61–70 of 103 posts
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It's not just misleading. It's wrong. The timeline and order of those events is wrong.
The phrase says "dozens of games" not only Half Life from 1998. So if after 1999 some games used the engine, the phrase is still correct.
As far as I know, all the popular games were proprietary, so I’d still say it’s incorrect.
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I genuinely do not understand this mindset. How will you get better at writing code if you never get feedback about how your code would be better?
Experience. You run the code and its (mostly) obvious if it works or not. For the first 9 years of programming I never shared my code publicly. My code wasnt useful to other people, so it wasnt a big deal. Then I finally decided to become a professional programmer, I decided to post my best code. No one ever cared. Today, 13 years of programming experience, I have no problem posting my code. I have written helper fun…
Also, and this is a thing I've experienced a lot, you can have really good intentions but there is some whole community that just blindsides you and beats the crap out of your work and tells you how stupid you are, to show how smart they are.
I have one (fairly anodyne) friend who works for a huge corporation who never gets tired of telling me that everything I build amounts to technical debt for my clients, because they hire a lone coder. That's the least harsh thing I experience in showing my code to other coders, most of the time.
Weirdly, Copilot is eerily good at replicating my coding style... even my idiosyncratic way of naming variables. But yeah, humans?
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Note that they're all multiplayer competitive games. That's the easiest kind of game to make and where the creativity part matters least, with the exception of fine tuning the game mechanics.
I’d you think they’re easy to make, I invite you to make one. Multiplayer is hard, and you have to do a really good job in your execution to make any money
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> I'm 100% certain your code is better than a switch statement with over 4000 cases. Then there's cases like that Yandere Simulator game, the source code of which got released/leaked and apparently it was so bad that people were making videos taking it apart, but also possibly because they disliked how the developer was leading the project: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yandere+simulat... But also appa…
Yandere Simulator's case was unique. You're right that people were angry at the guy in general, and he was also quite the internet clown. But it was the first time I've seen so many people who don't program suddently have an oppinion on what good code is or isn't. When asked, they couldn't even explain why. I assure you, half of those videos are filled to the brim with milquetoast examples that I really don't feel co…
Agreed, that's why I think there's arguments that can be made in favor of both DRY/WET, as well as SOLID/CUPID/whatever, even when those are in contradiction with one another, as well as more freeform approaches and KISS/YAGNI. Whatever works for each team and project.
> There's a billion ways to write something and none of them are outright wrong!
However, when your app is doing 2000 DB calls to render a list with some data because of the N+1 problem, I'd say that the code is definitely written wrong. When you need to jump around 20 different files across 6 layers of abstraction that could have easily fit into half of that, then the code might definitely be wrong and unmaintainable.
What we need are programs compiled down to some minimal instruction sets, simplifying the implementation of custom vm able to run such software. The source does not mean anything if there is no working compiler, or if the compiler doesn't support your new shiny platform. It is the same for servers. Having the source for a whole hosting service depending on some specific hardware doesn't matter. If we decide to truly…
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Games are a combination of art and code. Why should programmers be the only one's required to release their work under a viral license? Artist should as well.
I mean I do think it's fine if you wish to try to take this route. Nothing morally wrong or anything. But I think the art itself isn't just like code. It's not just the bits used to make images on screen. There are characters, stories, ideas, and worlds being created derived from the artist's personal life and philosophy. That's the actual appeal, and there are more downsides to making your IP open like this than the…
I hate when people bring up VVVVVV as a counter-argument to "But my code is embarrassing!". Saying it's an example of "truly awful code" when it's beautiful and well-structured compared to my stuff just makes me confident that I will never get over the embarrassment.
The real embarrassment is writing beautiful well-structured code that no one can find fault in... to support a game no one plays. If you manage to make a successful game don't take shit from anyone about the way the code looks. They're just Monday-morning quarter-backing.
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> I didn’t realize rimworlds source was available. It isn't, it's decompiled.
And purposely not obfuscated. Yeah, that really is bare minimum, but its still better than the deliberate obfuscation of many similar games. Minecraft, meanwhile, is obfuscated but with public mappings. That is a weird situation, but it still works kinda like the game being source available.
This is targeted toward "securing your game’s legacy", but it seems to be missing a crucial part of some games: servers. When games have a required online component, servers shutting down are the most likely reason the game becomes unplayable, more than the client not working on current platforms. So another option that could be added to the list would be to make the server free software (or at least share its binari…
I write and maintain a GPLv3 multiplayer game for Android to satisfy a creative itch. While writing the game, sustainability of the server component is top of my mind. I'd hate for the game to stop working for others down the line because I lose interest or am otherwise no longer able to tend to it. For those interested, I've documented the process I adopted to try to increase the bus factor beyond one [0]. I want pe…
I'm not sure how often that actually happened. The only games with parallel universe East Asian audiences belonged to #1 genres like MOBAs. While there was a belief that you could be making the next MOBA, hardly anyone was making realtime multiplayer games at all, so it was extremely unlikely.
It was a misplaced reaction to Ketchapp, the real antagonist. They would rapidly clone and blitz-market games. Indie mobile developers spent a year or more discovering and refining an original, fun mechanic, only to see this well capitalized actor seize their audience by giving the mechanic away for free. From 2014 to 2018, in my opinion, indie mobile developers transitioned to more atmospheric fare, and iOS and Android nowadays are a marketing-and-sizing tool for your inevitable Nintendo Switch audience.
Which brings us back to: what is there exactly to protect? Ketchapp didn't need the source code to clone those games. Nobody needs the source. If you make a PC game and have an audience, it will show up in Steam charts, you can't really keep that secret. And if you don't have an audience, you have seriously nothing to worry about. Since every game usually starts at zero, why protect the source?
My card game Spellsource has been open source for a long time (https://github.com/hiddenswitch/Spellsource) and my colleague and I are in the process of rebooting it. This game is community authored, players write the cards, so it makes mechanical sense to be open source. On the flip side, for the narrative & atmospheric single player experiences indie developers are authoring, it is hard to define what they have to gain.
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The tools thing seems to be the right approach. A lot of huge gaming genres came to be from modding, level editors etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_derived_... ARTS (Dota, LoL) to battle royale (PUBG, Fortnite, Apex), Tactical shooters (CS), team/hero shooters (TF, OW) and more… All of these genres came from making modding accessible and are some of the most successful genres to date. The new…
> The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.) I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and…
Warcraft 3 (2002, 2003) was infamously lax on IP, leading to e.g. several big DotA clones that employed the modders (Dota2 for Icefrog, LoL for Guinsoo) and legal disputes on who owned which properties [1][2]. Blizzard revised their EULA in 2020 to prevent similar cases. [3]
[1] https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91202572&pty=OPP&eno...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/05/does-valve-really-own...
[3] https://dotesports.com/general/news/warcraft-iii-reforgeds-u...