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Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

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Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before Notch left I'd say others like Jeb or Dinnerbone were more commonly known in the Minecraft communities as they were more active in the community & posting about upcoming things. (then of course Notch went off the deep end and most communities rapidly began distancing themselves from him...)

And the fame associated with these names was only possible because they canes from a small indie group that broke through to the mainstream so massively successful that I can't think of any other example on that scale in the last decade. In the 90's and early 00's, many big names practically were studio, the brand.

There are definitely still "well known names" in the indie scene. They may not hit mainstream success, but there's for example there's some pretty well known members of the Factorio team in the Factorio community (kovarex & Klonan come to mind). There's people like Maddy Thorson of Towerfall & Celeste fame. If they decide to embrace it I imagine one of the very few people on the team behind Valheim would also fit this, but it doesn't seem like they are interested in that.

There are still small indie groups that make breakout or successful games that hit mainstream awareness (Untitled Goose Game anyone?), but it seems like many prefer to use a company branded twitter than make their own name(s) public or just let the game stand on its own.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#172
post #9

John Carmack writes: > Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware It is amazing that in the past two decades most emulators transitioned from closed source closely guarded secrets to open sourced and often under a popular license. The preservation is unparalleled.

Mind that this doesn't mean that they are not commercialized - modern console emulators make a lot of money on patreon(in some cases up to $80k a month) for "private builds" that can run certain games, especially newer ones, better, and online features in some cases.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.

I'm sure that Nintendo's Virtual Console emulator series has made them quite a bit of money.

Well, they stopped doing it, so perhaps not.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#174
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not as recent as it seems in my mind, but Notch is a relatively well known game dev. And in the younger crowd he may be even well known than Carmack.

Notch ruined his popularity tho by being a total bigot and jerk. :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#Controversy

He's said some truly awful things. It's too bad people are downvoting you - this is part of the story of gamedev. Carmack would never say these kinds of things. Persson did. One is a famous and well-known and loved developer, the other is relegated to parroting talking points of alt-right/Nazi discussion boards and does not associate much with the rest of society.

Notch could have been more famous and well-loved than Carmack even, but his personality and hatred of minorities stopped that from happening.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#175

I tried running games from 2004 earlier this week and all failed in a spectacular fashion. I thought Windows was all about supporting legacy 32-bit applications.

You might have more luck running them in Proton or Wine.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your allocator - ptmalloc, the default linux allocator - is open source, and there's plenty of very robust open allocators (jemalloc, mimalloc, tcmalloc, etc). Understanding how your allocator works can be very important in certain contexts. On windows I'd expect the default allocator to be a black box, but I might be wrong. For garbage collection I strongly recommend this book (on top of the source cod…

> On windows I'd expect the default allocator to be a black box, but I might be wrong. The UCRT is at least "source available" on Windows, up to a point, and distributed with the Windows SDK. The release heap codepath is a bit boring: malloc: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Source\10.0.19041.0\ucrt\heap\malloc.cpp _malloc_base: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Source\10.0.19041.0\ucrt\heap\malloc_base.cp…

Thanks! I was wrong then.

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#177

I'm not sure that in the present day of massive teams and > $100 million budgets that there's much room for new celebrity game developers to emerge on that scale. Pretty much every gamer knows who he is. Now, even the biggest breakthrough indie game with a 5 person dev team wouldn't become a household name. These days it's the studios themselves that get most of the credit. Which may only be fair: When there's 100+ p…

Fame in gaming has largely moved into “content creators”. The most famous game developers are almost certainly YouTubers first and game developers second. There are some fairly big channels now that produce memey content about making games in nearly exactly the same way as people make memey content about Minecraft or Fortnite.

People like danidev: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIabPXjvT5BVTxRDPCBBOOQ

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#179

I tried running games from 2004 earlier this week and all failed in a spectacular fashion. I thought Windows was all about supporting legacy 32-bit applications.

You might have more luck running them in Proton or Wine.

Also ScummVM

Re: Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"

#180
post #172
post #9

John Carmack writes: > Unlike most emulator projects, Kemulator turned out to be closed source abandonware It is amazing that in the past two decades most emulators transitioned from closed source closely guarded secrets to open sourced and often under a popular license. The preservation is unparalleled.

Mind that this doesn't mean that they are not commercialized - modern console emulators make a lot of money on patreon(in some cases up to $80k a month) for "private builds" that can run certain games, especially newer ones, better, and online features in some cases.

Which is how it should be, IMO - the base model is available to anyone for free. If you want extra features after using the base model, then a small donation to the developers for their time is a worthwhile tradeoff.
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