Probably true in general. But there are always exceptions. Hard to imagine a tool better than Excel for slot game math calculations. Maybe it can be done?
Calculations for slot machine mechanics and payouts have been in Excel for a long time. There can be a LOT of complexity in these workbooks. Sometimes it’s tricky to debug - but what’s the alternative? Code is often hard to debug too.
Simulating results (Monte Carlo) is nice but having two sets of data for validation/checking against each other is nice.
The app refreshing every time it comes into focus is annoying. Not sure when this started but it’s frustrating when what I click on isn’t there after the app refreshes
It is useful to use the words hard and easy. As you mention, changing perspective around these concepts is the crux.
Hard problems or domains are unknowns. Working towards solving hard problems involves thinking through unknowns, which may or may not lead to understanding. An aversion to hard problems is an aversion to the unknown.
It's not as mature as other platforms, but it's built extremely well from the base up. Unity has a huge ecosystem and tools, but it's built on a shitty/messy platform full of bugs and hacks.
If I was to make a quick & simple 2d or mobile game today, I'd go with Unity. If you want to make something that will require more effort, but work well for years, Godot is better.
I definitely recommend GDScript, especially if you are using Godot 4 / GDScript 2. The language was designed to be used in Godot to make games, and in my opinion it’s very good at that. The editor integration is great, defining export variables for the inspector, adding doc comments that show up in the built in help viewer, dragging nodes and files into your script to get their onready and preload paths, etc… It’s just really nice to use, and takes literally a day to become proficient.
Yeah, I recently looked at setting up some C# dev for Godot 4 and I found documentation scarce. Conversely, GDScript was much better catered for, even allowing for the fact that the documentation isn't all there for Godot 4 yet
The only optimisation solver I use is Excel Solver Add-In.
It’s great, but you have to be able to put your problem into Excel to use it which does not work for all use cases.
In cases where I’m trying to optimise something that doesn’t quite fit into Excel cleanly I’ll usually do some sort of hand-rolled Monte Carlo optimisation. This generally works for me in the types of problems I most often solve.
Is it safe to say those optimizations are performed ad hoc? That is, you're manually in control of the optimization process instead of wiring it up to some kind of automation?
Yes! In particular, it is usually to create some concrete data/parameters to be used towards creating the final product.
In the usual Excel Solver case, for a simplified example, I want to create a biased coin where getting heads doubles your money and tails loses your money, with expected payout 90% in the long run. The parameters to change are heads/tails coin weighting, to target a value 90%. A fair coin gives a long run payout of 100%. It turns out that if a biased coin hits heads 45% of the time and tails 55% of the time, we end up with this 90% payout. Excel solver can come up with these two values.
In this example, we can come up with these 45% and 55% values theoretically. With more complex systems, we may want to see the effects of changing a subset of parameters that have an indirect effect on payout.
For example, if we extend the “biased coin game” to instead be “win your money back, 2, or 3 times your wager each with some probability” on a heads result, there are more parameters (and many solutions!) to get to 90% payout. Changing the heads probability has a further, second-order effect on the payout. Using Excel solver it’s straightforward to fix some parameters (heads/tails probability) and allow others to change (1x/2x/3x odds) to get desired results (90% payout).
If we further extend this methodology for a biased coin game, we can end up with a coin game that pays with distribution exactly like a slot machine in a casino, though it would not look like one!
Oh, yeah it does still work. Not sure why it was acting up for me the other day.
N.B.: You refer to the keystrokes correctly, while I refer to them using their modified characters (on EN-US keyboards, anyway) despite the modifier not actually being used, which I assume is why these keys were chosen.
Calculations for slot machine mechanics and payouts have been in Excel for a long time. There can be a LOT of complexity in these workbooks. Sometimes it’s tricky to debug - but what’s the alternative? Code is often hard to debug too.
Simulating results (Monte Carlo) is nice but having two sets of data for validation/checking against each other is nice.
I am not aware of any alternatives.