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Yes, but making a port of a game to a console involves using the console’s APIs for things. Things like input, network, graphics and others can’t use generic libraries in consoles like you can on PC. If you’re making a game on a modern game engine a lot of that is abstracted away for you, but if you’re working on a game engine or a game written from scratch you need to take these things into consideration.
There’s no way in hell those games don’t run on PC, you think every dev/artist/designer/etc has their own Playstation devkit for testing things? There was work needed, probably related to PSN and some other optional things that can be turned off for dev builds, but I guarantee you the games were running on PC before anyone even considered porting them.
Yeah, I don’t remember the specific books but there is a specific thing that I thought was brilliant. One book follows an Astartes that starts to suspect heresy in their ship and he escapes it, he approaches another ship and recognizes the Astartes on the other end of the radio and confides in him about his suspicion and he lets him onboard. Then in another book you follow the story of that other Astartes, who starts to suspect heresy in the fleet and when the radio call comes it confirms his suspicions.
Not the greatest thing ever, but it was a cool thing that I don’t think I’ve seen any other book series do something similar.
No it wasn’t, it used the same (albeit highly modified) engine, if that makes HL a mod then almost every game you play is a mod since they all use some preexisting engine. Otherwise you have to consider Marvel vs Capcom infinity a mod of Daylight since they’re both UE4 games, or even Call of Duty as a Quake mod.
You don’t need Quake to run Half-life, therefore it’s not a mod, it just uses the same engine, or some parts of. That is very different from Counter-Strike which you needed to have Half-life and mod it to be able to play it originally.
This is the moment where Valve should publicly announce they’re not laying people off, because they have enough cash to pay all of their employees by charging a fair 30% of every sale, which makes their business sustainable. Then point to all other platforms that charge 30% and say “they’re not firing anyone either” then get to the only one that charges 12% and say “they’re the only ones losing money on this business by trying to undercut the real cost of doing this business, if they had charged the same 30% as everyone else does they would have enough to keep those employees”. Probably a bullshit argument because Epic surely has enough money to keep them now and it’s just someone looking at a graph and making bullshit decisions, still a very strong point for Valves lawyers to make.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. The difference is in what the algorithm is trying to do, traditional DLSS uses the image rendered in resolution X as output and scaled down to X/2 as input (for example), so it’s trained to upscale images, whereas this new thing uses who knows what as either, and clearly outputs something that is not an upscaled version of the frame.
Because a pixelated circle being upscaled is a circle, but a pixelated circle being turned into a high definition pie is no longer a circle, and that’s especially problematic if the circle was just a cross hair or some other random circle like thing the AI thought was meant to be a pie.
Yes, both things are the same, but that’s like saying you had a tiny spider in your house and you were okay because it killed mosquitoes in your house, so you should be okay with having a colony of bats since they are also animals and eat mosquitoes. Yes, both are the same, but the scales and the amount of intrusion are completely different.
While I understand what you’re talking about, I would argue it’s bad metaprogression that you dislike. I liked Rogue Legacy when I first played, but didn’t enjoy the second one even though it’s essentially the same. Let me give you an example of good metaprogression: Dead Cells.
There’s the metaprogression that allows you access to new areas and new mechanics, but that’s fairly quick compared to the length of the rest of the progression, and I would argue it’s not the sort of thing you’re complaining about.
What could be similar is the way you unlock equipment, although you don’t become stronger with each run, you unlock more weapons. This gives you variety, but the vast majority of the progression happens in your head. If you have enough hours in Dead Cells and think the metaprogression is what made you so good at the game that you couldn’t finish one level when you started and now you play for hours, do me a favor and start a new save. After being on the second cell I bought the game for a different platform, on my first run I got to the first cell.
Which brings me to the second metaprogression in the game, cells. They make the game harder, not easier, and it’s the way to progress, you have to purposefully make the game harder to progress. IMO this is how metaprogression is supposed to be done, you need to be better, and when you think you’re good enough to beat the game it lets you know “you’ve only just started”.
