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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Yeah I donno. I think Unity's business model was always to infantilize the "developers" who want to make games, but are so technically incompetent Unity is basically their only choice. Then turn the screws and begin printing money with their captured audience. Especially devs who became dependent on their asset store.

Unity became popular primarily because it's easy. The business model was unobtrusive/invisible to your average less than 10,000 sales and/or never actually publish indie dev/hobbyist. It was icing on the cake not because it was good, because it wasn't explicitly terrible.

This is anecdotal but I was into amateur gamedev at the time it started to get popular and got to know at least two separate people who mentioned to me that they picked it specifically because of the nice licensing deal vs Unreal. It might have been cope or rationalization of lazy technical choices, but it clearly entered into the decision.

As for whether they always intended to tighten the screw, I don't have a clue.

I haven't developed in anything so don't have an educated opinion, but what engine would someone use if they were "technically competent"?

As a rule I hate reinventing the wheel - I suspect you and I may be different in that regard. I have approximately 0 interest in building a game engine from scratch or even some common component support like 2-D menus or whatever.

ZorbaTHut's rant was accurate the day it was written, and an excellent read. I'd argue Godot is getting closer to usability, and Unreal remains The Default Engine Of Choice for a normal team with any serious programming chops unless they have a very unusual use case of very specific philosophy they need to bring.

what engine would someone use if they were "technical competent"?

To the maximal degree, the answer is usually "write your own" or use some very light ECS library to do it. But technical prowess is only one of the factors you have to take into account. What your team already knows, how big it is, what is available that might help what you're trying to build on which platform are all also important.

I donno man. My biases are to hate things more the further away from the metal, and the more layers of abstraction there are. I've never actually finished a game I started making either. Maybe if I were more open to shitty engines I would have.

I will say, I most enjoyed making a game when I was just keeping it simple with C and SDL2.

What OS do you run on your daily driver system?

Always been a gamer first, so I've been stuck on Windows. Win10 currently. But god damned if the enshitification of Windows isn't driving me to Linux when Win10 lapses out of support. I have a spare computer I keep meaning to put Linux on just to start acclimating to trying to game on Linux.

I'm in the same position; but I suspect I'll end up giving WSL a try instead. (I've used Cygwin for decades.)

Modern Windows pisses me off so much. What the hell, Microsoft.

Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.

A couple examples:

Modern Windows pushes searching using the start menu search bar. Which could have been a valid design choice. But I search for something on my computer and instead it gives me a bunch of Bing web results mixed in. If you accidentally click on one, it opens Bing in Edge.

I recently had to run some Python scripts using command line. I wanted to open a Python session in command line to do some simple testing. A trivial task I am familiar with. But this time when I typed python into the command line it opened the Microsoft store to download Python. Which is strange because I already have Python. After a bit of Googling I found an obscure setting to uncheck to make command line work the way it always has instead of opening the fucking Microsoft store. They broke basic obvious functionality for truly no benefit. And the settings are hidden so deeply in a scattered mess of settings windows that I can only restore basic functionality by Googling and reading a bunch of forum posts. I await the day that an update reverses all of my settings choices and I get to do this all over again. Looking forward to ads in my start pane and a crippled command line.

In an excess of fairness, I'm going to shout out Windows Terminal It is a really good command line program. It actually cures most of my complaints with TMUX. This kind of handy functionality should be Microsoft's norm, not a rare pleasant surprise.

Ads in start menu.

Installing without Microsoft Account is ridiculous. And now you can be banned by Microsoft from using own user account.

Bing reward popups are now system level lootbox notifications.

Solitaire has ads.

Windows will badger you to delete files, transfer them into OneDrive and then demand to pay monthly for more space. And describe it as running out of space, despite local SSD having GBs of free space.

(that is just from what I seen despite not using Windows, I upgraded from Windows 7 to Linux)

I run win11 and I don't understand why none of this is ringing a bell for me.

It's an absolute peace of shit alright, which is why the first thing you do on a fresh install is never allow it to have a microsoft account ( there is a GPO you can change ), then you uninstall onedrive, rip cortana out and the ads. There are tools which will do this for you.

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Has modern Windows really gotten worse?

Yes, badly. Win11 tries for require an online Microsoft login, and Win10 will push it regularly if you refuse -- and worse, the transfer process from a local account to a Microsoft Account is very buggy, with ~10% of situations leaving data in the old (now-hidden!) local user account. The Notifications system actively invites adware from browsers. More and more common functions, such as network address configuration, are harder and harder to get to or obfuscated behind dumber and dumber interfaces. OneDrive is obnoxious, and more Microsoft Software will try to save to OneDrive by default. Both default start search to look at the internet first, before displaying local files or even shortcuts. So on.

Nothing individually is critical for most people, but it's just a cavalcade of bad decisions, with very few good ones.

Windows has gotten worse in all the ways Software as a Service poisons everything. I get ads directly through my OS now. I fucking hate it. They turned god damned Solitaire into a service, where it serves you ads you have to watch unless you pay for a subscription. I literally installed Windows 3.1 in DOSBOX so I could play good old fashioned Solitaire. Settings are scattered across an odd combination of old legacy menus in Control Panel, and new menus in Settings. I'm under the impression this is still the case in Windows 11. The Screensaver menu is totally unchanged from Windows XP I believe. Start menu search remains bafflingly broken, frequently prioritizing web results over the applications you have installed on your fucking desktop. Although that last one seems maybe marginally better than I remember it? Windows 10 had more updates that needed to be rolled back because they broke shit than I ever remembered happening before, and Windows 11 has even more of that shit than Windows 10 had.

Windows 2000 will always be my favorite Windows. Leaner and meaner than XP, with nearly all the same functionality until you get into some of the really late service packs for XP. Vista was a bit of a resource hog and ruined EAX, but it's Aero skins are here to stay. Windows 7 was more or less inoffensive. Windows 10 however really began the enshitification, and Windows 11 has clearly doubled down on it.

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