![ltgiv's tweet photo. [TL;DR]
My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives.
[WALL OF TEXT]
I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing.
Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help.
Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine.
You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?"
Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗
I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines.
There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know).
Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable.
Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.
What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work.
To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet.
To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game.
And that's precisely my point.
I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this.
YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?!
I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people.
I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated.
One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers.
Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again.
Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn.
That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment).
The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment.
We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm.
This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind.
Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore.
They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing.
Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer.
A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet.
If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can.
And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner:
• MIT
• Texas A&M
• University of Texas
• Purdue
Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots.
Which brings me back to Redot and tithing.
When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering.
And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started.
I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂
In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species.
So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine.
To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HUQJZSLWgAACa9f.jpg)
![ltgiv's tweet photo. [TL;DR]
My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives.
[WALL OF TEXT]
I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing.
Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help.
Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine.
You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?"
Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗
I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines.
There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know).
Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable.
Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.
What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work.
To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet.
To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game.
And that's precisely my point.
I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this.
YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?!
I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people.
I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated.
One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers.
Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again.
Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn.
That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment).
The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment.
We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm.
This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind.
Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore.
They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing.
Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer.
A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet.
If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can.
And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner:
• MIT
• Texas A&M
• University of Texas
• Purdue
Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots.
Which brings me back to Redot and tithing.
When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering.
And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started.
I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂
In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species.
So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine.
To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HUQJYpTWoAA9Rsq.jpg)
![ltgiv's tweet photo. [TL;DR]
My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives.
[WALL OF TEXT]
I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing.
Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help.
Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine.
You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?"
Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗
I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines.
There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know).
Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable.
Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.
What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work.
To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet.
To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game.
And that's precisely my point.
I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this.
YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?!
I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people.
I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated.
One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers.
Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again.
Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn.
That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment).
The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment.
We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm.
This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind.
Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore.
They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing.
Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer.
A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet.
If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can.
And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner:
• MIT
• Texas A&M
• University of Texas
• Purdue
Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots.
Which brings me back to Redot and tithing.
When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering.
And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started.
I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂
In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species.
So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine.
To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HUQJX4CXQAAcicP.jpg)
Olivia
Online
Redot
@Redot_Engine
Official account of Redot, the free open source game engine. Your game, your rules.
Joined October 2024
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5.8K Followers
3.4K Posts
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Redot 26.3 stable release is now live!
This release adds WorldScape3D for editing 3D terrain, Mode7Sprite2D for recreating SNES Mode7, plus structs, traits, and nullable static types to give you more tools when coding your games!
You can read about the release and see these new features in action on our blogpost here: https://t.co/lEbCzPrkxu
And you can download Redot 26.3 Stable here: https://t.co/sC7f7qD773
Deus Exia Demo is live at Steam Next Fest! Check it out!
https://t.co/mEHxiCdlAe
#SteamNextFest #IndieDev
There's still 7 days left to compete in our game jam!
The theme is Biohazard.
Do you avoid hazardous waste? Fight a horde of infected creatures? Are YOU the biohazard?
Your interpretation of the theme is up to you.
Register here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
Our Fall game jam starts NOW!
The theme is Biohazard!
This jam runs until the 25th. You can sign up for the jam and submit your game anytime before the deadline.
Register here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
We updated the Redot Engine downloads on @itchio to the 26.3 stable release!
It has a 3D Terrain editor, SNES Mode 7, structs, traits, and nullable types.
You can see the new features in action and read about it on our devlog page here: https://t.co/6Fs61nvWyH
It's screenshot Saturday!
Reply with some screenshots of your Redot project. It can be games, software, art, or anything else you're working on!
Our Fall game jam starts NOW!
The theme is Biohazard!
This jam runs until the 25th. You can sign up for the jam and submit your game anytime before the deadline.
Register here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
@LundukeJournal Thanks! This one is our biggest release yet!
This release came out just in time for our game jam tomorrow!
This is a themed jam that will run from Oct 16th to Oct 24th. We'll be announcing the theme when the jam starts.
It's the perfect excuse to try out Redot 26.3!
Sign up here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
Redot 26.3 stable release is now live!
This release adds WorldScape3D for editing 3D terrain, Mode7Sprite2D for recreating SNES Mode7, plus structs, traits, and nullable static types to give you more tools when coding your games!
You can read about the release and see these new features in action on our blogpost here: https://t.co/lEbCzPrkxu
And you can download Redot 26.3 Stable here: https://t.co/sC7f7qD773
Redot Fall Game Jam starts this Friday!
This will be a Halloween-centric jam. The theme will be revealed when the Jam starts.
The jam runs from Friday, October 16 to Saturday, October 24
Register here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
Redot Fall Game Jam starts this Friday!
This will be a Halloween-centric jam. The theme will be revealed when the Jam starts.
The jam runs from Friday, October 16 to Saturday, October 24
Register here: https://t.co/E7YZfub2TH
This is a fantastic read @ltgiv ! We love hearing stories about how Redot can be used to make learning fun! This is something that we're looking to expand on in 2027.
