Doesn’t really matter what your developers run on, you need your QA to be running on trash hardware.
We can even cut out the middleman and optimize unity and unreal to run on crap
Jokes on you, my corporate job has crippled the Mac they gave us so much that EVERYONE has trash hardware!
You have my vote.
But … where is the innovation (and also Alt text?)
Probably an innovative revelation of the concept of “bloat”.
Image description.
The image is a screenshot of a tumblr post by user elbiotipo.
My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy’s laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn’t work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.
With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.
Innovation is orthogonal to code size. None of the software most modern computers are running cannot be solved on 10 year old computers. It’s just the question whether the team creating your software is plugging together gigantic pieces of bloatware or whether they actually develop a solution to a real problem.
Planned obsolescence is one of the major engines that keep our current system of oligarchic hypercapitalism alive. Won’t anybody think of the poor oligarchs?!?
Stop making him cry, ask him some Rampart questions!
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS!
I can think of a few games franchises that wouldn’t have trashed their reputation if they’d have had an internal rule like “if it doesn’t play on 50% of the machines on Steam’s hardware survey, it’s not going out”
I think it’s given us a big wave of “Return to pixelated tradition” style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.
I don’t mind if indie devs try something experimental that melts your computer. Like beamNG needs a decent computer but the target audience kinda knows about that sort of stuff.
The problem is with games like cities skylines 2. Most people buying that game probably don’t even know how much RAM they have, it shouldn’t be unplayable on a mid range PC.
Unless they use Unreal Engine and don’t know what they are doing. It can be pixely and run like ass.
Octopath Traveler was the last UE based game that really ran well that I can remember.
Was that game any good? The mobile version had a Gacha mechanic that scared me off, but it otherwise looked like a really smooth SNES style JRPG.
I liked it. It’s not particularly hard or deep but the mechanics are nice, battles and encounters don’t overstay their welcome. The interwoven story was done quite nicely. I played it on PC. It runs great on Proton and Windows 7.
I haven’t played the second one, but reviews consider it an improvement. Now that they removed Denuvo I might get it.
And it plays at 5-15 fps like Rabi-Ribi.
Im making a 3D game now, and the goal is to get it running on a gtx 660
I think I already posted this at some point, but Software Disenchantment is always worth mentioning in this context.
Reminds me of a funny story I heard Tom Petty once tell. Apparently, he had a buddy with a POS car with a crappy stereo, and Tom insisted that all his records had to be mixed and mastered not so that they sound great on the studio’s million dollar equipment but in his friend’s car.
Mr. Petty is a wise man.
Reminds me of the ass audio mixing in movies where it is only enjoyable in a 7.1 cinema or your rich friends home theater but not on your own setup
It seems we’ve lost sight of reality there.
As we don’t intend to attend much cinema any more, I hope they bring back essentially a Dolby Noise Switch for movies. I don’t want to sacrifice too much, but booming noise followed by what comes out as whispered dialogue really cheapens the experience.
I hope they can find a process that gives us back a sound track for the sub-17:7 sound system.
They could add more audio tracks for different systems. Blurays support multiple audio tracks and they are almost never full.
I’ve always wanted to try putting something like a guitar compressor pedal in the audio chain just to normalize the peaks. My wife will find something to watch, but ends up spending half the time adjusting the volume, or just turning on subtitles.
A lot of media players have a compressor if you are watching ripped movies on an HTPC.
I have a much simpler setup though. Just a ‘smart’ TV and a sound bar I paid about $200 for so nothing fancy.
Not actually looking for advice, just a thought experiment of quick, easy and cheap fixes.
Dynamic Range Compression. VLC player has it, possibly under a different name though. Set it up on my theater pc, and I almost don’t need subtitles anymore.
On Windows: https://www.fxsound.com/ (now free and open source)
On old Linux: PulseEffects
On new Linux: EasyEffectsThose really make your crappy speakers or headphones go the extra mile.
That’s how my professors instructed me to mix. To make it sound as good on shitty speakers as possible and also sound good on expensive systems.
This is still a perfectly sound method.
Getting the music you made in your own DAW to sound good on your home speakers is almost easy. getting it to not suck on shitty speakers? that’s an art.
Then again my 2016 stock yaris had the best sound I ever heard anywhere.
I had the same exact approach back in the late 90’s. My friends had several band projects and when they were mixing their demos, I insisted that if the mixes sound good in a standard car stereo, they’ll sound good anywhere.
The thing is that developers tend to keep things as simple as possible and overly optimize stuff, when you find bloatware is usually some manager that decided to have it.
