Ms. ArmoredThirteen
- 4 Posts
- 26 Comments
What about a bash script that calls your CI/CD because the system is so old and complex anyone learning how to use it immediately builds a 1-off tool to hide what they don’t need but then everyone starts relying on that 1-off bash script so you extend the functionality then replace it with a proper tool then let that rot so you need a new bash script to call that to hide the useless parts?
My work someone made a robust automated build script, and they left so someone else made a wrapper around it to make it easier to work with, they’re gone now and someone wrote a wrapper around that to extend functionality in a backwards compatible way, but it’s overly complicated for my minimal use cases so I wrote a batch file to call it with my default settings…
I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything
The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.
The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same
I’ve only ever used it in browser to limit what it can see on my machine. I was told by one of my coding professors that one of the signs of a virus is if it monitors what apps you’re running, I’ve been cautious ever since of anything that does that (obviously it isn’t the only sign and isn’t instant virus bin, like I have an app that monitors GPU usage and throttles apps to keep from cooking my machine)
Oblivion suffers from middle child syndrome. It is the transition from the weird and fantastic of Morrowind to the mass appeal of Skyrim and it doesn’t really do either of those things well. I liked a lot of aspects of it. Like the changes they made with vampirism were interesting, dimension hopping was a blast, the addition of skills providing special bonuses like running on water helped liven up the skills. There was a lot of garbage though like how the level design was a clunky mix of simplified vs. capturing what Morrowind did, UI switch to prioritize consoles but didn’t even work well for console, the overall distancing of mechanics and the world. I remember it feeling like they put a lot of work into streamlining while keeping things unique which I appreciate but they didn’t hit the mark and ended up with a lot of hollow concepts.
Skyrim never even attempted to be weird so I think it’s a lot more cohesive comparatively. Like there’s no pretending anywhere in that game about what it is and in that way they did a reasonably good job. Probably the biggest differences though is Morrowind is clearly a game made with incredible amounts of passion. Oblivion also has passion in it but there are a lot of areas you could see that were rushed or they kept the devs leashed. Skyrim’s rare flicker of care makes me feel sad mostly knowing the devs had the capacity to go hog wild with it but didn’t for probably a variety of reasons.
It’s been a good while since I played oblivion though I’d probably have to run through it again to give you a proper answer (and might change what I’ve said here as I reevaluate it fresh). What’s your belated revelation on Oblivion?
Morrowind is the reason I’m in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It’s been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I’ve ever preordered, it’s the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.
I was hesitantly optimistic for FO4 when I bought it, it was off-putting but I worked through the disappointment of running into invisible walls so often, and when I finally got the gear and the freedom to power armor my way to the roofs I was pumped until I discovered they put fuck all up there. Morrowind was designed with jumping and flying and they made a 3D world that was fascinating to explore, Skyrim is completely flat, FO4 pretends to have 3D space but it’s a contentless liar. I’m so jaded now I didn’t even get to the hesitantly optimistic step with Starfield I just assumed it was going to be empty filler
I worked for the state once and the number of times I had to put my foot down for security was appalling. We’re talking like getting web services updated to use basic password auth could take months and I’d be pressured by management to ignore it because some asshat using the service doesn’t want to update their 30 year old batch file to deal with auth. Other people would regularly push things that could easily expose thousands of people’s identifying info just to get management off their backs. A couple projects I think I was specifically kept away from because they were “mission critical” and they didn’t want me slowing it down with trivial stuff like not leaking unencrypted databases…
Don’t take my pause key from me that’s the best key! I just want pausable games to bind with that key again like they used to, guys it’s right there by name and everything. Just started playing rollercoaster tycoon 2 again and, after the mandatory drowning of the first person I saw, I was delighted to find the pause key pauses the game. Even better is if I need to take a break from something pause/break is inclusive of it all. I can walk away from what I’m up to for minute and don’t have to worry that the machine is going to feel abandoned because it’s right there on the key just taking a break little buddy I’ll be back.
Well I’m a game dev myself and drm is bullshit. Denuvo can get fucked