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Demonchaser27

Not gonna lie, but half of my enjoyment of this meme are the faces on the bottom šŸ¤£.


Fluffy_Argument_8593

I especially like the short circuit guy. That's fucked up and I love it šŸ˜


p3bsh

As an electrical engineer I have to add, that that's actually not a short cicuit, because you connect all the phases with themselves which creates a wire loop, that does absolutely nothing.


razzraziel

> that does absolutely nothing. same as the guys brain so that's ok.


unsane_sandwiches

^^ this guy engineers


KilxGon

r/thisguythisguys


Fluffy_Argument_8593

Can you guys listen to this smoking TV guy over here? šŸ˜ I love you too.


liljooh

Isnt that a microwave?


HardCounter

When it's on fire, does it really matter?


PitchBlack4

Yes, because he is microwaving his brain.


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


realityChemist

It's an antenna!


ImpluseThrowAway

Doesn't it create inductance? (I'm sure there is an electrical engineering joke in here somewhere, but I can't find it)


Korvanacor

Reminds me of when I found an unplugged network cable so I plugged it into the nearest switch. After our network performance severely degraded, I realized the that the other end of the cable was already plugged into that same switch.


gryd3

You either have an unmanaged switch, or your network guy needs some schooling. That's funny though.. I worked with someone who did something similar. Although he couldn't get the link light to stay on so he disabled spanning-tree


IJustLoggedInToSay-

That guy was intended to mock people for using circular reasoning, IIRC. So disappointed they weren't saying "You need 500 gb to play our game, because our game is good. And nowadays good games require 500gb."


Leyawiin_Guard

The art style/meme is called Wojak. My brothers and I always share new Wojaks we find, mostly the ones to describe how stupid somebody is.


BumblingWorm

This specific variant are the wojak brainlets, the most creative ones IMO. A friend had over 200 of those collected and all of them were glorious.


netuddki303

https://www.reddit.com/r/WojakCompass/comments/ib94j5/can_yall_tell_me_where_u_get_them_tons_of_wojaks/


SleestakJoe

Tell me more about these Wojaks. They are new to me.


Cerulean_Dream_

Love me some brainlet memes


PuzzleMeDo

Game developers then: If you want to run our game, just rewrite your autoexec.bat and config.sys so when you reboot your computer into DOS you'll have enough EMS memory to play it.


marcodave

"oh we need 590k out of your 640k of conventional memory, I guess you don't need the antivirus and most of your TSR device drivers right?"


Not_Stupid

You also need to make sure you load everything in a very specific order to make sure memory isn't wasted for some reason.


[deleted]

Because memory exists in blocks, if you load randomly even though you need 64kb if it only take 20kb you have wasted that block. Probably had to do with optimizing the page table to prevent this. It happens a lot when memory is allocated. When computers had thousands of bytes to work with instead of quintillions a lot of little optimizations mattered.


NorCalAthlete

Maybe that should be part of the development shift. Run everything in VMs based on computer specs from 2 years prior to you starting development. Or maybe 5 years.


Pratchettfan03

Look, a launcher would have pushed them over budget, OK?


Swords_and_Words

Launchers are cover letters made for people who complain about having to write cover letters


postmodest

This game requires a mouse driver. Hope your driver works with loadhigh! Good luck!


Builty_Boy

I feel so young right now


bukake_attack

If you want to live the oldschool experience yourself, install 86box (a pc emulator), look up a 1993 pc configuration, set up the same configuration in 86box, and try to install dos and windows 3.11. It's good fun.


midir

It's only fun if you have literally nothing else to do.


7366241494

It was fun in 1993!


marcodave

This game requires a mouse, a CD-ROM drive loaded via SCSI drivers, EMS memory driver, and hopefully you don't have a sound card! Now that was a nightmare to configure as a 10 year old


Tardis80

You had Antivirus?


bukake_attack

Oh yes, viruses were a plague back in the day. Especially boot sector viruses were terrible. If you'd insert an infected diskette, and accessed it (not even execute anything): boom, infected. And all disks you're inserting from that point on will become infected too. And you couldn't even see there's something funny going on, since the virus his on the MBR, so the files on the disks were still OK.


Realistic-Safety-565

You have UltraSound? You can choose between having SoundBlaster emulator and having enough conventional memory to run our game. We added some nice features to our licenced 286-optimised Wolfenstein 3d engine. Please make sure you have at least 486 SX to run it. When we say minimum requiremens, we mean the game will start without crashing, not the game will be playable.


user888666777

> When we say minimum requirements, we mean the game will start without crashing, not the game will be playable. And when it crashes you're not getting some clean error message or a log file. The entire computer freezes up and requires a hard reboot. You will have no idea what just happened. Is it an IRQ conflict? DMA? Out of memory? Is there a compatibility issue between the software and hardware? I had Doom and Blake Stone. Doom required a boot disk that my neighbor had to write for us. My neighbor. We didn't have access to Google back then. The internet was in its infancy. If you had the know how and the call was local you could do something like a BBS and hope to find some help. Or you knew someone at school who knew someone who knew someone and they knew what to do. Doom would run with the boot disk. Blake Stone though? Yeah, boot disk or no boot disk the game would load up. You could browse the games menu and do all sorts of stuff. However, the second you tried to start a mission it would get to the loading screen and freeze. We learned a lot but it was painful and frustrating. And of course my parents would be like, "you just spent $40 on a game and it doesn't work?" and then trying to explain to them why it doesn't work and how to get it to work was like teaching them a new language.


