Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team
addie @ addie @feddit.uk Posts 3Comments 577Joined 2 yr. ago
addie @ addie @feddit.uk
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Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn't correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.
The "simplest" explanation is that there's a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it's hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also 'dark') don't have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.
Simple answer is that we don't know, and "dark matter" is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there's a lot of things that we know it isn't.
Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don't fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can't explain the rest.
CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has "fetch content" since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you'd like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you'd like. I don't think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.
You've got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more "partitioned" than shared - there's a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it's usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:
- load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there's no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they're just loaded and accessible.
- manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.
You say that, but elephants, which are the largest animal alive on land today, are surprisingly quiet. They've got very padded feet to support their enormous weight, which means they move very quietly.
Now, not seeing them? They were big bastards. Need some trees to hide in.
If you lose, physical scars. If you win, emotional scars.
This, exactly. When we redid our bathroom, we went from "immersion tank" hot water with about three metres of pressure behind it, to central heating in a closed system, where both hot and cold have the exact same pressure, about thirty metres head. Went from being basically impossible to have a shower, to being an absolute pleasure where nearly the entire range of the tap gives a useful temperature, and it's got a right blast of pressure behind it too.
Another alternative would be an electric shower - since you're just heating up cold water, the pressure is "always the same". They tend to be a bit pathetic and crap, tho.
To be fair, they sent out the email when they first did it. Just their internet connection is a bit slow.
The original did have a lot of varied and interesting quest ideas, and some of the graphics still hold up now - dawn breaking over the mountains and reflecting off a lake looks even better in higher resolutions. The problem is more that there's about a billion identikit dungeons which only contain level-appropriate loot, so you never find anything really exciting, and of course the leveling system is completely busted so every fight is a slog everywhere you go. Felt so limited compared to Morrowind, too - MW might have been a completely broken sandbox, but at least it was open enough to break.
I don't really feel that the main problem with Oblivion is how it looks.
Google did claim "half their new code" was AI-generated; obviously, take that with a pinch of salt, since they've a vested interest in promoting LLM.
Speaking as a professional dev, about half of my lines-of-code consists of whitespace, opening-and-closing marks for the javadocs, and such matters as function, method and class definitions and their matching curly-close-brackets. My IDE generates all of that for me, but I dare say that I could use an LLM to do it as well, and then "half my code" would be AI-generated as well.
My colleagues who are most enthusiastic about AI do turn in some right shit for code review; I suppose the best of it is over-complex and has confused error handling. They also tend to have about a hundred lines of what they've changed in the pull request description, and little or nothing about why. Github shows me what you've changed, I'm only interested in why you've done it, so that's actually providing negative value by wasting my time having to read it.
Good shout, Emperor. Appreciate all that you do.
Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you've not got a boot manager, of course.
Looking at how chonky his wrist is, I suspect that "original OP" is quite a big lad and that this isn't his first schnitzel sandwich. Suspect it's more "plump thumb" than a double-joint.
Once you start Vim, you don't even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain't no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.
Us Scots can say our aitches - always annoys me to hear "an hospital" on the BBC.
Faaking Laanduners - that's who'll be saying "an hero".
Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.
Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I've grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.
That's beautiful work, dude/dudette. I'd be pleased to have that as my notebook cover; you've some real skill, there.
As well as running as root, you can also disable kernel-level protections against Spectre and shit like that on Arch, which as far as I can tell doesn't even gain you a single FPS. But no real gamer would turn that optimisation down.
Indeed. Back in the day (by which I mean, up until about when Doom was released, around '93) then one of the "joys" of PC gaming was that you had fuck all memory and had to prepare a "boot disk" for every game, bypassing the operating system, basically to load as little as possible so that there was space for your game to run. Trying to fit the bare essential drivers - sound card, memory extender, CD ROM if you needed it for that game, mouse or joystick if you needed those - was a right fucking adventure every time, and it was always a toss-up whether you could get sound, music, or both, in any particular game.
If you're an old fart, or if you've ever used DosBox to play retro games, you might be familiar. DosBox makes it altogether too easy - loads of RAM and disk space, emulates anything, and it's very quick to swap things out.
A few things changed around that time:
- much more memory, and better processors (486s!) that could use it
- games starting to want hardware acceleration for 3D, and therefore need graphics card drivers, which were impractical to fit on a floppy disk, usually
- Windows 95 / DirectX meant that people wanted to play games by double-clicking them, and there being a "unified" way of accessing hardware, rather than directly writing to VGA- / SoundBlaster- compatible hardware.
I'm no Windows fan, but it was a hell of an improvement.
The concept of a "pure UEFI" gaming environment might sound great - direct access to hardware, what could be more efficient? - but the unfortunate reality is that direct access to hardware is a real pain in the arse. Every game would need a complete copy of everyone's graphics drivers, everyone's sound drivers, everyone's network stack, .,. . Computers are much more complicated than they used to be (although in some ways, simpler too) - very few games would work at all. You might get Terraria in 640x480 in 16 colours and no hardware-accelerated drawing, and maybe some sound effects if you'd a very common integrated sound chip on your motherboard.
The operating system is both a gateway and a gatekeeper to hardware; makes a lot of stuff appear to work the same, regardless of what it is really, and the ones that haven't been enshittified are really quite efficient, do their thing and get out of the way. Even the consoles have an OS for hardware access now, although they're lightweight. I think it would be a very backward step to be rid of them.
Heroic has made me start buying games on GOG again.
I used to dual boot "Windows for games" and "Linux for work", and would buy GOG in preference to Steam because I love what they do.
Got rid of Windows years ago because it's more of a PITA than it's worth, and basically went 100% Steam because Proton is so good.
Heroic is so awesome - better interface than Steam, in many ways - that GOG is back on the menu.
Awesome interview as well, @PerfectDark@lemmy.world - a really interesting read.