This seems like a huge overreaction. I really don't get what the big deal is here? Are people worried about Apple snooping on conversations? They already have enough iPhone to track any device in the world with the AirTag network? Not to mention every phone has like 3 microphones lol
Are you worried about malicious actors snooping on conversations? They have always already been able to do that longer than I have been alive and a transcription app isn't going to change that
Rapid prototyping is almost a meme at this point. If you are hand rolling code old school, you will waste more time shoehorning JavaScript and python semantics into rust code and end up with worse quality that takes more time rather than writing it from rust.
People did this a lot when rust was not as popular but there are plenty of very good rust programmers now who understand the language and can make programs that are significantly more performance for a marginal development cost.
Script ability can also be done in rust, Notably Zed (rust ide/vscode whatevers) is written in rust, and all the plugins are compiled to WASM, sandboxed and loaded.
Go is pretty nice for server-side API but if your application share types between boundries then rust is better
> Rapid prototyping is almost a meme at this point
> People did this a lot when rust was not as popular but there are plenty of very good rust programmers now who understand the language and can make programs that are significantly more performance for a marginal development cost.
Why isn't the game industry moving to it then? Bc it just cannot compete at volubility with C++, among other things. Yes, you can have skilled people, but the borrow checker is still there and that is an anti-change-me-fast fact of life. I think things like sending batches of info to the GPU in casted ways, alignment, etc. all go against safety naturally but this is fundamentally what needs to be done anyway when transfering data to the GPU, so adding a layer of safety for the sake of doing it to notice that your data-oriented pipeline has to suddenly change its shape would mean repeating work...
Namely, Rust is just not good at this. Rust is good if you can replicate a safe layer that is very reusable every time (when interacting with unsafe) or when you do not need unsafe at all or hardly, where you can take advantage of its safety fully.
Also, there are certain very tweaked data structures such as Boost.MultiIndex or linked lists with intrusive hooks and others that are not easy at all in Rust and they do have value in some situations. I had some of this in some telecommunication systems before.
> Why isn't the game industry moving to it then? Bc it just cannot compete at volubility with C++, among other things.
I have no opinion regarding rust suitability as a game language, but your answer doesn't sound right.
The actual reason is much simpler. The industry is built on a handful of game engines. Those engines are extended or scripted in C++ or C#. Thus the vast, vast majority of the work force will only have experience with those languages and the entirety of game studios' tooling is built around those. The end.
Because retooling and relearning development pipelines (on any level/most teams) for games is a horrifically expensive and time-consuming affair... which are resources not spent on developing any one of the potentially dozen or so games. It's just priorities, alas.
Someone in that industry can perhaps speak to it, but I have two cents of perspective...
I have helped a young person with gamedev interests try to learn rust (on Windows). They've learned some rust, but the graphics+Windows libraries and primitives to work with are not very good nor straightforward, even with AI assistance. Besides weakness in the gaming/rendering domain, there seemed to be some very real versioning/dependency hell that also didn't help.
It's massively easier to make progress on even just a 2D game with something like GDScript-based Godot (or Unity or...).
It seems like you're comparing "start from scratch in rust" to "start with an existing game engine in some other language". That's not really a fair comparison. there are popular game engines in rust (although i think they're mostly smaller/more niche then something like unity or godot), bevy comes to mind.
I don't think "volubility" means what you think it means. The usual meaning of "voluble" is "talkative" (gesprächig if your username is accurate). I'm not quite sure what you're going for here or in an earlier comment, but suspect it's something more like "ergonomic", i.e. the language being easy/natural to write and not getting in your way.
No, rapid development is essential when you're making games. It's not a "solved science", sure you can code something up and slap some programmer art on it then ship it but you very well know that won't be usable. You need to iterate on the gameplay and gamefeel a lot if you want something more than slop.
One way is sure the native language + embedded scripting language combo but that's got the trap of impedance mismatch i.e. you spend all your time making engine not game then it overruns. But in any case having a way to iterate fast is a hidden productivity superpower, look at how many game studios have Live++ licences on their webpage;)
Only Americans feel this way about Celsius. The only downside is that Celsius requires 3 digit precision to really accurately characterize what temperature a room feels.
I would be willing to bet humans are woefully inadequate at knowing the temperature of the room they are in anyways
I do concede the overwhelming majority of people that argue that one is better than the other (both ways) are basically just arguing "the thing I grew up with is better" - because when you probe further, there isn't really any supporting argument, just "I understand this system better because I grew up with it" but it's equally vacuous coming from people who grew up with Celsius.
I came to the US when I was 12, so I grew up with Celsius but didn't pay attention to the weather as a young child. But still, I've lived in both systems.