The thing is
Of course, we developers like to optimize and patch source code all the time. If I am suddenly woken up at three in the morning, I will immediately open the lid of my laptop and start optimizing the code. That’s our little developer secret.
It’s the marketing. Always the marketing. Especially the SEO guys.
One SEO guy we worked with told us not to cache our websites because he was convinced that it helped. He badgered us about it for weeks, showed us some bullshit graphs and whatever. One day we got fed up and told him we’d disabled the cache and he should keep an eye out for any improvements in traffic. Obviously we didn’t actually do anything of the sort because we are not fucking idiots. Couple days later the SEO wizard sent us another bunch of figures and said “see, I told you it would help I know my stuff”. He did not, in fact, know his stuff.
Couple days later the SEO wizard sent us another bunch of figures and said “see, I told you it would help I know my stuff”. He did not, in fact, know his stuff.
Ahaha no way.
We need more shorter games, made by happier devs paid more to work fewer hours, with worse graphics.
Steam is full of shorter games with worse graphics made by indy devs. Guess what? No one gives a shit! Because no one needs crappy games from 1980-s.
The indie boomer shooter scene is exploding, actually
This is data from 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1356730/steam-indie-game-revenue-genre/ but I believe it’s still pretty relevant.
In short, indie games are the games no one is playing. A tiny fraction of indies bring more than $200k, while AA and AAA bring in millions and hundreds of millions.
The idea that we need shitty games with piss poor graphics is just plain wrong. What we need are high res games to enjoy 4K experiences.
I think this is a false dichotomy and an over-simplistic view of the game industry. Remember, there are far more indie games than AAA, so of course they’re going to earn less, there are more to choose from. Plus, if an indie game does too well, it often stops being indie. Most of the money for AAA games is from the same few people paying thousands of dollars in many small purchases too.
Anecdotally, most people’s favourite games are, or at least started off as indie games. However, most people’s least favourite are going to be indie as well. I think the thing with indie games is that they vary a lot, often exploring things that many publishers simply aren’t willing to. This allows them to find and fill a niche perfectly that a publisher can never fill. The main thing is that people see this and start making their own indie games, leading to market saturation pretty quickly.
Plus, the vast majority of people still don’t have 4K monitors. It may be the future, but you seem to think that’s where we are now when we just aren’t.
Some of them are really succesful. Many people care. Others don’t.
Here the current Steam charts. Many indie games, some few with really low specs. Banana only needs 30MB RAM. Seems to be a great game. Hostly now, why are 50k people playing that “game” currently?
But back on topic: Yes, AAA games are more succesfull and earn much more money, but claiming “no one cares about indie” is stupid, when so many people play games like Rust, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Terraria, RimWorld, Valheim, The Forest, …
Games like Valheim and Rust are not some pixel art games which will run on a 2GB system with an integrated GPU, they’re pretty much AA games with an AA level publisher behind them. Yes, there are some real exceptions, like Stardew Valley, but you can count them on your fingers. They don’t make even a 1% of Steam catalogue. Thus my point still stands - no one cares about low end games.
Even if they don’t make up 1% of Steam’s catalogue (though I doubt that figure), they have had real impact.
It’s ok to not like them personally, but to say no one cares is disingenuous. Balatro doesn’t require much in terms of hardware but is having a real moment right now. Stardew Valley has been killing it for 8 years. People have thousands of hours in Rimworld.
Indie games are also great for community and modders.
I quite like many games with “poor” graphics. Perhaps not exclusively, but you’re seriously missing out if you only go for realistic-looking or detailed games. Give a few of those indie games a try, you might be surprised.
Edit: Oh, and terminal games are cool! Usually not very performant though.
Nah, sorry, I’m not playing pixelated crap on my dual screen 4K set up. That was cool back in the 1990-s on my Sega Mega Drive, but I outgrew that a long time ago. Fuck, I’m old…
I need a glass of whiskey.
Don’t we all, though I’m not opposed to any good liquor
Reminds me of the UK’s Government Digital Services, who want to digitise government processes but also have a responsibility to keep that service as accessible and streamlined as possible, so that even a homeless person using a £10 phone on a 2G data service still has an acceptable experience.
An example. Here they painstakingly remove JQuery (most modern frameworks are way too big) from the site and shave 32Kb off the site size.
Wow, nice. Sexcellent.
You mean eggcellent?
This is TF2 meme.
This is T9 meme.
