511–520 of 561 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten, so after the first crunch, ever more crunch to get the 2nd attempt to the finnishing line.
> GTA 6 was basicallly thrown away and rewritten How do you know? This sounds like an unverified rumor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?
Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect. It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews. "The professor made the class unfun." "The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class" I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have…
You say in a post below that your total games industry experience was a single internship at Blizzard and then a second stint where you "quickly realized" you didn't want to be a games dev at all, and went back into academia where you have been ever since. You say you made a game as part of your PhD, but it's actually a speech therapy program you describe as research. There's nothing wrong with that project for what it is, but your students aren't criticizing you because you're a woman, they're saying they wanted a teacher who spent time in the games industry making the sort of games they themselves would play.
I wouldn't bother pointing this contradiction out normally, but it's just so socially destructive to ask students for feedback and then attack them with the nastiest accusation you have access to, just because they requested a more experienced teacher. Poor kids! It's this kind of thing that results in recommendations to just avoid university entirely. Why sign up for being abused by a teacher like that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, but I think most people don't. People generally hate paying for software and the $60->$70 standard AAA game pricing got a lot of people (my well paid friends included) complaining. Even if it was very clearly said that it is the cost of a well paid and respected team behind the game, I think most people won't care.
That's fine though. The value of unions is that they can force consumers to pay for better working conditions and prevent a race to the bottom. Consumers usually are workers themselves so they also benefit from raising the bar of working conditions. Even if they don't like paying more, they are still receiving the benefit of living in a better society.
I'd argue GTA 6 is an inelastic good and people will play it no matter what, so I do think what you're saying applies here.
What is the career ladder like for game devs? In a union, the only way up is seniority or, in other words, the amount of money you've paid in dues over the years. A great developer isn't going to get rewarded with higher pay or a better role unless they've spent enough time/money as a union member.
I’m unaware of this ever being the case in the UK — the lack of closed shop units means that even when collective agreements cover promotion they cannot meaningfully set this based on dues paid, both because they don’t necessarily know how long each employee has been a member of the union, and regardless that would be illegal discrimination based on union membership vs not.
In the common case for private-sector white-collar collective agreements in the UK, promotion is mostly just required to be transparent, rather than setting out procedural rules for promotion.
Your focus on union dues also makes me suspect you’re commenting from the US, expecting a union environment much more like the US — and US unions are outliers in many ways.
Per https://iwgb.org.uk/en/join/game-worker/ union dues max out at £35/month for those earning £80k and more — this is vastly less than unions require as dues in the US, and that almost certainly reduces the impact that union dues have, even beyond the illegality of closed shop units.
I wish we had more (or maybe better yet one) software engineering union in America. The trouble seems to be that it's so easy to scab (outsource) or hire foreign competition (H1b et al) which is a pretty broken program even according to some of the people whom I've talked to who are on it. One multi-team architect I know working for a brand you've definitely heard of was making like $65K and doing a $250K job of it.…
Ironically even in the case here it is the outsourced people unionizing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in the games industry from 2000 to 2010 in the UK... We very much did crunch.
I remember it was very common when the UK was in the EU to have employers get you to opt-out from the European Time Directive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions. How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?
> How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions? Generally the reason there is a company that has better working conditions and compensation to go to is because of their union… so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At…
I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.
The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.
I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
>Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”. A lot of fancy keywords, but 1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served…
Yes! Games are complex! An empty site with modern infrastructure is just as complex as an empty multiplayer video game, exactly, we agree!
However, NGINX+a file isn't going to get you very far. You know that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft moved Halo to Unreal Engine. Call of duty engine is based off ID tech 3.
It barely resembles id tech 3 at this point (I am an engine and pipeline programmer at Sledgehammer Games). There are very very few remnants of it in the codebase. I occasionally do some spelunking to see what’s left and these days it’s just the occasional comment and function names (although the content of the functions will have changed significantly).