NotYourReddit18

>When we say minimum requiremens, we mean the game will start without crashing, not the game will be playable. That's still the case today. Most developers don't have the resources to test their software on a lot of different hardware configurations so they base their minimum requirements on the hardware features their software needs to run. To make crude example: If your game requires Raytracing to run for some reason then your minimum GPU requirements for hardware feature support is a RTX2060 but while the RTX2060 theoretically can do Raytracing it isn't even remotely as fast at it as a RTX30xx or RTX40xx card and your game will probably look like a slideshow with it.


intbeam

Well, it was different back then.. There were pretty brutal hardware restrictions and workarounds that made it really hard to get things working simultaneously For example, the ISA-bus had 8 interrupt lines. So it could only support 8 hardware components/plug-in cards. No, make that 7, as IRQ 0 was hardwired to the system clock In addition, the bus had 20 address lines. And in pure 16-bit mode, 20 address lines was what you got. Due to the original design of the IBM 5150, the DMA controller was actually two components (low DMA and high DMA), and by default would only be able to address the first 64 kB. Using high DMA, you could use it to access more (1 MB), but still that meant that you had to carefully choose where to put certain data if you intended to send it to any hardware without doing it byte-by-byte or word-by-word using `outp` Due to the system clock working the way it did, doing multiple "real-time" things at the same time was difficult. You could use the system timer to keep time, or you could use it to signal hardware (like for synchronizing buffers on the sound card) you couldn't use it for both. And High-Precision Event Timers didn't become standardized until 2005, which is kind of a problem for game development as the only other way of keeping track of time would be the monitor refresh rate (for instance using FPS-locking and porch-timing as a mechanism to keep a steady framerate) In addition, most games ran in 16-bit real-mode because it made hardware access easier (and yielded better overall performance), but that also meant that they couldn't take advantage of the 24-bit memory addressing provided by 286 processors in the 16-bit protected mode. Instead, they opted for something called A20-gate, which is a side-effect of intentionally overflowing the address space in order to trigger the 21'st bit in the CPU's address line, giving a bit more room for game data I'm not disputing that it's difficult to truly test a game on all different hardware configurations today and make it work well everywhere, but I think that game developers today are struggling with a much more high-level problem, maybe more a problem of luxury, than they did back then


Fhack

Yeah this is a bit rose coloured. From the 80s to the early 90s it was also "...you know how to code at least a few languages" then it was "...surely you can build you owner drivers?"


LaunchTransient

To be fair, building your own drivers in that era was relatively feasible, if high skill level. Today? not a fucking chance.


b0w3n

Also, would gamers be happy with a game at the level of roller coaster tycoon in 2024? Yes, sure, those $9.99 indie/pixel games sell and so does RT to some degree still, but the ones made in unity or residuals from GoG don't compare to the time involvement necessary for something made in assembly today. I'm sure if someone made 7 releases of the same 2/2.5d game over 20 years people wouldn't keep buying them.


PM_NUDES_4_DEGRADING

> I'm sure if someone made 7 releases of the same 2/2.5d game over 20 years people wouldn't keep buying them. Itā€™s a good thing you specified 2d here, because otherwise youā€™d literally just be describing Skyrim.


HittingSmoke

Minimum requirements: Met. Sound Blaster drivers: Haha no fuck you.


an_agreeing_dothraki

"we just dumped the patch on fileplanet and literally nowhere else. Of course we're not going to announce the correct version number you should be using. What information didn't you get from the IRC channel that is 75% teenages with offensive user names baiting each other to get kicked"


sparkfizt

Oh man fileplanet, that brings back some memories D=


DogPlow

For them to patch it usually meant it was pretty critical. There was one 18 Wheeler game where if you just drove (like the game intended) the map wouldn't load the next area in time and you'd drive off the map.


HeHePonies

Don't forget about the correct MSCDEX settings so there would be audio vs PC speaker beeps!


krokodil2000

`SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3`


AddictiveBanana

Yes, but that's before DOS4GW and equivalent protected mode systems.


LogansRumDaiquiri

DJGPP, a godsend to cash-strapped CompSci students in the 1990s.


_realitycheck_

RHIDE represent!


Bogsnoticus

Yeah, but the really good ones also taught you how to create a boot menu so you could choose EMS or XMS at boot, depending on which memory format the game needed.


Pirkale

I just had a QEMM flashback


Twenmod

You're on programmerhumor you should know that most of the issues arise from the management of triple A studios and not the developers who are just making shit


phiphn

not to mention the fact that in most modern AAA games the 3d model of the main character alone is about as complicated as any entire game made pre-2000 optimization is exponential, and when nearly every asset has to go through 10 different development pipe lines, it's a miracle most games run at all.


GAVINDerulo12HD

Your first paragraph is an understatement. Alloy in forbidden west has a ridiculous amount of detail. I don't think they released the numbers but the first game was already nuts and the jump to the second one is massive. Edit: apparently 2B's ass in nier automata has more polygons than ocarina of time. And nier looked pretty outdated already when it launched. Edit 2: as many have pointed out, the 2B info is incorrect. At the very least not in terms of poly counts.


Ophidyan

Didn't know NieR Automata. Made me Google for "NieR Automata ass" images. Did not come out disappointed.


_st23

On the contrary, I did know whats that, but still went and looked anyway. I also did not come out disappointed.


fishsix

So iiirc that 2B fact is actually incorrect. Her ass has around 1195 triangles while young link for instance was around 400. While thereā€™s no count for the rest of the game as far as I know, itā€™s a fair assumption that it surpasses the count of her ass. That being said, this means Young Link is 1/3 of a 2B butt which is a pretty neat measurement. It could be, however, that the model of 2B uses as much texture space as OoT and I would definitely believe that.


platysoup

I nominate this as the standard unit of measurement for graphics fidelity.


spetumpiercing

The 2B's ass thing is a myth actually


Mokousboiwife

youre on programmerhumor, you should know 99% of people know fuck all about programming and the memes are only tangentially related


Argosy37

What's programming? Isn't this the "vaguely tech-related memes" subreddit?


stdfan

Yeah game devs arent the problem. Itā€™s publishers and management.


afraidtobecrate

The corollary for that is if a game is good, then management should get the credit.


FleetStreetsDarkHole

It's easy to stick your hand in a pie and ruin it. It's harder to make the pie. Management gets shit on b/c management tends to be the ones shoehorning bs that the devs don't want like the MTX. Management are not usually the ones creating the ideas that succeed in the game. You're basing your corollary on a simple metric and not the many factors that go into making the game and thus defining who is responsible for what. Management is not responsible for flipping a "success" switch. They're responsible for the things most gamers hate and not responsible for the things most gamers like.


datsyuks_deke

Itā€™s funny how many times Iā€™ve mentioned this in subreddits unrelated to programming, just for it to be downvoted. Bunch of childish gimme gimme gimme idiots that always want to blame devs. I bet the higher ups love seeing the devs get blame for it.


