I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.
Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.
Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes responsible for half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?
It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.
Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.
You don’t need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don’t need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It’s perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that’s awful, fuck off.
Network effect creates barriers to new competitors, regardless of quality. Either for the upstarts or the leaders. See: Twitter. Once some choice is the default, anything else faces an uphill battle.
“Identity politics” always seems to mean “I am upset that different people exist.”
This is a nothing option in a video game. Nobody’s rubbing your nose in it. It doesn’t affect you, at all, but it’s a neat little extra for other people. Do you give a shit about other people? Or does the mere possibility of anyone distinct from you, the protagonist of reality, fill you with emotions you can’t handle? There’s no third option, here. It’s a checkbox for how NPCs choose voice lines, in exactly the same way they’ve done for decades. It’s just separate now.
But of course one glance at your profile shows you’re an unapologetic bigot, and what you mean by “gEnDeR iDeOlOgY” is exactly what every other diet Nazi means by it: you hate queer people, and you want it to be their fault.
We can’t be far from text-to-speech tweaking a ton of voice acting. Might have to pronounce or IPA your custom name, to get an AI voice to nail it… but maybe it’s better-off being wrong. There’s disarming verisimilitude in schmaltzy NPCs confidently fumbling your character’s name. Or if some characters heard it, but haven’t seen it, and you catch some mutter ‘so that’s how it’s spelled.’
Bash.org used to have a “worst of” section, for the lowest-voted quotes. It was mostly racist garbage. At some point the worst went something like, ‘that’s where black people belong: back of the bus, bottom of Bash.’
They nuked that shit shortly after, because why the fuck would you want that on your server?
Being black isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Being female isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Being queer isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Every “identity” I’ve ever been given has come through violent conservative oppression. Sometimes I’m the group they like - sometimes I’m the group they hate. But I’ve never fucking asked for the distinction.
Gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity… these matter as much as hair color, until some asshole decides there’s a right answer. Every flavor of “identity politics” that conservatives screech about is an abuse they invented and hurled at people until those victims stood up and shouted “Motherfucker I am.”
You don’t need pride until someone’s tried to make you feel lesser.
Get our of our goddamn way, and stop imagining you’re the good guy. You are the entire problem. You can stop, at any time.
Bigotry is a political opinion, but the idea that all political opinions deserve identical respect is really dumb.
Some people’s ideas are bad, actually. It is fine and good to tell them where to shove it.
The kneejerk demand for “civility” confuses polite responses for appropriate responses. Some people are monsters. Some people need to hear, “fuck off.” That is the correct attitude for a worrying number of online interactions, and if moderators won’t step up and proactively remove the bigoted propagandist time-vampires who deserve it, the least they can do is stay out of the way. ‘What you chose to say is fucking awful’ cannot possibly be more of a personal attack than being told ‘everyone like you is inherently broken.’
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun.
No, it defaults to body type.
This option is literally nothing to people who don’t care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We’ve had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don’t need to endlessly litigate whether we’ve been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.
A website saying ‘no thank you’ to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That’s what moderation… is. That’s why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.
In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won’t brick your computer, it’s plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.
You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn’t been erased from reality. It’s just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.
And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don’t want to deal with that shit. You can’t make us, and still pretend you care about choice.
The reason some things get downvoted, is that they’re factually incorrect, morally intolerable, or just plain incoherent. Reasons matter. The fact it’s “your opinion” means nothing. Some opinions are bad, actually.
What you’re doing is a finger-curling argument. ‘Oh what, is curling your finger a crime?! I’m in trouble cuz I went like this?!’ Sir - you shot your wife.
It's common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it's also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it's removing...
Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.
This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.
So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.
Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.
Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.
Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.
To share more about the design and process behind this new and vibrant collection, here's Satoshi Aoyagi and Leo Cardoso from our design team. Aoyagi stated: "While crafting this new collection of DualSense controller and PS5 console cover colors, we drew inspiration from the beautiful and powerful hues found in the depths of...
Headsets in the thousand-dollar range are plenty good and still not selling. Take the hint. Push costs down. Cut out everything that is not strictly necessary. Less Switch, more Game Boy.
6DOF inside-out tracking is required, but you can get that from one camera and an orientation sensor. Is it easy? Nope. Is it tractable for any of the companies already making headsets? Yes, obviously. People want pick-up-and-go immersion. Lighthouses were infrastructure and Cardboard was not immersive. Proper tracking in 3D space has to Just Work.
Latency is intolerable. Visual quality, scene detail, shader complexity - these are nice back-of-the-box boasts. Instant response time is do-or-die. Some monocular 640x480 toy with rock-solid 1ms latency would feel more real than any ultrawide 4K pancake monstrosity that’s struggling to maintain 10ms.
