Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 8

@yora Come to think of it, Unity3D, Unreal Engine 3, Steam, iPhone, Android, Twitter, and Facebook all happened within the same 3-year span (2005-2008). Not all of these things were ultimately good, but each of them changed a lot in its respective field.

I just remembered the NFT hype was only three years ago, and has already fallen into complete obscurity.

This in turn made me remember a Razem National Council session back 2019 (I think), where we were discussing self-driving cars as a potential future challenge to employees (particularly lorry drivers). That one's fallen into obscurity. too. No one's waiting for self-driving cars anymore.

The "AI" hype is in its second year now...

@maxim It makes me think of a game where I'd have a broom, and I'd be sweeping floor with it.

You know how people on the autism spectrum have this thing called special interests where once you find something interesting it becomes a rabbit hole that you just keep descending?

Well, the YouTube recommendations algorithm feels like it's been specifically designed to take advantage of that.

At least it no longer serves me juvenile creepy porn now. Today is the autism advocacy videos day!

(all because I clicked a clip of one of Fern Brady's shows)

It begins.
(book delivery still pending, these are just the outer covers)

@pandoriafalls I have a similar problem (not because of ADHD, though) and at one point I noticed my sense of accomplishment comes from reactions from other people. Which basically leads to doing things for the likes. Not sure this is healthy, but at least it helped me get a lot done on a regular basis.

I'm not sure how many people actually know this (I always thought everyone does but then I'm obviously biased), but the term "artificial intelligence" has been used in the games industry for decades. In this context it means "any seemingly autonomous behaviour on part of in-game agents, typically non-player characters". This broad definition includes decision-making algorithms in one corner, navigation in another, and animation in yet another.

Pretty sure tech bros play tons of video games.

I liked the original Homeworld a lot. I liked Cataclysm almost as much (almost, because I'm not particularly fond of that specific variety of horror). Homeworld 2 wasn't as good, but I've played through. Deserts of Kharak simply didn't gel, there were some design decisions that I don't think helped. And now I'm reading very bad reviews for Homeworld 3, and my urge to make a 3D space RTS of my own is only getting worse and worse.

My feeds occasionally bring clips from US TV news gone viral with some silly story, and I don't mind that, but I've noticed the hosts speaking on US news often sound to me as if they were talking to kids. Might be a simple matter of a foreign language having different default intonation from mine, but I never get this vibe from the news on BBC.

I may have just accidentally discouraged a friend from playing Baldur's Gate 3 by casually mentioning how every companion in this game tries at one point to flirt with you.

(the friend and I seem to share the dislike for relentless courting)

@Npars01 @cstross On the other hand, I went through my library of video games and the distinction there doesn't hold as neatly. E.g. both SHODAN (System Shock) and GLADOS (Portal) are feminine, murderous, mad as a hatter and not to be messed with.

A friend is writing a business plan for an assignment in her business school. The plan has some formal requirements, e.g. you need a logo for your planned company.

The friend prompted some "AI" for the logo and had it done in an instant, so now she's super happy she didn't have to spent a whole day on a placeholder.

The logo she got is the most generic you could imagine. Good for a placeholder, and not much else.

So that's a valid use case for AI. Placeholders.

Ogłoszenie drobne: osoby, które pomagały nam w wydaniu "Projektowania Przeżyć", uprzejmie uprasza się o sprawdzenie raz na 2-3 dni spamołapów, ponieważ w najbliższych dniach (prawdopodobnie od jutra) będziemy rozsyłać maile z prośbą o potwierdzenie lub zmianę adresu dostarczenia książki.

I don't want to sound like an angry old person, so let me first say that back in my youth there were tons of unhealthy preconceptions about sex, romance, and relationships, and some of them were outright creepy and not entirely explicable as mere miscommunication or naivety.

It's just that due to some bad life decisions involving mindless clicking I've been recently exposed to some current-generation webcomics, and, well, kids these days don't seem to have made any progress.

@leviadraconia Speaking from personal experience, anything can be a blocking volume if you're anxious enough.

Just paid the invoice to my printing house. I wouldn't be surprised if they had already queued the print, because we've done business before, but it's official now. We're doing it.

Can't express how much of a relief it is to finally see this book actually getting done.

@cai_tan Swearing is perfectly fine. Everybody knows a bugfix never works until there's at least one profanity somewhere in the debug pipeline.

That unbracketed oneliner conditional, though... ;-)

(just kidding, I do that too, at least when my boss isn't looking, which she is all the time, because it's part of our coding standard)

@elFlashor Localization and outsourced QA are the two places where collecting names for the credits can be genuinely difficult, depending on how good the subcontractor is at keeping track. Personally, if I were to manage a project, I would opt for keeping our own record.

Some flagship titles end up with immense credits lists because of their workflow issues (e.g. the release day is near, the game is half-done, but one of your subsidiaries has some HR to spare).

The largest project I've worked on in the last few years was Gollum, which was quite large but not AAA-scale large. Collecting names for the credits was a major concern, both in the sense that it was a challenge, and in the sense that it was important to the company. Hard to believe, but sometimes a subcontractor simply doesn't know who should be credited from their side.

(and don't get me started about administrative staff who insert themselves everywhere even if they worked on something else)

@yora Depends to a large degree on what kind of video game you're making. There are games where the world is as abstract as it is in a novel. Then there are games where getting from place A to place B means literally walking there, with or without a map. Thus, videogame worlds sometimes require wayfinding, landmarks, vistas, all sorts of visual language that needs to be baked into the fiction (and not just slapped on top of it).