Yes, that was the the place, I was one of the first engineers in that office but we got up to about 50 full-time devs at the peak before they started getting moved over to Europe for lower cost labor.
It was a total PITA to work with but not due to the engine itself but some choices that were made over time to use IN CODE FEATURE SWITCHES since it was before git and branches. There were thousands of features added and controlled with statements like this:
#define ENABLE_FEATURE
#ifdef ENABLE_FEATURE
// New feature implemented
#else
// Old code that is left around but probabbly won't work if the feature gets disabled
#endif
Then multiply this choice by every...single...line...of code that had to be changed for one feature. It was nightmare until we could adopt and transition to Git with branches and clean it up.
I actually worked on the Poseidon engine back when I was at BISim for serious game Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) which was the spin off built for military training.
The codebase here is so much cleaner and better organized than the version I remember wrestling with on a daily basis, and if you remember how buggy and unstable the DayZ launch was for users it can all be traced back to this since it was never envisioned to live as long and scale as far as it did. Fun fact Poseidon was the original internal game name they were building in 1999 before changing the game name and renaming the engine to Real Virtuality.
It's also easy to forget just how far ahead of its time this was since this shipped large open worlds with maps that were 12.5 km × 12.5 km and that was really easy to mod with a runtime scripting language SQF, not a separate mission editor. This was all in 2001, which is three years before Half-Life 2 would come out.
From personal experience finding and researching senior care ends up being a big trap, they lead you into a sales funnel before you can clearly compare real options. Data is hidden behind walls and when your under time pressure, and trying to make a serious decision, you end up hitting a search experience that is dominated by SEO pages, phone-number capture, referral incentives, all because your contact info is the product they will sell to elder care facilities.
Focused on Florida first to get the right UX and details needed.
My goal is is to make it way simpler with real prices and data research first and then add AI advisors who can make it much easier to make an informed decision. Then adding products that cut out the middle man, because it feels broken and shady right now.
The nearest current use of detection of particles in the air that I can think of is smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors for safety. Could adoption on these smart versions like Nest or Ring by adding your sniphi detector provide other types of early warning systems for safety, air quality or sensing?
Some thoughts are musty odors from mold/mildew, rotten egg smells indicating gas leaks, and fishy/burning plastic odors from electrical issues.
I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.
This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
I've heard that many of the big tech layoffs where actually just moved / converting them to contracting groups, so they lose the direct head count but kept the developer via the intermediary. Have others heard this too and could this have been a way to label contractors differently so they don't fall under this tax code?
I had similar experience with everything missing that final attention to detail and polish and having to write issues and ask other how they got past certain problems. I ended up switching to Pocketbase, and while it is not a complete or drop in replacement hosted service, it is light weight and approachable to feel comfortable that it can scale and be more stable long term.
Wow glad to see there were other fans of MSPaint, can't believe I built my open source version with wxWidgets 16 years ago https://github.com/murdockq/OpenPaint
I'm guessing this can be the new bot that could play competitively at GeoGuesser. It would be interesting if Google trained a similar model and released it using all the Street Map data, I sure hope they do.
Has anyone done something similar with the geolocated WIFI MAC addresses, to have small model for predicting location from those.
It was a total PITA to work with but not due to the engine itself but some choices that were made over time to use IN CODE FEATURE SWITCHES since it was before git and branches. There were thousands of features added and controlled with statements like this:
#define ENABLE_FEATURE
#ifdef ENABLE_FEATURE // New feature implemented #else // Old code that is left around but probabbly won't work if the feature gets disabled #endif
Then multiply this choice by every...single...line...of code that had to be changed for one feature. It was nightmare until we could adopt and transition to Git with branches and clean it up.