They talked big game about their product breaking the industry but said nothing about what it actually was. I needed to be passionate, and if I performed well I might be allowed to join the venture.

I remembered when you said unpaid jobs are the devil and said no to them.

If you were already planning on saying no to them or never responding, might as well tell them the "No one that agrees to work on these terms will be as good as me. You're better off hiring me at $<salary>, than expecting a decent job for free" speil. I've never been in this situation, but what harm can it do if you're just gonna move on to the next offer? I'm also drunk right now, so maybe don't take my advice

At 2/7/17 09:54 PM, MSGhero wrote: There was this one offer I got that sounded great and relevant, but it was unpaid and a startup. They talked big game about their product breaking the industry but said nothing about what it actually was. I needed to be passionate, and if I performed well I might be allowed to join the venture.

lol. It's unpaid AND you need to perform well before they cut you in on it?

a "no" is too polite for those fucks then lol

At 2/8/17 05:11 AM, GeoKureli wrote: If you were already planning on saying no to them or never responding, might as well tell them the "No one that agrees to work on these terms will be as good as me. You're better off hiring me at $<salary>

absolutely not worth the effort and I would barely trust them to actually pay the salary if they agreed to that in the end.

At 2/7/17 09:54 PM, MSGhero wrote: There was this one offer I got that sounded great and relevant, but it was unpaid and a startup. They talked big game about their product breaking the industry but said nothing about what it actually was. I needed to be passionate, and if I performed well I might be allowed to join the venture.

Run for the hills. Nothing good would come of taking them up on such an unbelievably shitty offer. Startups are a really bad idea to begin with; working for free would be absurd.

At 2/10/17 07:12 PM, Diki wrote: Run for the hills. Nothing good would come of taking them up on such an unbelievably shitty offer. Startups are a really bad idea to begin with; working for free would be absurd.

It's uncommon for me to come across startups in my field (mechanical engineering) and in my specific concentration, but there are a ton of computer science startups that I see. None of them have a tangible description of what they do or plan to do, or it's like "Facebook meets Duolingo" as if their shitty iOS-only app with 5 users comes close.

Hell, a few established companies I looked at in my field also don't say what they do.

"We offer solutions."

At 2/10/17 09:51 PM, MSGhero wrote: Hell, a few established companies I looked at in my field also don't say what they do.

"We offer solutions."

Is the second part of that sentence "...to problems which nobody has"?

At 2/10/17 09:51 PM, MSGhero wrote: None of them have a tangible description of what they do or plan to do, or it's like "Facebook meets Duolingo" as if their shitty iOS-only app with 5 users comes close.

Is this an anecdote about companies in your specific part of the country, or is this a broader comment about startups as a whole ? Because personally I feel there are many startups out there doing meaningful work beyond just creating "shitty iOS-only" apps.

At 2/11/17 12:30 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Is this an anecdote about companies in your specific part of the country, or is this a broader comment about startups as a whole ? Because personally I feel there are many startups out there doing meaningful work beyond just creating "shitty iOS-only" apps.

I'm in a place where there are a ton, so invariably some will suck and stand out.

At 2/11/17 08:17 AM, MSGhero wrote: I'm in a place where there are a ton, so invariably some will suck and stand out.

The problem with living in America is that we are actively targeted by people who want to screw other people. Statistically, we're the most targeted people in the world for pretty much everything ranging from scams to spying to straight-up assaults. (though most assaults don't actually succeed. We're kinda a military country. Still have a giant target on our back, though.)

So, yeah, I think we're gonna be a little weary when I'm looking for jobs.

At 2/7/17 10:06 AM, MSGhero wrote: Graduating with a masters this semester, (very) slowly still working on a procgen roguelite whatever game. We're closeish to a public demo, but it's currently hard to find the time.

I'm also on the job hunt. President Trump's order to stop hiring for government positions kinda fucked several of my prospects, so I need to apply to more. Haven't heard back from any yet, but I'm hoping I get a flood of calls soon.

Nice! Was your degree related to your hobby (game development?) or something totally different? I do remember you posting about making an RPG game w/ an element of randomness a few years ago if I'm not mistaken, I'm guessing it's that? Be sure to tell us when the demo does hit, haven't played any good Flash games (actually any at all) since 2008!

