someexgamedev
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
This yearly js poll always brings out the fanboys. The amount of "heard of it but would never try it" responses demonstrates that it's just a popularity contest
Cloud gaming has huge multiplayer advantages because you can skip the whole network stack and build your game for couch multiplayer, yet it's still playable over the internet.
Combine that with the deep pockets of F2P gamers, and Google's existing relationship with these devs via Google Play; I have no idea how they missed this.
Delivering content is not a valuable service. Making content is.
JavaScript game libs simply aren't as featureful, even the ones promising the scenegraph API. They don't work as well cross platform (by the end of that decade I had one codebase which could deploy to web, iOS, and Android); and that's where the audience has headed.
I hope this book spends some time on flash's contribution to video game design as well as web design.
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
Malls trialed interactive maps sometime in the last decade and it was a worse experience. One print map can service a lot of people crowded around it. Make the interface interactive and suddenly it's only usable by one person at a time despite being just as large as the old print map.
The right solution, if you want interactivity, is perhaps a handful of interactive map kiosks that are much smaller and meant for one user at a time. You could fit at least 4 of them in the space of any existing giant print map.
In general I don't think our current approach to AI is all that clever. It brute forces algorithms which no human has any comprehension of or ability to modify. All a human can do is modify the input data set and hope a better algorithm (which they also don't understand) arises from the neural network.
It's like a very permissive compiler which produces a binary full of runtime errors. You have to find bugs at runtime and fiddle with the input until the runtime error goes away. Was it a bug in your input? Or a bug in the compiler? Who knows. Change whichever you think of first. It's barely science and it's barely a debug workflow.
What pushed me all the way over the edge was when adversarial techniques started to be applied to self-driving cars. That white paper made them look like death machines. This entire development process I am criticising assumes we get to live in the happy path, and we're not. The same dark forces infosec can barely keep at bay on the internet, and have completely failed to stop on IoT, will now be able to target your car as well.
Worst thing is all our otherwise brilliant humans like Carmack are gonna be the guinea pigs in the cars as they head off toward their next runtime crash.
I can say that hiding them has reduced my engagement, which was my goal (the plugin is called Disengaged), but hasn't done anything for polarization.
To establish a link between engagement with these sites and polarization, you would basically be taking the stance that these sites are inherently polarizing, so using them less (by removing the engagement generators) decreases polarization.
Not a bad theory, but not one we can expect the businesses and investors behind these sites to implement on society's behalf.
https://github.blog/2017-04-11-private-emails-now-more-priva...
Even when game engines don't fail themselves, they can become obsolete. As a general rule: love no language, engine or platform. They all come and go over the span of a career and that's especially true in an industry like gaming which constantly sits at the bleeding edge.
Some of Unity's innovations like the asset store will endure no matter what engine is on top. But the next iteration will probably just look more like a package manager.
Goodhart's Law at work.