Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 14

And the thing is, the number of external dependencies (and their update volume) that you can realistically, properly vet for inclusion in your project, is inherently small enough that you don’t need a package manager. And if you need a package manager to handle it all, you can’t be checking what you’re pulling in and so you’re definitely vulnerable.

Corporate dudes are so full of it - they’ve spent every year since the magical 90s this idiot is citing chasing maximal IP enforcement of anything *they* own, but now they want to nick everyone else’s content, it’s all fair use apparently. Absolutely full of it.

I think it would be totally fair to pirate anything you want from any company that trains AI on other people’s content. Fair use https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/28/24188391/microsoft-ai-suleyman-social-contract-freeware

I have to grit my teeth every time a PC builder points with glee at their above-1KW PSU

A PC shouldn’t need to suck that many watts, at the end of the day it’s just dumping the equivalent heat into your room, it’s not a flex

@HauntedOwlbear ok that’s useful, thanks. May noodle about a bit more of an evening to see

Got PopOS installed on the old workstation last night, was very easy and the base setup runs very well, nippy and nice looking. Fractional scaling even works fairly well. I missed Directory Opus immediately, Double Commander is quite good but isn’t quite as nice. I haven’t tried running Affinity under Bottles/Wine yet. But by far the main problem is that UE runs terribly, about 30% slower than the same hardware in Windows 😕 Not sure why, AMD GPU perhaps

This is an older GPU and I’m running 4K so I’m careful about the size of the viewport, but I used to get 60fps on the same size viewport in Windows and it struggles to hit more than 40 here. That’s with all the Lumen stuff turned off in the super basic FPS example.

Actually now I think I forgot to turn off virtual shadow maps. Will have to try it without that

Nah that didn’t help. As well as the frame rate being low generally, it spikes down to the 20s every couple of seconds. To repeat this is the same hardware I was using on Windows until recently so I know it can do better, solid 60 with these settings / viewport sizes. It lags the whole UE UI.

I’ve checked and it’s running the Vulkan backend and my drivers are up to date (AFAICT). It’s not very usable; if you put a beastier GPU in you could maybe hide it but ugh - and those spikes are not great

Oh and it crashed in the Vulkan renderer when I closed the window 🙄

It’s a shame because a lot of the system is snappier than when running Windows. Some bits aren’t: the “Pop Shop” app is laggy AF whenever you do anything like search or install things but you don’t have to use that. I like how Gnome looks, but hate that it doesn’t remember where you last placed app windows when you reopen them (I know, KDE exists). Changing the default clang version was not well documented(UE needs clang 16 which dists don’t have). But I’m sure I could work with it

@psychicparrot42 This gets dangerously close to tin foil hat territory but I've come to the conclusion that keeping people as reliant on unstable jobs they don't like just to pay for essentials like housing/food/medicare is 100% intentional. It's much easier to control people who are anxious and dependent than people who are happy and free

I've been shipping open source code since before I knew there was an "official" way to do it. I published code on BBSs, mailing lists and FTP as "public domain". My main motivation to this day is that I grew up in a backwater with very little access to people or resources to help me learn, and other people publishing code was a life saver to me. This is my way of paying that back, and I figure it doesn't cost me anything since I'm going to be making it anyway. But...

...this is not how a lot of people see open source code these days. Many people seem to expect it to be production-ready and maintained like a professional outfit, for "free". This is not the contract. It's not supposed to be a "job", even if sometimes it can be for a lucky few. It's first and foremost a community effort, usually led by one or two people who just feel like doing it. You should think of it as a favour from a stranger; and maybe one day you'll pass it on.

This also explains why corporations tend to be pretty bad at being good open source community members. Humans intuitively understand the favour system - you help me out, I'll help you too if I can. But corporations fundamentally cannot recognise favours because they're impossible to value. Sometimes individuals can short-circuit that, but a large company just stops being able to participate effectively in a favour system, because there are too many processes & accounting systems in the way

I feel like subscriptions have generally made software quality worse. There was an argument that having to make paid upgrades to generate revenue to pay salaries put pressure on companies to change things that didn’t need changing, just to get that upgrade money, and subs reflected the holistic task of careful maintenance better. But in practice what’s often happened is the subscription props up bad decisions on product direction, because subs have to keep paying either way.

First pass of dispensing health potions #gamedev

In our house when we’re playing one board game, we have to get out a completely separate board game just so both cats have a box lid of their own to sit in and don’t fight over one 🙄

Takeshi’s Castle and Dark Souls have a lot in common. The key to enjoying them for ordinary people (rather than the eye-rollingly tiring, try-hard “git gud” types) is that they give you an excuse to fail, and to be OK with that, because it’s natural in the face of such a hard task. And therefore giving you permission to use whatever cheese techniques at your disposal to defeat this stupidly hard, borderline unfair game.

@glassbottommeg worth noting for all the folks who think using real brands is more immersive: it often doesn’t work cross-culturally anyway. The world is more global than it was and UK/US are more aligned than many, but still I often can’t tell if a lot of American brands are real or fictional 😉

Meta apparently found that chronological feeds "caused people to log off" and engage less with their platform, which is why they don't like them. https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

Perhaps it's because they saw what they wanted to see quickly, and went on with their lives. Instead of wading through a ton of engagement fishing outrage-bait and doomscrolling their way through the day.

We know by now that high engagement does not equal healthy usage. Meta et al thrive on *unhealthy* patterns.

Finally started watching a (long!) video about the UE Gameplay Ability System. I'd tried to get a sense for it from the written docs, but they just don't go into enough detail on how & why you might use it in practice. More like 1 paragraph on each bit & then "go read the Lyra source". Needing to watch a *3h* video has been a blocker on me bothering to dig more before now.

I don't think it's something I'll use on this game, but I can definitely see the utility. Just a lot of moving parts!