Yeah I'm in the same boat WRT to job hunting, looking for an internship this sem but most are unpaid. I think I'm better off just not doing an internship since I doubt I'll ever be able to find one in my current field (economics) and instead going on exchange. I'm still torn between the two: work experience or actually being able to travel for the first time in my life. How did you find doing your masters?

At 2/7/17 12:28 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Congrats, both of you!

I went to a startup right away, and I loved it, easy entry and organic growth in responsibilities. After 3 years I hated it, though, and left. There's a site specifically for startup job listings

This was the advice I was given by a mid 30 y/o working in the IT field. His advice was to pretty much go SanFran and get a job in a startup because I don't have much to lose in my 20s. I've been doing a double degree in economics and comp sci and was thinking of doing my honours in economics but I'm not certain it'd help me out in any way, does it actually help boost my employment prospects in either of my fields or is it just there for people who actually like research?

At 2/11/17 10:09 PM, slugrail wrote: Nice! Was your degree related to your hobby (game development?) or something totally different? I do remember you posting about making an RPG game w/ an element of randomness a few years ago if I'm not mistaken, I'm guessing it's that? Be sure to tell us when the demo does hit, haven't played any good Flash games (actually any at all) since 2008!

Yeah I'm in the same boat WRT to job hunting, looking for an internship this sem but most are unpaid. I think I'm better off just not doing an internship since I doubt I'll ever be able to find one in my current field (economics) and instead going on exchange. I'm still torn between the two: work experience or actually being able to travel for the first time in my life. How did you find doing your masters?

Nah, I'm in mechanical engineering. I have no time to work on my game though ughhh.

My masters has been a roller coaster of doing nothing and doing all things. It'll be worth it in the end, but it's a struggle because the foundation of research I'm building off of is bad. There's a hard problem that people literally ignore that I'm tackling, and it's just weird that only one other person has even mentioned it, much less dealt with it.

Clearly, I watch far too much YouTube.

I discovered something quite magical a couple days ago that I think you all might find interesting.

I spent way too much development time on my DisplayObject class. I finally simplified it.

Things are starting to come along, but still a long ways to go. I've been wrestling quite a bit with the engine I'm using which is never fun. I have had a really annoying performance issue again. This time related to the line of sight. Specifically with rendering it. I've stopping tinkering with it for now, but at some point I will need to revisit.

At 2/26/17 09:29 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: This time related to the line of sight. Specifically with rendering it. I've stopping tinkering with it for now, but at some point I will need to revisit.

I'm curious. Wouldn't LoS be calculated with two rays, then a TileMap would simply render the tiles needed? Is the bottleneck the tile map?

At 2/27/17 12:30 PM, egg82 wrote: two rays

Two is totally sufficient. Said nobody ever.
I suppose it depends on the number of rays, but honestly raycasting is pretty cheap.

At 2/27/17 10:10 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 2/27/17 12:30 PM, egg82 wrote: two rays

Two is totally sufficient. Said nobody ever.
I suppose it depends on the number of rays, but honestly raycasting is pretty cheap.

I do a fair number of ray traces in my AI. Theta*, which is a modified A* obviously, lets you move any angle from one point to the next, but it requires a raytrace/convex cast to ensure the path is actually clear. I thought I would have a lot of issues with it, but it runs fine and is better than smoothing after pathing.

At 2/27/17 11:06 PM, MSGhero wrote: I do a fair number of ray traces in my AI. Theta*, which is a modified A* obviously, lets you move any angle from one point to the next, but it requires a raytrace/convex cast to ensure the path is actually clear. I thought I would have a lot of issues with it, but it runs fine and is better than smoothing after pathing.

You can also always, always make any sort of pathfinding or ray tracing faster with QuadTrees. Either way, can't imagine that's the bottleneck. Has to be the way rendering is done.

After this last month or so, I'm reasonably confident in my ability to optimize things.

At 2/28/17 02:01 AM, egg82 wrote: You can also always, always make any sort of pathfinding or ray tracing faster with QuadTrees. Either way, can't imagine that's the bottleneck. Has to be the way rendering is done.

My traces are connected to the information within the grid, so quadtrees wouldn't do anything for me since I'm just using array access and checking for overlap with that one tile. "Not in the same quad" doesn't really matter bc that tile is being checked to find a path. Then again, it's kinda implicitly using quadtrees where each one is a single tile...

