Ephera
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Non-gaming anecdote: Colleagues wanted to build a Rust application for different platforms. (Save for scripting languages, Rust has some of the nicest tooling around that.)
Building for Windows:
cross build --release --target=x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
Building for Linux:
cross build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Building for macOS:
Uh, you need some signing key or something like that? I believe, they had also concluded that you’d need to use a Mac to do the build, rather than being able to cross-compile from wherever.
In the end, they decided not to support macOS…
Well, the unfortunate part about Metal is that it’s incompatible with the rest of the world, too. They could’ve integrated Vulkan and chose to do something slightly different instead, because that’s the way the Apple crumbles, I guess.
There is MoltenVK, which is a compatibility layer to be able to run Vulkan games on macOS. Maybe they’ll integrate that. But well, it wouldn’t be on-brand, and it certainly still doesn’t make it easier for gamedevs looking to support macOS.
A few years ago, I would have fully agreed with you, but having tried my hand at (hobbyist) gamedev broke those rose-tinted glasses for me. It’s just extremely hard to curate gameplay mechanics.
The only real way to know whether a mechanic works in your game, whether it’s fun, is to implement it. That means you’ll be programming for weeks and at the end of it, you might end up deciding that it actually isn’t fun, so you get to rip it back out.
This is also a somewhat linear process. If you think of another mechanic at a later point, you’re not going to re-evaluate all previous mechanics to see whether a different combination would’ve been more fun. Instead, you just decide whether this new mechanic adds fun to your mechanic-soup or distracts from it.
Point is, even as a hobbyist and idealist, with theoretically infinite time, I quickly learned to swallow my pride and appreciate when something just adds fun, whether it perfectly fits in or not. You’re just not going to create the perfect game. And a game that’s a sum of inconsistent, fun parts is still more fun than a coherent game that doesn’t exist.
Of course, this does not mean, you should include mechanics even though they’re overused. That seems to rather be a result from long development cycles, where games decide to include the mechanic when it’s not yet overused, e.g. when a popular game featured that mechanic, but once the game comes out, then a whole bunch of other games have come out before, which had also decided to include that same mechanic.
I think, part of it is also that it’s a rather isolated feature which is fun on its own. You don’t need multiple systems working together to make parrying fun. Instead, you just react in the right moment and there’s your endorphins. Pretty much the hardest part about implementing it, is to make enemy attacks readable, which you likely need for dodge rolls, too. And then especially for AAA titles, which can’t afford to experiment much, such an isolated feature is just a no-brainer to include.
Problem is that it’s also an impossible equation to expect customers to keep paying higher prices despite inflation nixing their wages. I really don’t know what they expect to happen. Many people will simply wait until it goes on sale.
I guess, it’s a way to squeeze the day-one rich kids a bit more? But at the same time, you’re cutting down sales when the hype is biggest. And if two people spend $60 each, that’s more money than if only one of them ends up buying your game…
Well, as the others already said, it’s a matter of taste and different factors play into it, but your argument with the AI is precisely why I find this decision so jarring: You don’t need nor want unpredictability in a skating game.
It’s not a competitive genre where the unpredictability makes it interesting. And I remember watching a video of a guy playing Skate where NPCs would constantly walk into his path and it was the most infuriating thing. If there would’ve been no NPCs, no unpredictability, the game would’ve been better.
Of course, with an MMO, other players will probably have no collision. But if you can still see them where you’re skating, they’ll still get in the way of you seeing what you’re skating on, particularly if you run into trolls.
I’m not completely negative to the MMO concept. Maybe it is fun to see just the sheer chaos of hundreds of others skating in the same place. Maybe they have some sort of idea to actually make interaction with other players relevant in some way. Maybe it’s kind of cool for folks to log into the Skate MMO and just hang out. Or maybe it’s only an MMO hub-world and you don’t have to see other players on the individual courses. But yeah, I’m just not holding my breath.
The problem is that no one asked for an MMO. The game series always offered singleplayer. The gameplay is likely made worse by being an MMO. People who are not fans of the series can just skip this game, but those who are fans of the so-far-singleplayer series are those who are asking for a singleplayer experience.
Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.
Hmm, you mostly press the button in the top right to progress through turns as well as through the individual ‘decisions’ within a turn. And each decision is something like “What should this unit do?”, so it will automatically select a unit and you can instruct it by either clicking on the map to tell it where to walk/attack or with the buttons in the bottom left.
In your first turn, one of those units is a settler, which you might tell to found a city. In that case, you also have to tell the city what building to construct, for which it will bring up the city screen and then you select that in the list on the left. Well, and if you do build a city, you also have to select a technology for it to research, which brings up another screen with the possible technologies in a tree structure, where you select one technology and confirm it.
I’m sure, there’s tons of places one can get stuck on, but it is fairly linear gameplay, so don’t overthink it…
Well, if you played it a few years ago, the tutorial was also still rather sparse. That should be better now, too.
Oblivion Remexicoed.
