HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

> There must be a lot of engineering work between parsing the JSON and having a playable level in ones engine

Yes (btw., if this wall of text already seems iffy, there's a convenient TL;DR at the bottom end), making a level playable involves many things which such an editor doesn't even touch. The game logic updating game states, enemy AI, pathfinding, physics, rendering, audio …

Whereas this “just” puts tiles into grid cells in layers. But: There's a UI that lets you quickly pick the type of tile you want to place next. And it doesn't have to be one particular sprite; it could be a collection of variations from which each grid cell receives one at random. And then you can undo that last one you accidentally misplaced. Then you can select a region, move it a few clicks over, copy and paste, etc. You have a UI for adding meta-data — e.g. ‘this region is tagged to trigger cut-scene #3 when entered’ — actually implementing that functionality in your engine is still up to you.

So how is this universal, agnostic, compatible? Good question. Now, disclaimer: I haven't actually looked at LEd yet beyond quickly skimming the above-linked site; I'm just a little familiar with relevant concepts from having come across similar tools (e.g. mapeditor.org, mentioned in andrewmcwatters's sibling comment). Check out the animation at the top of the linked page — note that when the user changes a particular tile or region of tiles, there are additional tiles adjacent to the edited region also changing. This sort of convenience saves a lot of time when editing levels, and with the right set of tools, you can get this almost for free.

Here's how: There are certain quasi-standard ways of laying out related tiles within a tile sheet (i.e. an image file / texture atlas with an implicit regular grid of rectangular cells) where you know that if you hand a graphics artist a template and they fill everything in with their pixels, every combination, transition, edge- and corner-case will have been handled. For example, if the tile at (3, 3) is land (some_enum.0) and the tile at (4, 3) is water (some_enum.7), you want a land graphic with a coast on its right edge and, to the right of that, a water animation with waves on its left side. As the tile sheet layout is well defined, so is the algorithm for translating that situation into the concrete offsets into the tile sheet where the respective tile graphics will be found. Someone might still have to implement that algorithm, but in an Open Source scenario, this only has to be done once for a given engine or graphics tool, instead of starting from scratch for every single game project.

As I was in a bit of a hurry and the above attempt at an explanation turned out quite vague and potentially confusing, I meant to offer a quite fun way of accessing much better illustrations of the concept: Look into the new-ish technique of wave function collapse! For a quick intro to the basics, see [0] or [1]. Alas, the particular implementation that very clearly shows how this is related to mapping the types of adjacent tiles to coordinates in a tile sheet stubbornly refused to show up even after a quarter hour of furiously searching the web and my bookmarks. Add ‘game‘ and/or ‘tiled‘ to that search term and you'll get a bonanza of interesting thesis papers and talks by pro game devs. I hope that skimming the abstracts for some top search results will get the point across.

Quick bonus tangent: Perusing Sebastien Benard's 2019 GDC talk on Dead Cells[2] is an absolute must. Unfortunately it's completely unrelated to the above-mentioned topics, even though Dead Cells does make an appearance in some of the relevant literature; but if you're at all interested in game design, it's way too good to not mention.

Summary: Implementing the enzymes that let your engine digest the output of your JSON parser will be a non-zilch amount of effort, but it's much less work than inventing a level editor from scratch. Or, paraphrasing poet/philosopher Fatboy Slim's sampling of some ancient IBM commercial[3]: “People[4] should think; machines can do the work.”

𝗘𝗱𝗶𝘁: In case you hadn't decided already: I'm a complete idiot. Hours before I even showed up here, bdickason† already mentioned[5] the relevant term of art: auto-tiling. Go look that up.

[0] https://robertheaton.com/2018/12/17/wavefunction-collapse-al... [1] https://gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ [2] https://youtu.be/OfSpBoA6TWw [3] https://youtu.be/_IZw2CoYztk [4] game/level designers [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599602 † Yeah, I know. But this contribution is genuinely very relevant and helpful. Credit where credit is due!

No, it's not, and these people should be held accountable for that for sure.

On the other hand, we don't know the exact details of how the whole system is set up.

It might be that "they "didn't get the memo" that they were voting for the wrong thing?" is underselling that the whole system is full of bad (if not flat-out dark) UI/UX patterns that increase the chance of mistakes like this. A good run-through of that might benefit everyone.

I will confess that I'm probably a bit biased in my interpretation of the context; I quickly feel overwhelmed by administration stuff and am always scared in bureaucratic contexts that I fill in some form incorrectly. Basically, it makes me feel like I'm in Jim Henson's Paperwork Explosion[0]. So doing that as your job sounds terrifyingly stressful to me (and yes, I do realize it's weird that I don't feel the same about programming, which is arguably the act of writing instructions for an unforgiving literal-minded bureaucratic automaton).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

⬐ dang

The explosion reminds me of his hilarious and surprisingly violent ads for Wilkins Coffee. They have precursors of Kermit the Frog and other muppets from as early as the 1950s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmhIizQQol0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxLyuw5bdyk

http://www.openculture.com/2012/05/jim_hensons_violent_wilki...

Seems like Wilkins Coffee is remembered mostly for those commercials: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wilkins+coffee%22&oq=%22w...

... though they were able to land a PR piece into the Washington Post in 1989: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1989/0...