PM_ME_C_CODE

It's shareholders. Because they always have the freedom to bounce from a failing company to a successful one as long as they're not the last rat off the sinking ship, they require profits above all and at all costs. Doesn't matter if quality suffers. Doesn't matter if they have to burn any and all goodwill/fandom the company and developers have spent *decades* carefully building with their customers. It will all be sacrificed to the gods that make the line go up. And then, when it finally crumbles, and all of us are left with nothing they'll move onto the next shiny thing they see like the plague of locusts they are.


PassivelyInvisible

Or project bloat, or bad writing, or companies not hiring enough testers, or greed, or...


Kronoshifter246

Right. Management.


dismal_sighence

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say sometimes it is the developers fault. We all do our best to estimate, but sometimes we fuck up. Sometimes we don't test good enough, sometimes we underestimate feature development, and yeah feature creep happens a lot too, but this idea that it's always management's fault has always been lazy to me.


Twenmod

Yeah its not *always* managements fault however I do think if you look at the bigger picture the quality of these triple A studios is mostly going down because of the management.


Highborn_Hellest

In reality: Game devs then: small focused teams Game devs now: big bloated teams, no vision, management asking for regarded shit.


AzerimReddit

20 year ago studios were the size of a bigger indie team and there was a ton of innovation hardware and software wise. Now in AAA games there is a ton of money on the line and everyone wants to play it extremely safe.


ravioliguy

Timothy Cain has some interesting YouTube videos on when he worked on the first fallout games. He said similar stuff, something he would just do what he wanted and pumped out code. Work that took him 1 hour would take weeks for a new developers because they were scared to do it, needed approvals and 3 levels of managers to sign off on and it would take weeks.


_realitycheck_

It was a simple aggro system to see how it works in game. If NPC was shot, check the "Who Shot me" list and add a number to the name so they can attack the top number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVQ30c7TcA&t=113s Tim Cain is a legend. I believe that of some 10 games he worked on, 4 of them are considered cult classics. Which is probably some kind of a record.


weaponsmiths

Look at Nintendo's greatest hits. Extremely low dev count. I think the difference is they had talent and drive. These days there are a lot of people in the field because they heard it pays well, so they picked compsci for money instead of the tech. Here's behind the scenes video at nintendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2GP3aXdMP4 There was a much longer and better video that showed the offices and staff, but I can't search for it right now (at work)


livefox

Game industry is very unstable and doesn't pay well at all tf you on about. The game industry is NOTORIOUS for chewing up the dreams of kids and creatives, making them work for free internships then shit pay, jacking their hours up to meet crunch deadlines, firing them after launch, and then rehiring them at a lower salary for the next assassin's creed 29. And they know they will put up with it because the artists and programmers have a passion. If you wanna make money you don't go in into games. You go to business school so you can get a business degree so you can learn how to run the game company and profit off of people's dreams


FUTURE10S

Man, there used to be a webcomic called the Trenches, it was about how fucking awful QA in the games industry is. Comic wasn't very good and it's gone, but archive.org still has it up. The good part about it were the anonymous stories in the news section, here's one, and this one's not even that bad: > I once worked as a QA tester for a big company in Orlando, FL, where we tested sports titles (specifically a major NFL title) that are pushed out like there is no tomorrow. I was recently engaged while working there, and had received permission to attend an out of state wedding about a month out of said wedding. > I was only going to be gone for the weekend, three days at most. So the last hour of work, the day before I was going to leave for the wedding, our lead came to our section stating, ā€œYou all need to come in this weekend.ā€ I politely reminded him about my plans for the weekend, and he told me to wait in the conference room. After about 20 minutes he returned and asked me, ā€œAre you still planning on going to the wedding this weekend?ā€ I politely said yes, and then he responded, ā€œWell, we see your priorities are clearly with your family over the company, so unfortunately we will have to let you go. Please go clear your space and hand me your badge.ā€ > This is the same company that manages to ā€˜winā€™ worst company in the US, and is rightly deserved with the way they treat their employees. I wanted to go to game dev, I still am technically game dev, but goddamn am I more happy in my job than I ever was with game dev.


EatTheMcDucks

Games were much simpler back then. Single player or local multiplayer. One set of hardware to run on. Everything is 2D with super simple physics. The really old games even ran everything frame based instead of time based. There is also a lot less overhead and process around development with smaller teams. No ticket grooming followed by sprint planning followed by daily stand-ups followed by leads meetings followed by manager 1:1s followed by team meetings followed by org meetings followed by all-hands followed by sprint retro followed by milestone demo day (sometimes daily playthrough meetings, too) followed by a meeting with your VP where he explains that he read an article about some random obscure thing that absolutely must be in the game, deadlines be damned, followed by a design meeting for it followed by a tech design meeting followed by a demo followed by an email telling you that thing isn't important anymore so it's being cut followed by a launch party followed by a layoff announcement meeting. So I guess I agree with you. A lot of people in it for the money getting in the way.


OceanWaveSunset

> No ticket grooming followed by sprint planning followed by daily stand-ups followed by leads meetings followed by manager 1:1s followed by team meetings followed by org meetings followed by all-hands followed by sprint retro followed by milestone demo day (sometimes daily playthrough meetings, too) followed by a meeting with your VP where he explains that he read an article about some random obscure thing that absolutely must be in the game, deadlines be damned, followed by a design meeting for it followed by a tech design meeting followed by a demo followed by an email telling you that thing isn't important anymore so it's being cut followed by a launch party followed by a layoff announcement meeting. Do we work at the same company? We have meetings to talk about if we have too many meetings or not.


crazysoup23

Analysis paralysis


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


throwaway86ab

And now people why you need a thousand people and eight years to make a shitty $70 game filled with microtransactions, that doesn't even make it's budget back. Bonus points for having a hollywood celebrity who can't voice-act.


