Lloxie

Lloxie

@Lloxie

That weird phasefoxie thing

Hello everyone! I'm Lloxie. I'm a furry writer, and I draw occasionally as well. And I dabble in coding now and then. Just a heads up, this IS technically an 18+ blog, even though I also have an AD profile where I post/share most of that kind of stuff. But do expect nsfw material to occasionally show up here as well. You can find links to my profiles elsewhere at the carrd link above, including my personal website if you want to know more about me. Or just feel free to ask me stuff!

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Lloxie
@Lloxie
MewMus
@MewMus
cosmopawt
@cosmopawt

wanted to make a post about the perpetual arms race between hardware engineers making their devices as fast as possible and software engineers making their programs as unoptimized as possible, but i couldnt figure out a way to word it

all im gonna say is, theres functionally no reason a phone needs 16 gigs of ram and an insanely fast processor to run youtube. and "tick-tock". and occasionally texting your friends. maybe listen to music now and then. the fact that an iphone 8 is "outdated" and "slow" is stupid. why should an App with words and pictures use 6 gigs of ram. why should my device be able to handle 4k video. i cant even see the pixels anymore at 1080p on a 6 inch screen. cameras in phones are really good now? ok. only because companies stopped investing in producing small digital cameras. game graphics are super impressive on phones now? dont care. we had a tool for that. called a "handheld gaming console". you kids wouldnt understand.

MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct

the decline of optimization standards in software engineering is killing the fucking planet.

fifty million fucking tonnes of e-waste every year because software vendors insist on writing everything in ffffffucking javascript. fuck you.

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

— Niklaus Wirth (1995), A plea for lean software

Lloxie
@Lloxie

Oh god I feel this so much. I have a burning, passionate resentment for the complete abandonment of optimization as a whole, particularly when it comes to games. I still balk if a game takes up more then 10 gb of space on my PC, yet I recently saw where one (I forget which) of the AAA titles in recent years is over 350 gb?! HELL fucking no. Don't even get me started on the graphics BS...

Bring back optmization NOW.

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GreenGale2000
@GreenGale2000

Personally, I think the highest phones should go is 8gb Ram for Emulation (the death of Handheld Consoles still saddens me), and between 64-128gb of Storage Space (I have a 32gb phone, and it doesn't have enough space for Jack). Any more is basically useless, and I cannot wrap my head around needing higher processors on something whose main focus is fucking Phone Calls.

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JavaDragon
@JavaDragon

I measure storage in unity games now
by default it includes 5 different quality levels that will all run basically the same and look exact except weird blurring on the lowest one (at least for indie games)

When I was using unity in college I got stuff done 3x faster than my classmates simply because I'd go in and remove all the presets but high, and my compile times would take like 1 minute instead of 5 to 15 (in extreme cases people spent more time compiling and updating than they did anything else for the entire class, unity just didn't like them that day).

I also find it funny how my favorite MMOFPS, planetside2, is less than 20GB despite 11 years of mmo cosmetics at a relatively high fidelity given it has a realistic artstyle and came out 11 years ago.
My other favorite big game, dead by daylight, bloated from ~16GB in my memory to ~37GB, but considering it's in a big game engine (unreal) and has 5 people per match instead of 300 people per render range with a similar amount of cosmetics total (ie, each is more detailed with a similar amount), I can forgive it.
Especially when compared to the many around 100GB AAA games that have been out for less time (many BRs) or have much, much lower fidelity per character.

I've gone off on some rants about how anti-optimization some indie dev cultures are in the past as well.

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Lloxie
@Lloxie

Personally, after the shit they tried to pull last year, I refuse to touch Unity even more than I already did. I try to avoid games made with it, too. So I can't really comment on that :s

Eyyy Planetside hehe. I avoid MMOs like the plague, but that's one that admittedly I can see the appeal for. I played the original at a friend's house a few times and yeah, I can see it being a blast with enough friends.

But yeah, I won't even consider a game that's over 50 gb. I've had some that originally weren't that much but then shot up high after an update, and I just said "Nope, I'm done. Uninstall." At least there are plenty of indie games that are better about it out there now. Usually smaller ones, but that's fine by me. Setting aside my current hiatus, those are what I usually prefer anymore anyway. There's a really neat, chill little village management/builder/sim type game called Odd Realm that I've thoroughly enjoyed and been watching the development of for a couple years now called Odd Realm. Know how much space the entire folder takes up on my PC? Right now, 646 mb. Yes. MEGAbytes.

I don't need fancy highly-detailed 3d graphics. Out of all the games I've enjoyed most in the past decade, none of them had especially fancy visuals, and even the ones that did, I ended up bumping the settings down for better performance. Because the gameplay itself is vastly more important, as well as (where applicable) the story. Hell, even when it does come to graphics, I'd rather it be interesting and stylized than "realistic". And that can easily be done with more limited resources. Just look at Undertale, for crying out loud. Or Night in the Woods.

Bleh, these companies need to be forced back into working on limited hardware I say. :P

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JavaDragon
@JavaDragon

I think if we went back into limited hardware a lot of those games just wouldn't exist at all tbh. Both the small ones and big ones.
I think half of this is culture around optimization (which itself is probably a counter culture movement against optimization being important), but the other half is simply the accessibility means people can do it without devoting ALL of their blood sweat and tears, only most/a lot of them.

I do also value gameplay over art in most cases. Planetside2 is probably the largest group of people playing on potato I've ever found, but in general even when given the choice between 160 fps on medium and 120 on high I'd take the former, the smoothness feels better to look at than fancy graphics even outside of gameplay/stability relations.

I've been avoiding Unity as an IDE ever since the CEO went on his 'PC should be like mobile and you're bad for not making it like that' rant.

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Lloxie
@Lloxie

I mean yeah, sure, that's a factor too. And I do appreciate that it's much more accessible now. But even so, I feel like there's a happy middle ground that, in my experience anyway, even most small indie devs are a lot better about hitting than the big companies that have way more resources and thus less excuse for not optimizing.

Yeahhhh I steer well away from Unity if I can help it. Part of me gets annoyed that so many otherwise decent people still end up using it for their projects. I get why, but it's still annoying.

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JavaDragon
@JavaDragon

I honestly don't get why people would choose it for a new project, the writing has been BURNED into the wall after repeated warnings prior.
If you already have a game built in it you're kinda locked into it and it sucks, I think those people are the primary victims of this greed.

I can see it for something small if you're fine if it doesn't exist in 3 years but nothing else, and even then it just feels like a sad mirror of twitter where people are so addicted to popularity and big-ness that they fight for it being allowed to keep it's status quo no matter what other factors exist.

Godot fortunately picked up the mantle of kitchen sink quickly (due to already being in dev for a while), so it feels even less excusable- unity was never really stable to work within in the first place (even discounting external stuff like greed), and godot not being so just makes it equal.

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Lloxie
@Lloxie

Yeahhh, people will put up with a damn lot of awful just to stick to what they already know, too. >.< Been finding that out more and more as time goes by.

Godot is great. I want to toy around with it more eventually, when I'm less busy with other things, heh. Goodness knows I've had game ideas.

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