Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
They claimed the Xbox One (the original last gen model) would be decades ahead of any other competitors because games would be, wait for it, cloud hybrid. Some things would render locally, but Microsoft servers would calculate complex collisions, volumetrics, crowd AI, and so on.
Because people complained about the connectivity requirements. Unfortunately I don’t think we are there still, infrastructure for a lot of areas will not support this.
For all its many many many flaws (like having your flagship game start in a snow storm…), Google Stadia very much demonstrated the viability of full game streaming. Even people with shit broadband could still play a “last gen” quality game. Sure people in the outright sticks won’t be able to but… they likely aren’t doing a lot of gaming as getting a 10 GB patch out to them is hard enough.
And if you are only doing game logic and some simulations, rather than full rendering? The bandwidth needs drop even more.
Sure, people with crappy broadband could play… At something like N64-level settings and slideshow frames per second, even with “last-gen” games. Granted, streaming an entire game is more of a load on bandwidth than cloud hybrid or patches, but if it was really feasible for the masses even a year ago, Stadia might still be up today, but it’s already gone. I would still rather be able to play a game I own on console without needing a persistent connection to play, as a cloud hybrid game may require. If there is still the option to play the game offline at lower settings, that wouldn’t be so bad, but then you just know that M$ will be looking to monetize the cloud hybrid option: “play at full settings online for only $— per month!”
Weird. Very curious what issues you ran into. I didn’t even have anything that bad on hotel wifi.
Mostly because: The video is pretty “easy” and mostly suffers from compression artifacts. If you can watch youtube, you can stream a game at generally one quality setting lower. Because latency is what matters. The actual game inputs are nothing on top of that.
Mostly it was just annoying that google did EVERYTHING they could to market it poorly and “Gamers” lost their god damned minds because they felt threatened. Which… is pretty reminiscent of MS cocking up the announcement of the One.
Don’t worry y’all. By cloud it’s just gonna be dynamic ads.
But for real, background animations and details could be streamed through another device having to render that something. Anything that doesn’t revolve around the gameplay itself.
So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?
Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?
The arrested Roblox developer was later identified as Mikhail Jacob Olson, also known as Simbuilder. Per the Chronicle, Olson was taken in (and later charged) for having a concealed firearm in his vehicle, along with “possession of armor-piercing munition and a large capacity magazine activity.”
Fuck, the dude was ready to commit mass murder. Anyone got more details on him and/or why he might have wanted to kill people there?
Do you know how little that narrows it down? There was also the controversy around them essentially exploiting free child labor - www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
That really doesn’t do anything at all to explain why one of the devs would get arrested for brandishing(?) A handgun. Literally conveys no other information other than “Roblox devs bad”, same thing is true of the rest of this thread now that I think of it.
Like just going off the title, that could be describing a would-be mass murderer who got foiled as easily as it could be describing some guy who just forgot to take off his conceal carry and the wrong person realized before he did.
I have to wonder what kind of ammo that is really, I’m a firearms enthusiast and have never seen armor piercing ammo for sale anywhere. Pretty sure it is illegal everywhere.
Really sucks to be a Unity developer right now. I’ve been working with mostly Unity for around 10 years now, and while I’m not directly affected by the recent changes, it really feels like the engine has been dying a slow death for a few years now. Hopefully Ricitello will leave eventually and they can turn this around, otherwise many of my skills will be useless in a few years…
If I were running a Unity project, I'd be tempted to just jump to Unreal. No matter what promises Unity makes you don't have any actual guarantee that they'll keep them while Unreal has the "non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract. However painful the switch is, you'll only have to do it once.
"non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract
I also wonder how Unity‘s approach will work in countries where that is the legal default. I have a feeling that we will be seeing quite a few lawsuits next year, if they actually go ahead with their plans.
Nintendo would probably prefer the 20 cent per copy license fee to a percent based one. New Pokemon games are sold at 60 dollars in the US and sell millions of copies. This is a bigger issue for indie developers looking to sell for a cheaper price to bring in sales.
are unity and unreal so different that your 10 years of experience in one isn’t helpful for the other? i’m not a game developer but I had assumed it was similar to web frameworks - definitely high switching costs for porting an existing project, but as a developer looking for a job there are still many portable skills.
i’d guess it also depends on what parts of the engine you are working in?
To an extent I can apply my knowledge to other engines, sure. I’m working on my third Unreal project currently, and while it’s not like starting from scratch, I’m definitely way slower working with it. It also doesn’t replace Unity completely. It’s great for high-spec 3D stuff, but almost useless for mobile 3D/AR apps, which is a lot of what I do (not making games but mainly industrial interactive 3d applications).
Hey same here, although I’m just getting started in the industry. I’ll look into Unreal soon I guess, been wanting to do that for a while anyways, and maybe also experiment with godot
Unreal is good if you want to work on big expensive projects at big companies. Godot is good if you want to work on your own projects today and potentially but not definitly work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized at small to middle-sized companies in the future. Unity is fine if you want to work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized companies now and potentially in the future.
Which sucks. There ought to be a clear and unambiguous path to chose for someone moving into game development today but since Unity keeps making weird choices that are hostile to developers whilst not continuing to improve at a good pace, it’s hard to say for sure which engine will fill in the not-Unreal Engine part of the market unless you have a crystal ball.
Realistically the best thing is to have as strong a foundation in programming generally as you can so that switching engines is minimally disruptive (as there will always be a need to do so eventually. There’s very little chance one single engine will continue to be the standard over the 40+ years of a career.)
I’m not so sure about that. Godot is fantastic for making the sorts of projects they are describing. But if the relatively minor difference between Unity and Unreal’s workflow are a turn off for them, then the consciously different workflow in Godot is probably going to be a significant barrier. Personally, whilst I love Godot because it’s FOSS and lightweight and a great platform for building smaller scale games: a big part of the appeal for me is that I find the Unreal and Unity ways of doing things stupid, confusing and clumsy and the Godot way clever, clear and elegant. I know lots of people feel the exact opposite.
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Aktywne