Sure, but that’s more about Valve not pursuing violations than anything else (in other comment I also mentioned how they turn a blind eye to Humble Bundle as well). But legally they could go after silent hill f and demand it be sold for a similar value to $31.49 since some time has passed and stem users have not been offered a comparable offer. I think what’s in the clause they make people sign is more important than whether they enforce it or not, because if it was about price parity with other stores then it would be abusive (even if they didn’t enforced it always), but if it is about selling something they provide then it’s not abusive even if they do enforced it always.
That’s not true, it only applies if you’re selling a steam key. Devs are free to set the price on any platform they want, want proof? Check out the currently free game on epic which has never been free on Steam.
Steam provides developers with infinite steam keys that they can sell outside of steam for 100% profit, however those keys cannot be sold at a lesser price than what it’s sold on steam. Which honestly sounds like common sense.
I think it’s you who is missing the point everyone is trying to explain to you. Valve doesn’t dictate the price on other stores, want proof? Epic gives free games regularly, those same games are sold on steam, for example currently you can get Definitely not fried chicken for free on Epic, but it has never been free on steam.
Valve only forbids you to sell Steam keys cheaper than on Steam. And even then they tend to turn a blind eye to stuff like humble bundle. They provide you with free Steam keys that you can sell and keep 100% of the value, but in exchange you can’t sell them cheaper than on Steam, which just seems like common sense really. If that lawsuit goes somewhere what Valve will do is charge for extra steam keys, or stop providing them, both of which are bad for developers.
Plus all of those games are still on steam, so no actual action was taken against them, one support person possibly misunderstood the question thinking he was selling steam keys and answered with incorrect information. I would get it if the game had been removed and that’s why they were suing, and in that case I would be with them, but that’s not the case. And Overgrowth is an old enough game that they could realistically risk it since there’s very likely not that many new sells happening.
All of my systems are Linux, launching Windows games on Linux is not trivial, Steam takes away almost all of that complication. It also provides an excellent ten foot interface for me to use on my TV and buy/install/launch games from my couch without any hassle. Speaking of controller usage, Steam provides excellent support to remap controllers even if a game doesn’t support it, and provide amazing features at that (for example multiple layers, gyroscopic mouse)
Games getting updated automatically is a great feature, I still remember having to download patches and applying them one by one after a fresh install. Similarly Steam also provides a workshop that allows you to install mods and keep them synced across different systems automatically.
Finally, the convenience of cloud saves for someone with multiple systems or who uninstalls a game and reinstalls it later is not easy to achieve without a launcher (I still have a saves folder backed up somewhere from before).
Besides all of that Achievement and other social features are important for some people. And for some games being able to easily play online with friends is amazing (if you’re not old enough to know what GameSpy is you don’t know what it was back then), although I don’t play too many online games so this one is not that important for me, but when I need that feature it is very handy.
In short there are many reasons, but if you’re playing old single-player games with mouse+keyboard on only one windows PC, then none of my reasons apply to you. Still I would argue that buying games on steam is easier than pirating them, so there’s the convenience factor still (e.g. at a friend’s house and they mention a game, open my phone, and in 5 min with a very intuitive flow I have the game downloading on my home PC so when I come back it’s ready to play).
The solution I’m talking about should already be the standard by most devs (especially small studios), even before LLM was a thing. See, small teams can’t afford QA, at least not to the same extent as big studis, so they need to add checks to stuff in a way that catches large problems, and a placeholder making it into the final game is a big problem. Even before generated images were a thing devs would just use any random image they had that more or less worked, and those images could have copyright or be problematic in any other way, so ensuring none of that made it into the final release has always been important.
That’s not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person’s job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.
I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there’s one thing I disagree:
However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique
There are ways to ensure you don’t forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_<name> or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won’t be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.
I think it’s okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don’t, it’s trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you’re building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.
You just answered your own question, no other medium would give you the anxiety the protagonist is experiencing.
