I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?

Sounds very negative, but I can confirm - it's the truth unfortunately.

I'm developing windows desktop apps since nearly 30 years now and tried mostly everything Microsoft has thrown at us - Win32 - WinForms - WPF - WinJS - WinRT - UWP - WinUI - MAUI - not sure if that was all - and Win32 always wins. Everything else is incredible broken and stops being supported in such a short time. It's a shame really.

It is what happens when passionate advocates feel betrayed by all the mismanagement that has happened since Windows 8.

I switched from someone that was kind found of WinRT, as what .NET 1.0 should have been, AOT compiled languages built on top of COM, improving the VB 6 experience, to someone burned out with the experience, back into Web development and distributed systems.

However, Microsoft keeps talking as if everything was tiptop, and that angers me thus I keep track of how bad things still are, and spend time making others aware of the false promises.

For example, I bet no one is aware that C++/WinRT is actually in maintenance, and the team responsible for killing C++/CX, is now having fun with Rust on windows-rs.

Yet Microsoft talks about using C++ to develop WinUI applications, as if the tooling was at the same level as using C++ Builder or Qt/QtBuilder.

I jumped the train when they crashed the Silverlight carriage.

Strange to wake up and see this on Hacker News - in 2025. I originally created this but am no longer involved - AMA if you like.

Thank you for doing it ! What was the motivation behind it/when did you start building it ?

I never built anything with it but reading through the source code got me to learn so much about programming. I probably spent more time copying stuff from Irrlicht/Ogre3D/ODE (although I never managed to grok that one) than anything else in high school.

I originally wanted to create a 3D game - and needed an engine for it. Never made it to the 3D game part, though :)

Many such cases

What was the main learning you got from building the engine? Was there some feature you wanted that no other engine at the time had? If you built an engine today, what would you do differently?

I thought most of the existing engines out there were too complicated, so I wanted it to be easy to use. Probably that's also why it became that popular.

For a modern engine today - I think the architecture of the engine would look different - and would focus more on creating and organizing content then mostly on rendering.

I was involved in 3D back then wenn Irrlicht & Co had some traction:

Todays graphics engine look completely different than the first flexibel pipelines around 2002-2005, and the rise of AI for usage during rendering will change the tech paradigms further (for the younger ones: In 2001, NVidia announced the Geforce1, we had 1 pixel shader and 1 vertex shader :-D LOL)

An old gamedev teammate sent me this link - got hit with a wave of nostalgia. Big thanks for creating Irrlicht back in the day.

I spent a lot of time studying this code way back when, it was a valuable resource in my personal journey, so thank you x1000!

Thanks for the quality software. Had some good times in high school trying out Irrlicht

It was a great engine. You built a great piece of software.

Why not? You likely already do on your phone.

Plus your coffee machine is watching you and relaying information back to CCP command already. That beady little flashing LED is the heartbeat of communism!

Somewhere in a bunker in rural China: "Look moi2388 has pressed Americano again. Imperialist scum!"

I do like my coffee to make political statements for me. It gives me more of a kick than the caffeine does /s

Very cool hack. Thought about that this could be possible several times now, nice that someone actually did and succeeded :)

"I'm not going to fix this crash, because next year, there might be a similar bug, and I'm not sure how to fix that yet." I hope you don't code that way.

I drive an electric car which already does this. Is a very futuristic and smooth sounding noise, and it sounds nice. Not like an ICE engine. People immediately notice you and recognize that you are in some new type of car. It feels positive, not negative at all as some comments here suggest.

Also, there is a button to disable that noise if you want to (at least in the Ioniq)

The Honda Clarity has no button to turn it off. My kids hate the attention it gets when I pull up to pick them up at school. It sounds like a spaceship full of slightly out of tune angels.

Wow, that really is absolutely horrifying [1]. The people advocating for this must have no idea the hell they will be putting us all through. Or they work for the oil companies.

Advanced pedestrian avoidance systems would prevent more injuries than this joke. This regulation shows such a complete lack of vision or respect. So glad I got my EV before this became mandatory.

[1] - https://youtu.be/QaxykqCkCjg

Presumably it has a speaker some place? Could you cut the wire to it?

Ever tried adwords? I think my first bug report of it not really working with other browsers was about 6 years ago, that time it was with Opera. My reports usually get verified but commented with "use Chrome instead".

Suggesting that their product works best in their browser is a world away from what MS pulled in the 90's, with the embrace and extend of standards.

I wonder how many relic Intranet apps force the use of old IE in Corporate world because they were built with the 'extended' dialect of JScript.

> perhaps the US criminal justice system is just as good at investigating, arresting, and jailing those who commit "crimes"?

Having worked with statistics around this issue and compared them with many other countries, I don't think this is the case. The USA seems to have two problems: A very, unusual high crime rate (about 10 times higher than in the country where I live for example!) and by comparison, a very harsh jurisdictional system. Combined, you get the result you have.

It could also be a simple routing bug. You cannot know.

It's also very frequently people being in 'walking' mode without realizing it

I'm surprised the accelerometer doesn't question its input when I appear to be doing 75mph on foot.