This is a somewhat naive view of engines in modern game development. Full-featured engines allow every department to dive in head first in parallel. The first gameplay elements often get programmed before the first pieces of content arrive. Scenes can be blocked out and drafted immwdiately at the start of the project. Complex animations with states and blend trees can be created amd tested independently of the gameplay code. Audio scenes, complex cues and (dynamic) music can be mixed and mastered independently of any code to integrate audio into the game. The whole process is highly parallelized these days and the engine tools serve to insulate the departments from one another to some extent so that everybody can move faster.
Right, yes. I think all I meant is that in earlier generations you could do modeling/sprites and concepting from the beginning, but there was a hard line in terms of how much code had to exist before the whole thing started to look or feel like much.
Thinking here especially of the Doom / Quake / HL1 era where they were basically building the level design tools in parallel with the game.
Whereas nowadays you can have movement, mobs, dialog flow, etc all with very little code, and it's placeholders like "oh we need a custom shader for this effect" or "that boss needs some custom logic".
You don't have to reinvent all these systems, but in my experience, you still have to code a lot to wire these very generic building blocks up in a good way that fits your specific use cases.
The sad truth js that for every solo devs that becomes successful, there are an untold number of solo devs that don't find an audience and fail. The reality is pretty brutal in games.
Yeah but how often do you finish a AAA game and want to cry at how beautiful it is. You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game. Like something really important is being done by indie devs.
> You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game.
Poppycock. What, you wanna cry at how beautiful *checks notes* Hatred is? What about Unity Asset Swap Shovelware #375438? And for those who fall on the 'violence' side in the 'violence' vs 'sex' debate, how about we take a gander at the corruption genre?
Sure, there are some amazing indie games (think of Unrest, for example), but there's also a ton of low effort garbage, and far too many projects which suffer from a lack of time, lack of resources, lack of ambition, or, sadly, lack of care. And, of course, the occasional 'I can't believe anyone at any point during the project thought this was a good idea'.
> You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game.
I've never had that feeling about any game. Indie games tend to be higher quality (because they are made by people who prioritize the game above business), but I think you're strongly overstating how good they are.
The last game I felt that strongly about at the ending was Red Dead Redemption 2. I don't think I can recall the last indie game I felt strongly about.
Indie games are important and deserve more attention. Let's not glorify them too much though. They can be shit, just like AAA games; they can also be great, just like AAA games.
Games are hard. I wanted to focus more on the fact that there is a perceived glamour to indie development that is totally amd utterly disconneted from their reality.
I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?
Looks like we both had incomplete information. I didn't know that some trains have their doors really close to the ground and it's actually very inconsistent. I'm getting a clearer picture now.
It is at least consistent within any one Amtrak route. The ones that go through the north east have to go through tunnels that can only accommodate single–level cars, while all the other routes have the double–level cars where the doors are really close to the ground.
I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers.
Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels.
The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
It's pretty obvious where the doors are (middle), which have windows. My point, replying to my parent, was that they said Amtrak platforms are at 110cm height. The lowest part of those doors are not at 110cm height, but much lower, almost as if the platform was much much lower than my parent claimed ;)
And yes, trains do exist, which either have doors at two different heights (these don't seem to) or that either automatically fold away so you can get out at ground level via the stairs that are revealed/created by the mechanism or that simply stay up for platform height entry/exit. Used both types. Now, whether or not Amtrak has those in specific parts of the US I can't say.
It's nore about whether we, the citizens, even want this deployed and under what legal framework, so that it will fit our collective view of what society is.
The "if" is very much on the table at this stage of the political discussion. Companies are trying to railroad everybody past this decision stage by moving too fast. However, this is a momemt where we need to slow down instead and have a good long ponderous moment hinjing about whether we should allow it at all. And as the peoples of our respective countries, we can force that.
Yeah, that's not how technology deployments work, nor ever worked. Basically, there is a "cat is out of the bag" moment, and after that, it's basically a free-for-all until things get organized enough for someone to eventually start pushing back on too much regulation. Since we're just after this "cat is out of the bag" moment and way early for "over-regulation", companies of course ignore all of it and focuses on what they always focus on, making as much money while spending as little money as possible.
Besides general strikes, there isn't much one can do to stop, pause or otherwise hold back companies and individuals from deploying legal technology any way they see fit, for better or worse.
