The Grid Compass series (especially the II models with the big screen) looked like it came from the future. Stunning in its era. Wouldn't mind seeing a reboot.
I doubt that very much. 20ish years ago I read about the Indians being very upset that the engines in the Sukhoi fighters they bought weren't even making it to the promised (very modest) 300 operating hours between overhauls. That's far less than Western engines routinely achieve. And with the hollowing out of the Russian industrial base that's occurred since then, I'd be surprised if it's gotten any better in the intervening years.
Maybe more than a headwind. From my time in AAA here are two things I learned that were true in that environment:
1. Artists hate Perforce.
2. You will never get them to try anything else.
I'm exaggerating, but not by that much. I lost count of the number of artists who are deeply uncomfortable with technology and just manage to learn the bare minimum to do their job, and then will take no more.
So besides everything else Lore needs to nail to be acceptable, they need to make it easy for artists to switch. Maybe when UnrealGameSync grows enough knobs and switches to make it unnecessary for an artist to ever touch P4V, Epic can roll Lore into UGS as an unobtrusive option. And if by then there's good support in Unity, in JetBrains, in Maya, etc., then maybe they'll have something.
I’ve long wanted that amazing uptime and virtualization and huge I/O and all that cool stuff mainframes offered, but on the desktop or in the closet, with modern CPUs.
I'd love to see this in the bootloader, along with a selection of binaries useful for recovery. Might sound silly but over the years I have had many a remote system get to the bootloader and then no further after an upgrade. Nowadays we've usually got a nicely sized EFI partition, why not stuff it all in there? Gimme a full Linux userspace from the bootloader, it would feel luxurious when I'm up at 3 am trying to recover a broken system halfway across the country.
Or is there already a solution to this that I've been missing? (Yeah, KVM/IPMI/etc, I know, but not all hosters make it easy to get to that.)
You're right, packaging would definitely be a challenge. The cylinder head would need to be low profile, conformal exhaust headers, dry sumped, and put all the plumbing you can (including the turbo and wastegate) behind the block. Maybe it’s not feasible, but it sure would be an interesting puzzle to try!
The peeps I've talked to who've done LS swaps seemed more interested in the economic, technological, and fuel economy leaps made versus the certified air-cooled default choices rather than the power, but YMMV...
Upsides are that they're both first- and second-order naturally balanced, requiring no balance shafts, which reduces weight and makes them very low vibration. I keep waiting for someone to come up with a lightweight, turbonormalized straight six that runs on Jet A to replace old turboprop engines on aircraft, but I digress...
In other disciplines, yes. Very common to hear it in mechanical or aerospace engineering, for example. They'll say "codes" to refer to multiple programs or "a code" to refer to a single program. It's amusing, when I was in the field I just went with it.
Many of the replies completely missed the part about Nvidia, sigh.
I unfortunately still see a lot of Proton bug reports that don’t repro on AMD cards. Hoping that improves soon, I’m sure Valve would love to tell hardware makers that Nvidia GPUs are supported.
It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.
I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.
If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.
As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.
And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.
Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.
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