Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)

The data centre lobbyists‘ core argument seems to be we should make the climate emergency worse for the “benefit” of de-skilling everyone, becoming reliant on centralised tech, and generally doing everything faster but worse.

These bellends can’t sod off to Mars soon enough. Hopefully they’ll ask an LLM to design them a habitat and that’ll be problem solved

Wait, you're not seriously telling me that to query for friends-only games on Steam you have to get the friend list (async) and then call an async function for every single one to find out if they're hosting a game? Or at least that's what the UE implementation allows (there is a FindFriendSession with a list of friends but it's a lie, it's unimplemented). Fecks sake

Oh and you're not allowed to ask about multiple friends in parallel for some reason. Sorry, people with lots of friends 🤦♂️

Just checked the Steamworks docs and yeah this isn't UE being annoying, it's genuinely how the API makes you do it. List all the friends, check what game they're currently playing, then check if they're running a server. Wow. I always assumed there was just a "friends only" flag to pass to the find sessions API, but nope. Mad

MinerMancers is live on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3223050/MinerMancers/

MinerMancers is a game about silly wizards going mining together. Delve into the mines alone or with friends to satisfy your employer's ceaseless demand for magical resources.

This is a labour of love by my wife and I; there's still a good ways to go, but we're looking forward to showing you more over the course of development.

Boosts welcome! Oh and wishlist it if you like the look of things! 😉

@steter I've also reverted back to 5.6.1 and cherry-picked the bugfixes I needed from 5.7 because Epic (once again) broke as many things as they fixed. As well as the things you've found, bundled PSOs (used to create the "precompiling shaders" loading stage to prevent stuttering) are completely broken in 5.7. I'm done taking new versions.

I sometimes think about how if open source had never happened at scale, and all LLMs had to train on was proprietary code, how different things might look right now. Breaks my heart; sharing code openly has been a huge part of my life and belief system for so long, and I was so convinced that the good that it did outweighed the bad actors taking advantage. I never imagined that the bad actors would win by automating their behaviour

@RobeeShepherd Yeah you don't have to give them what they ask for, just what they need based on what they asked for, which is not the same thing. But still, involves listening to them

I really don't know what Blender were expecting as a reaction to them being "happy to announce" they took Anthropic money. If the ONLY requirement for being a donor, as the funding guidelines claim, is "to support Blender's mission", and accepting the funding doesn't indicate any endorsement, then the celebratory shout-out wasn't required. But then I suppose not saying *anything* would raise more red flags when people found out. Could have said it less excitedly? Or just...not taken it.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116449538020922048

I wonder how many people are learning that by relying on a third party to do your job for you, you’re entirely susceptible to them jacking up the price and/or making the product worse (ie cheaper for them to run) literally whenever they want. IMO it’s insane to outsource your work to these guys and undermine your own fundamental skills.

@thomasfuchs yeah it’s daft how many things you need to add to Windows to make it tolerable. I used to love my Macs but Apple made it increasingly painful to be a developer for them. Linux is a bit of a mess on the desktop but maybe heading in the right direction one day. I wish there was some OS I could unreservedly like

@thomasfuchs Not to defend Windows (it’s shite) but FYI Powertoys Quick Accent merged a PR for these quote shortcuts recently https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/30481

I saw a young person ask ChatGPT how long their flight was today when they were literally holding the boarding pass with that information on it in the same hand that had the phone in it. ChatGPT spat out about 4 paragraphs on the subject when the answer was “40 minutes”. What a time to be alive

@rygorous as a kid when I used to see root beer referenced in US things I always assumed it was just another name for ginger beer (the only root I knew that they made drinks out of)

Edit: I voted “have not tried” because I’ve never technically drunk any - I sniffed a bottle once and it smelled so bad I didn’t want to try it

There’s this cachet about Apple folks that they’re somehow different, but seeing so many of their top talent leaving for Meta and OpenAI lately it just looks to me like typical valley bros following the money. I couldn’t for a second imagine even considering working for either of those companies no matter how much they paid me. But apparently all the shit they’ve done just doesn’t matter to these people

People thinking that LLMs are a good replacement for junior devs aren’t accounting for the fact that junior devs naturally turn into senior devs through experience. LLMs will never turn into anything more than they are right now, dumb pattern matchers that fool you into thinking they’re smart just because they can steal & remix work at a staggering scale while understanding absolutely none of it. But they can certainly create technical debt fast

Everyone loves a good complain when they get bad service, so here's a positive story for today. Our upvc back door mechanism started making horrid crunchy/snappy noises this morning, which really freaked my wife out and made her worry about it breaking and getting stuck open/closed. I called a locksmith who happened to be nearby already, and had a window before his next job, who turned up and fixed it within the hour. Stress averted, nice chap who has gone in my 'good contractors' book 👍

"Oh hey now we want you to pay more for our self-destructing chips because we made other terrible AI-hype related decisions" 😂

Jog on mates, come back to me when you've started making things that are actually good again 😛

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intels-13th-and-14th-gen-chips-will-reportedly-see-a-10-percent-price-hike-soon-partly-in-response-to-the-lackluster-performance-of-ai-pcs/

"It's so weird how we couldn't sell all those AI chips that no-one asked for"

@steter If you're going via FBX you might want to try this editor console option: `Interchange.FeatureFlags.Import.FBX False`

We've had loads of problems with the new Interchange importer but you can revert to the old importer with this option (has to be set every editor session, we do it in an editor startup blueprint)