Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Honestly the all trails stuff I don’t even find to be worth it in my area. It doesn’t have the trails, it has “trails.”

    i.e. it stitches 5 individual trails together into a mega trail with some roads you have to walk and then says oh look, a 6th trail over here!

    I’ve been hiking for years and just use park maps and Google maps.








  • No, the Java version runs within the JVM and the C++ version would run via native code. That’s effectively like having something work on an ARM processor and an x86 processor at the same time.

    They both could be modded, but it’s harder to mod C++ because the optimization phase is ahead of time. Minecraft modding is in part an accident because the optimization phase happens during runtime within the JVM … that means the binary “.jar” files align much more closely with the code mojang wrote … where as an “.exe” would be radically changed.

    C++ modding would also be more difficult because it’s harder to preserve stability in C++. In the JVM, basically the only way the program crashes is if an exception goes uncaught or the programmer explicitly asks the program to termite (which never happens). In C++ there are still exceptions but there are a whole lot of things that are exceptions in Java that aren’t in C++ … so you can’t just fence off the modding API cleanly and say “if an exception is thrown while running this mod keep going.”

    Those two reasons are the major reasons that games pick Lua over native C++ based mods (that and you can secure Lua and prevent it from doing anything it wants … Java and C++ mods can do anything they want, which is part of why the Minecraft modding scene is so good; if you want to connect to a database for administrative purposes, you can write that mod server side and have your database of block changes to find griefers, your plot database to protect plots, your store database to provide shops, etc).


  • I mean, yes and no. They have (I believe) slowed down, but for quite a while they were making MAJOR refactors every release and the internals were rapidly changing despite not much being visible on the surface.

    I think a lot of that stopped with dinnerbone taking a step back … but I’m also not as involved with the scene anymore so I’m not entirely sure if that’s true.

    But yeah, they regularly used to screw modders up redoing internals to make things dynamic instead of hard coded and refraction tons and tons of stuff.

    I miss the days when they were ambitiously pursuing an official API for mods; now they’ve kind of resigned to letting the community projects handle that. Which is not a terrible approach, but it’s not a great one either.





  • I think what’s “dangerous” with some of this stuff is they sometimes take normal things like “are you having any trouble with X? Do you feel this way about Y? Yeah, that’s ADHD/autism/whatever.”

    It reminds me of pills getting advertised on television… It’s not the best because even if people do seek professional guidance, people come in with a bias, and they’re almost coached in some cases from the media they’re exposed to.

    I worry about doing it to myself on random stuff with just WebMD “oh yeah, let’s see … knee pain is a symptom … hmm my knees do hurt sometimes don’t they?”




  • I’m coming at it from “I’ve played a couple hundred hours of CSGO and a little bit of CS2 which is basically CSGO but with a couple of graphical upgrades and minor game play tweaks leveraging those graphics, like the bullets punch holes in the smoke.”

    CSGO and CS2 seem more familiar than different, so it’s somewhat surprising to me that CS 1.6 would be fully reimplemented by someone. Normally that only happens when the game significantly changed (e.g., RuneScape changed its combat system and then the old combat system was resurrected under OSRS), so … I’m trying to understand what was that significant thing is.