Well, you're very much wrong about that. The cat can be put back into the bag if we want to. It certainly happened before.
Right now, companies are working extremely hard to give the impression that AI technology is essential. But that is a purposefully manufactured illusion. It's a set of ideas planted in people's heads. Marketing in those megacompanies that introduce new technologies like LLMs and AR glasses to end users is very much focused on reshaping society around their product. They think BIG. We need more awareness that this is happening so that we can push back in a coordinated and meaningful way. And then we can support politicians that implement that agenda.
> Well, you're very much wrong about that. The cat can be put back into the bag if we want to. It certainly happened before.
Name a single technology that was invented, people figured out the drawbacks where bigger than the benefits, and then humanity just stopped caring about it altogether? Not even the technology with the biggest drawback we've created so far (literally make the earth inhospitable if deployed at scale) apparently been important enough to do so with, so I'm eager to hear what specific cats have been put back in what hats, if you'd entertain me.
There are plenty of ways. For example, the technology would die completely the moment companies get barred from creating or running it. End users don't have the means to update those models and they would age and become useless.
The real reason why this stuff in underspecified in the spec is that some mainframe operating systems don't have file systems in the common modern sense, but support C++. Those vendors push back a lot against narroed definitions as far as I know.
I would assume that this is easy enough to implement that it will likely appear in a minor update to the upcoming Visual Studio version. MS kept updating the compiler since VS 2022, too.
I certainly hope so, but we'll see. To give an example, std::chrono::current_zone (C++20) still doesn't work on Android even to this day.
So as long as #embed isn't supported by all the 3 major compilers, I am sticking with my current embedding setup. I guess that's what I was thinking of.
In general, bespoke recycling processes can make sense, especially if you manage to design the items to recycle with the recycling process in mind. There are several types of goods where this is put into practice (paper, compounds like TetraPak packages, various polymer plastics). Not sure about all the differrent types of batteries, though.
We struggle to recycle normal batteries without injuring or killing people. Lead-acid batteries contain literal plates of lead oxides, and we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply! I don't see how we'd do any better with silver nanoparticles.
Nothing I'm saying is meant to condemn recycling as a concept, by the way. Only to condemn technologies where disposal is dismissed with a shrug and a "idk just recycle it."
> we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply!
AFAIK, the lead in the water supply doesn't come from batteries. It mostly comes from lead pipes. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the more efficient recycling programs out there.
"efficient" and "clean" aren't the same thing, and they never have been.
Recycling lead-acid batteries is extremely efficient. Nearly the entire battery by mass is recovered.
But, it also causes severe lead pollution around recycling sites. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the leading causes of lead poisoning around the world [1]. Estimations vary, but all generally agree that millions of human-years of life have been lost due to lead pollution caused specifically by lead-acid battery recycling. [2]
Returning to the original point, recycling anything involving heavy metals is extremely difficult to do without poisoning people. If we can't avoid it with one of the simplest, dumbest battery technologies in regular use today, I don't see how we're going to avoid it with a battery technology involving heavy metal nanoparticles.
My reading of both those reports isn't that lead can't be safely recycled without contamination, but rather that countries with low regulations and oversight aren't recycling lead batteries in a safe manor.
In fact, the second link is more about the problem with using smelting to recycle lead. That requires a lot of power and thus emits a lot of CO2.
Is it the case that lead acid batteries are being primarily recycled through exports?
This is probably one of those events where everyone on the inside has their own story that won't fit into a neat overarching narrative of how the files are handled because they only gets to feel part of the elefant each.
Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.
That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots of indie games, some of them are made by a single person. There are free game engines, so basically all one needs for a successful game is just a good idea for the game.
And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.
and if a new game
came out today that looked and played the same as Ultima online… What would you (and the rest of gamers) think about it?
Your expectations of that game are set appropriately. Same with a lot of Indy games, the expectation can be that its in early access for a decade+. You would never accept that from, say, Ubisoft.
Depends on what that game brings, I might like it a lot. Again, me and all my friends love indie games, most of them with pixel graphics or just low polygon. The market for such games is big enough. Just look up some popular indie games sales estimations.
You are a minor share of the overall market and the sad truth is that most indie games sell a pityfull handfull of copies and can't sustain their creators financially. And even indie games have to meet certain standards and given that they are developed nostly by single devs, meeting even those "minimal" standards takes years for many devs.
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