Also, worth noting that this game was made by Frictional games, they essentially invented (or at least popularized) the genre. So while you might be sick of similar games, it’s like saying Mario is just another platformer. Most similar games out there are heavily inspired by Frictional games games.
Yeah, because business can’t simply ask employees or random people to buy the machines, rebuy from them and still get them cheaper. Hell, they can even advertise they will be buying machines for 10% higher price and let random people offer it to them. It’s an open platform, you can’t prevent people from getting it. Selling the machines at a loss is a sure way to have Valve bleed money, just like it happened with the PlayStation 3 until they closed the system. I would rather the hardware costs a bit more so that the platform can remain open.
Re-read my answer, if they were sold at a loss like you suggested it would be beneficial for companies to purchase them to be office, servers or anything, costing Valve money without bringing them any profit afterwards because those machines would be purchased without gaming in mind, only because they were the cheapest available option (since all of the others have some profit margin and steam machines would be sold at a loss).
Yes, but my whole point was that PCs have other uses, so Valve selling a PC at a loss can’t recover the money with games because people won’t necessarily play games on that machine. Saying “if you’re playing games” to that point is like someone explaining to you why seatbelts are needed in cars and you replying with “if you never crash they’re useless”, like OF COURSE that if we enter your hypothetical example everything works, the whole point is about the disaster that would happen if that wasn’t the case.
It’s not in the thread line I’m replying to, to get to that I would have had to read another reply, and all of the replies to that to spot yours.
If the work you do can be fully specified in a Jira ticket, you’re a code monkey and not a software engineer, of course you can use LLMs to do your job since you can be replaced by an LLM.
And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.
You’re missing my point entirely, it’s not that it can’t help with, it’s that the solution it writes will not take them into account unless you tell it to, and to explain every edge case in enough details to be unambiguous about all of them is essentially the same as writing code directly. Not to mention that you can’t possibly know all of the edge cases of the solution it will write without seeing it, so you can’t directly tell it to watch for edge cases without knowing what code it will write.
I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code.
Maybe, but then you have to review everything it wrote so you waste more time. Give me one concrete example of something that you can prompt an LLM to give you code that is advanced enough to be worth it (i.e. writing the prompt and reviewing the code it wrote would be faster than writing the code myself) and not generic enough that I would be able to find the answer in stack overflow.
Those symbols don’t have to be structured
If you don’t structure them the LLM might misinterpret what you meant. Structure in a language is required to make things unambiguous, this reminds me of the stupid joke of “go to the store and bring 1L of milk, if they have eggs bring 6” and the programmer coming back with 6L of milk because they had eggs. Of course that’s a stupid example, but anything complex enough to be worth using an LLM would be hard to describe unambiguously and covering all edge cases in normal human speak.
and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.
Typos are very easy to correct, most editors will highlight them for you, and some can even autocorrect them but more likely you avoid most of them by using tab completion anyways. I don’t waste any brain activity on that, I’m thinking on the solution and structuring it in an unambiguous way, that is what writing code is, it’s not some cryptic art of writing the proper runes to make the machine do your will like you seem to be implying, it’s just structured thought.
Plus, copilot is shit.
Might be, wouldn’t know any other as that’s the one I have available to use, but sincerely I doubt others are that much better to make a difference.
I rate your post as a skill issue.
Yup, I have absolutely no skill in using LLMs, nor will I waste my time with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat tool for auto completing small snippets like we used to do with an actual snippet library a couple of years ago, it is also a decent tool to navigate unknown code bases asking it where certain parts are or how to achieve something in the. I would say that 60% of the time it gives you some good pointers, but 90% of the time most of the code it writes is wrong, but at least it points you in the right direction of where to start investigating.
I don’t expect you to understand this since from what I’m reading here you probably never worked on anything big enough, but a software engineer job is not to write code, that’s just a side-effect, our job is to solve problems, so either you’re trying to get the LLM to solve the problem for you, or wasting lots of time explaining your solution in English, reading the generated code, understanding it, analyzing it, fixing any issues and testing it, possibly multiple times instead of explaining your solution once in code and testing it.
