- What is your favorite technology from your project and why? What is it used for? How could it be made better?
- My favorite technology from my project is the Unity game engine. It is a cross platform game engine that allows you to create and edit a wide array of game types (from 3d puzzle games to 2d sidescrollers) with relative ease. It is robust in the resources that it gives you to create and maintain games, from massive dedicated asset package managers to supporting C# scripting for that parts that are too complicated for you to do simply with the editor. Though it is highly sophisticated and intuitive (after playing around with it a bit), it does of course have its issue. The number one problem that plagues our team is version control. A lot of the technology is highly abstracted away into binaries, which results in some commits reaching hundreds of thousands of changes in the codebase. This is also troublesome when trying to merge in changes, because the changes that conflict can oftentimes be incredibly cryptic. This can lead to some very frustrating times. To remedy this, I think that some kind of standalone version control specific to unity would be great, to allow devs to actually see what is going on rather than guessing at what has changed between commits.
- How are you using AI in your project? What are some pros and cons? Has it made you a better programmer?
- I mainly use AI in my project to either check where an error is coming from (have it look through my code quickly to see if I didn’t notice an issue) or to get started on something completely novel to me (I asked it about how trigger boxes and collisions work for example). One of the major pros of using AI is that it can accelerate your productivity. Unity is notoriously difficult to scour for relevant information, because it frequently updates to change how the editor works, and just recently went through a major change. Often for simple things, it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. The cons are that it can hallucinate and send you down a rabbithole that kill your time, and that if you don’t know what to ask it, it’s practically useless. I wouldn’t say that it has made me a better programmer necessarily, but it does help me pick up relevant information quickly that I would have had to scour for, for a much greater amount of time
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