GaelFG

I'm pretty sure it's because it's in fact 'just' a cool side effect to a common network architecture optimisation from the time where you could'nt send the 'state' of the entire game even with only delta modifiers and so you make the game detertministic to only synchronize inputs :) an exemple article I remember : https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-...

The main downside which probably caused the diseapearance is that any patch to the game will make the replay file unusable. Also at the time (not sure for quake) there was often fixed framerate, today the upsides of using delta time based frame calculation AND multithreading/multi platform target probably make it harded to stay deterministic (specialy for game where you want to optimize input latency)

Not from the article : Before you walk in, a supercomputer predicted which choice you'd make, and put $1000000 in the opaque box if it predicted you'd take just the one, or $0 if it predicted you'd take both.

So the amount of money in the black box don't change whatever you REALLY pick. Either the predicator would have guessed you'd pick both and there is 0$ in black box, in that case you have interest to take both boxes and win $1000 which is better than zero.

Or it predicted you would only take the black box, put $1000000 in it and then again you win more by taking the two boxes.

I don't get the 'choice' : the content of the box is aldready defined when you take your decision so taking it won't change the content of the black box and the open/transparent box have no drawback. What am I missing ?

Nextcloud is great !

Was really helpfull when making international phone call to services like IRS or sometime good providers. Trying to spell out my french name and long adress or some order number with my strong accent was such a pain until then ^^

Funny, I always thought that phrase was ironic and actually a joke against IBM bad quality/pricing ratio but abundant and aggressive marketing targeted at non technical managers. ( I actually have no idea of IBM quality/pricing ratio, I don't work on fields in wich they are present)

I bet (litteraly, founded an xr game development company in february) xr/vr games will indeed became a mainstream gaming platform in the next 5 years, maybe even next year. If or when it become the case it may totally become as present as smartphone and replace a lot of monitors, especially if they succeed to reduce them as smartglasses like their totally are progressing to.

if it become the case, meta get 30% of the revenues associated with it.

If it does not, i'm pretty sure they can now make good smartphones and even have a dedicated os. I'm pretty sure they can find a way to make money with it.

A meta quest 3s in inself is an insane experience for 330€ and it's current main disadvantages for gaming are the lack of players and the catalogue size. Even using it as a main monitor with a bluetooth keyboard is "possible". I would have find it 'improbable' a few years ago even as an enthousiasth, i now could totally imagine a headset replacing my screen in a few years with a few improvements on.

Never watched him but honestly, that would be pretty standard mature workflow. In most video games productions, efficient coding is basically conceptualizing a dsl from the game design, writing it's interpeter while gluing the needed library and make some tools to manipulate or better make converter from existing robust tools. 99% of 'actual game design related' content are assets and data.

I assume most of losses come from headsets R&D, and subjectively i would bet on them too, the progress are amazing, a today 350$ headset have better quality than 5 year ago 1500-2k ones. Honnestly I thinks VR/AR is becoming really amazing for games, if a quest 3 quality headset is available for less than 400$ in a year of two i'm expecting a massive adoption in a few years.

There is currently a bit of content problem : no enough gamer with headsets to attract spendings so no enough games to attracts gamers, so not enough gamers with headsets ...

But I went again on vr game development some months ago and the technical progress are really sweet and major downside are being removed.

Unless you specifically need a lot of the dot net library (and in this case you can probably theoretically 'just' use a plugin for access) I would encourage you to try gdscript. I went from 5 years of unity pseudo-c# to it in about 2 weeks, and I globally just find it an equivalent if not better experience for the majority of the code base.

Honestly one of my current fears is that they focus on c# integration in place of improving gdscript support (the integrated ide is not specially comfy, and static typing support still lack some feature, collection wise in particular. but nothing really awfull).

