221–230 of 277 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn. I do not understand owning more than one yacht. It's like private planes. Why more than one?
I would assume because moving yachts requires a lot of planning, so he'd likely have one in each location he wants to stay. Not excusing this behaviour, but there is a reason for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All, or at least most of Valve's games used to run natively on Mac, and now they don't (even on Intel Macs)
Is this a problem Valve should invest in fixing because it's an issues caused by them, or a problem Apple created for not caring about backwards compatibility on MacOS the same way Microsoft does on Windows? If Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility on their platform, why should Valve or other developers be burdened with the added cost, especially on a platform with small market share that won't drive many…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line. The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
Look at Star Citizen on other end... Too much resources can lead to endless scope creep, moving targets and potentially never actually shipping anything. Right constraints make things happen.
Roberts was the lead on Digital Anvil's "Freelancer", until the publisher (Microsoft), frustrated at the scope creep and protracted dev cycle, bought out the studio, demoted Roberts, and cut features so they could ship the thing.
It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)
* I first installed Whisky, a Wine/Game Porting toolkit/app thingy (https://getwhisky.app). Then I installed Steam for Windows inside Whisky, then downloaded HL2. The download was a little bit hiccup-y, but it worked. Testplay of HL2 was great, apart from the mouse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.
Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line. The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3... Does it lend itself to do other hard things like half life alyx?
Alyx wasn't just another HL game in isolation though, it was related to their adventures in VR along with developing hardware and APIs for it, and exploring how it works in a game
Which also shows yet another one of Valve's problems with making games, they treat their games like they're "tech demos", so unfortunately they're not as interested in actually moving the stories in their games forward or bringing them to a conclusion. They do a "tech demo", they move on from that tech, leaving the game and it's world and community behind. Plot? What plot? Perhaps they're also stalling on making continuations or even new releases in search of some "gimmick technology" to pair a game with, instead of just telling a story through their games. For those people that do like the narratives and the worlds in their games, it sure is tough luck. There's more to a game than just 'tech', but alas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good stuff. I have seen a lot of "complaints" from various people that they shouldn't have chosen UE, as it will have made the game much slower to develop since everything needed to be done from scratch. But the graphics looked much nicer in UE and not to mention the tooling is nicer than what one could use with mods. Surely, the upfront cost of porting aspects of HL2 over to UE is not investment lost.
Hasn't Unreal Engine 5 gotten a bunch of criticism about a lot of the games made with it having high system requirements, and often playing like a stuttery mess? Though it's hard to tell where the technical decisions end and developers not caring much about optimization (or expecting people to use upscaling even for 1080p) starts. Recently, it was revealed that even the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 benchmarks used upscaling and…
However, it should be noted that this isn't an issue for consoles (where precompiled shaders come with the game) or Steam Deck (where shaders are compiled via Fossilize before the game is even launched). It's most notable on DirectX programs during the first run, which hits benchmarks quite badly but also becomes less stuttery as more shaders are cached.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that. However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other…
Gabe owns yachts worth a billion dollars. I'm sure the others are doing just fine as well. https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yach...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good enough doesn't mean optimal, though. Every layer adds a performance penalty and that's how we end up in situations where we have layers and layers of abstraction eventually making all programs slow even on ever increasing hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
In fact, Windows gamers are using DXVK to reduce overhead. One needs to realise graphics APIs have historically not been terribly efficient.