It's interesting to see such a prominent and talented coder do his work on (what looks like) a totally stock Eclipse install. Not that there is anything wrong with it at all, but it puts into perspective all the time "wasted" by thousands of programmers (myself included) around the world tweaking their vimrc to perfection, obsessing over tiling vs traditional window managers, and in general worrying a great deal about the "optimal" workspace.<p>It's rather refreshing to see someone that just does his work with tools that are sufficient to do the job.<p>Come to think of it, I see this phenomena quite often at the university I attend. The "average" guys have regular flamewars on what language is best or whether vim or emacs or some IDE is the ultimate tool, MacBook Pro versus Thinkpad and so on, while the actual top guys keep churning out quality code in whatever language fits the task on whatever machine available at the time with whatever OS is on that machine.<p>This is obviously a great simplification and a single anecdote, but I think there is some truth to it. Masters of art obsess over the artwork itself, not the tools used to create it.
I'm curious--how is he able to make coding fast enough to be interesting to watch? It seems almost sped-up. I spend so much more time thinking than typing. Yet somehow he seems to be coding at a speed which would preclude a lot of think-time. I am confused, and a bit in awe.<p>And where is the part where strange crap happens that surprises you, and you spend 10 minutes staring at something and debugging it?
Watching other programmers code is a great way to learn new things about your tools.<p>From his LD21 stream I learned that Eclipse can do hot code reloading-- Notch uses this extensively to iterate with cycles measured in seconds.
I think what I enjoyed the most watching this was the fact that he clearly has a lot of artistic talent, as well as the ability to code.<p>Many programmers have been unable to produce masterpieces, due to the lack of ability to produce any of the required graphics / sprites.<p>Notch was just adhoc drawing animated sprites and they looked great.
I unsuccessfully tried to watch (and record) this with rtmpdump. Does anyone have success with it? This is as far as I got:<p>rtmpdump -r "rtmp://199.9.255.233/app" -a "app" -f "WIN 11,0,1,152" -W "<a href="http://www-cdn.justin.tv/widgets/live_site_player.re2cb52468e1a1f82af503eac77b389e6fc8e5282.swf" rel="nofollow">http://www-cdn.justin.tv/widgets/live_site_player.re2cb52468...</a> -p "<a href="http://sv.twitch.tv/notch" rel="nofollow">http://sv.twitch.tv/notch</a> --live -y "jtv_NkzwEXgKbSnzmSP_"<p>It is a shame that things like this are encumbered and tightly controlled.
Great fun to watch! He just posted a "work in progress" version: <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html</a>
Go to <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/ld22/index.html</a> to play the game (he updates it periodically as he's working on it).
I watched this for several hours today, cool stuff watching him. His reactions when the code misbehaves are funny. How he remembers which sections of code do what and is not afraid to cut out whole sections to achieve the effect he wants is cool.
Has anybody here had any experience entering Lundum dare?<p>For many years I have thought about the idea of building a game from scratch and even have a few half (or probably quarter at best) finished engines/demos.
Of course it is easy to become a perfectionist and compare your work to the best AAA titles which means you will never finish.<p>Perhaps a strict 48 hour deadline is what is needed to really force me to get something completed. Although since I haven't done any games programming for years I would just end up spending all the time reading the docs and correcting simple mistakes.
I noticed that he switches between the keyboard and mouse so fast it seems like he always has one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. How is he so fast at switching? For me, touching the mouse is the slowing thing I do in a text editor.
He seems to use a lot of "magic numbers" at first, but later on replacing those with proper variables. Is that common? I can't keep track of the meaning of such numbers while programming, so I tend to use variables straight away.
I've been working on a dribbble for the Game Dev community, <a href="http://www.metroia.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.metroia.com</a>, hoping to launch Jan 1.