ndepoel · HackerTrans

पिछला माहdiscuss

Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.

ndepoel

2 माह पहलेdiscuss

That's usually not a problem with Mega Drive/Genesis games, as they typically don't draw beyond the 224 lines that are visible on a (correctly calibrated) CRT TV. I've played this game on a B&O MX4000 CRT using an original Mega Drive and I didn't notice any issues.

ndepoel

2 माह पहलेdiscuss

Here's another: code was open sourced with every intention of becoming a thriving community-driven project, but in practice users only take from the code what they want for their own needs and never contribute back, or expect the maintainer to solve all of their integration issues for them. Eventually, the maintainer decides that they have better things to do than fixing other people's problems, and that there is more value to be had from bespoke contract work. Some updates still get pushed but over time the project gradually gets abandoned and the open source dream slowly passes away.

ndepoel

3 माह पहलेdiscuss

A lot of the things you mention there have been in development for the better part of 10 years already, and still haven't reach a stable, mature and production-ready state yet. Unity have also kept deprecated stuff around for much longer than they should have, which sounds great on paper for backward compatibility, but it just means they're lugging years of technical debt with them and it's slowed them down immensely.

Looking at the past year of Unity updates, since 6.1 or so, it seems that most of the focus is now going to refactoring major parts of the engine to facilitate backporting HDRP's feature set to URP. It's all good work and high time they did some cleanup and committed to a single standardized render pipeline, but it's not exactly moving the needle forward very much yet.

ndepoel

3 माह पहलेdiscuss

Unity 2022.3 is a great LTS version to park an older game in maintenance mode on. It's where everything kind of congealed into a solid, reliable engine again, after the hot messes that were 2020.x and 2021.x. It's also still receiving updates for Enterprise users through Unity's xLTS program, which admittedly isn't within reach of most people, but it's a good option for already released, successful games that require continued support.

ndepoel

3 माह पहलेdiscuss

It does make quite a big difference. The network packets received from the server in Quake will tell you exactly what state the game is in at any point in time. They contain information about the position and state of every entity and their motion, compressed via delta encoding. That means there's very little room for misinterpretation on the client side that would lead to de-sync issues. In fact clients have quite a lot of freedom in how they want to represent said game state, and can for example add animation interpolation to smoothen things out.

The example you mention of demo playback de-syncing when the circumstances slightly change, that is exactly what you get when you only record inputs from the player. Doom actually did this too for its networking model and demo playback system. That relies much more on the engine being deterministic and the runtime environment behaving consistently, because each client that replays those inputs has to run the exact same game simulation, in order for the resulting game states to match.

ndepoel

3 माह पहलेdiscuss

It wasn't really that much to do with determinism. Quake uses a client-server network model all the time, even when you're only playing a local single-player game. What the demo recording system does is capture all of the network packets that are being sent from the server to the client. When playing back a demo, all the game has to do is run a client and replay the packets that it originally received from the server. It's a very elegant system that naturally flows out of the rather forward-looking decision to build the entire engine around a robust networking model.

ndepoel

3 माह पहलेdiscuss

It kinda does resemble a natural resource though. The machines and technology in use at TSMC are so insanely complex, that there isn't a single person on earth who knows everything about how it works. TSMC functions only because of all of the pieces of the puzzle being together in the right place and arranged in just the right way. It's a very fragile balance that keeps it all running, and a major disruption could mean we get thrown back by a decade in chip-making technology.

ndepoel

4 माह पहलेdiscuss

The PS1 version uses a custom engine based on technology built for the game Shadow Master, the previous title by Hammerhead Studios. It was a technical tour de force for the original PlayStation.

ndepoel

4 माह पहलेdiscuss

Yes but also no. The problem with fixed point arithmetic is a lack of dynamic range compared to floating point. Floats are great at representing both large numbers with limited precision and small numbers with high precision, but with fixed point you have to make a choice based on which kind of number you're trying to represent. Meaning you need to use a mixture of 8.24, 16.16 and 24.8 fixed point types (and appropriate conversions) depending on the context of the calculations that you're doing.

It's possible to write a game engine with that limitation, but there's no easy natural conversion from Quake's judicious use of floats to a fully fixed-point codebase. You'd have to redesign and rewrite the entire engine from scratch, basically.

ndepoel

6 माह पहलेdiscuss

Windows is not exactly free of this sort of nonsense either. Just recently I built a new PC for a friend, and we wanted to keep using his old SSD and Windows installation. After messing about with Bitlocker recovery keys which was already cumbersome enough, we ran into a catch-22 issue where we needed internet access to be able to log in and verify his Microsoft account, but we needed to install a driver for the new motherboard's networking chipset first, for which you need to be able to log in to an account first. Eventually we found that you can use USB tethering from a phone to gain internet access, for which no special driver is needed, which got around the issue but it was not exactly an obvious solution.

ndepoel

6 माह पहलेdiscuss

That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.

ndepoel

6 माह पहलेdiscuss

The real "a-ha" demystifying moment for me was not so much learning about the elementary rotation, translation or even perspective projection operations. It was understanding how all of those operations can be composed together into a single transformation and that all that 3D graphics really is, is transforming coordinates from one relative space to another.

One important revelation in that regard for instance, was that moving a camera within a world is mathematically exactly the same as moving the world in the opposite direction relative to the camera. Once you get a feel for how transformations and coordinate spaces work, you can start playing around with them and a whole new world of possibilities opens up to you.

ndepoel

7 माह पहलेdiscuss

Id Software very much skirted the edge of legality by making Commander Keen outside of office hours while still employed by SoftDisk and using SoftDisk computers, and SoftDisk could have easily sued them if they wanted to. They managed to avoid that by striking a deal where the Id guys would continue to make games for SoftDisk while working on Keen and later Wolfenstein 3D.

There was a lot of code reuse between games. John Carmack is on record somewhere that the enemy navigation code from Doom and Quake still has its origins in some of the earliest 8-bit games he wrote in the 1980's.

ndepoel

8 माह पहलेdiscuss

Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.

ndepoel

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

As someone who has lost a close friend 15 years ago and a father 5 years ago, both way prematurely, I can confidently agree: you don't get over it. Instead, you learn to live with it. Their absence becomes a part of your life. The pain and sense of loss never goes away, but it becomes bearable as you gradually accept the reality.

As for how to deal with it, that is different for every person. Some people prefer to dive deep into their work to take their mind off things. When my father died, it was the other way round for me: I felt I needed time and space to deal with the consequences, both practically and emotionally. Work felt like a distraction that I really couldn't use at the time, so I more or less stopped working for several months. Clearing out my father's possessions, selling his apartment and dealing with the inheritance was part of the grieving process. By the time all that was done we were nearly half a year further along, and I felt ready to start picking up my life again.

Even so, many years later I'll still get tears welling up whenever I think back on that period, and I'll never not wish that my father was still here and that I could have shared with him everything that has happened in the meantime.

ndepoel

7 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

In my experience GC makes programmers sloppy in their resource usage. Just allocate a bunch of memory annnd... whatever, the GC will take care of that. But there are a lot of other resources besides memory that aren't automatically cleaned up like that. So what happens is people forget to close network sockets, forget to unsubscribe event handlers, forget to set certain references to null to actually allow the GC to do its work, etcetera... The existence and over-reliance on GCs has led to a mindset where many programmers are just not aware that what you create must also be destroyed at some point.

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