(Probably, why take risk) Can't tell the bank name (but yeah, in the top 4 by size) and not trying to defend your bank but the SMS validation thing is actually on the state 'fault' and you are in fact legally covered in most cases, I don't have the legal text on hand but by typing in google : https://www.moneyvox.fr/banque/actualites/77237/fraude-sur-c... Look for Code SMS and you have a link to the european reglementation. I assume one of the reason is that in fact in case of phishing wire transfert are heavily monitored and reversible. Without giving technical details, in fact 'a lot of peoples' have actually large right to move sums of money around. The trick is that's it reviewed and reversible for days.

I'm glad and don't see better solution than to use an algorithm to decide this over personnal choice. I understand the choice of using software. What I don't understand is why this software is not open source, heavily documented and the algorithm annually monitored, publicly reported and updated if necessessary by an open committee.

I personally prefer avoid being involved as much as possible in human life and death inducing procedure because that awfully stressful, but I don't see big problem on working on the software coding itself. What is problematic in this case is that the software was used to deinvolve everyone from the process and for what I understand the software developpement team was apparently tasked to make up the decision algorihtm and no human basic oversight was keeped during the attribution process.

I dont know if you are joking but when managing i do exactly that and that work (with a factor of 3 to be precise, with most people, some aldready take that into account). Works also with myself, i askmyself 'how much i think it will take, i double it and i assume half the day i will be bothered by other unplanned things'. It work remarkably well especially for longer projects.

I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security.

Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have been overkill on security or do they are not really a true 'bank' and more a payment provider ?

that seems such a change from some years ago were cost were totally the last of the issues against security.

The trick is as a player you are not really the main customer of steam. You are the product. The customers are game developers, and they are as predatory toward them as any big corp online store. Not worse, but not better either.

Is it because we're all just writing junk code as fast as possible and say fuckall to technical debt?

My guess is : probably, I love taking time to make architecture because it's fun and rewarding, but I would not be shocked it's the case, and in fact the right thing to do in a lot of case. 90% of your code will be thrown away anyway in the majority of cases, probably due to external causes. Also and that's probably where copilot shine : for lot of people 90% of your work is adding field/filters functions to a crud page or making a shitty demo for a pet project of your company.

The value is 'when can I show it to a potential client' and not 'is the architecture state of the art ?'.

Of course once the demo is sold, your 3 days prototype with a big "For demonstration purpose only" warning may end in production and you will have 1 afternoon to remove the warning and 'Polish the thing so it's bug free' but hey, that's another problem !

Joke aside, and the book have a lot of very opinionated and contestable content, I remember having read 'Refactoring' by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler and 'forced' myself to work on refactoring, when all my coworkers and myself were prompt to "reboot when possible" all 'old' projects or messy prototypes and I now think exept for rare cases : hacking, testing and getting feedback then refactoring while hacking new features is surprisingly efficient time wise even if you rewrite ten times a routine. When applicable of course, we are not talking medical hardware drivers).

And about your main 'interrogation' I would guess copilot is not specially efficient for you because you are seems to have an academy background and the experience about 'reading the docs' or 'making a google search'. Making even a senior software engineer "read once the documentation of your framework" is an impressive feat in a lot of software companies. Most people seems to prefer the "stack overflow look for/copy/paste/pray workflow" and copilot is basically an evolution of that.

I think the parent was referencing fake non profit organization, I don't know for USA but in europe it's a 'classical' tax avoidance trick going from 'having a charity which goal is to allow you to particpace in pricey leisure activities (work for mechanical sports for exemple) to the infamous Ikea tax evasion scheme, here is a random article talking about it but you have lot other if the subject interest you : https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-.... Take care the worl is a little bit darker after ^^.

In fact they do. Barely any development FOR the french government is done internally, all is externalized to "specialized" extern private companies (a known exemple Cap Gemini). I wouldn't call them clowns, and they do have competent people but they totally do focus more on public money extraction than on quality, like nearly all monopoly position companies. Results are sometime good sometime not.