The battery life being so short is just pathetic. My Garmin can last up to two whole weeks in a similar form factor and its pretty much the only differentiation
This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
>This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
This sounds like it would be a great mod for Factorio. Adds other players factories but in a dilapidated and decayed state.
I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.
I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.
Nethack does procedural generation pretty well, and indeed roguelikes are a pretty good framework for it, because the game design tends to revolve around giving the player different options to solve a given problem and they're also not too afraid to have the difficulty vary a lot between runs.
I love this, because decay implies a story, evidence of somebody else's specific failure, which procgen can't fake. It's not just clever, it's brilliant!
Minecraft's procgen villages and mines are oatmeal by comparison. Oxygen Not Included generates ruined stuff, but it isn't from other players, and I've never found it interesting -- just a way of handing you some advanced objects you don't have yet. Ruins with no provenance are a loot table with extra steps.
NetHack bones files, The Sims Exchange in 2000, Spore's pollination, Drivatars, and this mod are all the same mechanism, reinvented every few years by people who don't know it has a history or a name.
It has a name. Maxis called it the Pollinated Content System, and Caryl Shaw's job title was Pollinated Content Producer. GDC 2006, "Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore":
"Massively single player" names the shape of the game. "Pollination" names the mechanism, and it's the better word, because pollen goes where it's needed, carried by something that isn't the plant.
Chaim Gingold wrote: "Why not build creative exchange into the game, rather than as a website that orbits it?" The Sims made you visit a website. Spore made it invisible and automatic. That difference is most of the value, and it's the part every mod-based version of this still hasn't got.
Placement is the hard part, and it's the part nobody proposing these mods has thought about yet. Spore's server pulled content in as needed to keep the ecosystem balanced, and the game built a model of your taste to decide what to ask for. Will, in the February 2007 PopSci interview:
>We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic... And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.
>I have a team that works on the server like the database schema who figure out the algorithms to do the matching so that the content that you get make sense for your game and you don't have to download hundreds and thousands of mega bytes of content. You only get the kind of stuff that makes sense for your game.
That one mechanism answers Avicebron's "co-evolve the ecosystems", ratelimitsteve's "geography never affects the animals", and analog8374's curation problem, all at once.
Curation comes free. Download counts rank quality better than a designer can, because thousands of people are each picking for their own taste instead of one person guessing at everyone's. The "tedious lot of work" analog8374 describes is work the community does unpaid, and does better!
Payload size is why any of this is possible. Spore creatures compressed to about 3KB; 1KB of source expanded to 5MB of content, a 5000:1 ratio. Better than that: every piece of pollinated content was a "card" -- a 30KB PNG with the game data embedded inside the image file. You could email a creature. You could post one on a forum and somebody could drag it straight into their game. The picture was the data. A decayed Factorio base or Minecraft settlement is a small diff, not a 30GB folder.
Why it keeps dying: the mechanism is cheap to build and expensive to maintain, and it generates no recurring revenue, so it's always first on the chopping block.
Drivatars rotted. The Sims Exchange is gone (but I'm working on solving that problem). Spore's servers are somehow still up, which I always assumed was because there's nobody left at EA who knows how to log in and turn them off.
Now that EA belongs to the Saudi Public Investment Fund (93.4%) and Jared Kushner, the failure mode I worry about isn't a forgotten password.
The PIF's chairman is Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018 his people met the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with a bone saw and a forensic pathologist who had explained the plan on tape twelve minutes before Khashoggi walked in: "After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic bags, put them in suitcases and take them out." He left the building in five suitcases and his remains have never been found. Three days later they sent the consulate car to a car wash. The Saudi government's account changed five times in three weeks; the New York Times ran it under the headline "Khashoggi's Death Is Explained by the Saudis in Five Acts (and Counting)". In 2021 the US declassified its assessment that bin Salman approved the operation. Every word of that is one search away, and reality is worse than any joke I can make about it.
So the thing I actually worry about is not Spore. Nobody is going to convene a meeting about Spore. It's The Sims. Saudi Arabia's media regulator banned Final Fantasy XVI from the kingdom in 2023 over Square Enix's "complete refusal to modify the content to suit the region", and made Roblox switch off voice and text chat and delete over 300,000 games. The Sims 4 has shipped gender-independent clothing since 2016, sexual orientation as a character setting since July 2022, and since patch 140 in January 2023, chest binders under Tops > Tanks and top surgery scars under Body > Body Scars. Go look, it's in the base game. A regime that could not tolerate one man writing newspaper columns is not going to tolerate two little cartoon women getting married in a suburban house you built for them. That content is a rounding error in EA's revenue and an existential affront to the people who now sign EA's checks, cutting it costs nothing and buys goodwill in Riyadh, and the $700 million a year in cost reductions gives them a reason to say it was about money. I am writing this down with dates and menu paths so that when it happens, nobody gets to say it wasn't foreseeable.