⬐ hahamrfunnyguy

I first heard this 20 or so years ago when a compliation of works by Raymond Scott came out. The music featured in this advertisment is by Ramond Scott a composer and pioneer of the synthesiser for musical purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Scott

⬐ christkv

Reminds me of this other short done by Jim Henson for IBM I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IgF6_jVaj8

⬐ asciimo

About half way through I accepted the likelihood that there would be no muppets. Then I was surprised that this was an ad, and not an art film about Orwellian offices.

⬐ vanderZwan

If you listen closely you can hear Frank Oz say a few lines though

⬐ 52-6F-62

The last shot is a killer— "I don't do much work anymore—I'm too busy thinking."

⬐ egypturnash

AAAHM TOO BUSY THINKIN'

⬐ kevin_thibedeau

This machine reduces the head count of the typing pool. They're all busy looking for a new job.

⬐ 52-6F-62

Yep— that’s that old “two sides to every coin” part. GP made a much better point of that—I just was mentioning one line that struck me. People still are shooting for that end, but not preparing for the fallout so well.

⬐ vortico

Is it meant for the elderly man to look like Statler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Statler_and_Waldorf.jpg

⬐ ThJ

I think it's the other way around, given the age of the ad. The old man looks like he was the inspiration for that character.

⬐ superhuzza

Wow, the style immediately made me think of Organism (1975) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5X2zpCFzk

I can't seem to find any relation between the two, but the videos seem eerily similar to me.

⬐ DalekBaldwin

I know this from audio samples used in the Music for Programming podcast. I always want to find out where various bits of dialogue in the podcast come from, but they're generally really hard to Google. It made me laugh to see that this one looks exactly the way I imagined.

⬐ a3n

And now that paperwork is no longer paper, we can do even more paperwork. Thanks, IBM!

(After I just got off the phone to make an appointment with my doctor, not a new doctor, and it took 15 minutes to "freshen up" the paperwork.)

⬐ lasermike026

I really like 60's documentary styles.

⬐ tomphoolery

/r/NotTimAndEric

⬐ vanderZwan

Sorry if this is off-topic for HN. I thought more people here would be interested in looking back at this advertisement from 1967 for IBM. Not just for the vision of the automated future it promotes, but also because of the presentation style, and a bit because Jim Henson of Muppets fame made it.

I cannot say for sure if it is my modern interpretation of an old video, but my take is that Henson inserted a lot of ominous undertones that were subtly subversive the "official" stance of the advertisement. Certainly would fit his character. Henson also made a video with similar themes for AT&T in 1963, with an automated robot[0].

In retrospect we can see that instead of freeing us up, automation merely lead to more paperwork - an example of Jevons Paradox in action[1]. To me it's a reminder that with many problems we try to improve things by doing it the same way but more efficiently. Sometimes that is appropriate, but sometimes that will not be enough, or even make things worse without also applying first-principle changes that address the root cause of the problem.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivJNNwTGDcw

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

⬐ dredmorbius

Thanks for the Jevons Paradox mention, as that was going to be my comment.

If you want to reduce paperwork (or nearly any other activity or consumption), you need to increase its costs (or decrease its benefits), not reduce them through efficiency improvements. Preferably on the party imposing it.

⬐ mercer

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a younger sibling (10+ years) about high school homework.

I was shocked to hear from him and our parents how much homework he was assigned compared to myself at his age, and I couldn't help but wonder whether the ease with which this homework was assigned played a role.

In 'my day' homework involved handing in paperwork, which the teacher took home to grade over the weekend, along with that of 30+ fellow students.

In 'his day' homework involved filling in a web form within some shitty e-learning environment, or at worst uploading a document somewhere, which the teacher could either grade automatically in the former cases, or skim through on their laptop in the latter case.

Discussions surrounding this increase in homework often center around higher-level sociological/psychological factors, but I wonder how much of a role ease played in all this: if you can grade 30+ tests with a click of a button, perhaps it leads to more testing?

⬐ dredmorbius

Damned good point there.

> stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. (...) I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...

What I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions is Jevon's Paradox[0], which can be summarised as:

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

Or more cynically: when increased efficiency creates greater demand than that increase in efficiency. I probably don't need to convince anyone here that this happens in real life all the time - we're all familiar with Wirth's Law[1], right?

So I think the same applies to automation and work. If anyone hasn't seen "Paperwork Explosion" by Jim Henson (you know, the guy who made The Muppets and the original voice of Kermit, and Ernie), this is a really good time to do so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk

Look at what IBM promised: freedom from administrative woes! We can go back to do real productive work! Essentially exactly what we're hearing now. Now compare it to what actually happened. At the last two universities I've worked I have seen a lot of “the administration department is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding administration department” in action. At the expense of the quality of education and science, I might add.

Buurtzorg Nederland[2] got a lot of attention in recent years for breaking that trend with its simple approach to letting nurses self-organise as independent, self-managing teams (so what Agile tried to be I suppose, except for nurses). What is often overlooked is that this is basically just going back to the model that the Netherlands had up until the 1980s, but a bit enhanced with modern information/communication technology. Jos de Blok, who founded Buurtzorg, briefly that in this short TED talk[3], but my parents were both general practitioners until they retired a few years ago confirmed that this happened all throughout healthcare.

With programming, we know that complexity is something that must be actively fought or it sneaks in. We even have tons of special descriptions for how that happens: spaghetti code, big ball of mud, etc. So ask yourself: why would it be different in any other human-created system?

For me, this is part of the explanation for all the obscurity we see everywhere (that, and a vested interest of a number of parties in keeping things obfuscated). And my prediction is that the natural tendency of automation is to backfire, unless we actively fight this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg

"Machines should work, People should think."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk