Notices by Megan Fox (glassbottommeg@mastodon.gamedev.place)

Yep, this Hacker News post has the right of it. They're pushing for a "great slowdown" because the gains have been incremental for, uh, a while.

Like I'm not saying it's nothing, but it's nowhere near enough to get them to profitability, so they need an escape, and now. Or their valuation poofs.

Hrm. Ok I'm making a dungeon crawler with a very framed-in view with a thick HUD with lots of big character portraits and,

is there some way of getting vector art to look pleasingly crunchy? so it works alongside a crunched-up viewport?

Or do I embrace high-res HUD to create aesthetic distance?

Me, constantly, loudly: "and remember your local library has games and movies too!"

Me, quietly: "except mine, of course, we had those at my old larger branch, but now I'm in a tiny town, only a tiny selection 😭"

<checks online portal>

"Wait I can put a hold on games and they just get sent here?"

I'm pretty sure if kid me had seen this I would have been a Saturn diehard for life

No clue if it was actually fun to play, maybe even at the time it would have felt janky? But fuck me it looks so cooooool, and the combat looks decent?

Was the level design any good? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJxFWWQTsKg

Backstreet Boyz is playing at the dentist lobby

I have never felt so old

Folks struggling to make it as indies should probably read this: https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-wealthy-a-letter-to-a-former-student/

Also he only mentions rich kids and day jobbers, but there's also "has a spouse with a good job", "their parent died and left them just enough to get ahead" and "managed to pay off house so don't have rent"

If the team that made a game gets immediately laid off it's perfectly legal to pirate it

Look I don't make game law but I do fancy myself something of an expert on this so you can definitely steal the pirate game whose devs got laid off and they didn't even let em have a real launch party its legal

Like two fuckin weeks on Linux and I'm already a "telling my artist that, really, console git is simpler to use than a GUI anyways" person

I AM ON RECORD AS LOATHING GIT AS RECENTLY AS THIS YEAR

Linux: not even once

Anywho Kubuntu fucks, though I keep thinking I should have stuck with KDE Neon? Iunno, I just felt like opting for core stability vs coolest latest Neon

And Plasma in Kubuntu seems totally fine? So ya

Currently tryin to decide if I should install the Plymouth theme that turns my puter into a kitty

So Spectacle on Kubuntu does ALMOST everything I want. Captures screens, captures video, annotates.

But it's slow, and when you stop recording video, it just leaves the fucking window-region-selection UI up while it slowly encodes the file 😭

Is there a better alternative that does BOTH screenshot and video capture?

@jedi oh, huh! Weird. But thanks!

Ok so general Linux confusion about distributions now. I understand apt-get, more or less, but

- wtf is Snap
- wtf is Flatpack
- wtf is AppImage
- wtf is DistroBox

Are these basically all just containerized ways of snagging a pre-built binary that slots in more like a normal executable would?

Is the main diff that apt automates the build for you, whereas (gesturing) just grabs a containerized prebuilt?

Where does "I just downloaded an x86_64 and made a manual shortcut" fit into this scheme?

and then, having said that, is there some downside to using the containerized versions? For some stuff (Godot) I do actually need to provide my own executable cus I might build it myself, and I gather that maybe I'd have to make my own container or (something?), but for everything else like. Sure. I don't care where the Dropbox was built. I just need it to run on this OS, done. So flatpack just, works? That's the new cool shit?

Last time I poked at this was Debian and apt-get was the cool shit.

And I'm hearing apt-get actually does get binaries also (mostly), so now I'm further scratching my head on wtf all these new containerized thingies are.

Like aren't these all just apt-get in a funny hat? 😭

Is the main difference just that apt sorta only works by string name so you gotta know what it is and know it's there, whereas flatpack and the rest seem to be built more around web portals so you can just say "look, bro, just show me the fuckin Dropbox please"?

Ooooh. Got it. It's basically a way around the dependencies problem of apt-get, where this one requires This version of the library and that one requires That version of the library, and if you install this then that, oops, now it all breaks. Basically?

I'm guessing everyone also sorta panicked and moved to flatpack/snap when they realized how much apt's dependencies system left their ass hanging in the wind security-wise? That threat vector wasn't as recognized or worried over, early on.

Weird bonus question here: I saw a mention that adding snapd to KDE Neon (not sure why you would but go with it) would slow it down a bit on an old laptop, saw that snapd actually requires a daemon (huh?) and so:

- wait do all of these add resident daemons or is snap just weird?

- is the above concern overstated or valid?

Again, not sure why I'd add snapd to Ubuntu, I'll just use flatpack, it's just weird that daemons get involved to me I guess

(me as a coding camp youth counselor teaching a type-optional language)

"Alright kids, variable types, yeah I know, I KNOW, it's annoying, why not skip them! but-"

<spins chairs around>

"Think of them like a variable's pronouns. You wouldn't misgender your floating point buddies, right?"

Eyyy, someone else stumbling into my actual childhood favorite JRPG (well, "JRPG"), nice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pil99rfASBk

Did anyone else play Albion? Anyone at all? I have no idea how I stumbled into it, but it was formative for me. Fucking fantastic game.

The further I get in my career, the more I end up being the one Adult In The Room that knows how to do a thing,

except "knows" here means "did it once poorly, without expert supervision"

Yet that's still more than the rest have and

Oh fuck has it always been so and now I'm just on the other side-

@superblueowljump mastodon produces an RSS feed, and that site has calendar widgets and stuff too so eyyyyy