Developer of Ark Vcs. a Version Control System for Games
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After 3 years, 47 releases, Ark VCS has finally reached 1.0! 🎉
piped.video/XSnIw4siQ6U
It's a big release, with features that I've never seen to any version control system out of the box, like built-in changelist build status.
If you're tired of #perforce and #git, get it from ark-vcs.com!
#gamedev #indiegamedev #softwaredevelopment
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I can't comprehend why there is this massive push to get Rust in the middle of existing things. It's so prevalent that it feels like something orchestrated by some entity.
Why not simply do new stuff with it?
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When I'm programming, the number one thing that makes me sad is when I open C++ files that look like this.
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Strongly believe that visual coding tools like blueprints were a mistake. If you want to let ppl iterate faster a scripting language is way better.
Also, designers should be encouraged to code.
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It is specifically fishy how it seems to be aggressively targeting the Linux environment. Maybe the year of Linux desktop is not meant to be.
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@BetterSoftwareC was the best example of how a conference can be organised:
- Great Speakers
- 1 social day before and another after
- Breakfast, lunch and dinner (which were _really_ good food) handled in hotel
- Venue for the talks at walking distance
- Drinks / snacks in between some talks
- No concurrent talks
- Small attendance
- Expert handling video / audio
- Fast paced organization but the speakers had a lot of flexibility if they needed more time (in fact one talk moved to the social day after the scheduled days)
- Streamed and videos will all be made available for anybody that couldn’t see
All of this meant that everybody interacted with everybody else 100x more than in any other conference I’ve attended, and the vibe was always awesome.
It would be great to see more ppl focusing on this model instead of in the conference-as-a-business model.
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Every time I see projects like this it feels like Microsoft would have a lot to gain by spending $1M / year on a hand full of devs making cool stuff and just let them do whatever they want.
With all the employees they have, it feels like nobody focuses on improving things, and this may become very important but only be done when it's already too late.
Existing search tools on Windows suck. Even with an SSD, it’s painfully slow.
So I built a prototype of Nowgrep.
It bypasses most of the slow Windows nonsense, and just parses the raw NTFS.
On an SSD, this ends up faster than ripgrep, even on a cached run (Nowgrep bypasses most Software caching).
Demo: Filtering 2 million and searching ~270K files under C:/ for the substring "Hello".
I have many ideas to make these an even smoother experience. Let me know if this is interesting, and I might pursue it further to make a shippable product with good UX.
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Ark VCS 0.13 Is out! Among other things, it brings a cool feature that allows marking files to not be allowed to be committed simply by writing #nocommit inside the file.
If a file is binary, you can also right-click and Set No Commit
#gamedev #IndieGameDev #SoftwareDevelopment
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Wouldn’t be surprised that there’s 2 very different mentalities inside MS of ppl very tied to the kernel and ppl at the application level. Even in games you find this duality of very specialised ppl closer to the engine and ppl that just want to add plugins to do everything
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Then maybe project owners should just block these things. Let them fork repositories if they want to mess around, but prevent them from adding more entropy into the projects.
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The issue is _not_ the engine. I'd say the majority of problems is gameplay code. Blueprints started the problem, Gameplay Ability System was a mistake, developers took and ran with it. Lyra demo project exacerbated it.
The problem is gameplay programmers.
That being said, this engine is bloated.
>play game
>it has poor performance
>check the engine
>its UE5
Literally 9/10 times its always this piece of shit
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Not discussing the merits the language may or may not have. If you think that the language is good, great, go build new things in it.
Adding it into existing projects just adds complexity.
A while back there was also this thing about ppl just wanting to make C libraries into C++, which thankfully most ppl disregarded. Most of them became extensions / wrappers (e.g. gtk and gtk++).
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I do find fascinating the eagerness of the majority of programmers to find ways of condensing more information into less lines and not realizing the cognitive cost of doing so, and on top of that mistaking it as productivity.
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The problem is not governments, the problem is the Portuguese.
If the problem was governments you'd have some bad government that would be kicked out, but that's not what you have.
You have a people that has been trained to obey, that wastes their fighting spirit on football, that uses that same football logic to vote for political parties no matter how incompetent they are, that loves to complain about everything but is too lazy to act, that lives off glories from 500 years ago and keeps waiting for a Don Sebastião to come and save them from all the problems.