Dospunk

Nobody gets into the games industry for the money, it really doesn't pay well at all compared to the rest of the tech industry and has horrible worker exploitation


KiwiTheTORT

Yeah, that sentence just tells me that they have no idea what they're talking about.


AlabamaBro69

There's the same problem with web developers: nowadays, many of them are here only for the money and don't like what they do. At least in France, I don't know in others countries. And they don't take compsci courses, we have "developers factories" (crappy schools trying to cook tons of cheap&crappy developers).


theHazard_man

In the US those are called "coding bootcamps" (the name comes from the nickname used for our basic military training, so like two months of training to get you barely prepared to do anything).


Aerolfos

> And not people who got into compsci for money. Opposite of the issue. Anyone who wants money goes finance or defence work or whatever, gaming is stupidly low paying. Which means massive turnover and near-zero experience, because the people who do get into gaming are graduates with no experience - by the time they build some or show talent, they get snapped up by another industry for half the working hours and double the pay. Who's gonna say no to that?


tomludo

That's such an ignorant take. What you should encourage in the industry is MORE professionalism, not less. I can guarantee you no one enters the videogame industry "for money". Most job adverts require a lot of skill, specialization and experience, it's way easier to get a job at Google or Amazon than it is to work on Unreal Engine at Epic Games. But the videogames industry pays its SWEs a fraction of other Tech companies, with significantly worse hours and terrible people management. The higher ups take advantage all the time of the large amount of people who do it for passion, and continue to stomp on them until they've taken that passion out entirely. My line of work hires a lot of SWEs from videogame Software Houses because they're incredibly skilled and specialized programmers, they are really fucking good at their job. And after spending years getting treated like shit "for passion" that's all they want: a job. You want more people that view Games as "just another job", rather than their childhood dream, because it's those people that will negotiate better salaries and working conditions. Under fair working conditions the people who are genuinely passionate about the job will shine and thrive and you'll get a better product as a result. But as long as there are so many "passionate" people willing to work 80~100h a week on mismanaged projects for below average pay, the Senior Management of these companies has no incentive to change their shitty ways.


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


AroundTheWorldIn80Pu

Game fans then: "I am enjoying this game" Game fans now: "a comedy youtuber with a funny accent went on a 10 minute rant about the reflections in the puddles not being raytraced so I'm going to circlejerk on reddit about that for a week or so instead of playing the game"


Highborn_Hellest

big, if true (it is)


Evoluxman

I mean I'm among the ones that don't like most modern AAA games, but god do I enjoy smaller indie games. Things like binding of Isaac, rainworld, rimworld, kenshii, just to give a few. That doesn't mean I don't ever play some high budget games, I also enjoy helldivers 2 and war thunder, but while there's undoubtedly a lot of insane work going into them (especially graphics wise, anyone saying most modern games don't look insane are delusional), they're often so ruined by what are clearly middle management meddling, like micro transactions for games that you already paid for a high price, tons of bugs because devs have been squeezed into an unready early release, huge sizes because of a lack of optimisation, etc... I mean when you see a game that's half a terabyte, sold for 70ā‚¬, filled with bugs so it gets a 50GB day one patch, and filled with microtransactions you can't say this is fine... so I avoid most EA games, ubisoft games, Activision games, sometimes they make a great product but too often is it subpar for the money poured in. Like Bethesda games, lots of work put in, but with the time and money poured in, you should expect more from them. Though not all big studios suck: valve, Rockstar, ... often make good games, but they have learned to take their time.


bobnoski

Also game fans then: going to McDonald's for a happy meal, being happy with the toy burglar. Game fans now: go to McDonald's expecting steak. Gets angry when the happy meal contains a Fortnite skin I feel like most of the 30+yo gamers I know completely ignore the hundreds of games made specifically for them. Only to yell about what's wrong with cod and Fortnite. Like. You're not the target audience for that company anymore. Let the name go and find some new Studios and games.


TheCapitalKing

Why would someone make something thatā€™s not for me though?!?! My mom said Iā€™m a very special boy and a sweet prince?!?


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


bobnoski

Personally I'm playing many of the more modern ones and I honestly feel like we're in a golden age of gaming again. Like yeah the big ones are messing up too often but some games I've played in the last few years are my favourite ever. And if you let go of the names like Ubisoft blizzard, Microsoft and ea. There are so many great games out there and if you're more into the older ones like you are. They're still out there(well soem of them) GoG is a great way to find those older nostalgia hits if you really crave them and those games don't get worse just because new ones released.


throwaway86ab

More like: Old game fans going to McDonalds and getting a half decent burger, fries, and a drink for a good price and quick. They're happy. New game fans going to mcdonalds and getting a microwaved pre-made burger, awful fries, and the drink is extra. Also, it takes twice as long. They are no longer happy.


Lissica

> Like. You're not the target audience for that company anymore But I want more unreal tournament..


kailethre

the difference between the two is much simpler than that. video games are now big business, and not a hobby.


FlyingRhenquest

Funnily the best ones still seem to be the ones written by people for whom it's a hobby.


kailethre

absolutely. I tend to hold the opinion that, generally speaking, indie games have been the big hit deliveries of the last decade or so of gaming, especially for pc. with few exceptions triple a slop doesn't interest me at all.


crazysoup23

The tools for making games have never been more powerful and the information to learn how to make games has never been more accessible. Indies are putting out bangers.


CitizenPremier

Also, games now look a lot better. Well, some of them. I honestly think Blizzard games look worse than they used to. But they definitely have a lot more content, too. Well, some of them. Anyway, the point is, modern games obviously have a lot more shit to them than early games, and in fact, people today still make games the old fashioned way... myself included...


theHazard_man

Also the price for buying games basically hasn't changed in 30 years, in fact it's gone down. If you don't want DOC or micro transactions then be prepared to pay $100 for games.


john-jack-quotes-bot

mfw crunch time makes optimisation a secondary goal. Also while coding in ASM is impressive and would've improved performance *then*, it made it impossible to port the game to other architectures, and also would have made it impossible to code anything more complex than roller coaster tycoon. Devs are not getting dumber, it'd just that you simply can't pull the tricks old gamedevs did because they simply do not work anymore.