Needlessly absolute take. Yes, there’s going to be parents, who’d rather pay extra than look into what other games they could give their kid, as well as loyal Mario fans, who will pay pretty much any price. But there’s obviously also players who do weigh up their options based on price, and who will make different decisions when they have to decide between two titles, when one of them is cheaper. Especially with the additional invest for a new console and the more dire economic situation, I could see many players not buying into the Switch 2 at all.
Yeah, leaving moral reservations aside, it’s especially annoying to me, because it’s being pushed with complete disregard whether it actually helps me.
I’ve been working in a programming language for the past two years, in which I’m well-trained. Better than the statistical average that LLMs blurt out, at the very least. So, I’ll often end up correcting whatever it generates, rather than just typing out the same directly. In particular, I also find it much easier to think while typing, rather than while reviewing code, so I need pauses to think anyways. And I also just find it disrupts my concentration when the autocompletion-style LLMs keep flickering their suggestions at me.
Similarly, flavor images. So much of management is fucking excited about generative AI, because they can type shit like “wombat hanging off of a line of code” and then it slops out an image, which they can slap into their presentation and pretend it has meaning.
I don’t like those images. The AI-generated ones look terrible to me, but I did not either like them before they were AI-generated. It’s just pointless imagery, why are you showing me this?
Obviously, management can disagree with my stance, many people do, but if they want me to present shit, they need to respect that my presentation style just does not include flavor images, no matter what flavor image generator we pay for.
Yeah, I don’t have first-hand experience with Arch for that reason either. Well, and also because I do want a distro to set things up for me. You could set up the snapshotting (with BTRFS and Snapper) on theoretically any distro, but not having to figure out how and what settings are good, that’s why I go with openSUSE.
I might look into NixOS at some point. It obsoletes the need for OS snapshots, because the entire OS configuration is made in configuration files. But from what I hear, it helps to be a programmer (which I am) to really appreciate NixOS.
And yeah, don’t know much about Bazzite either, but from what I’ve heard, it really has some design decisions that make it feel more like a games console. The atomic/transactional updates, for example. As I understand, updates and such are applied to a copy of your OS, which gets swapped in when you do the next reboot. This helps keep the system stable after applying updates, but implies that you can’t really just poke around manually in your root partition.
It can be helpful for users not looking to experiment, but yeah, can be a pain, if you do want to.
As for a real-time kernel, the JACK FAQ says you don’t need it, but the distro might limit real-time scheduling anyways: https://jackaudio.org/faq/linux_rt_config.html
I’ve had JACK running on my system about a year ago, although I didn’t really have a need for low latency, so I can’t say, if it actually worked correctly.
Perhaps also worth pointing out that “Pipewire” is becoming a thing, which tries to make interfacing with JACK and PulseAudio much easier. I believe, I also used Pipewire back then. But yeah, folks who’ve dealt with JACK a lot more than I have, seem to be really excited about it, so it’s presumably doing a great job.
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.
If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
- Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other “Spins” are available.
- Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It’s really up-to-date, so much that it’s referred to as “bleeding edge” (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It’s also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
- Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I’m on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use apt, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses dnf and Arch uses pacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…
Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.
With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.
- My personal favorite DE is KDE Plasma. The default-layout is also Windows-like, but it’s got all of the bells and whistles and options you could imagine. It’s kind of power-user heaven and almost like a toolbox to build whatever workflow you want.
- The other big, popular DE is GNOME. It’s more macOS- and Android-like and focuses on a specific workflow. People who can get used to that workflow, then often really like it. The workflow itself is sometimes frustratingly uncustomizable, but it’s also fairly customizable when it comes to the details, typically by virtue of also having lots of features, which can then be customized.
- Well, and I guess, I’ll throw in Xfce, too, since that’s likely what you used, back when you used Ubuntu Studio. (Ubuntu Studio uses KDE since the October 2020 release, but used Xfce before then.)
Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.
Well, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that’s what I’d recommend, if you’re not looking to experiment.
This is a very mild violation, but I like to play these puzzles: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
…except that I create a custom difficulty level which is quite a step below the easiest difficulty and then I almost rather speedrun the puzzles.
The Rectangles puzzle at 5x5 size has been my crack for the past months and I’m at about 13 seconds now (using my phone as input).
I mean, it’s very casual speedrunning. No one cares about my time, so I actually never timed myself before just now. But yeah, I just like the different challenge of thinking fast rather than complex.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…
Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.
I think, it’s a combination of things.
To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.
But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?
Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.
I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.
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I mean, they do have the infinite money glitch, a.k.a. being owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft’s investors think Fallout 5 will make its money back, it’s more lucrative to get started on it sooner rather than later.
And it does also need to be said that they can’t keep remastering Fallout titles forever. They need to develop a new title at some point.
Bethesda Game Studios has so far always only had one game in development at a time, which should be TES6 right now. If they are working on Fallout 5, we’re likely talking pre-production stages. So, it might very well be the case that the two remasters come out in roughly equal spacing before Fallout 5 comes out in a few years.