And on top of all that you have many other things, the problem is much bigger than just "houses not built", and there is an immigration problem - and not just illegal - which will now be the focus and drive attention away of how the middle class will keep being destroyed.
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Finally have something to share about Ark, a VCS that aims to be an alternative to #perforce and #git, specially aimed at #gamedev. If you're also unhappy with current VCS state, please take a look at ark-vcs.com/
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Polish is super important, but it should always be done when you’re confident in the mechanics.
This is the biggest problem in big game productions, we tend to evaluate mechanics based on the looks. So you tend to do tons of passes in mechanics that are just not good in expectation that the looks will improve it, and in a lot of cases these features will get dropped making for a huge waste of time or worse actually end up in the game.
The same with level design, we tend to just start polishing levels instead of staying in block outs until we’re confident about the levels.
Time we spend like this will cut into developing other features and into making things run with good performance.
Recently had the opportunity to build 3 demos to demonstrate the power of game feel!
#gamedevelopment
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Although I do understand your frustration as somebody that has to work constantly with folder / file creation in my VCS, I'd say yes but with a create_path_if_doesnt_exist bool you can pass (which could be true by default, just want an option for when I know everything is ready).
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Private makes it easy for you to shallowly hide something, but you can still reach it, it just makes it disgusting / error prone when you have to actually access it for whatever reason (yes, it does happen).
Naming your variables in a way that hints it is _far better_.
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The funny thing is that they saw that and still thought “yeah, that’s good, let’s release the video”.
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The best message is when you go to a website with some chromium browser and it tells you it’s not supported on this browser and you have to use one of the specific chromium implementations
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Yesterday, Ark VCS had a demo at Handmade Seattle 2024 conference. Here's the video of the demo.
You can find the video of the first day at piped.video/watch?v=zYAif5Ph… #software #gamedev #indiegamedev
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Ark VCS 0.12 is out!
MacOS is now a universal app, it also has... Linux GUI beta!
Also has a new GUI Git importer, which opened a lot of interesting options.
Here's a demo on Linux import Dear ImGui (emails obfuscated for demo purposes).
#gamedev #indiedev #IndieGameDev
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They are creating a huge cognitive load and should be improved.
Unfortunately too late for C++, but hopefully other languages will learn from this mistake.
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Memory leaks are such a non-issue, don't get why we created the stigma that memory management and pointers are evil / difficult concepts.
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European Union is not a meritocracy. Lack of English skills is not the only problem with this character.
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It is just so much more cumbersome to work with, it's clearly a system done for scripts to manage, so unfriendly when compared to ipv4.
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This is not cool to read :P But both debugging and error handling with templates is a nightmare when compared to C.
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ark-vcs.com 0.9.10 was just released! A while back somebody asked me how merging a big project like Unreal Engine from one branch to another would look, so here it is. #gamedev #indiegamedev #software
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Only big companies can decide to phase out aggressively one of their best products and replace it with an inferior version.
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No offense taken, I didn't say that was the case I said it is so prevalent that it feels like that.
I've said before, but I'm not anti rust. I don't care either way, I just think it's odd for this push of putting it into existing projects. Adding more complexity to tech just creates problems instead of solving them.
An option would be just making clones. Another would be wrappers that extend functionality, the same way that C++ libraries wrapped around C libraries instead of just putting C++ into them.
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Unfortunately all companies focusing on investing in Portugal tend to go do Lisbon or Porto.
Highly recommend looking into other places, where local governments have done great work. Ponte de Sôr is a great example.
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Just feels like a waste of energy, and ostracizing the community members that actually wrote the thing up to this point.
Same thing with with trying to get it in the kernel or rewriting unix tools in it. Make new tools, better tools, tools with GUIs for god's sake.
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Ark 0.8.0 is out, and it brings MacOS support!
MacOS version has feature parity with Windows, that means a 7MB executable with server, cli and gui.
If you're looking into an alternative to #git and #p4, please check it out at ark-vcs.com.
#gamedev #IndieGameDev
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One of the biggest tricks from github, convincing ppl that their activity on their service correlates with quality of output.
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Ark 0.10.0 was released, and it brings Tags.
