Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 10

I'm building a custom editor in Unreal, and the barrier to entry is quite high. I've already added ten new C++ classes, only to make a rectangle with a name on it appear in a generic graph editor. I can move the rectangle around, but that broke my serialization until I realized I needed not one but two different classes to represent just one (type of) node.

Once I get past the learning curve, it's going to be a fairly powerful tool, but there's a long way to go before it works at all.

@Zeugs @cstross I would guess similarities stem from them having a similar agenda.

The thing about Russians not being allowed to call it a war is an idiosyncrasy of the Russian legal system (it's like setting a weight limit for cars to 20 tonnes, but making an exception for agricultural vehicles, and then insisting your new main battle tank is technically a tractor).

@Zeugs @cstross As a Pole who works (remotely) in a "German" team, together with two Brits, an Austrian[1], a Bavarian, and an Italian (and that's not even my most international" employer to date), I can't help but notice how that would hurt the entertainment industries. But of course that's what fascists always do: they outlaw fun.

[1] The funny thing about Austria and Bavaria is they have a different German there, arguably a separate though related language.

@adaliabooks @cstross When you already have a half-decent translation, you can put another algorithm on top of it that makes simple subsittutions, insertions and deletions, eg. turns "driver kills 3 in a car accident" into "Black driver kills 3".

(how do I know they're black? I don't, and they're probably not, I just blindly inserted "black" because I could)

@isaackuo @cstross I dind't know, so I did a quick check with the most cutthroat MMO I could think of, and apparently real money trading is considered a form of cheating these days, but it's still something they have to deal with: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/7370633552284-Real-Money-Trading-RMT

@isaackuo @cstross I'm pretty sure it's been at least ten years since the first time I heard about people using bots to play MMOs for them so they could make money selling items farmed by said bots.

The single silliest thing about the US is how a lot of places in the world are already doing a thing (public transport, universal healthcare, gun controls, proportional voting, winning by popular vote, the metric system etc.), and the thing in question clearly works, and works well, but the Americans still have this uncanny ability to convince themselves that it couldn't possibly work for them.

@nathell @jbiserkov @Svenlaa

DUPA = Defiantly Undoing Polish Acronyms

If 20 years from now I need to ask you "what did you do to stop Trump before his buddies started dropping bombs on my home", and your answer is "I did nothing because the other candidate had problems of her own", I am not going to accept that excuse.

Steam had the right idea letting people attach tags to games, because that tweet-sized summary next to the trailer really doesn't seem like a good spot for you to tell me your game is a "card-based tower defence idle clicker". What I'm looking for is some info on how this game is different, and not how it's more of the same.

A person I follow on Bluesky made me aware of a good point: before "AI art" became what it is now (i.e. poor copies of the internet's common denominator), the procedurally generated images were very surreal, dream-like and unsettling in their own particular way. They evoked emotions that were not that easy to replicate elsewhere. Which means they had a value of their own. Also, their origin was obvious and it felt, you know, honest.

When my father started using the internet back in 1997, his modem could do 56 kbps in theory, and 14,4 kbps in practice.

9 years later, the download speed in the first flat I rented on my own was 8 Mbps, which already felt like a lot at the time.

I'm currently downloading something from Steam, and the download speed fluctuates a lot. Right now it's on the lower end, about 320 Mbps. When it improves, it gets as fast as 450 Mbps.

Four orders of magnitude of difference in less than 30 years.

@sashag Mathematicians had discovered spaghetti code long before programmers did.

Which is why, to this day, the traditional meal of statisticians is the bolognese sauce.

static const boo* Be()
{
for (int Day : Life)
continue;
return nullptr;
}

@Leszek_Karlik @cstross President Vance appoints deceased Trump's advisor.

If I ever get to the point this pet project evolves into an actual project, I want it to have no romance options (it's a party-based dungeon crawler, so one would expect some of those). We're going to warn everyone up front that we're saving romance quests for the "Fan Service DLC".

Then we're going to have people vote on which pairings they want to see in the DLC. And if people decide to pick some weird pairing as a joke, we'll roll with it.

...and the romance will go horribly wrong.

I really liked "Pacific Drive". I even kept playing after the main story concluded. But I get the impression that either the things I liked about it are different from other players, or the authors don't necessarily have the same idea of what's making their game fun.

They keep releasing new decals for the car, and I really couldn't possibly care even less about those. I didn't even paint my car a consistent colour, because it kept breaking too often and I stopped caring at some point.

By the way, Katarzyna is a freelance 2D artist and is currently open to new commissions. As her coworker on two very different projects, I have only good things to say about her work ethic and teamwork skills.

Maintaining a slow but steady pace of work on what started as a pet project, but may yet become something bigger. Thanks to my great colleague Katarzyna Odrobińska (see her other work here: https://www.artstation.com/katodrobinska) for lending her talents, as we're looking for a comic book-style look for a not-quite-serious post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler.
In this concept for outdoor environments you can see we're trying to follow the genre's traditional limitations, except one: the sight range.
#indiedev

One of negative side effects of the early access trend is that it's now common to call the game "unfinished" rather than "poor", implying that the developers were lazy or scammers for not working on it some more, as if throwing more people at the problem would solve it (it usually doesn't).

Ironically, one game that everyone insists is bad, but was actually forced into release before a major patch was ready (and it ultimately never got released after negative initial feedback) is "Gollum".