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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I made games primarily for Windows which we also compiled for Linux. It is mostly input/output stuff, aka hardware issues. That is, audio issues, input issues, storage issues, dependency issues. Modern game engine mostly handle the rest. It wasn’t such a big deal to fix, but most gamedev lacked experience with Linux, and most projects are already over budget and late, so fixing Linux for an extra 2-5% of sales didn’t make much sense at small scale. Proton kind off fixed all of this tho.



  • Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.

    The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.

    At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.

    HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.


  • Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.

    So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.

    My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.

    I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.






  • It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.

    Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.





  • A bare bone program with rendering and movement is not a game, it’s a prototype, and this demonstrate nothing about modern game development. Of course a prototype with nothing but rendering and basic inputs coded in c++ is gonna be multi-platform by default. Hell, it is just code on a repo, you don’t even need to build it and test it and deploy it for all platforms as it is up to the user. I don’t think you understand the scope of making a fully-completed game. I had dozens of unfinished prototypes on my computer, some of which I made decades ago, some are multi-platform because of the language and tech. Still, this means nothing. It still cost money to support multiple platforms. Only exception nowadays is if your game happen to be compatible with Proton. But yeah, supporting Mac and a bunch of other platforms? It is not free my dude.


  • Valve is definitely an exception. I am not sure why, but it is pretty much in the open that Gabe Newell has a bone to pick with Microsoft and he has been throwing money at Linux for over a decade to break their monopoly on gaming. I’d argue that this has nothing to do with their love for the community and more so with Gabe’s personal vendetta against Microsoft.

    Reality is that most game devs, most executives and most people in marketing don’t really care about Linux. It is good PR to support Mac and Linux, and some of the geekier developers will go the extra mile to support it, but I think it is common in the industry to assume that Linux users are not gamer, or that they have enough knowledge to install a dual boot. They don’t care in the sense that they don’t even think about it, its not even on the radar for most game companies. Most studios probably never even had a discussion about it. That is how irrelevant Linux has been to gaming. Hence why Proton is such a tour de force.



  • In an ideal world everything would work out, but for some business it is a pretty huge commitment for what was less than 2% of the market just a few months ago. We certainly lost money porting our game in Linux at that last place I worked. It was before Proton though. Obviously each case is different, and some games work on Linux out-the-box due to Photon so this become a non-issue.


  • Elderos@lemmings.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlIt either runs on Linux or refund
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    1 year ago

    Virtually no anticheat worked on Linux just a few years ago except maybe Valve and Blizzard in-house solutions. Games that are out and already committed to a specific anticheat can’t do much but to wait, so it is not really on them. Changing the anticheat solution mid-way on a released game would piss off so many people you can’t imagine. On a brand new game though, I would agree that this should be considered.


  • Well, first of all I know multi-platform game exists and in some case it will just work out of the box. If it doesn’t though, not all companies have the money to hire QA for other platforms or devs to look into issues when stuff goes wrong on Linux. Most game companies fail and run out of cash, only the top survives. They don’t have that sort of money laying around to mess around a platform with 2% of users. My previous company certainly loss money on Linux and it was a cause of tension internally.

    Secondly, a Minecraft prototype written in c++ and using native OpenGL calls is a terrible example. Even though I understand the dev volunteer his time so money isn’t an issue, it would cost a fortune and take years for your average studio to make a game from scratch like this without a game engine.



  • The entitlement in this whole thread is insane. Is that how linux gamers are? Not to mention that modern gaming require developers to use third-party anti-cheat solution on which they have little control. You’d think the Linux crowd would understand that it makes more sense to please the 98% of players up until anti-cheats get better Linux support.