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Mortal Kombat+

mortalkombat.plus

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'Number of times Ed Boon said “Hello”' - 0

That has gotta be painful. As a kid who ruined their studies because of this game, wanting to meet Boon after learning about the Noob Saibot backstory was it! Heck I'd kill to meet him now. So I can totally relate to the developers' disappointment. Hope your dreams one day come true.

I bet their first "Hello" from an NRS representative will be a cease & desist letter due to all the copyright infringement... They could have opted for a brand new logo and a non-trademarked project name in order to make things at least a little easier for them...

That said, I hope the project does NOT die. Power to the FGC!

The romantic in me hopes not! These are now doing crazy things with MK10 (i am amazed how i find the story line just getting better and better). I hope they can appreciate the hacker in these folks from their own early days!

Aren't trademarks dependent on enforcement? i.e. if you allow your mark be diluted[1] by projects you like - you will have a harder time down the road defending against use by projects you don't like. So the best strategy is to go ape on everyone, including those you like. IANAL.

1. e.g. Kleenex

There are ways around this, including cutting them a license, or ignoring it.

I have heard this. But if that’s the case, and you liked the projects / developers, couldn’t a highly restricted licence be granted to the project?

A $1, non-profit, licence that can be modified or removed at anytime. It could even have an NDA attached so it can’t be publicly discussed.

Maybe they wouldn’t accept that. But it seems like there should be a way to officially allow a project like this to exist without enabling other groups that are not guided by motivations the licence aligns with.

They're distributing their changes as a patchset to the ROM, which is completely legal. As a result, they aren't distributing binary files; other hosts are.

They are using the Mortal Kombat name and trademark which they are most definitely not licensed to do.

That's not copyright infringement, that's trademark infringement. They're two entirely separate concepts.

The logos are copyrighted.

Doesn't copyright also come with fair use clauses?

During the early release of MK4 in arcades, John Tobias used to regularly come down to Playland Arcade in NY and wreck everybody at his game.

I met him twice from that. Never met Ed Boon though.

I have a feeling some of those guys were pretty accessible in the early days of the internet. I remember emailing Dan Forden (toasty!) to talk about the MK music back in the day. Nowadays, unless they're active on social media, it's not so easy to contact the creators.

I am pretty sure they were - I was too young at the time to do it. Though not a bad idea to do it now and see where it leads to!

I have a hunch if the developers eventually got this to run on original Midway hardware and installed it at Galloping Ghost Arcade outside Chicago that Ed would show up to check it out and say hi.

IIRC, this can run on real hardware. Maybe at least the UMK3+ hack (I think the security chip on that board has been hacked). I remember because I toyed with the idea of making a similar hack for WWF WrestleMania (which I have & runs on the same hardware). I really wanted to give each character a Fatality like the Undertaker, or do something fun with the Adam Bomb assets already in the game, but then I remembered I have no idea what I'm doing with regards to debugging or writing ASM code!

One of the devs streams his work on YT and it might be informative, but it's impossible to use as a reference...

Met Boon a number of times at E3 conventions - nice guy!

Ok dont laugh at me. Having grown up outside the US - I never even got a chance to go to E3 :(. Have to atleast take my kids there!

Yep. I met him too. He was open and honest, basically convinced me NOT to work on videogames lol

Care to share the story or what he said to convince you not to work in videogames?

He may have been saying, "don't work on arcade games". Boon's last major arcade game was "The Grid", which was (in my opinion) a well-made game, but unfortunately it came out during the end of the arcade era. It was a very expensive cabinet at a time when arcades were dying down that pretty much marked the turning of Midway's fortunes (and the arcade industry in general).

I have met a few of my heroes and I have always been let down. I hear Ed is a nice guy, but I don't think I could take being disappointed again.

I kind of wonder if it's a matter of knowing what you want to say to your heroes when you meet them. Like some people get the same question all the time or are uncomfortable about having to beat fawning fans off with a stick all the time.

> As a kid who ruined their studies because of this game, wanting to meet Boon after learning about the Noob Saibot backstory was it!

I met Ed Boon at the premier of Mortal Kombat II.

