Every time I see the argument that “Oooh no you can’t release server code, there’s proprietary code there!”, I question my software development skills.
You mean to tell me when you have licensed code, you don’t wrap it with your own interfaces? I was always under the impression that it was best practice to never rely on one single concrete implementation of your interface, hence the Dependency Inversion Principle.
If you have a proprietary library you use for determining the positioning of players on a map, you wouldn’t be directly instantiating BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit, you’d be using ICharacterPositioner and then using BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit as the implementation of that interface, surely?
In my experience working with devs at game studios (i’m a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.
It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.
Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real “okay, let’s go back and reduce our technical debt” for the majority of games.
So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.
But also… how does that change anything? “Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works”?
I’m not a smart nor good developer so maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but if you’re a game Dev and you’re using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren’t you already bound to whatever license they have?
I believe if you’re following say Unreal’s structure, you’re using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you’ve made you can’t use or share any of Epic’s code. That would still require users to agree to Epic’s EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.
Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam’s SDK, etc and I feel like that’s a tangled web.
I’m also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.
I’ve never worked with Unreal’s server setup, but I imagine it doesn’t absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.
The point is yes, there is going to be code you can’t legally release, libraries you can’t use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can’t, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.
Even if you strip out the code you can’t legally release, that’s a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
Taking a cursory glance through the solutions that already exist for this (which are largely standalone MMO style servers):
You lose out on many network troubleshooting tools unreal has built-in, as well as some of Unreal’s play-in-editor testing tools. Its also common to add roughly 1.25-2x netcode development time as you’re going to be coding things in on the Unreal client side as well as the server side.
I can see why this is feasible but rare to see in the wild. I think anything you pitch to an exec with a note that it may add 6 months to a year of extra development time (and QA time) is going to cause people to start swinging.
Edit: This comes off as negative and I don’t mean it to be - A lot of companies do their own Unreal engine tweaks and I could see if a company built it up, they could have something solid and easily reworkable for future projects.
Ideally though, if this became law, you would be accounting for the fact you might have to swap out the server implementation into your initial development of the game.
Also, some of those tools you might not need for production client code. Yes it’s gonna be a pain in the arse to develop server code without those tools, but not necessarily impossible. You could release server code with those tools stripped out, or able to be configured to work with those tools if someone else has the license for them.
In essence, you could modify the client to include configuration points that can point to specific servers, and then release documentation to say “Hey, this is what tool was originally used, these are the kinds of packets the client is sending (and whether they are expecting a response), and these are the kinds of packets the server is sending to the clients”. You then leave the actual server development to whoever wants to build one. That is, effectively, how private MMO servers are made, but regardless of the type of game, you’re still sending UDP packets to a server and receiving UDP packets from the server. You just need to know the purpose of those packets.
Well its only been a few days, but I’ve been trying to dive into this and I’ve hit roadblock after roadblock. I think setting this up as well as the tools is well beyond my skill level.
Depending on what the law actually ends up being and how it actually effects me, the shorter road would be to move away from doing multiplayer games.
Though my games are considerably smaller than anything else mentioned in these threads, so I don’t think anyone will really mind haha.
Abstraction is a trade off. You don’t want to build interface layers between everything… It’s a pain in the ass, and if there’s a 1-1 relationship between parts of a system then you’re basically putting in a minimum cost to modify that area in any way. So if you do it, it’ll probably be once you’ve locked down the design pretty well
Game development is pretty different than normal development too. You have a lot of one off and lose ends based on creative decisions… You aren’t building up on top of your system, you’re building out
And frankly, it leads to a mix of mind blowingly good code and a lot of terrible code
So no, I don’t think it’s that easy. I think it’s also a bullshit argument, and they should release the “proprietary” code when they finish supporting the game, or put in the time to make the interfaces
I don’t follow this argument. In this context, proprietary code is work product that has value to its owner. Often large swathes of said work product is reused across games so the theory is that releasing the work product means your competitors can make your work product. I do not understand how wrapping someone else’s work product in your own work product doesn’t require them to first release their work product.
Note I don’t necessarily buy the company mindset on proprietary code; I explained here because I don’t understand where you’re coming from.
I mean if you are required to release a server dev kit, or at least make best efforts to release one, you can release what code you have and go “Here are the interfaces, but I can’t legally release this code because I don’t own it, so someone else is going to have to create an alternative”.
It’s about making it easier for other devs to make up for the gaps, rather than going “Nope! Proprietary code, can’t do anything!”
So basically, the news here is that the switch 2 screen is better than the switch 1 at 17ms vs 21ms, except for one singular tester that claims 30+, which no other independent tester collaborates… And then they go and compare it to screens that cost multiple times the entire switch’s cost… And this is presented as a bad thing?
My understanding is that most testers found it’s about 4ms better than the switch 1, and the only tester that found it worse refuses to actually outline their methodology, and nobody can reproduce the 30ms+ number.
Lol, I get it but comparing the Switch 2’s tiny screen to €600-2000 OLED gaming monitors is fucking pointless (it’s where the 100 times slower comes from).