Redot hosts themed game jams with rules that are welcoming for devs of all skill levels, where they can work on a game by themselves or with a team of up to 5 people. These jams are more casual, and are a great way for people to jump into learning the engine and game development.
We also have videos on our YouTube channel that go over how to use some of the features introduced in Redot 26.2, and we'll be making more when 26.3 releases.
In addition to those feature videos, we plan on providing more in depth guides for the engine and game development in general when we launch Redot Academy. It's still in the early stages, but if anyone is interested in creating courses or lessons, feel free to reach out to us here or on our Discord server.
And of course, simply using the engine and sharing your projects is also a way of showing support. It reminds our devs of why they do this, and motivates them to constantly improve the engine.
Redot Discord: https://t.co/PVfGjmgrgV
[TL;DR]
My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives.
[WALL OF TEXT]
I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing.
Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help.
Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine.
You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?"
Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗
I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines.
There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know).
Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable.
Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.
What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work.
To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet.
To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game.
And that's precisely my point.
I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this.
YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?!
I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people.
I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated.
One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers.
Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again.
Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn.
That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment).
The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment.
We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm.
This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind.
Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore.
They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing.
Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer.
A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet.
If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can.
And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner:
• MIT
• Texas A&M
• University of Texas
• Purdue
Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots.
Which brings me back to Redot and tithing.
When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering.
And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started.
I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂
In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species.
So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine.
To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎
![ltgiv's tweet photo. [TL;DR]
My approach to tithing ranges from disaster relief to funding open-source projects like @Redot_Engine, which I use to help teach young people programming, robotics, and engineering. The goal is to stop infantilizing the next generation, challenge them with meaningful work, and equip them to build productive, independent lives.
[WALL OF TEXT]
I've mentioned this before, but I take a somewhat nuanced approach to tithing.
Sometimes that means dropping everything, breaking out the "boys and their toys," and deploying our equipment and resources when SHTF and the local community needs help.
Other times, it means funding Redot, an open-source game engine.
You might be wondering, "How does LTG IV conflate disaster relief and funding a video game engine?"
Well, dear reader, I'm glad you asked! 🤗
I've long believed video games are an excellent springboard into much more complicated engineering disciplines.
There's a sweet spot between beginner-friendly tools like Scratch and throwing someone into the deep end with SDL, fbdev, or low-level programming (ask me how I know).
Redot occupies that middle ground beautifully. It's approachable enough to get someone building something interesting quickly, but sophisticated enough to gradually introduce electronics, networking, physics, robotics, and systems engineering. AI makes that learning curve even more approachable.
Some of you might remember my article about modifying a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.
What started as a personal project became an elaborate exercise in electronics, power distribution, virtualization, and hardware integration. I'm still working on further modifications involving 3D printing, hypervisors, SPICE, multiple displays, and low-latency remote controls, concepts that overlap with my robotics and teleoperations work.
To the casual observer, it's a scaled TMNT arcade cabinet.
To me, it's an engineering curriculum hiding inside a video game.
And that's precisely my point.
I've had families from Church use my articles to introduce their children to electronics and programming. After visiting @wwwLiveFarm, some of their kids spent the entire car ride home asking their parents why school isn't like this.
YEAH, WHY ISN'T IT?!
I homeschool my own son, and having found formal education painfully boring myself, I have strong opinions about how we teach young people.
I also work with charitable organizations here in Texas helping homeless and vulnerable teenagers get fed, clothed, housed where possible, and educated.
One point I push particularly hard: We need to stop infantilizing teenagers.
Give them meat and potatoes. Difficult problems. Real tools. Meaningful responsibilities. Opportunities to fail, learn, and try again.
Most importantly, give them somebody willing to sit down and explain the complicated parts instead of watering everything down until there's nothing substantial left to learn.
That's why I spend my free time writing technical articles and developing curricula, and why I find Redot so useful (and fund it when I can, and as I rotate tithing around trying to douse the biggest fire at the moment).
The objective isn't necessarily to produce video game developers. It's to give young people an approachable entry point into increasingly sophisticated subjects, then help them progress toward apprenticeships, skilled trades, university, or employment.
We're already doing this at @wwwLiveFarm.
This summer, my university interns explored some of my arcade and systems engineering work. We didn't have enough time to connect everything, but we did get our autonomous rover prototype out onto a public road, with the interns controlling it using an Xbox controller while we followed behind.
Suddenly, networking, latency, radio communications, and systems integration weren't abstract concepts anymore.
They were driving an actual robot on a public road while we drove behind it with neighbors staring and some even stopping us to ask us what on Earth we are doing.
Several of those interns have since received full-time aerospace job offers based on their engineering work at @wwwLiveFarm over the summer.
A number would also like to return as full-time engineers, but we're still bootstrapping and self-funding everything, so we simply can't afford that yet.
If I can't afford to hire somebody, the least I can do is help prepare them for someone who can.