Talking to him was one of the things that basically convinced me to stop trying to work in videogames. Up until I met him, my dream was to make videogames.

I wish I'd taken pictures, the entire cast of Mortal Kombat II was there. This was at the AMOA show in Anaheim California, where companies that run vending routes meet up with companies that sell things like arcade games and pinballs and jukeboxes and vending machines.

Do you mind sharing what Ed said or did that convinced you to stop trying?

As they say, never meet your heroes.

so this was really a positive moment, just not what you expected?

Ed Boon showing where "Get over here" sound effect comes from (21 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vmW8FMIxYo

For those interested in these types of hacks, new legacy is a balanced and fixed sf2: https://newlegacy.fr/

I love that version, just really wish you could use that beautiful HD art from ST HD remix.

Does this work on Mac?

You’ll need an emulator, but yes, it does.

This is another one that you can find on Fightcade:

https://sf2mix.github.io

it's a more significant rework of sf2, has some interesting concepts baked in

By any chance is there a street fighter 2 hack that adds a Vs mode with level select etc to the arcade ROMs?

I think it's worth adding: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix is a rebalancing of Super Turbo done by David Sirlin and officially supported by Capcom. David's design notes and commentary are really interesting.

https://www.sirlin.net/sf-hdr/street-fighter-hd-remix-design...

I'd love to see someone do the same for Capcom vs SNK 2, but a guy can dream, right? :)

Unfortunately it's basically no longer available, and most of its changes are extremely disliked in the community. Which is a shame, because the changes to Ken were overall great but the rest of the changes really tank it. Characters like THawk and Akuma are bad jokes (in each balance direction).

Hmm. I wonder if HD remix would have had more success if they had the opportunity to do a few balance adjustments along the way.

Reminds me of the guy who fixed the famous ET game: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

Oh, boy! I blame my low college GPA on a Mortal Kombat addiction. They had a MK2 machine in our commons next to the pool tables that I'd play during every free moment, then sprinting to and from classes. Then later during junior and senior years when I moved a mile across campus, I'd hit up the local arcade which just got a brand newly released MK3 machine. The great thing about playing fighting games in the arcade was that it financially rewarded skill. The better you got at the game, the cheaper it was to play for a night, since the winner of the match got to play the next game for free. I'd go to the machine with one quarter and play for an hour with a line of people behind the left controller waiting to pay a quarter to lose. All the good players kind of had a pact not to play each other, to maximize our game time. When it was just us in the arcade in the afternoons, we'd play each other with variants like "random character" and "one handed" and "blindfolded" just to screw around and wait for the evening when the fish would show up.

I still have all of my Sega Genesis MK cartridges.

But when I really wanted to talk trash in the PS2 era, I would brag about beating someone with Kuma.

Good times. MK2 was still in the very early days of the internet and people were still in Compusa and AOL. Some enterprising kids would download and print the move sheets for all the characters and sell them for a few bucks.

You should write a book or a podcast about your addiction.

He will have to get in line with me and millions of other worldwide students from the '90s.

Basically the launch of any AAA video game back then (like 1994 DOOM or 1996 Quake) would cause a global sink in academic and corporate performance with workers calling in sick and students spending endless nights playing.

It was a great time to be a gamer.

Wait can you actually win blindfolded?

Also what was your character?

When you both play blindfolded, it becomes a meta game of knowing your opponent and how he plays, what patterns he uses, and then trying to change your own patterns to exploit what he thinks your moves are going to be and so on.

For character, I usually just let the game pick a random one for me. I found that after the initial fun of learning everyone's combos and special moves, the basic kicks and punches were all you needed. That was the real secret to MK: Precise use of high kick, sweep, uppercut, and block could pretty much beat anyone who made a mistake. If I wanted to show off (MK3), I'd pick Sindel and not allow one hit against me. I think I was the only person in town who used that character.

Another fun variant was to offer to only use one attack button (high punch, high kick, low punch, or low kick), and allowing your opponent to use all of them. Bonus fun: Let your opponent choose which button you are limited to!

Yes, this was the best kept strategy. Newcomers especially would focus heavily on learning the special moves, assuming the regular kicks/punches to be ineffective (or less effective). Big mistake.