Yeah it’s not good, it’s just a weird thing to put in the headline. It’s like comparing a new hatchback with its competition, but then also say it’s slower than the newest Ferrari. I think that should be a given as it’s a fraction of the price
They’ll release a “New!” version in a year with an improved screen as one of its bullet points, in a bid to get you to buy it again. And people will. See also:
New 3DS was actually a pretty huge upgrade over the original. Despite the name, it was effectively the next generation of the console. Or at the very least a half-generation.
To sign, you must provide a set of personal data, which is required by the authorities of your country for verification purposes. Specific measures are in place to ensure the protection of your data. See our privacy statement.
Perhaps if signing a petition didn’t require doxxing yourself then more people would sign.
I realize that it’s to prevent fake signatures and allow verification that the signatories are residents of the jurisdiction under petition, but this method inherently creates a sampling bias.
In the same vein as age verification, we need a solution for digital attestation that preserves anonymity and privacy. There are some initiatives in this direction, so perhaps we will get there some day.
There is an app that let you show only some data of your national ID and it’s verifiable by the other party. One of their usecases is specifically age verification. The app shows that the user is over 18 or under 18 and the portrait. There is a qr that can be used for instant verification.
But signing is kind of different. For signing you need an unique id.
I signed this petition with the digital certificate. It really never asked me for much more data. But the digital certificate includes full name, country and national ID number. But I suppose that’s the minimum needed for a valid signature.
Buenos Aires in Argentina already rolled out a decentralized digital id via zkSync on the Ethereum blockchain for their citizens, you basically have a zero knowledge proof that verifies who you are without revealing sensitive information. No more doxxing required
For those interested on how zkproofs work, it’s all mathmagic:
Can you help me understand which political petitions meant to document real constituent desires don’t require doxxing yourself? I don’t believe I’ve ever participated in any citizens initiative that didn’t require personal information.
There aren’t any, thats the point I’m making. Petitions produce sample bias that excludes the opinions of people who don’t want their legal name and home address printed on a document that might get passed around God-knows-where.
Our first data point is Monitors Unboxed. They found the Switch 2 returned an average pixel response time of 33 ms at 60 Hz.
Jesus Christ Nintendo. That’s absolutely horrendous. But on the plus side I’m glad the screen undervolting let you improve the battery life to an impressive *checks notes* two hours!?
all for the power of selling the device at profit and not at a loss.
when currently last gen pc handheld like the lenovo legion go is being sold at 500$ and has both a higher fresh rate resolution and 20ms pixel response time conpared to the switch 2s 33ms.
tl;dr he sandbagged the movement when it was beginning to build momentum with a bunch of, what would charitably be called, misunderstandings of the whole point.
Ah, another post where I get to rant about Piratesoftware. Fuck that self righteous, egotistical, fear mongering, ignorant, big headed, grifting, skript kiddy, cornball. Dude couldn’t be assed even to read the Q&A, then makes up stuff about the initiative out of thin air. Dude is such a little weezel, I can’t BELIEVE he still has a following after his hate campaign against the initiative. The fact that anyone outside of his immediate family cares about what he has to say boggles my mind.
Louis Rossman is, at best, a “free speech absolutionist” libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8
In a nutshell: It doesn’t matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all “He is a fucking prick and he didn’t read the FAQ” does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.
Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.
The relevant actors in this discussion already tried to address the arguments. Ross made a response video because Thor refused to talk to him like a petulant child.
Thor simply doesn’t care, his first comment to the initiative was literally “eat my whole ass”[sic]. The whole conversation is way past rational discourse. Thor decided to actively oppose the initiative under the main argument of “this is fucking stupid”(direct quote). There simply isn’t any rational argument to address. It’s all a personal attack and misinformation from a narcissist with an audience. He knows that this initiative kills his grift business. That’s all there is to know about the content of his rationality.
They certainly didn’t conduct themselves in a polite or persuasive manner during their argument(s). As others have said in this thread: he has attacked everything but the topic and when they did they (purposefully) seemed very confused about the overall goal and desire of the campaign.
Is this a case of being wrong about your initial conclusions and doubling down? Or is this a bad actor spreading purposeful misinformation? Going by the video alone it’s hard to see an alternative.
He’s a dev himself. He won’t be able to abandon his next game after it flops if this goes through. That’s why he’s spreading disinformation. I can only hope MoistCritikal’s video on it helps.
Also, SKG should seek legal action for defamation.
See, this again. They can abandon their game, it’s just that they have to patch out call home to function functionality. Patch out account verification and other bullshit. The game won’t work like before? That’s OK, it’s about reasonable playability. MMO with no players? That’s OK. No match making? That’s OK. However it was playing before abandonment, just let that run on the computer.
Maybe the final law will ask for a local server client, but the petition is only asking for reasonable playability. Reasonable.
He is referring to the fact that the only game pirate software has made was abandoned 7 years ago in early access and the dude just keeps patching it without significant content to avoid steam flagging and keep charging money for an unfinished demo. It’s an unimaginative ripoff to boot.
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