Makes sense. Individuals regularly get patents in America and individuals regularly get cancer in America. It’s just an asset albeit one that may have emotional value. But cancer will cost you your heirlooms here too
I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.
And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.
Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10...
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.
The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.
The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.
I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?
Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!
That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.
It’s Valve’s responsibility that Microsoft stripped DOS support from their OS in Windows 10?
Starting with Windows 10, the ability to create a MS-DOS startup disk has been removed, and so either a virtual machine running MS-DOS or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source.
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak.
I think it’s more about if you don’t upgrade your PC.
Say you bought a game on Steam, while Windows XP was current, then just kept that PC, didn’t upgrade for whatever reason. Why would you, your game is running fine. But now Steam doesn’t support Windows XP anymore or Windows 7 for that matter, even if the game itself would run on it, making Windows 10, eventually 11, then whatever in the future, effectively the minimum requirement to play your game. The dev isn’t really at fault, because the game could technically still run on that OS, you just can’t download it anymore.
I agree with him in that regard, that it these things suck, however few people are actually affected by this. I think there should be some sort of “Legacy Client”, but then you have to deal with security. Just saying, connect your Windows 98 machine to the net for an occasional DRM check isn’t really viable. Installers would be the obvious answer, but that’s not what Steam does. Maybe Linux could be the answer, but I don’t know if it could be basically the same at one point with kernel version requirements or something like that.
Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible,
I think they mean modifying the minimum requirements, because their electron based abomination of a client does not support older systems
so unless you know to use the goldberg emu, it will possibly make those games different, or at worst unplayable. I know of games that glitch with modern hardware, in one instance because it is so old the dev never thought about graphics hardware with 2 GB VRAM or more, and it was never patched either.
its suprising that such a high profile person does not know about goldberg emu (or various other solutions), so they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?
That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.
Healthcare is just a way to coerce the working class to produce value for the wealthy. That is the real reason why there is no universal healthcare in America.
I’d be interested to know how I can pay my electricity bill with my free healthcare. Also I need to go to the supermarket today; how do I convert free healthcare into a trolleyful of food?
Civilised countries like the UK and other European countries. Technically it’s not free because it’s paid for by taxation, but it’s free at the point of use: if I go and see a doctor, I don’t get billed, but I do pay 9% National Insurance tax.
WTF did I just read? Fuckin weirdos. That is uncomfortable on so many levels. Poor kid. I remain traumatised from the time I had to remove all the malware from my dad’s computer. That was twenty years ago, he’s dead now, but I still carry the abominable image of him in his wheelchair, pulling his decrepit knob to Thai ladyboys, with the dogs lined up on the sofa watching. Ignorance is bliss. Ho hum, conservatives eh?
It’s not just a shitty disease…. It’s a shitty disease that the Social Security Administration really, REALLY does not like to pay out disability for. Mostly because, unless something has changed recently, it’s hard to prove that you actually have it because it defies easily quantifiable medical testing, among other things.
So, it would be a curse on multiple levels!
Source: I used to be an attorney who fought for people who had been denied benefits.
This is tragic. I have been on NexusMods since the 2000s. I learned how to mod games because of that site. I will be pouring one out for this landmark of a website after work today. Paid for Lifetime and everything, because the website made it easy to find, install, and update mods for any given game that supported mods. Damn, man. Damn.
Well in Helldivers 2s case, its not helpful that they picked to use a dead game engine. Autodesk Stingray has been dead for a while.
Also, I might agree except that solo indie devs in their basement can add many basic features in 6 months time, not just one. I get that some features, like new maps, mechanics, or characters take time. But for example, when a game mechanic already exists elsewhere in a game but not in a different part (for example, a flashlight attachment on one gun but not a different gun), there is not a thing in the world that will convince me that would take 6 months to add. And if it would take 6 months to add, that is entirely due to laziness or incompetence.
Sounds to me like you’re not considering that they likely have a massive list of priorities to address and a flashlight attachment is simply not even close to the top of the list.
It was only an example. As the asset already exists in the game elsewhere, adding that same asset somewhere else in the game should definitely not take even an intern more than a week to implement.
