Realistically, it’s Animals for me. Solid narrative theme, Roger Waters’ trademark cynicism at peak potency, great tunes.

But part of me also wants to play devils advocate and say The Final Cut? Okay it’s not the greatest album they made, but it feels raw and real and heartfelt in its own way.

(Yes I also enjoy Waters’ solo albums)

Not just there - morale in game dev as a whole is rock-bottom. There’s been a layoff seemingly every other week since the end of 2023 and very few companies are actively hiring any more.

I’m not sure how aware the average consumer is of the state of the industry beyond a handful of high profile layoffs, but make no mistake: it’s in free fall right now, and people are leaving/being forced out in droves.

If you’re thinking of becoming a game dev right now, the best advice I can give is don’t.

Loving this little nugget from the article:

the translucent CD, which was pitched as an environmentally friendly option

Ah yes, the environmentally friendly option of producing thousands of plastic disks that don’t work.

Map men, map men, map map map men (men men)

Not exactly my discipline, but closely related: A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster is probably the closest thing to a pop-sci book about game design.

Well-regarded, well-written, and very approachable.

Founded in 1985, Rare is one of the UK’s most historic game developers, best known for Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie.

Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and it has since gone on to create titles such as Kameo, Viva Piñata, Kinect Sports, and Sea of Thieves under the Xbox banner.

Says it all, really. Rare has been mismanaged into the ground for the past 20+ years.

Sadly(?) I don’t think it was actually made with FrontPage 98 - the source is far too neat and clean!!

Agreed. Permanent hardware bans have been a thing since the PS3/360 era.

I’m not saying it’s a good thing that they can unilaterally disable hardware you purchased (although I certainly understand the reasoning wrt cheaters and pirates) but the author here is acting like the idea is some completely new scheme from the diabolical industry villains du jour.

It’s disingenuous at best.

No, I mean the completely unfounded claim that discord’s typing indicators are somehow a tool for analysing users’ writing styles and selling that on to data brokers.

It’s so bizarrely specific that it comes across as an unhinged conspiracy theory, especially when it’s delivered as part of a link salad.

Or acid!

It’s kind of impressive that you managed to squeeze in so many links to references but without including any that actually back up the accusation you’re making.

See also: video game AOE FX.

Big glowy green area? Could be a healing aura, could be poison. Good luck!

‘Can’t wait’ for the inevitable controversy when the official government chat bot tells someone to do something illegal, or gives dangerous advice leading to a death.

Like what?

It’s just a joke about Apple Wallet serving ads for their new F1 movie.

Not sure why it got posted in the first place, but it’s already been flagged & removed from HN.

There’s more than one argument against generative AI being used in games, and they don’t all apply to proc gen content. It’s an apples to oranges comparison in most cases.

From the article:

Danilov posited that the mistake was either the work of a “careless translator taking shortcuts”, or it was “done by someone on the dev/publisher side who couldn’t be arsed sending last-minute missing lines for translation and decided to throw them in a random LLM without oversight”.

Handong Ryu, who handled the Korean translation for the game, replied: "I was responsible for translating the vast majority of the Korean version of The Alters. Unfortunately, the same issue exists in the Korean version as well, which makes it more likely that the second scenario you mentioned is closer to the truth.

Sounds like this text was either added late in development or simply overlooked until after the last set of translation work had been completed, so the devs decided to let an LLM do it rather than getting billed for another batch of localisation.

Very dumb, especially as this puts them in direct violation of the Steam AI disclosure policy, but given the context I guess they figured no one would notice.

Specifically the hops used to flavour beer are a potent herbal sleep aid.

Per the author:

i never even knew about syncthing until now. it’s (clearly) a lot better, but again, the reason I made this is because of my school’s software whitelist. they only allow certain apps to run on my laptop, one of them being python due to out compsci class. since then, I’ve been using it to get around whitelists and make my own stuff. this allows me to sync up me and my friend’s stuff (like projects, etc.) while we’re in school and not have to worry about the whitelist

So this will affect Reddit and Lemmy too, presumably?