And the interest keeps growing. Just this past Thursday night in Dallas, I had additional University of Texas students asking about interning with us. I told them yes. Now we'll have four universities under our banner:
• MIT
• Texas A&M
• University of Texas
• Purdue
Young Americans are hungry for opportunities to do meaningful work. We should be giving them those opportunities instead of squelching their opportunities in favor of foreigners and denigrating our young compatriots.
Which brings me back to Redot and tithing.
When I financially support an open-source project, I'm helping maintain a tool I can use to teach children from Church, homeless teenagers, university interns, and others who might otherwise never encounter this kind of engineering.
And because it's open source, they can take those tools and that knowledge with them, continue learning, and build something of their own. They don't need me for this; I'm just knocking over dominoes to get a chain reaction started.
I don't particularly care whether they eventually work for @wwwLiveFarm (obviously this is what I'd prefer), an aerospace company, a machine shop, or start their own business, so long as they GGGOOO!!! My wife and I have friends in from Dubai right now, and their tribe's language is Batak from the island of Sumatra. When we were grocery shopping tonight, they told me their nickname for me is "hatop" which means "hurry" because I'm always bugging out and screaming "Code 3!" (lights and sirens), or when I'm really getting frustrated, "JUST F'N GO!!!" since I'm pressed for time and trying to get us all moved on from one point to the next with as little time as possible in between. Okay, I guess I can take that as a compliment. 😂
In essence, I care that they develop the skills to provide for themselves and their families, contribute something meaningful, and hopefully help the next generation do the same — especially as we become an interplanetary species.
So yes, sometimes tithing means loading up a trailer and heading toward a disaster. Sometimes it means helping a teenager find a pathway out of poverty. And sometimes it means funding a video game engine.
To me, they're different applications of the same principle: take the resources, knowledge, tools, and opportunities you've been given, and put them to work helping other people. Preferably while building some really cool stuff along the way. 😎](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HUQMLKgWYAEx7eJ.jpg)
If you understand the code, tested it, and can adjust it to pass our checks, you can submit them to Redot, even if AI was used to make it. Good and functional code is ok with us, regardless of who made it or what tools were used.
We've turned down some AI generated PRs in the past because the contributor didn't know what their code did, couldn't articulate how it worked, and were unable or unwilling to make our requested changes to get it up to our standards.
AI is a very useful tool for software development, but we expect contributors to take ownership of their submissions and coordinate with our team to get their code to where it needs to be for us to merge it.
We understand the decision to ban AI code from FOSS projects since it opens the floodgates for low quality and untested code, but our goal is to make Redot Engine as good as it can be to provide devs with the functionality and features that are needed to create their games. If your AI assisted code aligns with our goals and meets our standards, we have no problem merging it into Redot.
I have 19 patches to Godot engine that improve performance and stability, fix many bugs, add much better support for HOTAS, and add optional instrumentation and better profiling support.
They’re pretty good. I spend time on this stuff and don’t want slop in my code base.
But they don’t want them, because I used AI.
That’s okay. I’m glad Godot is open source!
But it does make me wonder how many of these types of quality engine patches are living out in the wild and not able to be submitted due to this policy.
And yes, I could rewrite them by hand and submit them. But the friction is just high enough that I don’t really want to. So they will have to discover and fix this issues themselves.
@jamonholmgren As long as you understand the code, you can submit those to Redot. We're not against code generated by AI as long as the contributor can take ownership of it and tweak it to pass our checks.
https://t.co/2WIswB6Mae
@vash_357 Console exports are something we want to provide, but it's a bit tricky when every console has own closed source SDK.
It's possible, but it's gonna take quite a bit of time and research.
Honestly, it would've been much easier to be a political activist group. It would've kept Redot in the spotlight longer and probably would've raised a good amount of funding for the engine.
But that's not what Redot is, and it's not what we stand for.
Redot is apolitical, and no, being apolitical isn't political.
We know it's hard for the younger generations to understand in this highly politicized world we live in, but there was a time when you could be in online spaces focused on a hobby or topic, and people from all over the world would come together and talk about that without bringing in politics. You could make friends with people of vastly different backgrounds and political views through a shared interest.
Most of us are old enough to remember those days. We want to create that kind of place, where the topic of game development transcends the political talk and culture wars that have taken over every other part of the internet.
As for the game engine itself, we added a 3D terrain editor, structs, traits, nullable static types, and mode7 in Redot 26.3, which just got its 3rd RC release a couple days ago. Many of those are highly requested features for Godot that they still haven't implemented yet, and we have more things that didn't make the cut for 26.3 that'll be in 26.4.
Biased opinion, but we recommend trying out Redot Engine for yourself. Let us know if you run into any bugs or issues that need to be addressed before the stable release.
https://t.co/3tdQd68hdi
@LundukeJournal @Redot_Engine Redot is not a real engine. It is a political activists group larping as a game engine. So too is Godot, but not nearly as on the nose as Redot.
@fnix_dev No, you can build other kinds of apps and software with it
@anorman728 There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's well worth it. You should definitely try it out!
@anorman728 Yup! That's the one!
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