!unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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

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.

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.

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.

Never give Nintendo money.

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.

“Oh come on, why the fuck, there’s no possible reason this code should-- wrong variable.”

I have too many comments reading “… how did this ever work?”

Is this security through obscurity?

Or for a one-off, copy the image in one program and paste it into another. Then it’s just pixels.

Even before… all this… anyone still on Twitter was an asshole.

Stop visiting the Nazi bar.

“Oh, you’re up early.”

“Sure.”

No, seriously. What was the benefit to Gaza in letting America fall to a fascist who cares even less about Gaza? They’re not even gonna get lip service. Israeli politicians are already like ‘what few restraints we had are now gone, let’s do it once and for all.’

The situation over there wouldn’t be much better, if y’all had stopped telling people not to vote against a fascist - but it would be better. Nevermind how much better we’d all be, over here, where you fucking live. This was a course of action with no material benefit to anyone you care about. How the fuck is it our fault, for pointing out that’s what would happen?

Incompetence would be so much better than what’s coming.

Temporarily acknowledging the game you actually bought. It’s allowed to exist, for a FOMO-appropriate period of time. Then it gets yanked away from you, again.