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handmade hero notes wiki

Hi everyone,

I was just looking at some old files on my computer and came across my notes for handmade hero. I put them up at . The html is a bit of a mess.

It starts at episode 56 goes till 173. Then picks back up at 201. (I started handwriting between this) Then goes to 216. Then there is day 236 at the end.

The style of writing differs between days. Some are quite detailed, and others are a sparse.

I was wondering if it would be worth putting any of these notes into the handmade hero wiki. Have a detailed write up of each handmade hero day to accompany the annotated videos.

Edited by Oliver Marsh on
I can't speak to whether or not this is something that should be on the wiki; the handmade.net staff should judge that. It can certainly be a useful resource, though. Thank you for sharing!

As someone who started with Handmade Hero way too late to even hope to ever catch up with the streams, something that would be useful to (a) help navigate the massive amount of content and (b) improve understanding of most of the later streams without having to see most of the earlier streams, would be something like a guided tour through the source code, an overview of the important data types and the structure of the main game loop.

I'm not sure writing up something like that would be a good idea at this point, since Casey seems to still be changing his mind on some of those things relatively frequently, and it would have to be maintained to reflect that. So maybe this only pays off if we start on this when the series is done? Even then, could it be written to still be useful when watching the older streams, where the game architecture was substantially different? Maybe more heavily edited notes summarizing multiple streams would work better?

Sorry to hijack your thread like this, but this seems related (since I think this kind of stuff should definetely go on the wiki) and I really wanted to float the idea.
Yes, maybe when the series is finished we will have a better idea of how everything played out and all the concepts used and try categorise around the big ideas. Have a entry for asset system, threads, software rendering, game loop etc.

Yes agree there is so much information in the series. Some sort of guided source code tour would be cool, so you can see whats happening. I saw something a while ago about using github commit changes as a way to see what changed, but having a more guided approach to the changes would be awesome. Kind of a blog post about the episode with the code changes, both as an accompaniment to the video and an alternative if you don't want to watch the whole video. I think the annotated videos are really cool, but something more of an overview and map of the episode.
Sorry to keep you waiting, folks!

So, the project wikis can be enabled / disabled by their owner, and I believe Casey would rather stick with just the forum than enable the wiki for Handmade Hero.

There were existing notes in the old guide which I've gotten into the new one through Cinera's "bespoke templates". Basically, a bespoke template is just an .html file that is sourced in an individual .hmml annotation file, rather than passed as an argument to the cinera invocation (until these things can be set in a config file).

We could potentially use bespoke templates to get your notes to accompany the videos, Oliver. Two options for this would be:

  1. You send their HTML to me to paste into bespoke templates
  2. You gain write access to the annotation repo and do the bespoke templates yourself

I dunno which would be better, but before going full bore with this I'd prefer that HMN's instances - multiple, currently, until a single one handles multiple projects - of Cinera use Cinera templates, so we have a better idea as to how we can write bespoke ones. An example of this being: we could perhaps then be able to choose to put introductory notes above the video player, as well as below it (and further benefits).

Gosh, yeah, Tristan, a guided tour through the source sounds cool, but may well be better left until the project is done. I mean, a vague possibility could be to use those GitHub commits to produce a sort of "localised view" of the structs / functions as they were at the time of each video. Naturally this kind of thing would require folks to sign in to GitHub so that it's only available to those who have permission to access the source.

I do also have planned some more useful overviews of the projects. Currently a project's table of contents just lists its videos plain, but it will be enabled to use "topic categories" - e.g. rendering, audio, procedural generation - to do things like highlight or group the videos. Perhaps there'll be a kind of "word cloud" made out of the categories too.
Hi Miblo,

I don't think my notes are super flash, so I thought they would be better suited to a wiki style, where people could iterate on them. I think probably wait till the series is finished to get a better idea. I like the idea of project category for the videos.