Hey, can you please make your substantive points without shallow dismissals or snark? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Unfortunately you posted a few comments in this thread that have crossed that line.
If you know more than others as a professional multiplayer game developer, that's great, but in that case the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so others can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Putdowns and swipes only degrade the discussion.
Tom I'm afraid you're misreading the tone of my posts and their character.
I could post anything objectively true in this thread like "the sky is blue", and some idiot will post a one sentence response that in fact it's not. This idiot likes to be the last person getting snark in responding to a completely reasonable statement of fact or opinion by an expert in the space.
What I do differently is that yes, I do reply to the snark with a rebuttal. Is this rebuttal snarky? Potentially, but is it earned? Definitely.
You're moderator so let me speak to you that way. If you don't let people rebut bullshit in this comment section, you'll just end up with a bunch of uninformed discourse, where the final word is made by some idiot, who doesn't even make multiplayer games and everyone ends up thinking the sky is fucking green. This has real world consequence when future game developers try to build games on poorly made technology, which ruins game studios and people's lives.
Then again, it's hacker news, and what do a bunch of wannabe startup guys know about making games in the first place. Unskilled and unaware of it. Moderate away sir!
You can "rebut bullshit" without being aggressive or nasty. If someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information respectfully. Putting others down, or slamming their work in a hostile way, doesn't help and degrades this community badly.
Btw, it's quite common for commenters to underestimate the provocation in their own posts and overestimate the provocation in other people's posts. Those two factors can multiply into quite a skew in perception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). I wonder whether this might be a bit of a factor here, if you really don't see how aggressively your comments were coming across.
In my experience providing detailed information in a response in the comment section on this particular topic (game development and networking) in hacker news comments simply creates more surface area for nitpicking and arguing in response, so I keep to short responses and rebuttals.
In the future, I don't feel that writing anything more here on this topic is a worthwhile use of my time.
Yes yes, everybody should be the Dalai Lama. But I'm not.
Each comment that I post, kind or not, when it's longer creates a larger attack surface area for people to nitpick and respond to. This in turn creates larger and larger posts I need to make in response.
By the end I need to write whole essays in the comment section, nobody wants this, so I just keep short, and curt so people stop responding.
For example:
> Ah you mean like implementing UDP and supporting complex lag masking netcode before we have to?
I could respond with an entire essay about how lag masking netcode and UDP-based protocols (both accepted and very standard best practices in the game industry) informs the design of data structures on the game server and how you store game state in order to support delta-encoding in a cache efficient way.
I could then explain how this most likely completely invalidates the current design of SpacetimeDB which is surely based around TCP synchronization using events when properties change, which doesn't scale when lots of objects change at the same time, and causes hitching when people play over a combination of latency and some packet loss because of head of line blocking.
But it's just so above the heads of the people reading this comment section, that it will spin off stupid responses like "Hurrrrr. But doesn't World of Warcraft use TCP?".
It's much easier to just realize that the game they're working on will most likely fail (because 99% of multiplayer games released these days do fail, if you haven't noticed, the game industry is in serious crisis), and if the game has no players, does it really matter if it's networked using UDP or TCP? End of discussion.
ps. The last game team that argued UDP vs. TCP with me was the team behind Stormgate backed by Hathora game server hosting. In fact, Hathora even spun up a ridiculous architecture astronaut architecture for this game based around TCP because they didn't know any better.
This team was adamant that they didn't need to use UDP, because they had implemented rollback netcode in an RTS, and TCP would be just fine with rollback netcode and edge termination with AWS global accelerator. This is objectively wrong, but it ended up not mattering, because their average CCU these days on steam is around 10.
Yes yes, everybody should be the Dalai Lama. But I'm not.
You're just being asked not to be a jerk to people on a messageboard. It's the same thing being asked of everyone else so that we can have a decent messageboard and it's not difficult.
If you know more than others as a professional multiplayer game developer, that's great, but in that case the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so others can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but in that case please don't post. Putdowns and swipes only degrade the discussion.