I also decided to jump to the final form of the licensing model:
- Indie: free up to $500K funding / annual revenue
- Business: perpetual license w/ 1y of upgrades and price per seat
ark-vcs.com
#software #gamedev #indiegamedev
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Nunca percebi o conceito de voluntário para conferências quando os preços dos bilhetes são bastante altos e até há sponsors.
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No, the times are the times the plane was scheduled to depart.
Also, at least in Portugal, the names of destinations switch between Portuguese and English, so the destination ordering would imply moving the entries around between languages.
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Quite interesting how lines of code keep being used as if it was a good metric of quality. Always surprises me when somebody with a programming background still uses it.
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Had the immense pleasure being interviewed by Łukasz for his @wookash_podcast, and it is finally out!
It was great to be able to talk about version control systems, go into why decentralization is a mistake for 99% of developers, and also showcase a why Ark VCS is better! :-] @wookash_podcast Thank you for having me!
Here is crazy fun talk with @nafonsopt who was kind enough to not only chat with me, but made a demo of the ARK right there during our chat.
Git works great for source code, but when you enter the world of projects frequently changing binary data, solutions that Git (LFS) or other VCSs provide are quite mediocre.
@nafonsopt, being an observant engineer, watched the pain, extracted the core concepts and made ARK which is a VCS answering this need. And to top it, made it in jai, @Jonathan_Blow's language - hashtag flex.
Nuno, thanks a lot for the time! I had lots of fun and it was great to challenge some of my git-oriented mentality.
(Who even needs decentralized vcs really?)
Enjoy the conversation!!
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Ark is meant to be a performance driven versioning control system, and here is how that looks when compared to the industry standards #git and #perforce piped.video/watch?v=RTYhX61v…. Find out more at ark-vcs.com #gamedev #indiegamedev #programming #software
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It’s a greyscale, knowing the direction you want to go in is important, knowing how exactly it’s going to be at the end is not. I do agree that academia focuses too much on how things are at the end - tbh a lot of projects are quite simple and usually you’re given a exactly what you need to deliver -, but also if you’re doing anything complex without thinking of the direction you’re going it creates tons of problems too. The best programmers in my experience are the ones that can see this “direction cone” quite well and know to keep things simple.
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I don’t think games these days take ages because of tech, they take ages because weak game design / direction. We went from games have to be fully defined before ppl you could consider you’re in production to games going into production with just some ideas barely designed.
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This is all great, but have you seen the quality of the software in the average entertainment system of basically all legacy brands?
Maybe if you have a few high quality vendors this can work, but I for one won't trust legacy companies doing it themselves.
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And that's fine, if you like a language and you want to make a copy of something, do it. I'm specifically pointing out the getting into the middle of a project and adding yet another tech stack. Adding library dependencies is already bad, but adding full new systems is just bad decision making.
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@Quenestil For example:
And it's common to have things like instead of you just calling some function, you send some event with a gameplay tag that something intercepts and reacts on it, then triggering some other message, etc.
Not only does performance get back with this approach, but debugging is so much harder, going in and fixing something becomes way harder because either you have to strip out tons of middle layers or you simply can't really do much.
And then you need to ship, _many times_ whomever did these systems is not there anymore, and it's very hard to understand what impact changes will have, and the closer to release the more ppl are afraid of "big refactors", so it becomes a game of just time slicing logic, instead of N shots the weapon now deals N / 2, etc.
IMO the old damage pipeline from UE was 10x better than what GAS brought to the table.
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Given that I get notification symbols on my app, then I open it and there's no notifications, and after I click notifications it actually displays them, I wouldn't call it a solved problem yet.
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Git is just not a great tool in version control for almost everybody.
Somebody making a new VCS in rust would be a better use of energy than putting rust into git. The tool is flawed for the use it's being given.
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If you’re trying to get to market super fast browsers are really the only way. There’s not any good solution for you to deploy a cross platform native app with tons of features like you can with browser. Only 1 I can think of is qt which was expensive and super convoluted to use
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The problem is not just readability - although that's an important one -, but also performance and easiness to refactor.
Having worked on big projects with both approaches, the BP ones were the hardest to fix bugs and improve performance.
