Ephera
- 2 Posts
- 159 Comments
Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
Not quite in the spirit of this post, but I managed to complete Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for the first time this year. It’s been my favorite game for a few years now, but it’s a roguelike and doesn’t allow for many mistakes, so lots of starting over.
That is also the complete list of games I completed this year. I started replaying Thomas Was Alone, but somehow the platforming passages were a lot more frustrating to me, so haven’t finished it…
I always thought, it worked quite well to have different areas with weaker or stronger enemies. That way, you have challenges to match to your character’s strength, but you still have a form of progression and you get shown your power-level when you pass through a low-level area again. Downside for game studios is that this requires good world building, to guide players where they should or should not go. And yeah, that wasn’t exactly Oblivion’s strong suit with mostly everything looking like a high-fantasy meadow…
I don’t know about New Vegas, but the trick with Morrowind is that when the guy tells you, you need to go to a cave west of town, that you then get lost, run into a naked barbarian and help get his clothes back, then you run into a lady who got robbed, but fell in love with the robber, so you help reunite them, and then you’re halfway across the map and have long forgotten that you were supposed to find a cave, but you had a much better time than you could have had in that cave.
Also, the cave might be south of town. It happens. 🙃
The person who announced this change noted in a reply that “Negative filtering is coming soon.”…
Nope. The actual disclosure dialog is a bit more precise in its wording: https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging
I find that difficult. Aside from code reviews, often times your job as a maintainer is:
- getting a refactor or code cleanup in while everyone’s asleep
- shuffling commits around between branches
- fixing the CI toolchain
- rolling back or repairing a broken change
- unfucking the repo
- fixing a security vulnerability
A required review slows all of these tasks to a crawl. I do agree that the kernel is important enough that it might be worth the trade-off.
But at the same, I do not feel like I could do my (non-kernel) maintainer job without direct commit access…
Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.
You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.
Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.
I’m guessing, what OP wants is:
- limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
- somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills
Man, fuck oil spills. You walk into the first dungeon, you set fire to an oil spill with a spell. Then you’ll try dropping one of those laterns, which are always conveniently placed above the Exxon Valdez. And then, that’s it, the fun is over, the joke is told, that’s all you can do with oil spills.
I’d also really like to know what other examples there are of it being more reactive. You can’t freeze the ground to make enemies slip. You can’t zap a river to fry some fishes. You can’t set fire to wood.
It really feels like some dev thought to themselves, we’ve got oil lamps, maybe we could have some of that drip out, and then the Sweet Little Lies guy said fuck yes, put lakes of oil into every dungeon, so I can claim we’ve made the magic system more reactive or some shit.
I feel like a big reason why AA disappeared is poor visibility in a saturated market.
Indies get visibility from just posting on social media and indie-specific events, because many people genuinely just love seeing labors of love.
AAA games get visibility from just pumping millions into marketing.
As a AA game, you’re kind of caught in the middle. You’re not enough labor of love to reach the indie enjoyers, and you’re frequently just drowned out by AAA marketing. Not to mention that AAA releases are frequent enough that you’ll pretty just reach gamers who enjoy a certain genre or franchise.
Having said that, we’re on the tail end of the games wave that came from the pandemic. Maybe in a year from now, AA games are in a better place again.
Well, to quote the article’s response to that:
Nice idea in theory, but these built in blockers pale in comparison to the real thing.
Vivaldi users point out that the built in blocker is noticably worse than uBlock Origin, with some guessing that Vivaldi doesn’t fully support uBlock Origin filterlists (Vivaldi is closed source, so it’s harder for users to investigate).
Recently saw a streamer talk about this, and not a tech streamer or anything. She didn’t get quite all the details right, but I think that’s the massive fuckup of Google here: If you don’t get the details right, your interpretation is simply that Google is killing ad blocking.
She’s actually using Opera and understands that it’s Chromium-based, so her takeaway was that Firefox might be the only option left.
In that vein, she also talked about how Google Search is now just ads and bad results, and when someone mentioned DuckDuckGo, she responded that she’s been genuinely been thinking about switching.
Like, damn, I know Google is big and this alone won’t kill them. But her talking about it still felt like the initial drop before the rollercoaster goes downhill. I don’t think, I’ve heard a non-techie talk so negatively about Google, possibly ever…
Well, I wasn’t aware that they’re doing this, because I don’t follow Microsoft news.
Now that I’ve heard it, I don’t find it particularly surprising, although as the other person suggested, surely there’s a more proper solution.
Maybe they don’t want a proper solution, though, because it puts them into the news…
You mean more like Veloren. 🙃
(It’a basically a community revival of Cube World.)
