One thing I didn't like about it (and briefly experimented with, in a prototype for my own game in a similar vein), was, much like EVE, it's called a “spreadsheet game”, but there's no spreadsheets in the game, or any sort of API bridge that makes doing stuff with the game in an external spreadsheet environment easier. I understand that this may just be part of the appeal of these sorts of games for many people—reading through stat blocks and wiki pages to figure out what numbers and what formulas need to go where to build the Ultimate Spreadsheet for your purposes (though in the end doesn't everyone just use existing Ultimate Spreadsheets created by others, or at least use them as reference?). And trust me, I did have a lot of fun building my Google Sheets infrastructure to coordinate business and production between myself and the three friends I got to (briefly) play Prosperous Universe with me. Also, don't get me wrong, I also enjoyed the subsequent rabbit-hole of learning how spreadsheet implementations actually work, including historical alternative spreadsheet implementations that had a lot of cool ideas like Lotus Improv [0]. But, in the end, I just wasn't having enough fun with Prosperous Universe to keep playing after awhile.
I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.
Box2D is still pretty darn good! Definitely recommended for 2D physics game projects. The C APIs for Box2D and now Box3D are just so nice to work with.
I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?
Sweden is the only country I'm aware of that has a Wikipedia page specifically about this incredibly niche local phenomenon which by the way has no correlation to anything being discussed here at all.
There's a huge difference between making your own streaming box that people have to buy in order to use, and buying the company that makes the streaming box built into basically every new TV.
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
> Am I missing something serious here
Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
This isn't really much of an excuse given contemporary models though. My current game project has a GUI editor mode and it was not difficult at all whatsoever to set it up such that whenever I run a debug build of the game:
- It opens to the editor mode rather than the gameplay mode on launch
- It makes a .run/ directory next to the executable if one doesn't already exist
- It makes a timestamped directory within .run/ for this current debug run
- It automatically records stdout to stdout.txt, stderr to stderr.txt, and a crash.txt if the game crashes, in the directory for this run
- When the “take debug screenshot” function is invoked (which can be done by pressing F12), it saves a timestamped (based on time since executable launched) screenshot in the directory for this run
- Editor actions and 3D camera movements are recorded to playback.txt in the directory for this run
With all of this in place, I can do a debug build, run the game, do something in the editor, and take one or more screenshots where things went wrong. Then, Codex can see the log files and screenshots and try to diagnose the problem. When attempting to fix the problem, it can automatically recompile the debug build and rerun it with a launch option that plays back the latest recording file, which does the same sequence of editor actions/camera movements and takes screenshots at the same points in the process. Then it can compare this to the initial recorded run and see what needs to be fixed.
We could be having a GUI renaissance right now but for various primarily aesthetic reasons people are churning out TUIs, and personally I think it's a huge mistake.
Why is it only a matter of time? The AI-as-a-service companies are going to continue to improve their products by improving both the part that could be reproduced in a self-hosted setup, but also the “secret sauce” they put on top of that to make it a better product. There is no incentive for this “secret sauce” to be something that can be reproduced for self-hosting, is there?
I've seen people genuinely wonder how one would go about making a 2D platformer without a generalized third-party physics engine—as though every single classic 2D platformer didn't have its own simple, bespoke physics simulation!
There are entire classes (even genres) of video games that don't require substantial third-party library support, and it's frustrating to see that this seems to be more and more of a minority view as time goes on.