The issue with UK services is that they all are fucking random and plenty of sections don’t work. There are billions of logins, bugs and sometimes you just get redirected to some bloody nightmare portal from 1990-s. And EU citizens couldn’t log in into HMRC portal for years after Brexit, what a fucking joke! And all they do is spend time removing jQuery, good fucking job!
At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I’d argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you’re well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
Get that homeless guy a home.
Also, if you are in a basement/mountains/middle of Siberia, waiting for 32 kB takes quite some time.
I’m all for ending homelessness, but that’s really a different problem than we were discussing. I’m pretty confident jQuery isn’t stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there’s no way you’re gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It’s just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can’t download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second.
Even 3G is not always avaliable, even 3G sometimes slower than 2G.
32 KB here, 32 KB there and boom - you have bitbucket.
At least in the US, the reason 3G isn’t available is that it has been phased out, as has 2G. You may as well complain about how slow it is to send data with smoke signals, because 4G is table stakes for an internet-capable device now.
Where I live even 4G isn’t all that reliable. Making a phone call is mostly impossible and a text message is hit or miss unless I’m in a town or along a major road, This is due to terrain and the general lack of towers. 4G is spotty at best and with many areas having no service at all. And I ain’t never going to live long enough to ever see 5G out here.
But, I would agree that while 32KB is pretty minor for an internet connection, things have a way of stacking. 32KB here, another extra 32KB there and pretty soon things can get ‘heavy’ to use.
US? US is wild place. A lot of people still on ADSL, but 2G and 3G equipment is thrown away and say “lol, you problem, buy new phone”. I won’t be surprised that there are a lot of places where internet is less stable than in a train going through tunnel under the mountain in the middle of Siberia. Which means no internet.
I wonder what happens to internet connection in rural areas of USSA, since you suddenly started talking about it.
In Europe(or at least in my part of Europe) there are places where mobile internet is overloaded like subway system and city center and places where mobile internet is very unstable like my house in suburban area and, agan, trains.
Also, engieneers already had tech debt of updating to new jQuery version, which can result in a lot of wierd bugs, so it was achiveing two goals at once.
And probably 50£ phone IS their target device.
🙄
That’s the most professional comment section I’ve ever fucking seen.
Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.
Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.
a) don’t let in anyone who acts like petulant children b) give adults an outlet for occasional outbursts that would make them sound like petulant children
Website is amazingly responsive as well, seems to be working.
Contentious in the comments!
I’m training to work in hardware currently. Its my hope that there at least, people still care about min-maxing power vs performance.
It’s really hard.
Wasn’t expecting it to be easy. Think it will be much more rewarding though. Already has been thus far.
Edit: wait, that was a pun, wasn’t it?
Any recommendations for a beginner or hobbiest? I’m going to assume it goes beyond writing more performant code
I started with raspberry pi zero projects. Specifically projects that make use of various GPIO hats like cameras, displays, speakers, etc. At that level, things are still very abstract compared to bare-metal firmware, but you learn some of the basic principles of I/O. Next plan is to read up on circuit design, and start doing more projects with arduino-controlled breadboards.
A lot of it is in the design stage tbf. If features/UI can be cut or simplified then it can make a big difference. Performant code is good and the tech stack you choose also matters.
My understanding is that hardware companies usually alternate generations: one for performance, one for power. It seems like this is the balance that makes the market happy.
Yeah, well, I have 1.8Gb so 😏
can we get this law passed pls
Yeah, you’d better hurry.
Antix made my old Chromebook’s usable. Old tech is fun.
Antix is the last one standing on the support of old hardware, also gentoo Debian and tumbleweed is good ones since they support WIDE range of architectures
It’s not that hardware isn’t capable, it’s just manufacturer isn’t willing. Or rather willing to not.
In 1000 years this meme/tweet/post will be what my entire generation’s existence will be known for. Noone will remember the politics, the disasters, the geopolitical events good or bad, they will remember our entire world and existence ad the only time that technology advancement was driven by the big tech mafia trying to see how far it can get it’s dick in your digital footprint.
It’s the new cops v robbers or bootleggers v prohibition race. Our tech is getting faster to out run the corporate fuckin maleare but the faster we go the more they stuff in so to the avg user they’re ended with paying $6k for a GPU/cpu combo that runs at the same efficiency as my school library’s c9mputer did running ms-dos running Oregon Trail in 1995. You are so confined by only having access to functions with massive fuckiing app buttons that even logging in as a guest user req you to memorize every CLI ever made.
It’s become my defining “I don’t want to live in this world anymore”
You’re provoking my alcoholism. I reread your comment three times and here I am on my way to the liquor shop.
