• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Holy shit, the amount of pure seethe in the jkpress post could power a small city.

    The more of Mullenweg’s posts and such that I read, the more he comes across as someone that took some professional/business writing classes and thinks that just because he’s using business speak conventions it means that he’s not coming across as a massive petulant child.

    It’s a shame, because he does have some valid points it seems: that the proper existing process wasn’t followed for offering to take the lead, and questioning security and sanity controls in a distributed theme/plugin system.

    But it’s buried so deep in barely concealed shitslinging that it’s nearly impossible to take seriously.




  • Yup. Regulatory and audit requirements are a motherfucker.

    Also, I don’t mean to speak down to devs, but as a rule of thumb you tend to think far higher of your skills just because you know the building blocks. Being able to build a boat doesn’t mean you know how to sail.

    I know multiple people who are prodigous developers but know jack shit about basic computer usage and security. People who had to be guided to the control panel in Windows. Yes, even after they added the search bar. People hired to work in an exclusively Windows enterprise environment.

    Now add that amount of potential that lack of basic operational skill carries for fucking things up to the least competent (or at minimum the least careful) co-worker on your dev team.

    You (any dev reading this) as an individual would probably never fuck up that badly. You (any dev reading this) would probably do everything right, correct, and wouldn’t cause problems with root. But the rules aren’t written to protect against the competent, or against people never making mistakes.



  • Yeah, I get that the devs probably don’t want to rehash the same level editor mechanics ad-naseum so instead they made the far more complex/in-depth Dreams, but I think there’s still value in simpler creation tools. I’m sad they moved away from LBP.

    Simpler tools lower the bar for entry and can make creating things easier. For LBP it also enforced a cohesive art style, and unless the creator was insane it enforced a specific set of game mechanics.

    With Dreams you have no idea what you’re in for, and there’s countless people taking time poorly reinventing the wheel for basic gameplay functionality. You can’t just go and use a highly polished “platformer mechanics” pack created and tested by a professional team like you got with LBP or more recently (and far more restricted) with Mario Maker. Every “starter kit” is going to have differing levels of amatuer jank.

    It’s a great “intro to game development” tool, but I personally think it’s lacking in the “play high quality user created content” realm because there’s less quality content as a result of the complexity.












  • They have been “working” on Half Life 3 for over a decade, with many promising leads found through datamining things left in other source games over that time. There is almost always absurd levels of speculation over the smallest crumbs of datamined material.

    For example, there’s been an unfinished NPC worked on for Episode 3 left in Half Life 2 that was first shown in a tech demo in 2006, literally prefixed with “Ep3_” in the code. It’s been around for 18 years and the most that was used from it was graphics for the gels in Portal 2, vs all of the speculated things about it.

    The recent documentary they released had what was effectively a post-mortem section where they talked about why Episode 3/Half Life 3 never came out.

    I can see why you might think that their new controller and headset might be enough of a game changer that they feel like making 3 is worth it again, but the overall feeling I’ve gotten from them from following all of this closely since the pre-Orange Box days is that: 3 isn’t happening due to the immense pressure and expectations that have built up over the many years people have been waiting. Maybe we get Alyx 2 or some other spin off, but the only thing they’d accomplish with 3 at this point is disappointing a wide variety of people with countless conflicting expectations.

    At the very least you also have to contend with “Valve Time”. What would take a normal studio a year takes them four due to their obsession with polishing everything. Team Fortress 2 started development in 1998 and didn’t release for 9 years.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see where they go next, and I hope this means more than a voice actor sending a fun new years message. But you need to understand that “definitive evidence” of 3 coming based off datamined material has been floating around for 15+ years now.


  • If you can, I highly suggest buying a pack of cheap cable clips and velcro ties off amazon and trying to route your cables nicely/out the way.

    My little one is considerably less furry and requires regular diaper changes, but having the cables out of the way and running more tightly against things has really helped keep accidents from happening due to curious hands.