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mosfetarium

43 karma · joined January 1, 2020

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mosfetarium··on The Futures of Inform
It dominated the scene for quite a while. Looking at the Xyzzy award winners will confirm that. Even the first Best Game winner ("So Far" by Andrew Plotkin) was an Inform 6 game.

However over the past decade or so the scene diversified a lot more, particularly as choice-driven rather than parser-driven games became a lot more popular. Twine is a tool for making browser IF games that really broke through there, although in recent times Ink has gained popularity both for making IF and as a tool for making dialogue systems in other non-IF games. Most new parser-IF games I encounter though still tend to be Inform.

A small tangent: for readers interested in IF and curious about trying to write one, Inkjam is 3-day event where you make a short game with Ink, and this year's event is in early September. I participated last year and it's good fun and a good challenge!

mosfetarium··on Schroedinger's streaming service just died
I feel like this issue is brought on by the fact that it seems like copyright law hasn't been properly reexamined for the modern era. I support the notion that the ideal model is people pay the rightsholder in order to enjoy the media, and offering resale of pure-digital media instead leads to some weird "You make money based on the peak simultaneous number of owners, rather than the number of people who consumed it", which just doesn't make any sense to me as an economic model.

So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the publishers are violating the intent of these relationships at all, it's just that copyright law being extremely out of date requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing resalable access, and be done with this nonsense.

I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the labels.

mosfetarium··on Doom Cacowards
There's definitely been improvements in level editors for existing engines. Hell, if you want to use those old editors, there are even plugins like HammUEr, to use Hammer with Unreal 4 and Qodot to use editors like TrenchBroom with Godot.

But I will say there was something particularly special about level editors coming with the greatest games of the day back in the 90s and early 2000s. Not only was this extremely accessible as it meant you could just learn level design, and not the rest of game development, but it meant you got to learn level design for your favourite games, something particularly enticing to young people. You also got a bit of a built-in audience.

mosfetarium··on Doom Cacowards
The incredibly low skill floor is definitely a big part of the scene's success.

I know a number of veteran professional level designers are kinda worried about the field. So many of them got their starts playing around with the level creation stuff that frequently came with PC games. It got them interested and allowed them to walk before they could run. So they're a bit afraid a new generation might be starting from less than they had. There's some hope that maybe Minecraft and Roblox will be a younger generation's starting point.

Game development is the most accessible it's been in many decades, but level design specifically is perhaps less accessible than it was circa 2000.

mosfetarium··on Doom Cacowards
Doom mapping is basically it's own weird artform that people have been refining for nearly 30 years. Unlike a modern AAA game it's typical for a single person to make a Doom map and so people can develop very unique and identifiable styles that come through in their maps. If you're an old Doom-fan and never got around the checking out the scene, Cacoward winners are a great place to find some highlights.
mosfetarium··on Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)
I don't think it gets quite mentioned explicitly in this video, and don't I know if it's what the parent comment was referring to, but I recently learned the interesting detail that this lock system was invented for the international NES, and was not a feature of the original japanese Famicom. And apparently Nintendo did have a bit of a problem with large numbers of bad unlicensed games in that market.

This apparently was a small motivator in the development in the japan-only Famicom Disk System, a floppy-disc-like drive addon, which did use a protection system that amusingly was based around trademark law. There was a number of other interesting elements about the Disk System, but I'll suppress my desire to vg history ramble :)

mosfetarium··on Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future
Sweet. Thanks for the correction there because, as I mentioned in the comment, there was room for my opinion to be outdated.
mosfetarium··on Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future
I used Unity in a work environment for about a year and a half, so I feel like I have a reasonably informed, if potentially a little outdated opinion, since that experience was some years ago. Whilst Unity is generally more mature there definitely are areas where I strongly prefer Godot. (Disclaimer: I am a FOSS nerd)

First up the added Unity maturity isn't always as helpful as you'd expect. There were many areas that felt very incomplete, requiring us to write our own solutions, or find third party ones often at cost. An example was I believe we encountered strong limitations with the built-in AI Navigation system that made it pretty useless to us. There were third-party navigation solutions, but this sort of summarizes part of the problem with Unity: there is a lot of third party addons, but a lot of them felt like things that just overcome the often confusing limitations of the original product that I already paid money for. Lots of game engines can suffer from being particularly suited for certain genres and not others, even supposedly generic ones like Unity. So if you were making something that was kinda weird and would require a lot of bespoke special work, using Unity didn't really get you any wins.

Godot plays better with VCS systems using a nice human-readable scene format called tscn, that is swapped for a binary format on project export. I find this format is usually readable enough to review scene file changes in PRs, with the usual exception being a scene that was primarily imported geometry data. To get around that we'd import geometry data into bespoke geometry scenes, and they'd be nested by reference into the scenes that you'd like to be able to review diffs on. Additionally this scene format merges nicely in git, and has allowed me to work on team projects and have people edit scene files in their own branches without fear. Unity (and Unreal) at least at the time, had nothing approaching this. There was a Unity text-scene format, but it was a merge nightmare regularly. In practice we ended up using a VCS product (I believe perforce) that allows you to exclusively check out a scene file. Which at least stops people stepping on each others toes too much but hinders productivity.

Unity as of last I heard still does not have an out-of-the-box solution for nested prefabs, with many opting to use a commercial add-on to supplement the short-coming. This feels like it has been the single most complained about Unity pain point, so it was very confusing that nothing really seemed to be happening. Godot uses an approach that I find much more elegant. There's no distinction between a scene file and a prefab, which allows for some nice refactoring where something becomes a prefab after not initially being conceived as one. You simply have the ability to make a scene graph node that is a instanced reference to an external scene, and this nests nicely with no limit that I've ever encountered.

The Unity Editor was a bit of a dog. It regularly crashed and experienced general slowness. I find Godot much more stable snappy, and don't experience anywhere near the amount of tool frustration. But I have heard that it has been quite a bit more stable in the past year or so.

I encountered a lot more weird rigid design in Unity. IIRC if you wanted to runtime load content such as textures or models, they had to be inside of one specific subdirectory of the project. In general Unity seemed to force its philosophy of project organization onto you, while Godot will happily go along with whatever approach you want.

I still think there are reasons to use Unity. It is more mature, companies generally want access to an existing talent pool, and let's not forget that often it is worth sticking to the tool you know. But I definitely have found that I enjoy working in Godot more than I did Unity, and as a fairly experienced programmer I don't mind not having as big of a community to rely on for assistance. I don't work as a game programmer anymore, but I continue to do hobby projects near exclusively in Godot.