ProgrammerHumor
itScaresTheHellOutOfMe
Discussion
What scares you? Too many pixels?
Uhmm a magic numbers are fun.
storyline_array[218] = 'Coffee Age 404'
I knew PirateSoftware was a Clown by name dropping Blizzard every 5 seconds...
But I had no idea he was an actual coding clown 😭
he and his daddy works at blizzard bro he is so cool and if you dont get it i can explain it to you by drawing squares on ms paint with a fake deep voice for you 😤
I mean his dad not just works at Blizzard but he is actually a big thing there. He worked at Blizzard when it wasnt named Blizzard, he is as I know one of the OG people of the starting time of the company. But Yeah about the rest, you are actually right.
His dad also streams on twitch and he's actually cool not just trying to look the part
ah yes the Ultra Low quality , i missed it
Both of code and image. Balanced, as all things should be.
Even when i knew jack shit about programming, and i still don't know that language, i can tell that makes 0 sense
I’m willing to hear anyone that can make sense of it for me. I’ve done some very basic game dev stuff, in so far as connecting two computers and making a block move on both screens. Probably not much further than implementing hit points.
What is the point of this kind of array? This seems like something that should be using a specific database for the application and not the actual code?
The most logical reasoning I've seen for this, atleast to me, is that he knows it's bad but it looks cool, like woooh big amount of lines, which for people that don't know any better seems like it's just straight up a good thing, like i was new and large amounts of lines seemed like something cool I didn't understand yet was happening
It does succeed at line counts!
It doesn't. Actual properties would take as much lines of code.
So, why this? Is it just his preferred flavor of spaghetti?
What is the point of this kind of array?
Cus you can index them and then the time complexity of accessing a dialog is O(1)
(Don’t worry chief, we’ll come up with a better excuse)
KISS Keep it simple, stupid
Depending on the exact use-case it could be “reasonable code”.
It's reasonable in the sense that all the methods people say he should have used instead literally did not exist in the engine at that point and he refuse to refactor when the bottleneck is story writing.
It was written 8years ago in game maker studio and refactoring it now when the bottleneck is writing story is a waste of time. The way you would have wanted to write anything like this simply did not exist in the engine at that time. That is the reason it's still in there, you can disagree or agree but.. thats why.
im a c++ software developer and ive never seen even the worst indie devs ive worked with write code like that, so yeah, pirate software is on a whole other level of stupid
Is there some GameMaker quirkiness that forces this or makes this natural?
Idk about gamemaker, but I will say that RPGMaker was probably the introduction for many gamedevs- and it’s pretty much exclusive method of state is global switches lol
And in some fairness here, dialogue trees aren’t exactly a solved problem in games, and are the source of a lot of spaghetti and heinous things like this.
Wouldn’t kill him to at least use actual names (either through a hashmap or a super giant struct) instead of a number indexed array though.
Gamemaker studio didnt have support for structs back then and he refuse to refactor when story writing is the entire reason the game is slow to release.
no. it's just programmers incompetence.
I don’t know that much coding I’m guessing he didn’t separate the assets.
When the game dev forgets to hide the eldritch horrors of the debug log… "Coffee Cold Knowledge (0|1)" sounds like a cursed ritual 💀☕
Private software's code?
It's quickly becoming the programming version of loss
Yes but tbf he's not the only one doing this
https://www.reddit.com/r/YandereTechnique/comments/ufya27/apparently_undertale_has_a_1000_long_case_switch/
I can't shame the code of developers who actually finished their games.
Can’t shame a dude who doesn’t claim to be a genius either
This. A lot of people who defend PS use Undertale and Balatro as examples because "Well. They have shitty code, yet their games are good!"
But I've yet to see one singular post from Toby or LocalThunk where they mention they are experts in programming.
IIRC LocalThunk is humble to a fault, to where he didn't go to the game awards as he thought he didn't deserve the comparison to those other games.
Now that you mention it, did PS mention he's an expert in programming? I feel like if he did, we'd be getting a funny compilation of it by now.