That Liu Kang kick where he used both feet and sounded like a chicken was damn near impossible to defeat when your opponent was spamming it. Every now and then I could block and upper cut but mostly I would upper cut and start getting kicked again.

Repeatedly flying in and elbowing the opponent can also be annoying for them, until one block successfully breaks the chain.

heh yeah it could be defeated with a block and you could then round-house him while he recovered, but getting the timing down was tough

Yes! After playing a ton of rounds, you get to where you can visualize in your head what is happening based on the sound, timing, and what you've done with the controls. As the fight goes on though it gets increasingly more difficult because you don't know what the other player has done with their controls. So, winning is possible, but extremely difficult. Easier against AI players especially the lower difficulty settings that are much more predictable.

>After playing a ton of rounds, you get to where you can visualize in your head what is happening based on the sound, timing, and what you've done with the controls

"Use the force Luke" - Yoda

For the scenario in question, you would really have to attribute it to Obi-Wan.

Yoda would actually say "Luke, the force use, you must". Now you know why he didn't get that line in a script.

I used to be able to provide very accurate play-by-play commentary on someone's game of Addams Family Pinball from the next room, based on sound alone. I doubt I could have played well blindfolded but I bet I could have played better than a pinball n00b, at least.

> Wait can you actually win blindfolded?

Different game but equally impressive imo. Obviously takes a lot of practice but audio cues are huge for these kind of challenges - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w6z-h4hoEU

Another game, with two blindfolded players sharing one controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4HnZ4-_HzI

Early MKs are mostly unreactable visually so sound effects become the first priority.

Killer Instinct 2013 unintentionally at first has different sound (and music!) effects for each move as well as every meter so at some points devs were astonished by a letter from actually blind players with a few advices on how to make it even more accessible.

Upcoming Street Fighter 6 has the options needed!

Mortal Kombat devs made the later games really accessible, to the point blind players can be competitive.

https://youtu.be/zn3r0Pe8f9A

I’ve played with people like you and bravo on acquiring the skills. I was good enough to play through to credits without losing a round. But I knew people that could do it blindfolded without taking a single hit. I had no chance on 2 player against them. For me it started with Street Fighter 2. One summer when I was probably 10 or 11, when the arcade came out, the corner store near my house had it and along with unlimited refills on the soda fountain. They had some special hypercolor cup that you paid $5 for and got free drinks all summer. They didn’t factor in kids hanging out for 12 hours a day playing the new game they brought in. Or maybe they did, we put a lot of quarters down those games.

They brought MK in later and it was a solid few years of summer memories.

Hacking this thread to ask a questino about videogames/copyrights/trademarks.

I've been working on a videogame (one player, on the browser) based on a very popular IP (let's say Star Wars, but it is not Star Wars). I have very good relationship with the IP owners / lawyers, and I even asked them permission to create the videogame. This was their response:

> Whilst we value your support as a [REDACTED], your question touches on many complicated intellectual property issues and, as a result and as you probably aware, we typically don’t give advice or permission except to say that we object to any unauthorized use of our IP, as well as to any use that casts the works in a negative light, or that falsely implies an endorsement by or association with us. We therefore recommend that you do not proceed with your project.

However, months have passed since this response and I am still very interested in proceed with the game (developing the game is very fun, and I am sure fans would love it). But I don't want to spend months on it and having it down as soon as I release it (and break my relationship with them).

What would be a good movement at this point? Ask for the price for the rights? I guess it would be in hundred thousands of dollars?

Just to clarify, I am not expecting any profits from this game: I'd release it as a free-to-play, no ads, in browser game.

Can you change the game in a way that doesn't use the IP? There are many games that are clearly inspired by some IP (game, TV series, film) but doesn't actually use the IP (you need to do more than just change names of characters or whatnot).

Other than that, yes, you need to ask for a license deal. Depending on the license holder, this may be cheap or expensive, or you may be able to cut a more flexible deal rather than pay upfront (e.g. share of profit, but you're making a non-profit deal, so...). Or maybe you can make a deal to release it on their website.

Or just hope they don't notice...

