Abolish software patents.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

!unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Nazis making shit up and moderation failing to silence them is not a question of eloquence. Fuck off with that.

Guy named Bird, guy names Jones.

The industry was so different back then, Unreal Tournament 2004 still shipped with a software renderer.

The industry was so different back then, Michael Abrash documented that renderer’s development in Dr. Dobbs, an actual ink-on-paper journal.

Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed: Intel. This renderer, Pixomatic, was all hand-optimized assembly, from the guy John Carmack hired to outclass him. At one point he realized one instruction in a very tight loop was redundant. Removing it made the loop slower. Which is, in technical terms, some bullshit. Doing less should not take more time. It wasn’t from alignment or cache or pipelines or any sensible cause. Abrash called in favors so he could study the actual traces of the Pentium 4, because he just had to know what the fuck was happening under the hood - and Intel made him sign a stack of NDAs, so we the public will never find out.

Language barrier.

Also, glass barrier.

That’s not disproof they did things differently - or well. Any multiplayer-only game without players is a dead game, even if the gameplay it would have is mindblowing.

Cats run windows all the time.

Missed opportunity for gen 1/2, because this would perfectly match the Ancient Mew foil effect.

Why would it matter who made it? It was a corporate trend-chasing exercise, for an abusive business model, arriving years late and costing the wealth of Croesus.

Multiplayer-only shooters are a death wish. Either you succeed instantly and massively, or your game is nonfunctional. With digital distribution it’s not even a coaster. If all these nice people were allowed to be smart people they’d deliver the PvE that Overwatch lied about.

I’m told the pace was a lot slower. Less twitchy, more tactical. Higher time-to-kill.

I’m also told it was ugly as sin. That’s one way to stand out from Overwatch’s waifu parade.

This video and the Portal trailer blew people’s dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2’s tech is now ‘Yep, that’s a thing. Was it new?’

If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.

Round back.

Never give Nintendo money.

Are you also frightened?

Jiggling TBD.

Blindly copy whatever notes you already have. Letter for letter, typo for typo, doodle for doodle.

Don’t use inline code / code blocks formatting for text. There’s no line breaks and the syntax highlighting is nonsense.