I'm not sure that's right. Video game customers are wrong (or dishonest) about what they think they want. They want to see themselves as intellectual gourmets, only in research of exotic gameplay and rich stories but still spend the great majority of their money on blockbusters with decade old recipe and ip (while being vocal about their price or their lack of originality). No problem with that in fact, video game are leisure time activities.

Where the big producers ARE totally not listening is monetization. But here again 'globally that work' and most (not all) customers see themselves as more 'moraly right' than they really are. Everyone is happy to bash f2p immoral economic system, but are glad to enjoy free games. They will all speak about how possessing your games is important, but will take gamepass anytime because it's less costly. (here again they are just pragmatic and nothing is wring with that).

A funny thing when you discuss and do post mortems with little game development studio, is that each time they try to avoid a notoriously 'shady' practice, first critics will be about them missing (mainly gamble/casino mechanics and timesink/grinding features) ^^

Hot take : fully cooperatives board games are either bad wargames or bad role playing games. But good social activities neither less and good introductions to the genre. And yes, it's totally ok to only play theses.

They are, I think still 'rares' today because game wise they are less intense and deep, so people really into gaming will prefer other games. But they are still a lot less rare than 40 years ago because there are more positively presented in culture and common and it's a lot more easy to convince people to join a board game night, especially if tell them they can avoid human competition and role playing.

Certainly but totally not leaded by theses companies, whose practices are the reason union should exist, a lot more than Unity. You think a 20cent fee per install is revenu cannibalization ? read one of their publisher contract.

I laught when I read the names, Voodoo and Homa game are "movie bad guys level" souless hightly predatory game publishers (don't know the others). It's a PR stunt.

I never tried with Godot specifically, but i (and fellow varied developers) did it a lot in Unity and "it worked". The main points were :

- Relative ease of use for us (especially when working with juniors/intern who often only studied game engine and don't have framework experience)

- Performances ok/good (seriously it may depend the platform but a native game engine often have far better performance than a browser on input latency/rendering, wich is logical, it's the point AND they do a lot less than browser on other features)

- You can go really wild on design/feedback with low effort, especially if you have a mobile game ui on yours work folders

The pain points (some may be alleviated with dedicated libraries, I used none) were :

- On complex UI (multi tabbing/multiple modal screen ) the lack of native support you have in dedicated web framework was a pain

- You have to add yourself complex features natively offered on forms. Especially history, complex filtering.

- On complex I/O (network/files manipulation) the engine was (naturally) lacking.

- Unity and probably Godot assume by default they are the main windows on screen, you can encounter problems about that if you use it as a 320x200 windows between 4 other windows.(that said if you considered electron you won't be in unknown territory ^^)

"I won't give names but trust me", VC funded tech companies with 3-10 bros 'who have or not a vague technical background but more see themselves as high level thinkers' between founders and their first hires for 'key strategic roles' followed by an engineer and one to three interns to fill production role are a common reality, at least on startup scenes I attended. In the startup process 'marketing' is also glorified (not that i disagree it's importance) so once you have one or two guy who can make demos, hiring marketing people is often the next priority.

A bit ranting : Working with unity for some years, I think the problem is not specifically the fee in itself, it's the context.

It need polishing, there are edge case and abuse potential to work but if I were to consider the new Unity offer without prior background "why not".

The real main problem with this announce it that it confirm that Unity management have a hard time on monetizing their product (you can see it in their services) and don't care about backstabbing you and will use it's leverage. The problem is not about if 20 cents per install after the 200k one is fair. The problem is that Unity say 'hey you know about the game you made some years ago with our engine ? Now you must either kill it or pay us a new tax AND that tax will be based on an arbitrary known by us only secret proprietary data but trust us we know what is good.

And, and that's finally the main problem, they are bad with stability and keeping up promises. I, and probably a lot of other dev would give up for any new features for like 2-4 years if they just MAKE WORKING THE ONES EXISTING.

And I'm not even talking about engine features. I'm just talking about service like VCS ou Cloud Build or Remote configuration or multiplayer hosting or adressable assets (ok this one is probably more an engine problem).