But I digress...
"The knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode" is the symptom. Nobody being paid to own it is the cause.
And generative models are trained to produce the conditional average, so pointing one at the oatmeal problem gets you oatmeal faster and in greater volume. The only fix anyone has ever demonstrated is a person who cares about one specific creature.
Kate Compton says 10,000 bowls of oatmeal. Phil Hartman on SNL got there in 1989, and it was a lot more than 30,000.
Stop settling for oatmeal. There's fiber, and then there's high fiber!
I don't know why but it made me think of the original premise of Drivatars in Forza games - Microsoft selling it as an "AI" learning how you drive, then your individual driveatar would be submitted to Xbox Live and would randomly appear for other players in their offline games, but it would drive just like you drive. Really cool concept, of that "footprint" of your play appearing in other people's games.
Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.
With rust a handwritten base sets the standards, and I feel like I have lower usage rolling the first few hundred lines of code and then gradually expanding rather than going in blind.
Also reverse engineering an existing product and using the information to map out behavior and structure is incredibly valuable
I'm not giving up recovery codes, nor my ability to default to locking out people who physically have my device. I usually don't allow auto-login or biometrics login either.
If a website/app goes passkey only (or, even worse, if it starts relying only on one-time email codes), I won't use it.
I know plenty of others who feel the same, though I don't know if we're numerous enough to put a dent in a company's bottom line or not. I imagine it depends on the company and its target audience.
Haha, you think the CIA and FSB loves doing this stuff? Companies love doing this kind of stuff way more than your government employee shmucks. It is way more prevalent in private sector than you could ever imagine
I have considered making a website that specifically enforces the use of a hardware passkey such as a yubikey since you can verify that it it is a real device signed by yubico meaning that if you want a bunch of users to come discuss a subject they are verified by means of having to purchase a physical key. Obviously, there is nothing stopping someone from buying a bunch of yubikeys but you can then ban said users with those yubikeys
If you need Autohotkey you can still run that under wine (if you are ahk on windows applications), you can run total commander under wine. You can log in as admin I think its time to make the switch
If they’re running auto hotkey they’re also likely gamers, likely needing to run games that either can’t emulate or lose performance when running via proton or wine. AKA, this advice, like most “switch to Linux” advice, is tone deaf.
Not sure why you think it's gaming related but fine, I just don't think AHK can do anything special. OP sounds rather like he's trying to find gotchas and justify staying on Windows, not genuinely find the replacement, which is also a thing in these discussions (see his adjacent post with a vague dismissal, I personally used a heavy TC setup under Wine and it was indistinguishable even 15 years ago). All these features are either readily available or the apps themselves are Wine-ified with no performance loss, I have tried that and I don't think you have. All you need to switch to Linux or Mac is overcoming some friction which is of course inevitable, but utility software like this is definitely not a hard blocker.
The points I made were valid blocks for using Linux exclusively. Like the other dude answering, I wonder if you ever used Autohotkey to unfuck annoyances in software. I bet you have no clue at all. Regarding your other improvement suggestions, yes, it is actually easy to log in as administrator, and yes, DoubleCommander is a great alternative. You people are right about that. No, Total Commander does not run smooth under Wine, at least on Linux Mint. No, there is no good replacement for AutHotkey. You people are wrong about that. <Homer Simpson Voice>so far</Homer Simpson Voice>.
I have extensively used AHK for workarounds with annoying software. Generally, it's probably the worst class in terms of a workaround if you had something specific in mind with a bit of effort you could solve this now with AI tooling to write your something that does that specific behaivour anyways.
The only valid holdup for Linux at this point is kernel anticheats and some larger commercial software that is deeply engrained in the windows ecosystem eg most desktop offline CAD software. But once again AI is going to help you get that running under wine. I am already working on a series of wine patches and a custom runner to allow me to run ProE/Creo under wine without issues.
> wonder if you ever used Autohotkey to unfuck annoyances in software.
Sure I did, but what particular annoyances in what software that you want to take with you into another ecosystem? I just don't get it, as you're being vague about it. Every environment has its own ways to solve your actual goals, and has its own quirks that need entirely different workarounds, not necessarily AHK.
Are you worried about malicious actors snooping on conversations? They have always already been able to do that longer than I have been alive and a transcription app isn't going to change that
reply