To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse.
Maybe, I don’t know how far into the game I got since I never finished it. But I don’t think it ever felt empty… Although the damn zombie mission is one I hate and has made me quit the game in more than one occasion.
I’m running Linux now
I have been running Linux only for over a decade, so I can confidently say the game runs, and in Steam is just hit play.
Not replying to you but to that statement, they’re absolutely wrong. I’ve never finished Bloodlines, life keeps getting in my way and I keep losing my save file (this is not unique to Bloodlines, there are several other games that are in the same bag). My point is every few years I start a new save on the OG bloodlines, and that game still holds out great, sure graphics are outdated, but other than that it’s a great game even by today standards, and while I haven’t played bloodlines 2, I’m fairly confident from everything I’ve seen it’s a worse game by every metric that matters. These people think that graphics can overcome anything, but that’s one of the least important parts of the game.
Sorry, I won’t go through your post history to reply to a comment, be clearer on the stuff you write.
I’m a software engineer, and if that’s how you code you’re either wasting time or producing garbage code, which might be acceptable wherever you work, but I guarantee you that you would not pass code reviews where I do. I do use copilot, and it’s good at suggesting small snippets, maybe an if, maybe a function header, but even then 60% of the time I need to change what it suggested. Reviewing code is harder than writing it yourself, even if I could trust that the LLM would do exactly what I asked (which I can’t, not by a long shot) it would maybe be opened to bugs or special cases that I would have to read the code, understand what it tried to do, figure out edge cases on that solution and see if it handled them. In short, it would take me much longer to do stuff via LLMs than writing them myself, because writing code is the easy part of programming, thinking on the solution and it’s limitations and edge cases is the hard part, and LLMs can’t understand that. The moment you describe your solution in sufficient detail that an LLM can possibly generate the right code, you’ve essentially written the code yourself just in a more complicated and ambiguous format, this is what most non technical managers fail to understand, code is just structured English, we’re already writing something better than prompts to an LLM.
It’s not just that, but I thought that replying to every single point would be too verbose. But you might be interested:
On a big studio Dev’s hardware can be as varied as on the real world, and while yes they’re usually beefy PCs, they’re not at all uniform.
Which for the most part is just natively done by changing the render size of the canvas. Only some games, and almost never ports, take resolution into consideration for other things like menu layout and even then it’s usually just 2 or 3 different configurations.
Usually the answer to this is “fuck it”, the only things a controller can do that KB+m can’t is rumble, and pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity you get away by mapping two different keys, and rumble you get away with adding audiovisual queues (which you should already have because the rumble might be broken in the person’s controller). Also, controllers work on PC.
Yes, but actually no. This is a solved problem for the most part, there might be some small tweaking needed but a mouse is very intuitive and usually just adding a couple of sensitivity sliders makes it so every person can control their experience at will.
If only we had developed standards for hardware like OpenGL/Vulkan, and the OS abstracted most of the other things away for you.
Do you think errors don’t happen on console? Error handling is error handling.
Does the game not launch on consoles? Do you think every game needs a separate launcher on PC?
Most of those are already there, the extra ones added are just about graphic control for performance reasons, so it’s usually just using downscaled versions of things or disabling features. And I guarantee you that most of that was in the game already because otherwise it wouldn’t run on Bob’s machine, they just needed to make a pretty UI for it.
This is accurate, there might be a considerate amount of effort needed here depending on how lazy devs were. Most people know not to use input directly and abstract it through a layer of actions, but sometimes things slip through.
There are other things to consider, things like network stack and input handling are very specific for console development, and if you’re not abstracting them through your own APIs you’re going to have a bad time porting the game. But there are reasons to do this even if you will only ever use one API, so most games should already do that. Also, this is an engine level fix, once you do this for one game, every game using that engine gets that fix.
But hey, what do I know? I only work in the low level network stack for games.