Comment by wackget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wackget | Hacker News Reader

> Uploading achievements to Steam is a pain. You can't just define a list and give it to their command-line tools; you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one.

> I think if you're a big important game studio you don't have to stand for that and they give you a bulk upload tool, but I'm not one of those so I looked at the HTTP calls it was making, saved my login cookie to a file and wrote my own.

No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this?

> Although I developed the game mostly on my Mac, during development Apple invented this thing called “Notarization” where if you run any app on a new version of MacOS, it'll make a network request to Apple to ask if the app's developer pays Apple a yearly fee. If the developer does not pay Apple a yearly fee, MacOS will pop up a dialog strongly implying the app is a virus and refuse to start it.

No way. Fucking hell, Apple. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of dollars have been wasted because of this?

>No way. Fucking hell, Valve. Sort your shit out. How many thousands of hours have been wasted because of this?

This is to prevent abuse. Some games will have 1000s of achievements as a feature, because gamers like games with lots of achievements (and because Valve kinda encourages that with some of their store features), so forcing people to do it manually is a way to decrease that kind of activity somewhat.

That's a lazy excuse IMO. There's a lot you can do, like letting small developers have up to 100 achievements, with more requiring talking to partner relations.

Valve already capped the number of achievements to 100 because of that kind of abuse, so I'm not sure it justifies having poor UX:

> By default, games are limited to 100 achievements at first. Reach out to us via the "Support" option at the top of this page if you have questions about this.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/achievements

An easy solution to this is to give point-based weights to achievements and cap the max total "points" any given game can have, allowing a developer to have many small achievements for their game if they wish. But really, none of this matters because Steam achievements are easily auto-unlocked via SAM.

“Wasted? How could you say that?!” - Apple exec, wiping their eyes with a roll of $100 notes from their extortion program.

The bit about Apple Notarization is incorrect.

You can do it with a free Apple Developer account. You only need to pay $99 if you want to distribute it through the App Store.

Still much more of a pain than it should be.

No, you can't.

I don't believe you are correct I'm this. A paid account is necessary to obtain the signing cert.

<<you have to laboriously click through the slow, confusing miasma of PHP sadness that is the Steam partner site and add them one by one.>>

Read question: Can this be automated with Selenium? For a long time I was using very low level Chrome DevTools libraries. Then I switched to Selenium. It is so impressive. It actually works, without weird 1-5% failures that you waste time chasing... then adding small sleeps to make it smooth and working.

I would suggest playwright or puppeteer myself. It uses the dev communication channel for chrome(ium)/firefox and works much better, even if you're limited to JS... there's a Deno port of puppeteer if you want to avoid some of the node.js bits for (imho) a cleaner experience.

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