But drama almost never kills FOSS software. It just causes it to fork. FOSS software can become like an olympic flame that just keeps getting passed from dev to dev. Once there are people actively using something, those same people are motivated to fix any issues they have with it, or add any features they are missing. That then drives improvement of the software, which in turn drives adoption, which drives more improvement…
There was huge drama around Emby going closed source, but FOSS Emby simply got forked, becoming Jellyfin.
There’s an example just within lemmy, the lemmur app apparently stopped development due to some drama, but it got forked and Liftoff picked up right where it left off.
Yes. There can be drama around FOSS projects, and there often is. Loosely organized groups of volunteers putting together serious software don’t work as efficiently as a paid team of devs led by a visionary with final say. But FOSS projects are capable of becoming self-perpetuating in a way proprietary software can never do. Once they reach a high enough level of adoption, they are very hard to kill.
Ah. Yet another reason for game studios to turn away from commercial dev tools and turn to FOSS software like Blender and Godot.
And since game devs are, you know, developers, they can even contribute to these tools with heir dev time, improving them and accelerating the industry shift away from this commercial bullshit even more.
I mean, I use the term to describe the action to others when I do it. I don’t actually hold some elitist view that it’s wrong, rather, I’m being ironic to make fun of those who do. It’s a useful term in an of itself, without having to be exclusively for elitist use. It’s convenient short-hand for something like “I save-scummed my way past that boss”, or “I save-scummed every time I failed stealth” when simply describing how you played something to someone else.
And save scumming is absolutely and an intended mechanic in games like BG3, preventing it would be the easiest thing ever, but lots of games even go out of their way to make managing multiple saves convenient. Immersims go even further, in Deus Ex there are hotkeys to let you instantly set a save point at any time so you can load back to it when things don’t go your way, or you want to try multiple approaches before committing to one.
It’s even taken into consideration as a max difficulty option in some games, were the game will prevent you from backing up your save, and delete it upon getting a game-over.
But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.
And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.
Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.
I’m fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you’re gonna play at low settings, anyway.
But it’s worth noting that “optimizing” the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn’t really possible. You can’t compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that’s before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.
None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.
Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.
But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren’t that many corners to cut.
There was talk about making “steam deck optimized” versions of games that would ditch high resolution assets as they would be pointless on a 720p display. Nothing seems to have materialized.
That said, there are reasons why games are taking more and more space. Game assets cannot be compressed the same way image files intended for humans can. They have to be stored losslessly, or there WILL be rendering artefacts. And a material or texture in a game is composed of a lot more layers than just an RGB image (normal maps, specular maps, material maps, depth maps). And modern game-engines can pre-bake a lot of things that otherwise would have to be rendered in real-time. That pre-baked render data has to be stored, preferably in high resolution to avoid aliasing, and shipped along with all the other game files.
Games aren’t ballooning in size for no reason. Stuff like pre-baking essentially trades storage for the ability to get the same looks for less processing. More data layers in textures and materials allows rendering to take shortcuts in how the appearance of a surface is calculated, etc. etc. etc.
But none of this would prevent the option to not download these resource files for ALL detail levels. If you’re not gonna run a game on ultra textures, you don’t need those files sitting on your drive.
Vita. Once you mod it, which is easy and recommended, you can play any PSP game on it you might want, on a slightly bigger screen, with much better controls.
The hell? There's no age-gate for anything. Except maturity. If you think someone enjoying something is childish, instead of feeling happy for them, then you're the one who has growing up to do.
Books are also a great hobby, which many find boring, but it's never considered an age thing just because the typical adult isn't into reading books. The same goes for games. Not everyone enjoys them, but that's a matter of personal taste, not age. Sure, our tastes can change during our lives, and some people "grow-out" of their childhood interests. But that might be more correlation than causation.
Take my dad, for instance, I remember him gaming on his PC and PS1 during my pre-teens, but he stopped gaming for many years. But recently, he got BACK into gaming, and asked me to build him a modern PC to play on, since it's been so long since he's used non-apple computers. These days, when he finds the right type of game for himself, he is more difficult to get away from it then I am.
Games are a new medium, and new things get adopted first by new generations. So maybe older ones consider them a "kids" thing, but at 26, I see no reason why video games would ever stop being a part of my life.
TF2 got freaking murdered. Me and friends keep going back to it again and again. I'm so happy northstar exists now, it's too bad it can't do anything for console players.