Well, in this case, it is actually Valve that does the licensing. I don’t think the original companies have much to do with it, other than maybe being more willing to sell through Steam than e.g. GOG or itch.io.
But all in all, yes, it would be a much more useful law, if it declared such a licensing model void.
I’m guessing, they didn’t tackle that problem, because there are more legitimate uses of a licensing model, like World of Warcraft only giving you access while you’re paying the monthly fee.
Nothing unsolvable, but you need some solid laws and it’d be a lot less likely that you’d get support from enough political parties to carry this into actual law.
Before the Unity suicide, I doubt it had 10% either. And you know, making games takes time, so in terms of released games, we might still not see an uptick.
But I do think newly developed, particularly indie titles will go beyond those 10%, and maybe even quite easily so.
There’s not many statistics out there, so here’s some horribly biased ones: https://gamefromscratch.com/godot-popularity-at-gmtk-jam-2024-explodes/
This is from a gamejam held by a particular YouTube channel. That YouTube channel has an ongoing series about making a Unity game, nothing about Godot yet.
But it is a gamejam, where people sit down for just a weekend to make a game, so people will be much more willing to try a new engine out. Although they’ll typically have some prior experience, since you don’t want to spend the whole gamejam learning an engine.
But yeah, those caveats notwithstanding, that still is a significant growth for Godot.
I imagine, part of the reason is that you can really get fucked by law enforcement in many countries, if you operate a server and don’t curb illegal content that you’re aware of.
That wouldn’t sit well with me either, if my friends’ concept of free speech is just continuously saying illegal things for no good reason.
Man, you almost feel bad for them, because clearly some effort went into this. It’s not like they just slapped high-res textures on and called it a day. You can tell, because that would’ve looked better.
But I don’t actually feel bad, because no one forced them to remake such a recent title. You don’t run that risk, if you remake something that actually looks bad in the first place.
So, uh, after writing that, I realized the most recent FlorisBoard update actually removed quite a few features and this might not be true anymore. 😅
For example, FlorisBoard had glide typing built-in, now it doesn’t anymore. Apparently, the dev is working on re-implementing it along with word suggestions (which are currently missing, too).
I actually happen to not need these features, so I kind of forgot. And this most recent update came with an add-on store integration, which seems like it could become quite cool in the future, when there’s more add-ons: https://beta.addons.florisboard.org/
Aside from that, I think, FlorisBoard still has a few more configuration options, but on the other hand, HeliBoard has a Kaomoji tab in its emoji selector, so I guess, I’ll give HeliBoard another shot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ah, that’s the “Android navigation bar”. All I know is that Google really doesn’t want that bar to get hidden when the keyboard is open, as there’s otherwise no guaranteed way of closing the keyboard. So, I’m guessing, you’d need some extremely hacky methods which modify the OS, like XPosed or whatever is the current thing is in that regard…
I’m using FlorisBoard: https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.patrickgold.florisboard/
Many people also like HeliBoard, which is somewhat simpler: https://f-droid.org/packages/helium314.keyboard/
All the initiatives I’ve read so far, did have pretty concrete suggestions for how laws should be changed. In my experience, law makers will gladly consider a suggestion, because making laws is hard. Yes, that means lobbying is rather easily possible, but consumers are the group that does the least amount of lobbying.
Yeah, I had to figure out what it really is from Wikipedia and my two reactions were:
- Ubisoft has a ‘universe’? Huh, I guess, they do have a few franchises there.
- That actually sounds reasonably interesting. At least it’s not just yet another uninspired shooter.
And like, yeah, lacklustre marketing puts it quite well. I had heard of XDefiant before, but all I got from that was that it’s a shooter, which made me fall asleep immediately.
Had they sold it as “You ever wanted to pit the Splinter Cell guy against the Far Cry bandits?”, I would have at least remembered it.
But to be fair, a lot of games are currently coming out. It is difficult to be seen for pretty much all titles…
There’s this open-source, Diablo-like game/engine, called FLARE, which I find interesting in that regard, because the basic gameplay is there. My monkey brain is having fun with it, i.e. getting an endorphine rush, because big numbers go brr.
But they obviously don’t have the budget of Blizzard, to try to hide that that’s what it’s doing.
I think, around 4 times throughout the campaign, you get the same spider model, but this time it’s five levels stronger than last time. 🙃
- Ephera to
English - •
- 1Y
- •
I think, a big part of the problem is that much of the cost is sunken into things that don’t really teach you too much. The basic game concept prototype can probably be developed for less than $10m. You do still learn some things by making really nice graphics. But then making those nice graphics as well as sounds, voice recordings and world design for your massive open world, that’s when you’re just doing more of the same at quite the scale.