magic_lobster_party

Usually the most straightforward solution is good enough. And when you want to improve the performance, it’s rarely about time complexity.

They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.

They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.

A few potential obstacles:

1. Use of proprietary third party libraries. Havok seems to cost money for example. I’m not sure how Havok would work out in an open source model, but there are probably many other third party libraries that would stand in the way as well.
2. Distribution of assets. The game is not much without its assets, and many of the assets can be third party. For example Quixel Megascans. Even old games like Super Mario 64 heavily used third party textures and sounds. Not sure how they would like their assets be distributed freely.
3. Music. If the game uses licensed music this is a no go. It’s even difficult for companies themselves to release their old games with their original music.

Difficult to punch coworkers in their face in zoom

Refactoring for the sake of refactoring is rarely a good thing. It should be done with a clear purpose in mind.

Refactoring is often necessary to ensure new features can be continuously added with ease.

Undefined is not part of JSON specification. It’s also not a thing in Java.

I don’t understand why a company like Sony wouldn’t provide you a way to play ps1-3 games on your ps5. I would even be ready to pay for it.

They want you to buy new games. Not to play your old games.

PS5 doesn’t support CD, so popping in PS1 games (and a few early PS2 games) won’t work even if PS5 had a proper PS1 emulator. It’s only a matter of time until DVD support will be dropped for future consoles as well.

Re-releasing old games digitally is also difficult. More from a legal aspect. They need the permission of the holder of the IP. If they want to release Crash Bandicoot again, they need permission from Microsoft, who’s the current IP holder.

It’s also extra problematic if the game uses licensed music, which became common in the PS1 era. Then they need permission from all the involved artists. The Tony Hawk games are problematic in this regard for example.

New releases of Sonic 3 doesn’t include some of the original tracks. Possibly due to the potential involvement of Michael Jackson.

Moore’s law is not a given. It has been slowing down recently.

Current games are made for current day’s design of graphics cards. They are very dependent on pixel shaders for example.

Let’s be hypothetical. Imagine that future graphics cards go all in on ray tracing. Pixel shaders have become a thing of the past and no new hardware support it natively anymore.

Preservers have two options: either try their best to simulate pixel shaders effects through ray tracing, or emulate it through software.

Simulating through ray tracing won’t be accurate. Many pixel shader effects can’t be properly translated to ray tracing. Emulating through software can be hard. I don’t think many games even from 20 years ago can be fully run on modern CPUs.

That’s true, but there are still many games using in-house game engines.

God of War, Spider-Man, Elden Ring, GTA, Tears of the Kingdom, Doom Eternal, Halo Infinite, Destiny, Call of Duty, Cyberpunk, The Last of Us, Diablo 4, etc.

These are popular games that game into my mind. I don’t think game preservation should be limited to Unreal games.

I’m not against it, but it’s not a silver bullet for game preservation. All game engines are unique. Some are heavily optimized for their target hardware. Just because you have access to original source code doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy to preserve it for future hardware.

I mean, there are games that got terrible ports despite dedicated teams working on it full time with access to original source code. It won’t be much easier for the fans taking this on as a hobby project during their evenings.

Only the games with most dedicated fans will get preserved for future generations.

Developers tend to think in extremes.

This practice is bad sometimes? Avoid it at all costs!

This practice is good sometimes? Use it all the time without question!

Just use JQuery (with a PHP backend)

Even the issue tracker?

Reddit and Twitter aren’t comparable here. I’m not bound to the fediverse just because I post here. I can still use Reddit if I want. I don’t care much if my posts aren’t seen by anybody here either.

Code hosting is a different story. It’s not ideal to host on both Github and Gitea at the same time. It’s a mess to keep track of multiple issue trackers at the same time. If you chose one you’re kind of bound to it, so you better choose the alternative that increases the chances of future success of the project.

The suggestions are also deprecated

IntelliJ is great for organizational settings. I would never use it for home use as there are many good free alternatives for that kind of setting.

Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

So jetbrains is “acceptable” because I don’t need to open my own wallet.

I’m sure most of Wikipedia’s staff prefer to get their salaries in their local currency.

It costs money to exchange Bitcoin to some actual useful currency.

Wikipedia removed the option to donate by Bitcoin because too few people used it. I don’t deny that some people prefer to pay by cryptocurrency. It’s just that these people are too few to drive a change.