SDL is written in C, but bindings are available for multiple languages, including C++ and C#. As it happens I was actually using it with C++. And there are other libraries you could use instead, like GLFW or Allegro.
I’ve never thought of C as being that much lower-level than C++, but I guess everything’s relative.
the cross platform is a pain.
It doesn’t have to be with libraries like SDL. Years ago I got stuck fighting all-in-one game engines that didn’t fit my design choices, precisely because I thought it would be worth it for platform independence. Then I found out about SDL, which was what I actually wanted.
If someone thinks that not using a pre-rolled engine with a full editing suite included is a waste of time, I can respect that. But there are options if you’d rather make your own but still don’t want to have to learn the ins and outs of multiple hardware architectures and operating systems.
Only if what you are printing onto is regular paper. My contention is that since printing itself has become a somewhat niche act for individuals printing at home, they’re more likely to be printing for specific reasons, which means that they’re more likely to want to print things like transfers or other specialized substrates that may not work well with laser printing.
Yes, I believe that laser printer toner lasts longer than fluid ink, although ink can last for years when stored in a properly sealed bottle rather than in a cartridge inside the printer, which is possible with a user-fillable cartridge.
Thanks to the proliferation of portable devices, a lot of people no longer need a printer for “regular” printing at all in 2026, and some of the more interesting printing substrates either don’t accept toner well or won’t survive the heat of a laser printer’s toner setting stage.
Also, while the technology is theoretically simpler, it may be harder for an individual to source or make the physical components like rotating drums and high-res LED arrays.
Anyone who is already familiar with HSR, imagine seeing this video and having it be the first time you’ve even heard of Homestar Runner.
You’d probably feel like some kind of tapeleg.
The classic adage of “The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time” comes to mind.
Its always all those “little touches” that eat up so much time, because you know that your audience will expect them, and you yourself feel that they should be there; a smoothly-moving cursor for menu selections, playing little sounds when selecting or cancelling, a puff of dust that jumps up when the player character lands (but keeps animating in place rather than sticking to the player), text sliding or fading in and out instead of just appearing and disappearing… All the individual “little” things that add up to quite a lot of work.
I also sympathize with you on a lot of the points you raised about “family-friendly” games. I’m a teacher, and when I make activities and games for my students, I face a similar set of constraints (must be enjoyable for the weakest students but still engaging for the most advanced students, little to no player elimination, high replayability/reusability, has to actually reinforce the target knowledge/skill and not just be fun with the material tacked on as an afterthought).
I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing “VIbc coam” on the spine.
I have a stupid question: Are you sure you’re not confusing “line out” and “headphone out”? They’re different, and pretty much every desktop supports both these days. But standard PC speakers usually connect to the “headphone” socket.
Private members aren’t actively blocked from external access; they’re passively marked “Access prohibited”.
That means that rather than being unable to find the members of a class, C programmers simply can’t pick up on the signals telling them that they’re not wanted.
(Fellow C programmers: I’m joking. :D)
People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
Cheers to the person who linked to the “font - hide” solution. I didn’t know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only “valid” for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.
He sure loves to evangelise “cloning”, a.k.a. “copying other people’s work”. One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.
To make an analogy, there’s usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that’s acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.
People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.
I’m sorry if you’ve already checked this, but I had a similar problem with a Windows laptop recently that just would NOT stay in standby. It wasn’t a question of if, but how long.
Eventually I found that some "Wake on IP’ settings were set to “Wake on any/all IP traffic”. I switched those off and now the thing stays in standby/screen blanked.
Mitchell and Webb.
“Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?”
My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn’t recover properly due to some edge case.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to believe that if I thought of something that I’d never heard of before, I must have been the first person ever to come up with it.
Now that I’m older and the Internet is ubiquitous, when I have those moments I go straight to a search engine. And even if I’m not the first, I still feel pretty good about discovering whatever it is for myself.
I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I’ll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.
I think it depends a lot on context.
Wiping the dust off an old, low-spec ex-office PC, getting it barely functional, throwing a couple of RGB lights in it and trying to pass it off as a competent gaming rig for a high price would be completely unethical, I agree. But salvaging an old PC, actually refurbishing it into something useful for light day-to-day use, and selling it as such with a small markup to cover parts and labour seems completely fine to me.
You and I may have the skills needed to take a worn-out old PC and breathe new life into it easily, but not everyone who’d be happy with a modest secondhand system can do that.
As it happens, until just a few years ago I was running my high-end games on what started as a secondhand commodity PC with an i5-3470, without complaint.
Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?
From what I’ve seen, efforts to develop microtransaction/microdonation systems generally seem to have trouble with regulatory compliance, either through legitimate legal requirements that force them to do things that seem nonsensical to their users (My guess is that the registered servers issue OP mentioned with Flattr came down to this), or due to greedy intermediaries stalling and witholding under false pretences while they hold out for a bigger share of the money, without appreciating the already extremely thin margins involved.