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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Something about the Blitzball players all being characters you could find in the world, some of whom would otherwise be unremarkable NPCs really burrowed into my brain with FFX. Something about the fact that you’d have relationships with characters in two different contexts where they would often play a wildly different role in each really made the world feel a little bit more alive than normal.



  • AFAIK it’s a system to let Linux software bundle all of it’s dependencies up with it so it just works in a self contained way that doesn’t care about what else is and isn’t installed.

    Advantages is that they are more reliable and user friendly than traditional approaches to Linux software installation.

    Disadvantages are that they have bigger footprints where you might have the same dependencies I dependently installed for each app rather than as a single installation that they all utilise and that they need to be updated individually (as part of the flatpak.) IE if basically every app uses the same dependency and it turns out to have a huge security hole, under normal Linux software the developer would patch it, you’d update it and the hole would be filled. With Flatpaks you need each individual Flatpak developer to update the version used by their Flatpak and for you to update all those Flatpaks before the hole is plugged. I think I remember they run in some kind of sandbox to mitigate this though.


  • It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that’s a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there’s a chance right?)




  • Unreal is good if you want to work on big expensive projects at big companies. Godot is good if you want to work on your own projects today and potentially but not definitly work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized at small to middle-sized companies in the future. Unity is fine if you want to work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized companies now and potentially in the future.

    Which sucks. There ought to be a clear and unambiguous path to chose for someone moving into game development today but since Unity keeps making weird choices that are hostile to developers whilst not continuing to improve at a good pace, it’s hard to say for sure which engine will fill in the not-Unreal Engine part of the market unless you have a crystal ball.

    Realistically the best thing is to have as strong a foundation in programming generally as you can so that switching engines is minimally disruptive (as there will always be a need to do so eventually. There’s very little chance one single engine will continue to be the standard over the 40+ years of a career.)


  • I’m not so sure about that. Godot is fantastic for making the sorts of projects they are describing. But if the relatively minor difference between Unity and Unreal’s workflow are a turn off for them, then the consciously different workflow in Godot is probably going to be a significant barrier. Personally, whilst I love Godot because it’s FOSS and lightweight and a great platform for building smaller scale games: a big part of the appeal for me is that I find the Unreal and Unity ways of doing things stupid, confusing and clumsy and the Godot way clever, clear and elegant. I know lots of people feel the exact opposite.


  • I think the game “development” industry is run by people who don’t understand the difference between a game designer and a game developer. As such there’s lots of people who only know as much about game design as the average developer does being tasked to do game design work and vice versa.


  • The reality is that it’s a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it’s not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you’re doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.

    It’s like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you’re making it do is broadly the same.









  • I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.

    I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.

    IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.

    Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.


  • It certainly does pose an issue from that perspective but I’m not sure any more than websites in general. It’s not actually that hard to rip off a website’s design and so it’s quite common to see phishing scams of that nature. In some sense it’s less likely to happen with people impersonating a Lemmy instance simply because actually setting up and running one is more work than impersonating just a regular website.

    Yes, someone could create an instance called “officiallemmyinstancedotcom” and pretend to be the one single official lemmy to try to trap people searching for Lemmy not entirely knowing what it is, but I don’t think the fact that people already think places like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world are synonymous with Lemmy is a prerequisite for someone doing that. If anything, people who mistakenly think one of those two is the only “real” Lemmy are probably less likely to be taken in by a malicious one.

    Still…

    Providing clearer on site messaging to help avoid this sort of confusion sounds like something a good UX designer could perhaps assist the Lemmy FOSS project with?