GlaireDaggers🍉🏳️‍⚧️🎄

Thinking about how eventually Unity's solution to "hey can we get modern rendering features" was the Scriptable Render Pipeline - aka "Fuck you, write your own damn renderer then."

unity seems to be 5% a game engine and 95% a way to generate Transactions by letting people sell each other various fragments of middleware in the hope that some day they might assemble a working game engine if they spend enough money

Ah.

The mesh I was using had, for reasons completely indecipherable by humans, a copy of all visible geometry but with an invisible texture applied to it.

This, apparently, completely broke the GI.

It works now lmao

"If you raise the price of the fucking hot dog, I'll kill you"

Costco seems to be the one company that consistently and intentionally refuses to let their approach slip - including completely rejecting anti-DEI measures, and it's great to see that it also includes "we will literally fight the government to avoid having to raise our prices"

It should totally be possible to have a text version of the asset for editing that is cooked down into a compact binary format for distribution.

Especially considering that in an engine like Unreal you should really have the infrastructure in place to be able to differentiate between "editor version of the asset" and "processed game ready version of the asset"

It's just deeply unpleasant to use.

The debugging and refactoring experience in Blueprint in general is just so incredibly half baked.

It bothers me a lot that Unreal *HAS A TEXT BASED SERIALIZATION FORMAT*, but doesn't use it for assets on disk

I've taken this approach when doing Sega Saturn & PS1 tinkering, for instance, using make files with python scripts to parse all of my JSON & spit out compact binary files

You can always process the text data into custom binary with a build tool for runtime as well!

In cases like, say, "table of all spells in the game", the answer is yes, because you can easily end up with two designers who want to add different spells to the table for example (and there's a lot of other scenarios where it's useful too)

So it should be text IMHO.

Ideally, in a system like this, you want to consider whether two people will ever need to touch a file at the same time.

For assets where the answer is no (sounds, textures, models, etc) binary is fine.

If the answer is yes, then it should be text IMHO.

And if they check in changes, your stashed or shelved work might as well be thrown away. Can't be merged. Do it again from scratch.

If you're using something like Perforce, you end up in scenarios like:

- You make some changes, then stash or shelf those changes
- Someone else checks it out.
- Now you can't unstash or unshelf the file at all, because it's locked by the other person.

If multiple people need to make edits to the same table, being a binary file means that edits cannot be merged.

Without automatically locking binary assets, this makes conflicts *very* easy to encounter.

With automatic locking, it's still a huge pain in the ass.

Data tables should be plain old JSON on disk and I will die on this hill.

You know, from working with Unreal Engine long enough, I think I've decided:

Using binary files for data assets is a terrible fucking approach that makes version control an absolutely nightmare.

Throwin' arm ain't as good as it used to be

So I guess my answer to why it feels different is because the sheer number of collabs in Fortnite gives the impression of an advertising billboard in playable form rather than a focused celebration of gaming history.

I often think about somebody who asked "why is Smash Bros celebrated but Fortnite is derided for this?"

I think the answer is quantity.

In Smash, it's often surprising when a new character is added, because there's only so many. In Fortnite it's rarely anywhere near as surprising.

I saw a video of a thing from Fortnite that was like

A hundred third party characters swarming some big boss character. Homer Simpson. Hatsune Miku. Godzilla. Goku. Chun Li. A bunch of others I probably didn't even notice.

Idk. It just turned into a bunch of licensed visual noise to me. Oatmeal.

Probably unnecessarily curmudgeonly take (Sweeney's shitheadedness aside):

I think Fortnite would be much cooler if it was just the original characters instead of all the piles of random collab stuff?

Talking with a financial advisor

"What's your line of work btw?"
"I'm a game dev"
"Oh cool did you work on GTA?"

I feel less jolly with each passing year, but damned if I ain't gonna put that Christmas tree up anyway

It's actually fascinating to watch things like indie games evolve over time - the way they're continuously polished over time, new features added & bugs fixed, cumulative hours of new content added.

Imagine if Among Us, Phasmophobia, VOTV, etc launched as-is and never received any updates.

Snippet of an article talking about the "8 squared curse of extinction" in Final Fantasy 2, which is a glitch where the player can increment a room hierarchy counter past 64, wrapping to -1 and triggering a variety of glitches such as freezing the game

"Games used to be released without day 1 patches"

"sure I think the paper was bad & deserved a failing grade but for some reason I think it's actually way more important to complain about the grade being a little too harsh" 🤡

"The bigot was wrong, but I'm going to nitpick the trans person anyway" is a genre of post that never fails to make me want to lob a brick at Mach 5 at the poster's head