Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 2

@djlink my experience of a lot of dev in the US is that a lot of places focus on faster to develop over end efficiency. All our software is bloated web crap now. And US dev salaries have been inflated for years. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that someone could do it faster & cheaper by just actually trying to do that

@psychicparrot42 and there way me losing my shit when a sector light flashed on and off in Doom

@Craigp oof

@Craigp I’m really hoping this one is less impenetrable when done, I loved the idea of the original but hated every moment of the hour I gave it

@scrivolical I remember is having a huge pop tart phase in late teens (they were new). I distinctly remember the burned tongues and sugar crash hangovers

I’d prefer that no-one was scraping everyone else’s content and burning power and water to turn it into stochastic bullshit machines, but I’ll at least enjoy the schadenfreude of the bottom falling out of stupid valuations due to someone else doing it cheaper

@bbbscarter don’t worry, I self-identify as an old man these days (although I prefer BluRays 😉)

@landelare Interesting, any examples?

Did too much in Blueprints again, had to rip it out and replace it with C++. I should know better, but in my defence it was very user-facing "UI like" code, just using actors, and I normally do UI code in BPs. But like always it hit a complexity wall and I had to unpick it

If only

@wolfr @bbbscarter @dormouse759 kids just bash everything until something happens, learning by massive amounts of trial and error. It’s nothing to do with intuitiveness

@markuslatvala @jonikorpi I've known some good visual designers, and some good UX designers, and it's absolutely not the same skill. Sadly web & phone app design has completely elevated the former at the expense of the latter. It goes all the way to the top too, e.g. Jony Ive making some terrible design decisions in the pursuit of the clean lines and thinness that undermined usability badly

@jonikorpi I think it’s worse, I think designers deliberately threw this away because they prioritise things looking pretty & “modern” over being intuitive

@armstrong I’ve had to write that “tap” means “a short touch with the tip of your finger, not the nail” based on previous experience with older folks

@lisyarus ahh yeah - I quite like it

@andrewwillmott yeah, huge fall from their original ideals

@GeekAndDad yeah, and these days Apple are leading the way in design that sacrifices obviousness for prettier looking devices

@lisyarus assigning to flowx / flowy functions weirded me out at first but they both return references I guess? I haven’t really seen that pattern before but I guess it’s better than raw array access (assuming inlined)

Take this post. How do I know the flat icons underneath the post are buttons I can press, and yet this icon:
➡️
is not? Only because I already know the context rules. I have to know them to know what’s interactive and what’s not. The amount of pre-knowledge UIs expect these days would make UI designers of old spin in their graves

Old intuitive interface design was rooted in the concept of “affordance”, in that things did what they looked like they did, or felt they did when you touched them. Buttons were raised and went down, knobs turned, sliders only went back and forth. Now, nothing looks like what it does; everything assumes a meta knowledge, something that is completely the opposite of intuition