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- cross-posted to:
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higgsboshark The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it LIke ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the wortd. But It’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm Checkmate, nihilism.
cheskamouse This is a powerful positive message.
pluckyredhead I’m literally reading a book right now (Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski) that says this is scientiically sound.
There have been studies done on rats and dogs where they develop learned helplessness in the animals by giving them impossible tasks. Eventually the animals stop trying, even when the task stops being impossible. (.e. put a rat in a maze with cheese it can’t get to until it develops learned helplessness, then put the cheese somewhere it can get to it and it won’t even try ) But once they show the animals they CAN do something - i.e. physicaly moving the rat to the cheese-the learned helplessness goes away.
No one can move you to your cheese for you, but the book says DOING something - which they define as “anything that isn’t nothing” can help. Make a food. Work in the garden. Clean a thing Do a favor for a fiend. Call your elected officials.
Knit a sock.
If you feel overwhelmed by existential despair, do something. It doesn’t have to be big It just has to be anything that isn’t nothing.
Two weeks ago I downloaded Godot and started using YouTube to teach myself game dev.
Made some tranquil grass with a wind effect. Downloaded a 2D pixel sprite and made an animation state machine. Watched couple more videos and then decided to try out 3D modeling. I now have my first low poly character sketch done and am working on animating the rigging.
My depression has dropped significantly as actively working on building new skills and giving myself the ability to express ideas I have had kicking around in my head for the past 15 years is incredibly empowering.
Go find your thing.
This is very wholesome. I should really do the same or something similar in my field. It’s hard to recapture the magic when you are exhausted from work all the time.
Make some grass. No seriously if you can play pause and follow this along you can expand from there. There are so many amazing devs out there sharing everything you could possibly want to do in a game.
I expect updates.
Man. I’ve been meaning to learn gamedev for the past decade, but just never actually got around to doing it. I can do regular software dev and produce music, though lmao. Game engines just seem very difficult to learn, and Godot is basically my only choice because I have a strict FOSS requirement.
I was considering making a SNES game instead, since I already know 6502 ASM (65816 is basically just built on top of 6502), but that doesn’t seem like the skill is as transferrable as a modern game engine.
I still don’t even know what a shader is exactly lmao.
It just graphic effects. So in the case on the grass, it’s what adds the color, then a visual white noise is run over the area is a seemless loop that dictates the movement of the x/y vertices.
So basically, it’s just code that defines how objects are rendered?
Are shaders and lighting related at all?
Yes. No.
Sometimes both.
I don’t think you could call the grass and object since it’s not a 3d model, it’s a bunch of 2d images stacked on top of each other at a high enough resolution that it looks like a real line from above. The way you draw in these 2d images is via a shader as you wouldn’t do it on the CPU. (Not a graphics engineer just an amateur programmer so don’t fully trust my word on it)
As someone who has survived the last 15 years by throwing myself into various creative and offline things, I will say that there is a limit to how much it can help.