Eran | The Less Interesting Times

2021/11/28 News: Average User has no Concept of How Much Game Dev Costs

Recently, some clueless joe on Twitter said he will pay 10,000$ to the person who adds a multiplayer aspect to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If he was going to donate to a modder who was working on it, that would have been fine but it seems like he was thinking that he could hire someone to do something like that for that kind of money. Here is a long, detailed response to this which you should read but here’s the summary: 10,000$ would pay for about two work months of the average+ programmer. Also, networking is hard. The hardest networking challenges in gaming usually arise in fighting games because they usually need to be exactly per pixel and per frame accurate and, probably over distances where network traffic takes more time to go back and forth than it takes pro players twitch reflexes to react. You can see how important this is if you go back and read about the network woes of Street Fighter V. Now, the demands of a PvE, open world, action RPG would probably be a lot less strict but these are still difficult problems. Especially if you’re talking about tacking on something like this onto a game that was definitely not designed for it. You want a more current example? On the one hand, Battlefield 2042 is out now and it’s buggy as hell. On the other hand, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is also out and it’s much better. Probably because the team is backed Continue Reading →

Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.

2021/11/19 Portugal just became nicer to employees

Portugal recently passed a law they fondly call “Right to Rest”. It contains various measures to help employees have a better work-life balance such as the ability to work remotely when you need to take care of a child or companies contributing to household bills when an employee is working remotely a lot. But the nicest thing about it is indeed the ban on contacting employees after work hours. I’m guessing there is a stipulation about emergencies or people like server administrators and doctors who are supposed to be on call but the fact it’s enshrined in law is just amazing. Kinda makes me want to move to Portugal. :)

Posted in High-Tech, IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.

2021/11/16 Activision-Blizzard Proving Again That They Just Don’t Care

Activision Apologises and Removes ‘Insensitive’ Quran Pages from Call of Duty: Vanguard. Seriously? I mean, really? I did my basic Arabic studies and I know that the Quran (like the Bible and the New Testament) is Islam’s holiest tome and they do take it very seriously with how you treat iconography. But even if you didn’t know that disrespecting the Quran would whip up Islamic people into some kind of rage, imagine what it would feel like to you (or your more religious friends/family members) if there were pages of your religious texts on the ground where everyone is expected to walk. Or, because you’re one of the hugest game companies in the world who want to sell your games to as many people as possible, have some freaking sensitivity consultants.