>> I’m not a Unix geek. I get around ok, but I am most comfortable developing in Visual Studio on Windows.
This is a lesson for me and probably many others. Don't get hung up on tools, ship!!!
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That attitude is quite prevalent on the games industry, hence anyone that would spend some time among AAA devs would learn that they don't care one second about stuff like portable 3D APIs and OSes, as people in forums like HN think they do.
What matters is making a cool game with whatever tech is available and ship.
Game engine programmer here. I came up on DOS and Windows, and for a long time that's what I was comfortable with, and everything else I presumed to be alien. Once I'd worked on things that were both cross-platform and low-level, the idea that different hardware platforms and OSes were different went out the window somewhat. It was literally enlightening. In the old days, we had to be mercenaries. SNES is popular now? Port the code to that. PC getting big? Port to that. Later on, it was more like you had to be on everything. The last proprietary engine I worked on would compile with large subsets of features intact on Windows, MacOS, PS2 through 4, XBOX 1 through One, iOS, and Android. Probably more than that! Someone in the company was always adding a new backend, and I was frequently surprised to learn we ran on something I didn't even know we ran on. To a user, these platforms are totally different from each other, right? They aren't. It's all putting data in buffers, pushing parameters on the stack, and jumping. More importantly, the backends were tiny compared to the game engine.
This perspective makes it supremely frustrating anytime I try to get a 'normal' programming job, and run into the 'but do you have .NET4, ASP.NET Core, and JS6??' mentality.
There really is only a few post-game programmer job that will use the skills you've developed creating games: science and new technology development. That is where you'll find developers and dev shops that respect coding without frameworks (because the platform is so new there are none) or without the popular, latest dev tool toys. Working in such a shop is often supremely satisfying because your job is to make that new platform conform to modern development standards. A job an experienced game developer does on their own anyway.
Great advice! I did front and back end web dev at Microsoft for a few years. One of many nice things about working there was I, personally, didn’t get typecast too much. Though, ironically, after my web stint, some game teams didn’t want me anymore :( But I eventually did find a role in HoloLens.
* ES6
makes note: not normal programming material
Exactly what I mean, thanks for sharing.
I think the subtext of your comment here is something like, "Look how productive he is without mastering the real tools we Unix hackers use! He can get by with second rate Windows stuff!"
Maybe I'm reading you wrong. But if I am right, it's good to take a look outside of the Unix bubble. Visual Studio is literally the world's most sophisticated developer tool. More human hours of engineering have been poured into it than likely any other piece of software we use on a daily basis.
Windows isn't my jam, but VS is incredible.
I laughed when I read the tools he was using, fvwm and vi. Back in 1993 or so, I wrote a hundred thousand lines of filesystem performance benchmarks using those exact tools. They're surprisingly productive.
does it beat intellj's IDEs?
yes
Here here. Junior webdevs will often consider the use of vim and other command line tools (over GUI based tools or IDEs) a badge of honor.
I find this interesting since I used to get so excited as a teenager when one of the id peeps updated their .plan file.
Yeah that was the point that stuck out for me the most as well.
He took a week off to focus on a problem set, and ended up spending a number of hours working around the limitations of his setup instead.
I mean, I don't want to sound judgmental. Perhaps that was part of his plan. It just stuck out to me as seeming orthogonal to his expressed goals.
I'd say it's part of the plan - don't pass judgment over a system until you've tried it for an X amount of time. Same with Windows and Visual Studio. It's sorta related to cargo cult I guess.