Is paying 20 cents per install for indy studio a huge bankrupting event ? Probably not, but what is the next step now we know their strategy for making more money from engine is firing developpers, upping prices and making fusion with shady ad networks known for spyware controversies ?

My two cents as former (and currently writing business plan for a new company) small scale entrepreneur : If like it seems your main problem with your current work is stress and overworking, full time company building without big net safety will probably be worse.

The empirical advice a give a lot in indy gaming development and that is validated by even successfull studio founders : if you think an office work take your energy and time and don't let you enough physical and mental energy to create your product wait trying not to starve without a stable income.

Something to consider : look for a new job less mentally taxing (one trick working for lot of people is to take one with work different from the one you will be doing in your company) even if less payed. Ideally look for part time job. They are great when you want to create company because by definition you have a maximum work time negotiated. Create the company before entering and put it in the contract 'I also have a side company i won't close and continue working on my free time'. If it seems hard to negotiate wait trying convince someone to pay for your product/service ^^.

It may slow a bit the startup process but not having to worry about paying your rent in three month can make you gain a lot of mental energy at the end of the year.

Well they were given theses right by the users who spend lot of money on having these system resources and are asking games to be as beautiful and complex we can (not all the users, i'm not the last to spend time in oldschool games, but a significant and heavy spending portion of them).

Business is exactly why most games dont spend an enormous budget on optimization today. It's not a requirement by the great majority of customers, it's quickly time and cost heavy, so the return on investment is pretty low.

Yes, i think even with infinite optimization budget a today triple A realistic rendering could simply not be possible on a too old computer in realtime.

I also think while it would really add value if background application like teams/slack/discord would be less resource heavy because they are open but not the main focus, when you play a high end video game it make sense to consider it's your main reason to use your computer at that time :)

If simulating and rendering a complete complex intractable realistic but imaginary world with today achievable level of detail seems mundane to you, it's far to seems like to me :)

No opinion about browsers and OS, today games are doing lot more of stuff valuable to most users than those of yesterday. I don't know enought about modern value of os and browser, exept empirically they do seems to crash a lot lot less than 20 years ago, but also syp a lot more on me :)

If you are serious (I do game development for a living and work on graphical assets daily so that seems evident for me, but I totally understand it can be arcane stuff) it's simply that they choose a stylized graphical style avoiding a lot of costly details you generaly find in hight end games.

They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps.

All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude.

If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare :

- 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one. All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment.

- a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment.

While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware.

As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)

"that would mean lower profits for employers (who contribute a higher percentage of their income)"

No, for equivalent 'net money on your wallet after tax' a company pay more tax for employees than for company owner.

Without detailling too much (and by choosing an 'arbitrary but realistic situation') the are two ways of getting money from your company to your personal bank account :

- a specialy taxed "company owner" salary (you can make simulation here : https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/eurl , yes I choose a specific company category, but it's a common one, you can compare with a the 'standard' employee tax numbers : https://entreprise.pole-emploi.fr/cout-salarie/ ) which give you benefit from the social security system and which cost a bit less (for a standard company owner range of pay) than an employee salary.

- A 'company profit share' at the end of each year. You 'decide' how much you company profit was this year and that you want to give to owner, you pay a "less important tax than on salaries" give it to the owner, and then they pay their personnal income tax on it.

The optimisation game is to ensure yourself a sufficient salary to have a good social protection (and other perk like being abble to rent/buy/loan money easily) but also benefit from company income share wich is less taxed.

I dont even talk about legal trick to avoid parts of the company income tax, wich is way more complex to handle than a salary.

There are some potential very big game changers, I do hope it will pass. Specially because I think a lot of theses measures can only be applied through regulation and will improve consumer experience.

The problem for me with walled garden is 'if they are legal, every company SHOULD enforce them if they can. Not doing so would be plain stupid.'