I think a clear example of this would be The Orville.

Example space battle scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKepuFEzFAI

It's obviously inspired from Star Trek TNG and they want you to know it, but it has different characters and details. It's not Star Trek, but it's also true to the original than any recent Star Trek TV shows or movies.

So yeah, I would say, just change character names and make changes to your designs. Make it be its own thing and have fun with it.

One of the things to note that it is possible that they've already sold their IP to another company (or in talks to do so). Some other company may then object to your use of the licensed material in violation of their exclusive license for the IP.

As noted with the Spiderman fun, IP may not be simple. Some other organization may already own part of the IP from another deal (e.g. Sony owning Spiderman and MCU as part of Marvel Studios / Disney not being able to use Spiderman as a character until a deal was reached).

Is there a list/screenshots of some of the more interesting bugs they fixed?

Yeah it's a pdf on the page though

Can you folks stop flagging everything until its dead because you didn't like the persons delivery? This person is correct and I had to vouch for the comment just to see it.

It's Friday ffs just give it a rest for one day.

The direct link is https://mortalkombat.plus/download/2225/

Thanks for the direct link. I tried looking again and again in the page, but I still can't find it there.

Yeah, what text on the page links to that URL? I’ve scoured it on my phone and can’t find it anywhere.

You have to go to the game link, and then to a third page to find the changelog.

I couldn't find it on the main page.

What do you mean by "the game link"? The only page that seems to make sense is https://mortalkombat.plus/mk1 , but there's no PDF link anywhere on that page; I even checked the source.

Yeah, it's only on the II and 3 pages: https://mortalkombat.plus/mk2 because I guess 1 isn't done yet.

https://mortalkombat.plus/umk3

And it's annoying that it won't even let you "open the PDF in the browser"

No screenshots, though. That would be a great addition to the page. Or a playthrough video on YouTube.

Here's a video showcase I found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twWbx9dCuHA

It took me a while to realize that these are patches to closed source games.

I had originally presumed this was Midway's version of Aleph One, where Bungie released the source to the original Marathon trilogy, and the community made it work on modern hardware. Considering Mortal Kombat is owned by Warner Bros now, I don't expect that to happen.

Slightly disappointed. Was I the only one expecting an ill-conceived Mortal Kombat centered streaming service?

You are not alone

After Mortal Kombat X I thought Mortal Kombat+ would be stuffed full of ads, microtransactions, and playable characters paywalled off behind DLC. Doesn't seem like it so far, but it's still in beta so time will tell.

I loved MK3 but was never a fan of Ultimate MK3. New characters were great, but the game felt like it was jam packed full of bugs, and the AI in single player was literally impossible. The computer would instantly counter everything you tried to do, and you could only succeed using various jumping around tricks - you could never win in a straight fight and enjoy the combo system as intended.

yeah, the AI would read your inputs and react without frame delays (contrary to input generated by the user). there was even some code that would reduce the chance of that happening depending on many coins you placed in the machine

The AI in MK was always notoriously 'cheap'. I remember it was impossible to perform a throw on the AI. They would always throw you instead. You could even go so far as to freeze the AI using Sub Zero's freeze move, attempt the throw, and they will still throw you while they were frozen.

It's surprising the lengths they seemed to have gone to make the single player experience not fun. I know the goal is to get more quarters in the machine, but it felt like the wrong way to do it.

The 2 player competitive experience was where these games shined. It's just a shame that there was more potential for a fun single player. Regular MK3 I always found to be fun against the computer, even though the difficulty ratchets up as you climb the tower.

Sold my Amiga 500 to one of the game’s graphic designers back in the 90s. He told me his image was used for one of the characters.

Oddity of that night… I was in Chicago and I had a very old car at the time (Olds Omega). It konked out on me as I was leaving. So I had go back up to his apartment and ask to use his phone. He (and his wife/gf) let me, but they acted very odd like I was somehow up to something. I couldn’t find anyone to pick me up either and I didn’t want spend the money I just made on that crap car! Luckily I went out and tried again and the car started.

It always struck me how he and his girl seemed so… well almost elitist — maybe they were so isolated they were just scared of lower class strangers.