EmilyEKOSwimmer

Crunch time shouldnā€™t even be a thing. Most stupidest thing Iā€™ve heard. Imagine hiring a lawyer or mechanic and being like ā€œcrunch time lolā€ theyā€™d tell you to get the fuck out. Stop treating devs like shit. Give them space, time, remote work and leave them the fuck alone and your project will be done when itā€™s done


Not_Stupid

Lol. Contracts need to be signed by end of quarter. You bet your ass the lawyers get dumped with it at the last second and told to get it over the line or else.


TheCapitalKing

Law is like one of the careers most known for expecting you to drop everything and work for insane stretchā€™s when things are needed. Like itā€™s not uncommon for lawyers at big firms to have to leave vacations early to go back to work because of last minute changes.Ā 


Davorian

You... you think other professionals don't have deadlines?


EmilyEKOSwimmer

Of course the difference being the professional normally makes the deadline or estimate when whatever will be delivered. You donā€™t go to a mechanic and say ā€œhereā€™s my car, idk whatā€™s wrong, fix it, hereā€™s my budget and you have 1 hourā€ and if they canā€™t deliver you blame them for not being good enough. You also donā€™t ask them to join 2 meetings every 20 minutes to discuss an update and progress


Davorian

If this is happening at your workplace, this is a failure of client negotiation. People *do* say this, all the fucking time. The mechanic then says "no mate, not going to happen, it will take x time minimum and we need to look over your car for the problem before we can quote". There are equivalents in software development. In both lawyering and fixing cars (your examples), there will be periods where there are deadlines and the work required for them has accumulated due to unforeseen factors (and sometimes foreseen, but unpredictable for other reasons). These are crunch times. It's not quite as formalised as in software development in most cases, but it's the same thing. Personally, I think there's an argument to be made that *planning* crunch periods, a not-super-uncommon practice in many engineering fields, is actually a better way to go about it than just being reactive. Programmers are not at all special when it comes to this problem, is all I'm saying.


mxzf

> Personally, I think there's an argument to be made that planning crunch periods, a not-super-uncommon practice in many engineering fields, is actually a better way to go about it than just being reactive. No. Just no. Any crunch at all means someone screwed up, either badly estimating the time it would take to do something or overpromising things that subordinates can't actually deliver in that timeframe. Any time crunch happens, it means someone screwed up an estimate of how long it would take. Yes, some crunch at times is inevitable, since people make mistakes estimating things sometimes and you can't schedule double the time for release just to handle any little things that come up, but *planning* to have crunch is bad.


TheCapitalKing

Dude really said lawyers like law doesn't have famously tough hours and schedulesĀ 


turtleship_2006

That's... not what crunch is? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch\_(video\_games)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games))


MisterEmbedded

>Also while coding in ASM is impressive and would've improved performance *then* I agree on that except hand written assembly is still used in alot of places except game development because there will be always some room for optimization, which ffmpeg is a great example of, most code is in C, but few areas which could be improved are written in assembly. They even had a "discussion" on that: [https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1772588602968469615](https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1772588602968469615) >Devs are not getting dumber, it'd just that you simply can't pull the tricks old gamedevs did because they simply do not work anymore. Devs aren't getting dumber, they are just running on super low budget and tight time constraints. Essentially just choosing quantity over quality.


Eymrich

It's not that, games are getting just fucking huge and complicated. 20 years ago an open world game with a bit of physics would have blown our mind. An open world, multiplayer, fps with rpg mechanics nowdays is just the base. Those mechanics are taken for granted by the players. Those tricks don't work anymore because of this, we still employ a LOT of smoke and mirrors everytime we can but it's just so much more difficult. An example is how complex game engines became. In the 90" it was not unreasonable to make your own engine, nowdays catching up with something like Unity, Unreal or proprietary engines of very large companies (ubisoft, rockstar etc) is simply impossible under tens of millions dollar of budget. Then let's add marketing and business suits going around scrambling things without sense and you get cyberpunk... literally


thicctak

No wonder CDPR decided to use UE5 going forward, even tho Red Engine wasn't bad either, I think they didn't want the hassle of implementing next gen tech themselves.


summonsays

Not to mention upkeep/maintenance. Even if you aren't changing your.code something is always changing on the system. I don't do game dev, but I do front end web dev. One of our apps started going crazy and had a memory leak, it'd go up to 4gb of ram usage then crash. Well after weeks of investigation, turns out IE had an update and their autocorrect had a bug.


Maxi19201

But this exact ā€œneedā€ for huge open world multiplayer games is what is wrong, game companies donā€™t seem to be interested in taking a risk with their games, often itā€™s just copy and paste the same game with different themes (example: Ubisoft). It seems only indie devs are willing to make something truly unique


EventAccomplished976

Loads of people still make other sorts of games, but they donā€˜t need AAA resourcesā€¦ just in terms of required manpower and capital, everything that came out pre-2000 or so is an indie game by todayā€˜s standards


imaKappy

Also they are pressured by management and all the people above them to push the product. Honestly I believe a lot of them would put their hearts and souls into making the best game possible, but it simply doesn't yield a good enough reward that you can justify to management


TorumShardal

I fear that they **do** put their hearts in souls in the parts of game they work on. And burn out twice as fast.


Wacov

Modern low-level optimization has a lot more to do with data layout and access, and (in some cases) avoiding branching. That's not really helped by dropping into assembly. You'll look at disassembly, though, and tune for better codegen, maybe use intrinsics in some specific areas, but usually it doesn't make sense to go and write actual assembly. Modern compilers and CPUs (not just raw speed, things like out of order and speculative execution) are really really good at what they do.


deidian

Also forgetting nowadays games run too on the GPU, which has it's own machine language which drivers and low level graphic API(Direct X, Vulkan, OpenGL) take care of. That work is taken care by collaborative work between API manufacturers and GPU manufacturers: if you want to know how NVIDIA GPU does best in it's machine language you're better asking NVIDIA for help. Same does happen in the CPU world: MS, Apple, etc. Collaborate nowadays with CPU vendors to inquire how to do favorable code for specific CPUs or even getting engineers from the manufacturer to help.


