Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me
youtube recommended me a video about how the portal gun in portal test chamber 02 can miss the spot it's supposed to open a portal at and NO IT CAN'T IT'S NOT SIMULATED IN A WAY THAT WOULD EVER ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.methe portals that the portal gun opens before you pick it up aren't opened by the gun
it's just rotating on a platform and then some particle effects play and a portal in a predefined location is turned on or off
Valve didn't design the chamber to automatically break if you leave it running for too long due to floating point precision stuff because it would have been significantly harder for them to do it that way than to do it the way where it never breaks
this is before Source Engine had any kind of scripting support, so everything had to be done with timers
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.memaybe the video is about that but I'm not wasting my time watching a video that opens with a complete lie about how something I already understand works
1
0
0
I did briefly scroll down to the comments before closing it and most of them were along the lines of "I can't believe Valve would be so brazen as to make Dropship Bloodhound in Deima Surface Bridge out of an invisible train rather than something that would perform an exactly identical function but be called something different in the map editor"
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.melike, if you want to talk about weird tricks Valve had to do to make stuff work in the game engine that don't make as much sense outside of that context, that scene where Barney pulls the crowbar out of the winch and hands it to Gordon in EP1 contains three different crowbars
the one in the winch cannot be held but is physically simulated, then the one that barney is holding is a weapon, and when he hands it to you it's a different instance of the weapon because unequipping it would have spawned it in the wrong place so it's easier to just kill it and spawn a new one
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.methere's all kinds of stuff like this in games - any time two characters hug in any game with any art style there's usually something ridiculous going on
2
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.medid you know that in alien swarm the npc for the pilot (which never appears on-screen and shares a model with the most common enemy in the game but has to physically exist for technical reasons) is stored in a box hidden somewhere within the bounds of the level?
0
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me@PetraOleum there's the kind of person who thinks the fallout train being a hat is ridiculous and the wildest thing that has ever happened on a computer and the kind of person who thinks the fallout train hat is uninteresting and they're both very wrong
0
0
0
Elias Mårtenson
loke@functional.cafe@ben wasn't it Half Life where a train moving on a track is actually an enemy walking around under the floor with the train being a hat?
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me@loke I believe in Fallout 4, helicopter is defined as a race
1
0
0
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me@charlotte @loke grenades in alien swarm are technically classified as corpses
1
0
0
Elias Mårtenson
loke@functional.cafe@ben @charlotte there is something about game development that is so alien to anyone doing regular software development. 😀
1
0
0
Charlotte 
/Cinny 
charlotte
2
0
1
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me@charlotte @loke I vaguely remember someone on a Guild Wars 2 dev stream saying something like "a game programmer's job is to find out what the game designers are doing and make a normal way to do it and plead for them to use it"
1
0
0
Charlotte /Cinny
charlotte
1
0
1
Ben Lubar (any pronouns)
ben@lubar.me@charlotte @loke ok yes alien swarm: reactive drop aliens are technically a subclass of CAI_BaseHumanoid but they aren't in original valve alien swarm
0
0
0
Elias Mårtenson
loke@functional.cafe@charlotte @ben yes, but taken even further. If it is broke, but nobody notices (unless they look real hard), don't fix it.
0
0
0