He speaks in a way that would make people believe that. He often mentiones that he worked a blizzard, which is mostly associated with game development and he claims to be a hacker that worked for the Dep. of Energy which would also require deeper knowledge of such things.
No one knows if he actually worked at the DoE and his Job at blizzard was a QA, which does not necessarily mean that he knows how to code.
So in short: no, he never said that? Just as the other devs mentioned above?
The guy is arrogant, but the (anti)fan-fiction people write is just as astonishing.
Btw, regarding Blizzard he was always saying he worked in QA and then as security guy of the battle.net app, which is barely programming. Hate the guy all you want, but at least hate him for the real stuff.
First of all, I'd just like to clarify that I don't hate the guy. I just think that he was unnecessarily harsh and missed some points when talking about SKG.
The thing with the QA, I know that there are lots if clips talking about that and that it wasn't a secret. However, as far as I know, he left this point out of his SKG video so people who only saw this one video could have gotten a wrong idea and taken him as some authority in these topics when he really has no idea how difficult it would actually be to implement these changes. I haven't followed him close enough say that he misrepresented himself in his livestreams, I'm just saying that his SKG videos and the clips of him talking about SKG were as misleading as could be if you don't follow him close enough.
Edit: I also think that this mostly blew up because most people who did not actively follow his livestreams had this image of him. Him winning the Streamer Award for Tech streamer also contributed to this image.
One of them does not have 20 years of programming experience.
And does not constantly brag about being such a great game developer
Right, but Undertale was made in 2 years and PS has had 8 years and he's still "finishing" chapter 3 out of 5.
Jesus, PS should just stop streaming and get the thing done. Taking that long for this kind of code quality sounds like YandereDev territory
Streaming is his only income. Nobody is buying his game, he "had to quit" a part-time job at offbrand games (over non-existent review bombing), and his kickstarter for Heartbound only made 20k last I heard
You're free to have such code when you sell over 5m copies.
So was Toby Fox not allowed to have that code before he sold 5M copies?
The game is finished and runs smoothly... And Toby doesen't brag. That's all you need to be miles and miles ahead of private software
Toby never claimed to be a good programmer. Making games (especially solo) is the intersection of a lot of very different skills. There is obviously programming, but ultimately it’s not anywhere near as important as story writing, level design, art, music, etc.
Unless it negatively impacts the end product, i don’t particularly think it makes sense to criticize the code of an indie game.
Unless they claim to be an elite hacker with 20 years of game development experience, then it’s on them.
Both PS and Undertale are using GameMaker. Not to take away from the PirateJerking but is this more of a GameMaker limitation than a skill issue? Both are terrible code practices but I’m leaning more towards GameMaker being the issue than skill
No, you can apply most coding practices to Gamemaker, GML still has best practices that PS doesn't seem to know about. For example: PS has once said that Gamemaker doesn't have booleans so using 0 and 1 in parameters is perfectly normal to represent those. But if you checked the documentation of Gamemaker it does address that, while there is no "true" typing for gamemaker, they do have the global constants of true and false, and they advice you to use those in case they ever do end up making boolean data types.
These are far from PS's worst lies covered up by a pretend-expertise, but those lies stack, and he has become a lolcow at this point because he never admits to these obvious contradictions.
If you look at it terrible practices yes and i am also not that familiar with gamemaker to judge that but imo these bad practices don't matter that much if you're the only developer. In case of undertale what's the point of making an i18n compatible system with ressource files for dialogues if there's no plan to have internationalization and there is no other person working on the project eventually having to deal with your mighty god switch block. + the game is finished and i also don't understand the judgemental tone in the thread i linked. It's a shipped product and people are wasting time doing a code review and be judgemental about it
You're never the only developer. Future you is basically a completely different person who will have to deal with past you's shit code.
Seriously, anyone not realizing this immutable truth should go back to a project of 5-10 years ago and debate if past you would be allowed on your new projects.
Pixels.
“You see that door marked ‘pirate’? You think a pirate lives there??”
I think he's just scared of jpg'd images. /s