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New post about how the @UnrealEngine #framework is split between server & client on #network nafonso.com/home/unreal-fram… #gamedev #indiegamedev
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Highly recommend this talk by the great @voxagonlabs
@voxagonlabs' talk "Parallelizing the physics solver" is now out on YouTube. Enjoy!
piped.video/Kvsvd67XUKw
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Actually this would make sense for just going “I want to reimplement x in y language”. Doesn’t explain when you add a new language into an existing project, since the license would stay the same. Pretty sure that even if you rewrite it piece by piece it probably wouldn’t old up.
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I blame it on poor education. When I was in school, there was a considerate growth of teachers pushing the "fear of memory management" and how "it's a problem of the past because it's solved with GC".
We also train ppl to be afraid of making things, that they should just get stuff off the shelf / built-in.
I was molded by these approaches and was lucky enough to have a good mentor early on in my career that dispelled a bunch of these misconceptions (including extreme OOP doctrine).
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Do we actually know what percentage of users cares about that? ATM only thing that would even make me consider upgrading phones is not performance, it’s battery and system stability.
It’s cool from a tech but not from a user pov. Feels like it’s for Apple to keep prices high.
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First version of Ark VCS running GUI client in MacOS X #gamedev #IndieGameDev #softwaredevelopment #perforce #git
ALT Ark Version Control System's GUI running for the first time in MacOS X
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Regardless if I agree with it, I can comprehend somebody deciding to shutdown the plants.
The thing that I don't get is why the urge to start destroying them? Why not simply leave them there? It would at least give you options instead of permanently handicapping you.
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Sorry if it came out that way, didn't mean to say that there weren't ppl doing it, it's just weird all this drama regarding rust. For example Odin you just see ppl doing stuff, there's no dramas about trying to push itself onto other projects.
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It's great to connect to a machine via ssh, put the app running and then detach, and close the ssh connection.
Later you can connect to it again, reattach to that tmux session, and have the stdout right there, quite useful imo.
That being said, it has horrible shorcuts.
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Ark Vcs 0.2.0 was released!
Adds a Built-In Server option which allows you to have local Servers ran automatically for you, very helpful if you want to try out Ark or evaluate it while using another vcs ark-vcs.com #gamedev #indiegamedev @programming #sofware
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The problem is that git is the wrong tool for game dev. Regardless of how complicated it is given it’s decentralised architecture, it requires to picky back on git-lfs and I don’t know a single team >5 that didn’t get into issues using it for game dev.
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I used to love driving at night, was really pleasant.
As I age it's getting more and more intolerable. Would be great to have some better tech applied to headlights to help minimize the current issues.
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Why did it decide that your conversation was more interesting than the one I was having?!
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Ark 0.4.0 was released! This version focuses on improving collaboration on small issues with a rethinking of what Shelves should be. ark-vcs.com #gamedev #indiegamedev #Software
piped.video/watch?v=ZgdJcLWA…
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Unity had the same kind of problems years back (e.g. physics would allocate), and Unity staff had the same kind of stance / arrogance when we brought up issues to them.
I think this is the kind of thing that happens when a project goes from niche to massive amount of people.
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Just released Ark 0.7.0! Main feature is communication encryption. If you're looking into an alternative to git / perforce, please check out ark-vcs.com.
Next big release is focusing on Mac OS X support. #gamedev #indiedev #IndieGameDev #SoftwareDevelopment
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5h para fazer viagem directa Lisboa -> Madrid, uma viagem de 500km em linha recta, é uma média de 100km/h. Sou o único que não está impressionado com isto?
Em 2034 viagem será 3h... Tipo... parece muito pouco interessante. No máximo esperaria uma viagem de 2h.
Portugal e Espanha ligam Lisboa a Madrid por ferrovia até 2030
Viagem direta em 5h e alta velocidade em 3h até 2034
Menos voos, mais mobilidade sustentável
Investimento europeu, interoperabilidade e compromisso climático
#MIH #MinistériodasInfraestruturaseHabitação #LisboaMadrid
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If I didn't use Jai, I would be in this camp too. Although there are some annoyances it is still so much better to work with than c++.
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Some times you just start going down rabbit holes.
I wonder how much the Linux community is actually interested in a new VCS with GUI that is very different from Git.
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I think ppl mix simplicity with less lines of code, which is actually not the case. Debugging this kind of templated code is much worse, no real gain from using it.
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It has so many layers and indirection that it’s not uncommon to have big call stacks for something as simple as dealing damage.