At 2/27/17 12:30 PM, egg82 wrote: I'm curious. Wouldn't LoS be calculated with two rays, then a TileMap would simply render the tiles needed? Is the bottleneck the tile map?

It's not the algorithm on the CPU. I am using recursive shadowcasting.

https://github.com/ondras/rot.js/blob/master/src/fov/recursive-shadowcasting.js

The problem is the rendering. The game engine I'm using is all WebGL based, but it's all abstracted away from me, and my ability to write my own shaders using their API is limited. So using their API to do things like masking, drawing graphics, is fine for a while, but as the masked area grows it becomes frustratingly slow. Ultimately I may have to switch over to my own rendering engine if it gets bad enough. The engine is pixi.js, btw.

At 2/28/17 09:39 AM, MSGhero wrote: My traces are connected to the information within the grid, so quadtrees wouldn't do anything for me since I'm just using array access and checking for overlap with that one tile. "Not in the same quad" doesn't really matter bc that tile is being checked to find a path. Then again, it's kinda implicitly using quadtrees where each one is a single tile...

I guess my point wasn't QuadTrees so much as what they do. Reducing the size of any searching increases performance, period. So, yeah, basically the same thing. Smaller array = better performance. Always using the smallest search space in any given situation = best performance.

At 2/28/17 11:34 AM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: It's not the algorithm on the CPU. I am using recursive shadowcasting.

This lead me to a really good article on FoV algorithms if you haven't seen it yet. Was actually incredibly interesting.

The problem is the rendering. The game engine I'm using is all WebGL based, but it's all abstracted away from me, and my ability to write my own shaders using their API is limited. So using their API to do things like masking, drawing graphics, is fine for a while, but as the masked area grows it becomes frustratingly slow.

Do light and shadows need shaders? You could write a new lighting engine. It's what I'm doing, at any rate :x

On a completely unrelated note, I feel really smart for choosing GCloud over AWS right now.

At 2/28/17 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: On a completely unrelated note, I feel really smart for choosing GCloud over AWS right now.

I was pretty happy that use cdnjs.com as the CDN for all the sites I work on. Had I been using AWS, pretty much every site I've made would be a broken mess because that's where I serve jQuery and Semantic UI from. (And would have had many pissed off clients.)

Also, who's the retard at Amazon who thought it was a good idea to host the service that checks the status of S3 on S3?

At 2/28/17 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: On a completely unrelated note, I feel really smart for choosing GCloud over AWS right now.

At 3/1/17 03:54 PM, Diki wrote: Also, who's the retard at Amazon who thought it was a good idea to host the service that checks the status of S3 on S3?

Hate myself for making this

At 3/1/17 04:22 PM, Sam wrote:

At 2/28/17 08:23 PM, egg82 wrote: On a completely unrelated note, I feel really smart for choosing GCloud over AWS right now.

At 3/1/17 03:54 PM, Diki wrote: Also, who's the retard at Amazon who thought it was a good idea to host the service that checks the status of S3 on S3?

Hate myself for making this

Even without any dependencies, your site would have gone down if it was hosted on AWS. (And a shitload of them did.)

Yes, I am taking a meme seriously. Come at me.

At 3/1/17 06:05 PM, Diki wrote: Even without any dependencies, your site would have gone down if it was hosted on AWS. (And a shitload of them did.)

Yes, I am taking a meme seriously. Come at me.

I just wanted to stay relevant with the youth

At 3/1/17 06:09 PM, Sam wrote:

At 3/1/17 06:05 PM, Diki wrote: Even without any dependencies, your site would have gone down if it was hosted on AWS. (And a shitload of them did.)

Yes, I am taking a meme seriously. Come at me.

I just wanted to stay relevant with the youth

Get off my lawn!

At 3/1/17 03:54 PM, Diki wrote: Also, who's the retard at Amazon who thought it was a good idea to host the service that checks the status of S3 on S3?

That was my favorite part of the whole thing. The irony was delicious! I also liked the part where everything was "increased error rates" - yeah, the error rates were increased. To 100%.

At 3/1/17 06:05 PM, Diki wrote: Even without any dependencies, your site would have gone down if it was hosted on AWS. (And a shitload of them did.)

Anything hosted in particular regions (yeah, multiple) would have gone down. So, the solution would be to have multiple copies of the site spanning across different regions. Possibly even different providers, but that's damned tricky.