Again, it is understandable in certain circumstances that major content drops take time. But for something as simple as the flashlight attachment example (which again is only a hypothetical example), there is no excuse for something like that to take 6 months or more to implement. Even if they have other priorities, something like that is so menial to implement that it would not take any significant amount of time away from higher priority development. Particularly because, in the example, other guns already have flashlight attachments, it already exists in the game. Unless they programmed the game in the literal worst way imagineable, they likely have a modular weapon system with slots that accept attachments. Very easy to add a new slot and allow it to accept the flashlight attachment, again as an example.
a big part of the complexity in programming (especially game programming) comes from balancing flexibility with speed (both implementation and performance). At some point, decisions are made weighing out risks, priorities and plans that will solidify a part of the code base in favor of speed (or some other factor) at the cost of flexibility.
this happens all the time
A lot of the reasons a solo dev or modder seems like they can progress so fast changing things is they aren’t facing a lot of the same factors and they aren’t needing to go through any rigorous testing.
At some point in the process, there’s too much risk and and overhead involved to make any change. This is totally normal from triple A down to game jams.
And, you can’t ignore that some of these things come down to game design. A change like you’re suggesting, just adding a light, can negatively affect the balance of things even if it seems like it wouldn’t.
It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don’t think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don’t get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.
On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction… see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).
I am not a game dev and do not have a stake in this personally but also dislike the ‘lazy or incompetent dev’ line that gets used sometimes. While ALOT of games seem to be made with really shitty code, with a game that seems as complex as Helldivers 2 adding a new feature can be a lot more complex than expected.
First there are non-technical factors: bosses that might not want to implement the feature and needs to be convinced, the devs might not know how to implement it and need to do research which takes time, artists that need to be added to the pipeline for assets, budget or other financial concerns (management might not think the feature will contribute to revenue), or even something like petty internal politics.
One the side of technical problems there is combinatorial explosion where adding ONE feature means thinking about how it interacts with all the other features. There is the problem of possible technical debt where you might inherit bad code from previous devs that you need to change before you can add anything. There is also the problem that the feature might not be technically feasible; remember that a game has only a fraction of a second to do its calculations and display them to the player while also checking for player input. This does not even begin to consider the problems caused by being a multiplayer game with possible network problems.
On the discontinued engine, the studio founder said that they were already in development of Helldivers 2 when it was discontinued according to the Wikipedia article.
Yeah I agree this seems more like tech debt and possibly a shitty architecture to me, both problems that ultimately come from poor management. The codebase I’m responsible for at work was developed in a mad rush, and the levels of pointless coupling and interdependence sometimes makes it hard to change anything without spending forever tracking down all the stupid little places that piece was touching. That shit comes from management pushing you to just do the thing already and move on, which works for a while until things get so messy you have to slow down or spend some time on a refactor. Someone could easily have made a technical decision for the sake of expedience, which was then built upon and became interconnected with other things in a way that made changing it require a major change, which of course no manager will support, so the work gets broken up into 100 tiny stupid tickets trying to move toward adding the new feature without ever making a breaking change, slowing down the whole thing even more.
Sure, larger businesses have more developers to get more work done. But there comes a time when throwing new developers at a problem convolutes the process and actually slows things down more than it helps.
Something that seems simple to you like a flashlight attachment may not be so simple under the hood.
Solo indie devs have an advantage because they’re familiar with all of the code. They’re the ones that wrote it.
They don’t need to learn a new part of the code when making fixes or changes. They don’t need to explain to another dev that “you don’t change how this information is passed in here because you’ll need it to look just like that in some other section that you’ll never touch”.
Additionally any decisions/changes/etc. are all decided by one person, no need for meetings to get everyone on board and explain exactly what you want to do. No need to try to get everyone to understand your vision for what you want to happen.
A famous comic might explain this process a little better:
I don’t think the game engine has anything to do with it. The common criticism against Helldivers 2 is that there should be more enemies, biomes, weapons, missions etc.
Adding a new enemy isn’t easy work. People think it’s just dragging a new 3D model to the map and then it’s done.
First it needs to be planned. It must be conceptually different from all other enemies so people don’t complain about that it’s just a copy paste reskin. Then it must be developed, which includes code, modeling, animation and sound design - all working in tandem.
And finally it must be tested and tweaked to ensure it mechanically works with all other systems in the game, like other enemies, weapons, missions, etc. Maybe during testing they realize it’s not as fun to play as they imagined, so they have to go back to the drawing board and iterate. Each iteration can affect code, modeling, animation and sound design. However, all involved aren’t just waiting in standby for feedback from play testing. They’re currently working with 100s of other things at the same time.
And then after a month of work they realize it’s never going to mechanically work, and they have to start from the beginning with a new idea.
Then repeat all of the above until they find something that actually works. This could easily amount to 6 months of work.
Working as a solo dev on a project you know by heart is literally the easiest work to do. If you’ve never had to work on a large old codebase you have no idea just how hard it can be to make changes.
I’ve done this sort of thing for years and I would not even give an estimate on a change for a new project without some time to look at the code base.
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