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Weathering Software Winter

100r.co

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Re: Weathering Software Winter

#11

Post by sitkack »

Roark66 wrote: post #8
wlesieutre wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.

Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can actuall…

Folks will be using gameplay video and AI to reconstruct games in 5 years. Could send a 1 hr video through an ML model and all the game assets could come out the other side.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#12

Post by nine_k »

theamk wrote: post #9

It always saddens to me when people only think of the extremes, while perfectly good options exist! If your develop for highly locked device (iPhone) which requires the very latest version of huge dev environment -- maybe choose some other development target which does not evolve quite as much. Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years. And don't forget to make sure that your OS does not break without updates either.…

The thing with iOS and iPhone is that it's the market that pays best. A typical iPhone user is more conditioned and used to pay for apps, and is more ready to pay for the cool factor. So, switching the target market to Android devices may be harder than one thinks.

> Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years.

Hmm. Have you really been paying attention? They very much are, and in exciting ways. They don't make old versions unserviceable though, and that's great.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#13

Post by ilyt »

Roark66 wrote: post #8
wlesieutre wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.

Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can actuall…

Sure it will, with cracked binary off torrent...

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#14

Post by quartesixte »

xvedejas wrote: post #10

The author mentions power use being a factor. Last I did some research into this, smartphones are by far the most power-efficient general-purpose computers broadly available, using several times less power than something like a raspberry pi. I wonder if running an open-source OS on smartphones was considered for their sailboat permacomputing?

100r also is experimenting in hardware that can survive being thrashed around at sea. Or that is a key constraint of theirs. And I think a lot of smartphones fail this criteria.

Also when your powersource is solar powered batteries, the small differences probably don’t matter a whole lot.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#15

Post by ilyt »

ido wrote: post #4
adql wrote: post #3

> We grew up in Montreal, and many of our friends worked in AAA studios like Ubisoft, making free-to-play games, building projects that had a lifespan of three years. The projects that we made in the past on the Apple stack, Electron, or on Unity3D, also had a lifespan of three to four years, but games like Super Mario, as well as others produced in that era, are still playable today. The games that don't work in som…

The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking. I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms - old, popular (but still…

Original point was that author thinks game made now will be less long-lived than game made 20 years ago so that's all irrelevant really but...

>An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.

Weirdly enough (not really) despise all the whining about loss of Flash games community people stepped up and wrote the emulators required for that. No idea how iphone side of that looks tho

> But choose a random not-very-popular computer game from 1996 and there's a fair chance it won't be easy to make it work properly.

In most cases it will probably be as easy as average game because it is average game and most emus carry for needs of average games of that time just fine.

You'd have to look pretty hard to find unplayable ones, and most other... wouldn't be much harder than trying to make the DOS game work back in the DOS times with various special things you needed to do and set back then so the game worked.

Sure, games nobody wanted to play in the first place when they were released will be neglected but that's not exactly that huge a loss. If game deems to be more important than it was back then someone will figure out how to run it, as long as data is preserved.

The online-only ones are a big problem, sure they can be cracked just fine but the moment they are server based that's a whole shitton to reverse-engineer, and while some popular MMOs got that done (mostly so people can play without paying but still...) it's by far rarity to see.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#16

Post by seti0Cha »

This whole thing strikes me as silly. Problems accessing services while alone in a boat in the middle of the sea is not anything like the general problem of preserving information and technology. We don't need to make knowledge individually accessible and maintainable because humans generally don't try to do that by themselves. And humans are actually really good at preserving the knowledge they care about. Kids in school read a poem first written down 2500 years ago about an event that occurred 500 years before that. The dead sea scrolls failed to overturn the world of biblical scholarship because it turned out the later copies of the texts were actually quite accurate. The fact that our devices don't just work without a supply chain and a steady source of power, or that there are 20 year old games almost nobody cares about which we can no longer play just doesn't signify that much. Nor does the fact that the BBC couldn't figure out how to preserve some chunk of data for 10 years.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#17

Post by didgetmaster »

> Our philosophy is that to make fast software, you need slow computers...

One of the reasons why our industry produces slow, bloated software is because the engineers building it often have the fastest computers with the most resources. It should be a requirement before shipping to have your whole team personally use the software for a week on 10 year old computers.

One of the reasons why my data management system (https://www.Didgets.com) is so fast is because I regularly ran it on an old Core-2 Duo machine with a slow hard drive and limited RAM. I didn't stop tweaking it until it ran fast on the old hardware.

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#18

Post by wlesieutre »

ilyt wrote: post #13
Roark66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can actuall…

Sure it will, with cracked binary off torrent...

Offline support for Diablo 3 took 10 years and that’s a game from a major company. Not every game is going to get the same treatment before their servers go away.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/wqn9yb/diablo_i...

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#19

Post by bvisness »

seti0Cha wrote: post #16

This whole thing strikes me as silly. Problems accessing services while alone in a boat in the middle of the sea is not anything like the general problem of preserving information and technology. We don't need to make knowledge individually accessible and maintainable because humans generally don't try to do that by themselves. And humans are actually really good at preserving the knowledge they care about. Kids in s…

“We don’t need to make knowledge individually accessible and maintainable”, followed _immediately_ by “humans are actually really good at preserving knowledge”. Who do you think does the preservation? How do you think preservation works?

Re: Weathering Software Winter

#20

Post by bvisness »

I loved seeing this talk in person and really enjoyed reading through it again now. I’m kind of fascinated by the longevity of software for simple systems - games like Another World or Monkey Island or even DOOM are well-loved decades later, whereas games like Black and White that don’t port well are largely forgotten.

I’m surprised to see commenters here who don’t see portability as important for preservation - or maybe just don’t really care about preservation at all.

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