You don’t need to be an “elitist” to be scared of strangers in Chicago in 90s in the night.

So how do i play this mortal kombat thing on a mac?

Does MAME not run on the mac?

https://github.com/mac-a-r0ni/mame/releases/tag/mame0248

In Fightcade [0] the unpatched MK2 rom works fine.

Seems patching a ROM should be possible using MultiPatcher [1].

---

[0]: https://www.fightcade.com

[1]: https://projects.sappharad.com/multipatch/

This needs a custom build of MAME to play?

That's... ugh.

(edit- it doesn't, just recommended)

Fightcade is the community-adopted way to play older fighting games online.

From the FAQ:

The version you use will depend on your computer processor. In theory, the most up to date version of MAME you can use will result in more accurate the game emulation which usually required a faster computer processor to run the game at full speed. If you have a 64-bit processor then you want to use a 64-bit version of MAME (games can run up to 40% faster). It’s best to use the newest version of MAME as long as your computer processor can handle it. We recommend that you use the version of MAME that is offered on the ‘Download’ page. This special version has been modified to recognize Mortal Kombat 2 Plus (etc) as its own game. You may chose to use a different version of MAME, but you may get an error when trying to load MK2.ZIP. Don’t worry though, we will go over how to get around such problems in a later section.

>Mortal Kombat 2+ is compatible with any version of MAME between 0.119 and 0.203.

It seems that it works in standar MAME builds, but they recommend their custom compilation for best performance.

> This needs a custom build of MAME to play?

My immediate thought as well, especially without any indication of source for either GPL compliance or just to know what they changed.

It’s because the hash of the roms changed so make complains

They should also convert the sprites to HD with AI, like Nvidia's RTX Remix does. That could potentially look really good. Maybe even do some tweening to improve the frame rate.

Can you tell me more about this? I've never heard of it, and have always thought that it would be cool to upscale old videogames.

Here are some examples of what people are trying. It's very early and will only get (much) better from here.

Nvidia RTX Remix: https://youtu.be/Vg52-HZhrFc

Stable Diffusion remaking low res sprites:

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xmp9x3/as_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x5qrje/usi...

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9t1dx/img...

Oh my, thank you. I think I love MK3 more than any other game, even Quake 3. There was a... period in my life when I wanted to do nothing else. I barely survived school because I was preoccupied with simulating fights in my head instead of paying attention.

I maintain that MK3 for DOS is still the best port in terms of bugs and general feel. Yes, I didn't like Ultimate all that much.

Thank you GoG and whoever is working on this for keeping the dream alive. Bookmarked

Ok but I can't unsee that the first two say plus plus ("plus+") and the 3rd just says "plus"?

(Very cool project though)

I feel like Super Mortal Kombat 2 Turbo was the logical choice. :)

Was secretly hoping for a "remastered" edition kind of like what they did with command and conquer.

Recently tried this title with my kids on my MAME cabinet, and holy shit i completely forgot how hard they are compared to regular switch games, we been having a blast but it clearly has a toll on the kids and we had some frustation talks :)

I wonder which patch version of MK they are using. IIRC the 3.0 patch (had the contest advertisement) was the last patch that allowed juggle combos. After that the opponent would fall super fast after the first juggle hit. It kind of ruined the game for the pros.

I remember seeing "pros" in the arcade doing combos with something like 40 hits. They were using that character with the crowbar, can't recall his name.

MK source code was leaked a while ago, so no need to spend months for disassembling.

You can't use that leaked code without being sued. It has to be clean room implemented or disassembled AFAIK.

But using the trademark and copyrighted content from the game on a website is risk free?

Nothing is risk free. As long as the user has a legal copy of the game it is possible. Just look at OpenRCT2. You need to have a legal copy of the game in order to run it.

The fact that it's in binary form doesn't somehow exempt it from copyright. A translation of the disassembly into C or whatever is still derived from their copyrighted material.

Most of the EULAs explicitly prohibit disassembling - even the act itself.

I love seeing these community projects to reverse and/or update classic games. Disassemblers (& decompilers to an extent) are becoming so good and accessible that these kinds of projects are becoming more common.

