Moosferatu

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Moosferatu


  1. Personally, I think it's fine if he isn't super involved.  Sure, ideally, I'd like him to lead the game, but since he isn't, why muddy the waters?  It seems weird to me that they just keep on piling on more "big names".  I fear it may become an unfocused mess.


  2. elmuerte, everything you said is true. I shudder when I think back on the code that I wrote fresh out of college. I was fortunate enough to work with some good developers early on who taught me a lot. I fully support hiring un-experienced people out of college, but you must invest heavily in them to grow good development practices. That said, it's often easier than working with an experienced developer who has entrenched bad habits. The last company that I interviewed at, and was hired by, was also into those worthless puzzlers and quicksort type questions. The only way I know of accurately evaluating someone is to sit down and write something non-gimmicky with them. Ironically, at this company, after 6 hours of interviews I wasn't allowed to touch a keyboard once. The mind boggles.


  3. I'm also only part way through. I disagree with the assertions about programmers' skills somehow being more quantifiable that others. Granted, I can't speak for programmers working in the game industry, but I can't imagine it's much different than other industries. Schools don't pump-out cookie-cutter programmers. In fact, most of what you learn in college is rubbish that does not make you great at real-world programming. It's difficult to find people who are genuinely good at it, or have the potential to be, ask any recruiter. Furthermore, the state of the code bases even at prominent tech companies is shockingly bad. I'm not doing a great job expressing my point, but it's essentially that schools don't train programmers well, there is a huge range of competencies, and truly skilled programmers are in short supply.


  4. Not exactly sure what you mean, are you saying like it's a fire pokemon, and all fire pokemon are reskins because they have similar move pools? Or are you saying they look similar in appearance? If you mean the former, in the original game pokemon only had one type, in all the newer games they can have two, which makes a HUGE difference. Also based on their stats they can be very different. If you mean the latter, fair enough, they all basically look the same.

    What I mean is that most of the "new" pokemon are analogues for the originals. I'm not saying their stats are identical, but the fit a common role.

    For example:

    Pidgey = Pidove

    Rattata = Patrat

    Geodude = Roggenrola

    Emolga = Pikachu

    Paris = Dwebble

    and the list goes on...

    As I just scrolled through the pokedex, it looks like there's some fresher looking things towards the bottom of it.

    Also, I swear I am so sick of fighting those damn elemental monkeys.


  5. I recently got a 3DS, and, fueled by fond childhood memories of Pokemon Blue, purchased Pokemon Black to go along with it. I'm only 4 badges in and my pokemon are about to hit their 30s, but I have to say that I'm not terribly impressed so far.

    For just about every "new" pokemon that I see I think, "Oh, this guy is just pokemon X from the original with a different skin." It almost makes it worse that they pretend that they're substantively different.

    Some of the new organizational and battle stuff is pretty cool, but I still haven't figured out why I'd want to play dress-up or ride a battle train.

    I suppose I shouldn't complain about the plot, it is a Pokemon game after all, but, for some reason, it surprised me just how unengaging it is.

    Not that it's all bad, but it doesn't make sense to me that it seems to be highly regarded critically. Perhaps I'm just not far enough yet.


  6. I recently accepted a new job in Seattle, and will be moving in a couple of weeks. I decided to drive out, and, since I'm coming from Michigan, have a substantial amount of car time I need to fill (~38 hours, according to Google). I was wondering if anyone had any good recommendations for audio books or audio productions? Besides The Lord of the Rings, I've never really listened to audio books. I've heard a fair number of radio plays (or whatever they call them) from BBC over the years, but I have a hard time recalling the names of most of them.


  7. I recently replayed Grim Fandango for the first time in years and years, and it struck me how much of the dialog is ingrained in my memory. Oddly, the quote that I've had replaying in my head (and out loud if I'm alone) the most is the memo from Don at the beginning of the game:

    Thank your lucky stars, and get to your freaking cars! We have a mass poisoning on our hands! Too many dead to assign specific cases, so it's first come first serve! Let's see some hustle out there!

    Not a very useful quote, but I love it. Anyone else have any quotes that unexpectedly get chiseled into memory?


  8. Where is the fuse box puzzle that was causing trouble? Is there one besides the one with the three fuses in the vault? Did I miss something?

    Too bad you can't save Anna...


  9. Scala has a pretty steep learning curve. Out of the JVM languages, I'd recommend Fantom. I haven't done much with it personally, but the docs read pretty much exactly how I wish Java was.

    bd_monkey, just think of something fun that you'd like to make (a desktop utility, a web app, etc), and then start figuring out how to make it in the language of your choice. For example, back when I was first learning Java my first project was a small desktop application for randomly picking episodes of Futurama to watch so that my roommate and I didn't have to waste time figuring out which episode we felt like watching that evening.


  10. What kinds of things are you primarily going to be programming? Why not try both, and focus on the one you enjoy more? Personally, I think Python is a much more enjoyable language, with some annoying limitations, while I dislike Ruby's syntax, but it is very powerful and there are lots of cool projects that use it.