Two innovations could make this painless.
One, complex lenses are a hack around flat lighting. Get rid of the LCD backlight and use one LED. This simplifies the ray diagram to be nearly trivial. Only the point light source needs to be far from the eye. The panel and its single lens can be right in your face. Or - each lens can be segmented. The pyramid shape of a distant point source gets smaller, and everything gets thinner. At some point the collection of tiny projectors looks like a lightfield, which is what we should pursue anyway.
Two, intermediate representation can guarantee high performance, even if the computer chokes. It is obviously trivial to throw a million colored dots at a screen. Dice up a finished frame into floating paint squares, and an absolute potato can still rotate, scale, and reproject that point-cloud, hundreds of times per second. But flat frames are meant for flat screens. Any movement at all reveals gaps behind everything. So: send point-cloud data, directly. Do “depth peeling.” Don’t do backface culling. Toss the headset a version of the scene that looks okay from anywhere inside a one-meter cube. If that takes longer for the computer to render and transmit… so what? The headset’s dinky chipset can show it more often than your godlike PC, because it’s just doing PS2-era rendering with microsecond-old head-tracking. The game could crash and you’d still be wandering through a frozen moment at 100, 200, 500 Hz.
Undoubtedly point-clouds can be beaten, and adding a single wide-FOV render is an efficient way to fill space “offscreen.” I’m just cautious about explaining this because it invites the most baffling rejections. At one point I tried explaining the separation of figuring out where stuff is, versus showing that location to you, using beads floating in a fluid simulation. Tracking the liquid and how things move within it is obviously full of computer-melting complexity. Rendering a dot, isn’t. And this brain case acted like I’d described simulating the entire ocean for free. As if the goal was plucking all future positions out of thin air, and not, y’know, remembering where it is, now.
The lowest-bullshit way is probably frustum slicing. Picture the camera surrounded by transparent spheres. Anything between two layers gets rendered onto the further one. This is more-or-less how “deep view video” works. (Worked?) Depth information can be used per-layer to create lumpen meshes or do parallax mapping. Whichever is cheaper at obscene framerates. Rendering with alpha is dirt cheap because it’s all sorted.
Point clouds (or even straight-up original geometry) might be better at nose-length distances. Separating moving parts is almost mandatory for anything attached to your hands. Using a wide-angle point render instead of doing a cube map is one of several hacks available since Fisheye Quake, and a great approach if you expect to replace things before the user can turn around.
But I do have to push back on active fake focus. Lightfields are better. Especially if we’re distilling the scene to be renderable in a hot millisecond, there’s no reason to motorize the optics and try guessing where your pupils are headed. Passive systems can provide genuine focal depth.
Still $300 or $400 for a wonky platform. That’s priced better than I thought they were, but the minimum viable product is far below that, and we might need a minimal product, to improve adoption rates. The strictly necessary components could total tens of dollars… off the shelf.
Less than you might think, considering the small range perspectives involved. Rendering to a stack of layers or a grid of offsets technically counts. It is more information than simply transmitting a flat frame… but update rate isn’t do-or-die, if the headset itself handles perspective.
Optimizing for bandwidth would probably look more like depth-peeled layers with very approximate depth values. Maybe rendering objects independently to lumpy reliefs. The illusion only has to work for a fraction of a second, from about where you’re standing.
A fresh report into Unity's hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation....
And screw anyone going ‘but then how money?!’ while it infects billion-dollar business models. There’s no amount of money you can pay, where greedy suits won’t imagine taking your money and selling your eyeballs.
I propose a Red Faction retro spinoff. Cash in on the underused franchise and the modern boom-shoot glut by doing a voxel-based game where everything, and I mean everything, is destructible. Like if Teardown was a setpiece-heavy FPS pretending to be from the Delta Force / Outcast era. Low fidelity keeps costs down, the genre is weirdly underused for all its indie-demo examples, and if the immersive sim curse kills any sequels then they’re only back to square one.
As always: if leaving or sucking ruins a game for everyone else, your game is badly designed.
Only MOBAs have this level of toxicity. All MOBAs have this problem. Maybe lashing strangers together for forty-five minutes, in a zero-sum contest where half of them will lose, with so much inter-dependence and complexity that nobody feels responsible, is not great for the human psyche.
You can’t even kick someone. Losing them for any reason ruins the game. You have to tough it out, for most of an hour, after waiting however long just to start the game, and the inevitable loss will still count against you. No kidding people get wound-up.
If you could leave, you’d never be trapped in a long game. You would enjoy every long game. The ones that suck wouldn’t last.