MK2 brings back massive memories from my youth. Taking a step back, are fighting games popular today? I don't game much, but I haven't seen or heard of any major fighting games outside of RPG style battles.

Quite popular to the point where it has it's own dedicated subculture that runs tournaments all around the world. This summer's EVO tournament in Vegas had about 8k attendees with 9 featured games (including the newest Mortal Kombat, MK11), along with many side tournaments for older or less popular games. The Twitch stream had a peak concurrent viewership of 250k as well.

Besides those dedicated enough to fly to tournaments and compete with the best, FGs still seem to be generally popular among the mainstream; SFV sold 6.6m copies, MK11 sold 12m, and GG Strive sold 1m. The 2010s were a total revival of the genre, which had a bit of a dead period in the early aughts.

It's funny reading this stuff. I played in what would become "EVO", way back in 1992.

There were around 40 people there, about ten of them competing. It was held at an arcade that was downstairs in the La Jolla mall in San Diego.

This was the first worldwide Street Fighter II tournament, that later evolved into the EVO tournament.

Seeing MK2 for the first time in the arcade is basically a flashbulb memory for me. I had never even heard a rumor about it, it was just there, in all its glory. Seeing Reptile, the secret character from MK1, be a regular cast member blew my mind. Not to mention the much larger cast in general. Classic game.

MK has made a comeback after many years/flops in 2011 with a fresh reboot and serious plot. That was a great game. I believe they've released two more sequels to it which were still good.

I'd love to see a trilogy like combination of all the games. I would say my favorite gameplay of all the games is MK2, but my favorite characters and move sets are all from UMK3.

Bonus: When Scorpion was in a basketball game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNn-O1FE9bs

Whoever owns the trademark isn't going to appreciate this.

Extremely not smart to so prominently use the Mortal Kombat name and logo. Come on... we have seen this so many times. Cease & Desist coming in the next week.

IP lawyers: “it is literally free money for us from IP holders”

This much work is nothing short of truly amazing.

Only Ed's eyebrows could rival the spectacle.

Thank you devs. Please keep it up until it's done.

MK2? →→A,→→A, and my sister screaming that her little brother was "cheating". (I played with Mileena quite a bit.)

I'm giving this a try.

(2016)?

Surprised this wasn't shared earlier but it's as old as 2016.... just a different site mortalkombatplus.com

Aww, I was kinda hoping this was something official because of the 30th Anniversary.

Can I play this on a normal switch?

Is the source public?

I don't think they have the source themselves. They say they used a disassembler and they provide the patches for download, so you can rebuild as much of the "source" as they have using a ROM copy and the patches.

Makes me suspicious that they used the source leaks of several MK games to develop this.

> Want to play it? Here's how. ... Fightcade: Similar to MAME, but instead runs a custom emulator in an Electron based client called FBNeo

Electron. What.

FBNeo is just a fork of FinalBurn Alpha emulator which has been around forever.

Fightcade provides accounts, rollback netplay and a lobby system and is the main way that the FGC (fighting game community) plays older games online.

It works really well.

ok but Electron? For an emulator hosting fighting games? Is that not a problem for games which require fast reactions?

More like Electron for portability and minimal troubleshooting effort across a wide set of computer configurations.

They've made it really easy to use. Can't say the same for other emulators.

It's just the GUI wrapper, relax.

> It's just the GUI wrapper, relax.

the "relax" bit was pretty unnecessary and condescending.

simmer down

no u

About as condescending as your reaction to the project using Electron.

well electron is garbage and I stand by that.

it works well, but it's a fundamentally flawed way to produce cross-platform applications. too much performance is just wasted in the DOM and the JS runtime.

developers trade a small amount of development time profit for themselves in exchange for perpetually sluggish software for each and every one of their users, who could number in the millions. it is a few weeks or months gained for the development team, but costs years and years of cpu time measured cumulatively across all users.

the tradeoff should be the other way around. I will gladly trade away weeks of my time if it saves cumulative years of my users' time.

End user CPU time hasn't been a bottleneck in over a decade. There is fairly little difference in processing power requirements for home users now from roughly when Core2Quad CPUs were out. I was still running one of those as a development workstation until about 5 years ago.