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Ark Versioning Control System first preview launched! If you're looking for an alternative to #perforce and #git, specially focused on #gamedev, please give it a try at ark-vcs.com and consider supporting it! #indiedev #IndieGameDev #programmer #softwaredevelopment
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Surprised to not have found any tweet from this account Thronebreaker. Almost everything in the overworld is 2D hand drawn elements.
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The people have spoken, and now with Ark 0.13.1 you can also use #nocommit on workspace changelists!
ark-vcs.com/download.html
#gamedev #indiegamedev #SoftwareDevelopment
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I think in practice it will be "another cmake" added to projects. Software already has such bad build systems / practices, this will only make it worse.
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I disagree with Godot's developer, but it's a bit disingenuous post. It makes it sound like Unity were always "pros" when that's not the case.
At least with Godot, you have source, so if you have a problem you can try to fix it, with Unity we couldn't.
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Sempre pensei que a revolução solar seria na aplicação no topo dos edificios, dps até começou a aparecer empresas com conceitos de meter nas estradas, todo este raciocínio fazia sentido.
Começar a eliminar área vegetal para cobrir de painéis nc me passou pela cabeça.
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As tech keeps getting more complex, Ark tries to bring back simplicity to how Version Control Systems handle servers.
In Ark a server is self contained in a folder. To migrate it, you simply move the folder
piped.video/SRGT-nZbTzM
#programming #gamedev #IndieGameDev #software
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I think it’s quite important for a person to decide what they want to put into the world and that money, views or clicks shouldn’t be the primary metrics.
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The worst feeling of no trust that windows gives me is when I open task manager and see that the cpu was being used at 100% but then immediately stops, w/out you being able to see what was using it. Would be great for windows to have better TM including keeping some temp history
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I once was told that at a big-ish company that doesn't use Unity they decided to organize an internal game jam, and basically a lot of the ppl that did it used Unity.
The company was contacted in the following days to either pay for Unity or uninstall it.
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Which would you prefer to work it as a normal user?
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If you have to manage server infrastructure, you probably setup mechanisms to deal with this, but as a normal user ipv6 is horrible.
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Ark VCS 0.3.0 is Released!
It now has file locking support. Here's a video of how it approaches it when compared to #perforce
piped.video/watch?v=H46ZqPzm…
For a simple and fast VCS, specially focused on supporting #gamedev #indiegamedev pls check out at ark-vcs.com
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Ark 0.6.5 is out! It includes the ignore system revamp and Ignore Inspector.
Here's creating a new workspace with a built-in server, importing Unreal Engine 5.3 and committing it in just 2 minutes. ark-vcs.com #gamedev #IndieGameDev #SoftwareDevelopment
VCS ignores can be complicated in big projects, making hard to know why something is or is not ignored. So with the revamp of ignore system for ark-vcs.com, decided to expose this info. This is running real-time on UE 5 source (~183k files / folders).
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Stop putting global shortcuts on your software!
The other day I had a problem with Ctrl+Shift+X, turns out that it was some AMD software running in the background. Luckily, it has settings to turn it off.
Today Alt+Shift+S wasn't working as expected, so it turns out it's Microsoft Edge deciding to take a global hotkey even when the browser is in the background to push some new visual search BS they want to boost some metrics on.
And being Microsoft, you can't turn it off! Instead it gives you a link to Edge shortcuts, in which this new BS feature is not even there.
Conclusion, uninstalling Edge. Good job guys.
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Every time there's a new LLM being hyped, I ask it to do a myers diff algorithm in C. They never delivered a working one. Some compile, some don't, usually there's an error they tend to do and when I tell them it properly fixes, but they don't generate a proper edit script.
Curiously enough, a friend of mine after I commented about this was able to get chatgpt to give one that works, but he reached there in a less linear way. First he had asked to do just a diff, and then later the question was adjusted to ask for myers, and the same usual error appeared and then it fixed it, but it was in the end a working myers that generated correct edit scripts.
However, when I ask chatgpt it never gave me a proper one. So I don't know where this will go, but _maybe_ that's the approach that ppl using LLMs (at least in the short term) need to do, like don't go straight to some problems but circle around them, I don't know how to explain it better.
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Just released Ark Vcs 0.6.0, which brings Linux server / cli support.
If you're looking for an alternative to Perforce / Git, please give it a look. ark-vcs.com
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