Root problem: the game requires a fixed number of human players, from start to finish. If bots worked then you could just take the L and quit. Or safely eject someone who’s being a total cock. Or possibly even split the game in two, so both the “fuck this” and “fuck you” groups see everyone else replaced with bots.
Bots don’t have to be good with every character. Bots don’t even have to play by the same rules as humans. They just need to be balanced. Which you’d figure these developers are really really good at, after fifteen years of pouring new characters into these games.
Individual scoring would be almost as powerful. A high-level player with a low-level team should ideally be scored on their skill - not a binary win / lose condition. Especially if half the players are guaranteed to lose. Long matches provide oodles of time to evaluate. And if bots work at all, the game can quietly run simulations from snapshots of the ongoing match - checking if players did better or worse than a player-like script would, and by how much.
Compare sports. You have a regulation basketball game. On one side is the 2023 Miami Heat, minus Jimmy Butler. On the other side you have the AZ Compass Prep Dragons, plus Jimmy Butler. The Dragons’ chances of winning are approximately diddly over fuck. But a talent scout watching those high-schoolers get smoked 132-15 can still recognize which of them are doing especially well under the circumstances. And Erik Spoelstra can still give Tyler Herro side-eye for ever missing a free throw. Despite a blowout loss, every individual can be judged for how they played, both in terms of independent actions and productive teamwork. (This new kid at Arizona, Jimmy somethingorther, is really good.)
Yet in a video game - where every moment can be scrutinized frame-by-frame, and statistical analysis is so easy you’d think this was baseball - there is only total victory and utter defeat, and only for whole teams. Everything from Smash Bros to Overwatch has little trophies to hand out for leading performance in a bunch of arbitrary details. So why doesn’t a loss caused by one feeding troll count as 90% of a win for the players who almost eked it out in spite of them?
More importantly: why doesn’t the game make it feel like they were doing good, when they were doing great?
Aw. From the thumbnail, I was hoping for 3D shaders that somehow matched the cartoon. Transformers: Devastation pulled it off mumble-mumble years ago and looked friggin’ incredible. I know it’s mostly using environment maps for squiggly cell-shaded reflections, but just, god dang. The execution can be masterful.
Starfield Premium owners now have access to the game in full and are testing their internet download limits with its massive 120 GB file size, but a few hopeful gamers are going to have to wait regardless of how much they paid in advance. Intel Arc GPUs currently cannot play Starfield, with varying symptoms ranging from the game...
We already had that - it’s called “early access.” But people gunked that up, so they have to roll along the euphemism treadmill, and make a fancier name for paying extra to get an incomplete game.
UPDATE 2It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!...
And nothing’s changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn’t get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we’re boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don’t care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we’re having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I’d say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
Terraforming Mars team defends AI use as Kickstarter hits $1.3 million (www.polygon.com) angielski
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher Urges Members To Approve Strike Authorization Against Video Game Companies (deadline.com) angielski
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com) angielski
Payday 3 developer drops Denuvo from the game before it's even out (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
It's common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it's also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it's removing...
Sony Introduces PS5 Deep Earth Collection (www.techpowerup.com) angielski
To share more about the design and process behind this new and vibrant collection, here's Satoshi Aoyagi and Leo Cardoso from our design team. Aoyagi stated: "While crafting this new collection of DualSense controller and PS5 console cover colors, we drew inspiration from the beautiful and powerful hues found in the depths of...
Valve employee reveals “stupid expensive” scrapped VR console plans (www.dexerto.com) angielski
Fables creator places Wolf Among Us universe in public domain amid clash with DC over Telltale adaptation (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Unity will quietly waive controversial fees if developers switch to its ad monetisation service - report (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
A fresh report into Unity's hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation....
Report: Embracer has made layoffs at Gearbox Publishing (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Saints Row and Red Faction IPs Will 'Live On' at Plaion, Says Deep Silver (wccftech.com) angielski
Smurfing is Not Welcome in Dota, Valve bans 90k smurf accounts (www.dota2.com) angielski
G.I. JOE: Wrath of Cobra | World Announcement Trailer | Freedom Games (www.youtube.com) angielski
Intel Arc Owners Left in the Cold With Starfield as Advanced Access Begins (www.techpowerup.com) angielski
Starfield Premium owners now have access to the game in full and are testing their internet download limits with its massive 120 GB file size, but a few hopeful gamers are going to have to wait regardless of how much they paid in advance. Intel Arc GPUs currently cannot play Starfield, with varying symptoms ranging from the game...
Has YouTube Blocked Your Adblocker Yet?? (strawpoll.com) angielski
UPDATE 2It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!...