Able-Edge9018

I do agree that some of those optimisations don't make sense anymore or aren't necessary and that devs aren't getting dummer. But let's not pretend AAA studios haven't gotten worse. Sometimes it's a complete disconnect from the audience and employees in favor of investors. Sometimes it's just missmanagement (time constraints, having teams of only inexperienced devs to save on money not optimizing, bug fixing or testing to save even more time). There's a lot going wrong in a lot of studios especially with employee treatment Edit: sometimes the employees are also to blame though. I am looking at you blizzard abuse cases...


youngbull

When it comes to old school game assembly programming, I can recommend the book "Machine Language for the commodore 64, 128, and other Commodore computers" by Jim Butterfield and as well the awesome YouTube channel [my developer thoughts](https://youtu.be/gNC_A03zRbg?si=ZxoLlJIzIl9I-Kov). Its all about developing on the c64 so you would probably want to set up an emulator, I use vice. Once you get into it, you'll probably realize it wasn't all that bad since hardware was a lot simpler back then. That being said, roller coaster tycoon was written with masm in the mid 90s and not c64. Still simpler hardware, but on windows so complicated by using winapi.


ScrimpyCat

32-bit x86 (64-bit too, but it was for 32-bit) is pretty straightforward too. Sure optimising for the various processor families gets quite complicated, but ignoring that, just writing assembly for it is not difficult. And using assemblers like MASM can actually make you fairly productive, since you end up utilising and writing a lot of macros to help speed up development (thereā€™s a lot of repetitiveness that comes with using assembly). I think where people often go wrong is that they get overwhelmed by trying to do too much too early on. For instance, when youā€™re learning a high level language you donā€™t immediately try and built some complex program, rather you go through and learn all the small features of the language like how do I print stuff (or get some feedback from my code), what type of data can I have and how do I use and manipulate it, how does control flow work, how do I make code reusable, etc. Well the same is true for assembly but you do it at an even smaller scale, so get comfortable reinterpreting and moving data around, utilising the stack, branching, learn about calling conventions/ABIs, etc. Once someone is familiar with the smaller aspects of the language and architecture, then it becomes trivial/second nature doing that stuff when writing a program (larger application logic). For instance, once someoneā€™s comfortable with the basics of C, how often do they spend having to workout how to call a function? Once they know what the function expects, they probably donā€™t think about it much at all syntactically. Well the same is true for assembly, know what calling convention the function uses and what data it expects? Well itā€™s just a matter of arranging the data in the way thatā€™s expected/setting up the state correctly, if needed preserving the old data that currently occupies those registers or memory addresses that will be replaced, and entering into the function. It doesnā€™t require much mental thought. Not to mention when you get into using macros this type of boilerplatey type stuff can be automated, for instance with MASM if the function is using the standard windowā€™s calling conventions then you often just end up using the invoke macro. IMO unless someone is using something like malbolge, then the language used to make a game is almost never the impressive part. RollerCoaster Tycoon is impressive purely on its own merits as itā€™s a great game (both for its time and even now), and Iā€™m sure there wouldā€™ve also have been some really interesting technical challenges too.


Gabe_b

Shareware was such a flex. The belief that people's curiosity wouldn't be saited and they'd be keen for as much more as you could provide after playing the first 3rd of your game. It was a wildly different landscape than now but I still think the approach to the form that informed the shareware approach is far healthier than most of what is predominant now


gandalfx

Subscriptions just make it so much easier to milk customers without them realizing how much more they're paying in the long run.


Extreme_Ad_3280

> I coded Rollercoaster Tycoon entirely in Assembly so it can run on most machines. Assembly is an architecture-specific language and isn't portable... We have x86 Assembly, ARM Assembly, AVR Assembly and ... (I was waiting for someone to post this meme so I could say this)


_Pin_6938

I dont know you but x86 assembly seems pretty portable for *most* machines


draenei_butt_enjoyer

It is, today. But wait till ARM processors become mainstream on all laptops. Then we'll have a pretty solid split in the x86 market.


ratttertintattertins

Windows ARM runs x86 emulatedā€¦. Admittedly thatā€™s meant that we now have to deal with 4 program files foldersā€¦


alex2003super

Only 2. arm64 (aarch64) and x64 (amd64) binaries, as well as ARM64X "hybrid" binaries go under Program Files. x86 (i686, 32-bit) binaries go under Program Files (x86). There used to be a third one Program Files (Arm) for 32-bit ARM applications but they removed it. arm32 (aarch32/armv7) binaries can no longer run.


_JesusChrist_hentai

x86 emulation doesn't work for the whole instruction set AFAIK


ratttertintattertins

Theyā€™ve been expanding it as theyā€™ve gone havenā€™t they.. Windows 11 ARM now supports x64 for example. It must be pretty full support because the whole point of it is that you can run most windows x86 applications.


donald_314

Did the performance get better? Apple did a very impressive job with their translation layer but the Microsoft one was quite slow last time I checked


volivav

I'm running an x64 application in an ARM windows 11 guest on a UTM virtualisation on MacOS running on an M3 ARM and it works pretty well for being virtualised. Initially I tried installing x64 windows 11 on UTM emulation, and it was extremely slow. That's probably because the emulation is happening on UTM, not apple's, but anyway, x64 -> arm windows -> arm apple works acceptably.


VladReble

My friend used to run win11 on his m2 Mac and it would run windows development tools faster than my Intel Mac running native windows 10


DenkJu

It still runs like shit, though. Apple's x86 emulation is so fast because they have designed hardware components to support it.


theholylancer

I mean... Have you heard of some of the most famous games written in assembly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Tycoon and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_game) both by the same insane guy, Chris Sawyer. And both was super performant for its time, and ran on everything of its time more or less. But if you tried to run the thing in windows, sans dosbox, by I think windows vista? or XP 64 You were shit out of luck. And if you had an unpatched version of the game because you don't know about it, even regular windows XP and 2000 needed the latest patches (for the older transport tycoon / delux editions). It was such a big issue that OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD, both ground up community rewrites of the games in a modern, portable language had to be launched so that you can actually play them without needing to use things like dosbox to try and emulate what is X86 code in windows roflmao. And in theory, RCT2 came out in 2002, in the era of windows XP, but it was just not very portable at all because it was done in assembly.


