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Broodwar remaster was also good. If they faithfully uprez the graphics, fix severe bugs, and do nothing else then there’s hope. The 2D remasters have a good track record so far.
That said, had anyone played WC2 recently? It’s pretty rough. It’s fun for nostalgia sake and if you’re into the lore of Warcraft or the history of RTS, but it doesn’t hold up like Broodwar still does.
Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.
It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.
At AAA studios you can pour your heart and craft into creating something beautiful along with hundreds of other wonderful colleagues, for years, only to have it ruined by management who literally doesn’t give af. Not only do they not play games, or even like games, they are proud of this fact in a sort of, “sell me this pen” type of way. These people always existed but the “financialization” of the industry means they are everywhere now. Even one of these people in the wrong place can be poison, and they are everywhere. This mutated organelle has made the entire studio system too neoplastic to perform its primary function.
It’s like training for years as a chef, slaving away in a hot kitchen for the big opening, then having the owner (who hasn’t cooked in decades) insist you serve your food in the toilet because “hey it’s porcelain, it’s the same as fine china”. Then when the restaurant bombs you get fired and he gets a huge bonus because he’s a genius cost cutter and you couldn’t sell his vision. Nobody cares that you made the best bisque of your life when its served in a toilet. How many times can that happen before you say, “fuck it”?
Well for me it was ten years. Not laid off, but just couldn’t take it anymore. I could probably get another job with my resume, but I just can’t bring myself to apply again. Through a little planning and extremely good luck I’m not really under any pressure. Makes me feel like a fool because a lot of people work worse jobs, but then I remember how sad and angry I was all the time. When I look at job postings those feelings return. The problem is I still like it and want to do it. I feel forced out because I care about making good stuff instead of just “line go up”. I would take a huge pay cut to work on a team that had the “magic” again.
Just spitballing but you’d have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.
The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.
An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.
This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.
You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say “fuck the users”, with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA’s approach to drones.
In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.
This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also “permanent staff”.
Management likes to go on and on about how staff are “family”, but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! ~(for staff only)~
Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I’m not expected to participate in their “corporate culture”.
Speaking as someone who’s worked inside a couple “AAA” studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It’s no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.
The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it’s impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don’t see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It’s seriously depressing. I’m a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I’m watching the sequel.
I don’t want to dox myself, but I know what happened here. Performance was unacceptable on Series S, and it was unknown how effective optimization would be. BGS management is extremely risk averse, so they decided to add more loading areas. For example, making Neon multiple cells. Later the optimization team came through and it turns out that wasn’t necessary but CK workflow is way too manual and bug prone to undo the changes that close to release. I don’t remember if Purkey left before the buyout but Series S became the performance target and that made everyone freak out.