space-nerds-in-space VS Git

I don't know if this counts, but I wrote a parser for "the ship's computer" in my game, "Space Nerds in Space". It's described here: https://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/speech-recogn...

I also wrote some toy "interactive fiction" things (with less sophisticated parsers) in python and Lua as a way to gain familiarity with those languages, not that they are very interesting in and of themselves, though they demonstrate a fairly standard technique behind these kinds of games in a compact way.

https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/maste...

I have this book, which I got about 10 years ago, and found it very helpful when writing my own (primitive, not even close to state of the art) game in C, and I have recommended this book to others on reddit many times over the years. My copy of the book still has the CD inside, never opened. I never looked at it, mainly because I found there's no need, the algorithms are not very long for the most part, and I needed to understand them and fit them into my codebase anyway.

Space Nerds in Space - multi-player starship bridge simulator so you can captain your starship through adventures with your friends.

Space Nerds in Space (github) is an open source spaceship bridge simulator so you can captain your starship through space adventures with your friends. Each player mans a station on a simulated starship. There are stations for Navigation, Weapons, Engineering/Damage Control, Comms, Science, and a gamemaster station. It's written in C, with a Lua API for writing "mission scripts". Multiple starships can be present in the simulation at once if you can manage to gather enough friends to crew them. It even supports speech recognition and natural language parsing if you're so inclined.

This is what gaseous-giganticus uses. Combined with some other techniques, it can help with making some clouds for earthlike planets, but not in real time. Mentioned here previously. The process I use for making earthlike planets with clouds for Space Nerds in Space is described here.

As an example, I made this game which is basically a multiplayer star trek game where each player is a member of the crew of a spaceship. There are "scenarios" -- little missions -- that are coded in Lua, some written by me, some by other people. You can see them here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/tree/master/share/snis/luascripts/MISSIONS There's a Lua API my game provides described here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/master/doc/lua-api.txt

Not an MMORPG, just a LAN game really, but my spaceship bridge simulator Space Nerds in Space is open source (GPL2) and in C. The network server architecture is pretty simple, TCP, and a read thread and a write thread per client, which would be a bad design if there were a large number clients, but for less than 30 or so clients (realistic number of clients is 5-10, leaning towards 5), it's absolutely fine (KISS principle). There's some documentation about how it all works here: Hacking on Space Nerds in Space and the website for the game is here: https://spacenerdsinspace.com

Continued this discussion on github: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/discussions/322

I have an open source game project I've been working on since 2012 or so. I have received patches from 23 people during that time. Maybe 4 or 5 have made significant contributions (more than drive-by bug fixes, and I'm counting myself in those numbers). Well, you can take a look for yourself and see how the contribution graphs look

Look at any PR/patch series that got merged into the Git project. https://github.com/git/git/

Any random one. Because those that did not meet the minimum criteria for a well-crafted history would not have passed review.

Boy, I can't find this either (but also, the kernel mailing list is _really_ difficult to search). I really remember Linus saying something like "it's not a real SCM, but maybe someone could build one on top of it someday" or something like that, but I cannot figure out how to find that.

You _can_ see, though, that in his first README, he refers to what he's building as not a "real SCM":

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

Here is the direct link, as HN somehow removes the query string: https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=peff&since=2023-10...

I understand all that.

I'm saying, if you write a survey and one of the possible answers is "diff", but you don't clearly define what you mean by "diff", then don't be surprised if respondents use any reasonable definition that makes sense to them. Ask an ambiguous question, get a mishmash of answers.

The thing that Git uses for packfiles is called a "delta" by Git, but it's also reasonable to call it a "diff". After all, Git's delta algorithm is "greatly inspired by parts of LibXDiff from Davide Libenzi"[1]. Not LibXDelta but LibXDiff.

Yes, how Git stores blobs (using deltas) is orthogonal to how Git uses blobs. But while that orthogonality is useful for reasoning about Git, it's not wrong to think of a commit as the totality of what Git does, including that optimization. (Some people, when learning Git, stumble over the way it's described as storing full copies, think it's wasteful. For them to wrap their heads around Git, they have to understand that the optimization exists. Which makes sense because Git probably wouldn't be practical if it lacked that optimization.)

The reason I'm bringing all this up is, if you're trying to explain Git, which is what the original article is about, then it's very important to keep in mind that someone who is learning Git needs to know what you mean when you say "diff". Most people who already know Git would tend to gravitate toward the definition of "diff" that you're assuming (the thing that Git computes on the fly and never stores), but people who already know Git aren't the target audience when you're teaching Git.

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[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/diff-delta.c