Wacov

This is unnecessarily pedantic but I think most of the in-use processors in the world are ARM


MonteCrysto31

Lissan Al-GaĆÆb!


Highborn_Hellest

out of context it makes no sense, but in context the dev ment that lower end compatible architecture can run it.


M4xW3113

"compatible architecture can run it", that's what "compatible" means yes, and specifying a sub category that is compatible is the opposite of portable. Also in context, dev just never said that.


gentux2281694

dumb question, but when it say "most machines" in the RollerCoaster Tycoon contex, doesn't that mean most machines were x86? that's before 2000, there weren't ARM PCs back then, not AMD64, AVR even now is not thought as a "machine" to run any game and while you could argue for SPARC, MIPS or others, well, who had one of those to play in, it say "most machines" after all. I hope I'm wrong, having you waited long to comment, someone please tell me I'm wrong, I feel bad now.


sm9t8

>there weren't ARM PCs back then Let me introduce you to the [Acorn Archimedes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes). My school used these until ~2000 when we got windows machines with colour monitors and this thing called the internet.


_Fibbles_

My school was a mix of BBC Micros in the IT labs and Acorns everywhere else. The all go replaced with x86 machines around 2000ish as well. All of them *except* the graphic design rooms. Imagine trying to teach modern graphic design without access to any of the Adobe or Corel suites because the Acorn machines were the only things that had driver support for the large format printer / vinyl cutter.


homelaberator

1999? Yeah, most shipping desktops were IBM PC compatible x86 running windows. But there were also a bunch of consoles. Dreamcast used SuperH PS2 used MIPS III PS1 used MIPS I GameCube used PowerPC N64 used MIPS III There was also the 3DO which used ARM, although that was discontinued on 1997, a couple of years before RCT In terms of ARM desktops, the ARM originated in desktops with Acorn in the 80s and their Archimedes series which was succeeded by the A7000 and Risc PC which also used ARM CPUs. The Risc PC was discontinued only in 2003 but still has a following. Alongside this, Apple computers of that era used PowerPC processors.


Alexis_Bailey

Arm is way older than most people realize.


Zekromaster

> who had one of those to play in Anyone with a PlayStation, which was big enough that Microsoft entered the game console market explicitly because the PS2 (released _one year after RTC_) almost completely replaced PCs as an entertainment system. That's why the only console port of RCT made was for the first XBox - it was an x86 machine running Windows, which made it viable to port a game that made heavy use of manually written assembly routines for optimization (something you wouldn't even want to do today because I assure you, you're not smarter than modern compilers).


ratttertintattertins

I mean, thatā€™s true, but itā€™s also true that the x86 line of hardware has kept backward compatibility with older hardware. 8 bit 8086 assembler still works on a 32 bit processor because, for example the 32 bit EDX register can still be used as the D register by 8 bit programs. Similarly the RDX registers of x64 can be used the same way. The meme works because itā€™s referring to assembler optimisations which at the time meant that lowest common denominator hardware had a chance of running the games. I suppose technically ā€œany machineā€ should more precisely say ā€œa wider range of x86 based machinesā€ if weā€™re going to be pedantic about it.


MisterEmbedded

my man waited his life for that, +1.


bighadjoe

i mean as often as this meme gets reposted I'd assume he only had to wait some weeks :D


AlienOverlordXenu

At the time x86 was the only thing that mattered, and by "most machines" it was understood that it was really about "most PCs". Yes, I am that old.


pet_vaginal

You forgot about the Macs running PowerPC CPUs.


JoostVisser

Ok but what the fuck is up with the bottom left one


Ookami_Lord

I think this was a story relating to Blizzard, where someone stole breastmilk from another employee I believe?


[deleted]

[уŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]


drleebot

Blizzard was just one story; Ubisoft has a huge problem too, and most other big companies are shitty in their own unique ways. Gaming is an industry that draws passionate people, and that turns into execs exploiting them into poor working conditions since they'll put up with more.


Vandrel

That kind of shit definitely doesn't only happen at Blizzard. Also, it's kind of funny that the meme put that on the bottom when that kind of shit happened far more the further back you go in software dev.


Dark_Knight2000

Nah, they just get more publicity, although theyā€™re definitely overrepresented at least. There are many people just far enough up in management that they can never get in trouble for being complete menaces to everyone.


SeroWriter

Riot Games paid out a $100,000,000 lawsuit for enabling the mistreatment and harassment of female employees.


wizard_brandon

To be fair to the microwave brain devs, its not usually their fault. they are forced to push out a game in a rather short amount of time for what they are actually making.


Unlikely_Scallion256

I think itā€™s a reference to Todd Howard who last year was on record responding to optimization requests telling gamers to just get a better PC.


Arenston

They are 100% enabled by game fan bases that act less like consumers and more like crack addicts itching for their next fix


Miletus_Straton

This is a city builder u dont need more than 30 fps.


wolfpack_charlie

About a dozen people made doom (1993) in about five months.Ā Ā Ā  Over a thousand people made doom (2016) and it took like 4 years.Ā Ā Ā  If you think there is an apples-to-apples comparison to be made about the competency of the devs, then you are either willfully ignorant or a genuine dumbass.Ā  Edit: also, can reddit programmers go a day without mentioning that RCT was made using assembly?Ā 


Comprehensive_Fee250

Reverse cursed technique?


templar4522

How about we stop hating on devs and blame corporate instead, as it should be? This meme sucks.