CPU cycles are absurdly cheap. CPU speeds have been stagnant for 15 years. Average consumer applications still aren't taking great advantage of threading and with the recent CPU architecture attacks we're better off without Hyperthreading anyway.

The absurd popularity of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, Figma, Signal and WhatsApp with consumers says clearly that nobody minds all that much.

it's not a bottleneck, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. how many chunks of coal burned solely to give Electron the Watts required to do what it is doing over something more reasonable? it is definitely more than zero.

how many laptop charge cycles are caused entirely by electron apps using more power than traditional applications? impossible to know for sure, but easy to know that it is far greater than zero.

does this mean that you can carry my preference to its extreme and assume that I am advocating that all applications be written in Assembly and be extensively tuned? no, it does not.

I am saying that Electron is a tool of a developer who cares about their own experience over the experience of all of the users of the software they write, combined. the entire reason we write software is so that an end user's life can be made easier. if you think anything different, you likely have an MBA or don't understand why people pay for or use software. Even games are played so that the life of the player can be enriched. Part of the work ethic of this field (that apparently only I believe in) is to not deliver terrible software to end users, and it is my personal opinion that Electron developers choose what is easiest for them to get another round of funding going, and not what is best for the users who actually consume the product. These developers write for money, and to make the world a better place for themselves, at the small, but very real, expense of everyone else.

the absurd popularity of the electron apps you mention is probably due to the fact that they are only available as Electron apps or as web pages. "Look how successful electron is" doesn't count if there is not an equivalent traditional app to compare it against. And I am recalling a lot of people on the internet, including this website, and lots of people at work actively and repeatedly complaining about the performance of all of those applications, so I am not really sure that you are standing on solid ground at all.

Eh, given the age of the hardware, there are worse ways to distribute an emulator that you want to work on multiple different architectures and operating systems. And if you compile the intensive stuff down to WASM, is probably even easier to justify.

What indeed, what are you remarking on here? It's just one of a dozen easily used cross-platform UI frameworks, what's the problem? (and of course, "what's the problem for people on modern computers for which even small games are 500Mb these days", electron's not being used to distribute a web app that's 50x smaller than the UI framework itself in this case)

I've argued this so many times and it now exhausts me.

there's another comment by me in this thread somewhere that summarizes it well, but because you asked nicely:

WARNING: OPINION AHEAD

electron encourage bad tradeoffs and because of that it is an ecological problem, literally. many thousands or millions of people suffer sluggish software and must continually wait for their electron application to respond so a few developers can save a few weeks of time. it's the exact wrong tradeoff.

web developers infest this site so I am downvoted every time I say this, but I simply do not care. web tech today is absolutely horrible and if you know that (how could you NOT) and you write web software that does not improve the landscape, you are morally bankrupt.

Sounds like you should write a blog post that details all your complaints and link to that, and then post it here so folks can comment on whether your reasoning made sense, because calling people who use the web, which isn't owned by any single person, or regulated by any single entity, and isn't policed by any single person "morally bankrupt" might already be squarely in "get off your high fucking horse" territory. A bag of insulting opinions is worth less than a bag of wooden nickels =)

Cheap, easy, efficient. Pick two.

People are allowed to use easy, but (sometimes severely) sub-optimal solutions to make things they think are cool, because people make things, and there are thousands of tools that let them do so. It's why PHP is still around, and it's why people flocked to Electron. Electron won because "you should learn the hard thing" is a no-sell. They should! But they won't! Because they don't have to. And if you don't like it, go make a more efficient UI framework that is cheaper (that one's tough, free is free) and easier (and that one's also tough, but maybe you'll pull it off).

I'm not going to blog anything. No one cares what I say, and I'm going to change zero minds about anything, no matter what I write.

In the human race, I am but fodder. One of the masses of people just existing. I come here to learn things, and I wind up getting in arguments, because it's more or less the only place in my life where I have feelings about stuff that isn't the feeling of pure pain.

What would you propose they use instead, given they need to develop quickly across multiple platforms?

SDL + ImGui

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