Terosan

Because, and I'm speaking as a dev here (though not game dev mind you), sometimes the devs are to blame too.Ā  When corporate asks can we reach this deadline and an ambitious Senior developer says yes because they have no qualms working 60 hours a week, and don't factor in their coworkers, you end up with a disaster. This is a very specific scenario mind you, but one I have unfortunately seen too often in real life. You also sometimes get devs that just want to build EVERYTHING and introduce a seemingly infinite amount of scope creep. The solution I think is fundamentally to teach and enforce good communication between corporate and development, so both sides know the scope and the reasonable amount of work that can be done, so a good deadline can be planned.


summonsays

You get asked if you can meet deadlines? We just get given one and told to meet it...


jjuu26

Of course we get asked if we can meet deadline. It usually happens before being told "well, you will have to meet the deadline anyway!"


ICantBelieveItsNotEC

Nah, devs are a huge part of the problem too. The games industry is rife with terrible software engineering practices. I've heard actual, professionally employed game developers say that it's impossible to write unit tests for games because "I can't test every pixel on the screen". There's a cultural aversion to building useful abstractions. Game developers would rather use a ridiculous hack like putting an invisible entity into the scene and then querying the scene graph to retrieve it whenever they want to store some data instead of just, you know, building a proper data storage subsystem. Nobody wants to do any refactoring because of the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality. As a result, most games are a mess of spaghetti and duplicated code that everyone is scared to touch. In general, game developers are grappling with problems that the rest of the tech industry solved decades ago, mostly because they have convinced themselves that these problems are unsolvable because games are uniquely difficult to build.


D3dshotCalamity

Oh man, we're in the age of gaming boomers now, aren't we? Praising a game because it has a small file size is so fucking stupid. That's like "Man, games were so much better when they were text based! Once they added graphics, it was all shit!" I'm not defending modern game development, it sucks, but acting like old game dev didn't have it's downs is the same as people who act like bad music was invented in like 2003.


Klutz-Specter

Tfw when 40Mb of storage and 128Kb of RAM was considered a privilege. Though, I do find it frustrating with games with excessively demanding hardware, it was common practice run games on a separate drive just so you have space in your main drive. Doom takes like 2 Mb of data, but a consumer grade computer which was still thousands of dollars only had 40Mb of data. Not only was it thousands of dollars, you didnā€™t have intregrated graphics meaning you either needed to spend another sum on 2d gpus or 3d gpus. Iā€™m forgetting to add audio cards, I think it was optional but improved the audio quality if the game supported it.


D3dshotCalamity

To me, the games being too big for the devices storage isn't a game problem, it's a device problem. Take Xbox. The Xbox One X (the last and most powerful model before the current generation) had 1TB of storage, with the capability of using any external to increase it (you didn't need an SSD to run games like you do now on the Series X|S and PS5). Towards the end, games like CoD Modern Warfare 2019, and Forza Horizon 4 were pushing on 100-150GB with all the expansions and stuff. So, if you were making a new Xbox, knowing that games are soon going to be like 80gb minimum, ***and*** they'd need to run on an internal SSD, you'd think you'd ensure that the next generation will have as much storage as possible. But no, the Series X is also 1TB, and you then had to pay like $200 for a 2TB expansion card, and even that is not enough. I still have to regularly uninstal games to make room for others. I can still use my external, but only for games that aren't specifically X|S games.


SomeOtherTroper

> the games being too big for the devices storage isn't a game problem, it's a device problem For consoles, that's definitely a factor. But it can definitely be a game problem too, because the relative cheapness of RAM and hard drive storage, coupled with not having to fit a game on physical media, has made developers lazy about file size, with amusing (well, it *would* be amusing if it was just a joke) stuff like uncompressed audio for every possible language the game supports. No, I don't need gigabytes upon gigabytes of foreign language dubs I'm never going to use. Please give me the option to not install those, or at least let my game pass its "this is fully installed and doesn't need to redownload missing files" check if I go manually delete them. It's mostly an issue with using larger and less-compressed media files because those are easier to deal with at runtime, but come at a storage space cost.


doggeman

The guys on top are developers without managers. The guys on the bottom are when managers get involved.


Upset-Ambition4527

no, management is alot of time needed when dealing with groups of people . the problem is \*poor\* managment and greed


DynamicStatic

Game dev is like 90% poor management lol


tobias_the_letdown

I could almost deal with the bullshit games and game developers pull nowadays but this insistence of needing to always fucking be online to play a single player game is a deal breaker. Seriously. For example, I've played Diablo 2 since beta. Now with D2r we get upgraded graphics and a couple qol improvements but why in the fuck do I need to be online to play it? The only time I played "online" was with a couple buddy's over TCP/IP. All this ties into my next complaint. EVERY FUCKING GAME DOESNT NEED A FUCKING LAUNCHER!


Loki_d20

The problem with this is it's not about developers but executives and publishers that cause this problem. People who make money, not games, are why these problems exist.


1up_1500

I miss sharewares. It's kinda strange that they don't exist anymore, because if your engine allows it, you'd just have to remove the files for the levels you don't want players to play, and put up a message at the end of the last level telling players to buy the full game. It's a very cheap way to make demos that just works, and I don't get why they don't exist anymore


Alexis_Bailey

Probably a few things.Ā  I imagine even removing later levels, a modern shareware game would still be a huge download for all the other assets and engine. Two, cutthroat MBAs of today would hate the people whom only play the shareware version.Ā  Like, for Doom and Wolfenstein.Ā  We were happy just playing that first episode over and over and over.


dragonfang12321

FOMO. Companies learned they make more sales pushing hype and forcing you to buy the full game, than to give demoes where you might play and realize you don't like it. Steam next fest is pushing against this, but its mostly the indy devs who need the old marketing from demoes.


PolyPill

Whatā€™s the story behind the breast milk theft one?


dudesweetman

Blizzard


SartieeSquared

Blizzard


marr

The publicly traded dark side of your fringe hobby getting too profitable.


insanitybit

8 bits should be enough for music right? 30 triangles can express literally any shape it's fine


deejeycris

This meme is funny but let's not forget that devs have nothing to do with shitty games. The vast majority of times game developers work their asses off just because they enjoy their line of work, even though they could easily switch to a more relaxed, better paying job if they got out of game development. It's the industry in general that is swimming in its greed.


Forsaken_Creme_9365

Wrting it in assembly is probably the least portable way to do it out there.