Losing source code takes zero effort or energy. It is in fact tremendously easy, as you just have to do nothing. That’s less than not losing it, which takes at least some amount of effort. On top of that management might take issues with that effort because it is producing no tangible result affecting your immediate bottom line. Both for them and for devs, it feels like a trivial corner to cut.
So far the fastest TTL (Time To Loss of source) I’ve observed at work was two days. Dev leaves → new guy comes in → makes his own repository → what’s that old repository no one uses, gonna delete it. Two days.
Note that this hinges on the new guy thinking it takes less effort to start from scratch than to understand what’s there, which is the natural state of the new hire dev. Some expensive structures and processes must be put together to prevent that. To be fair, that was 10 years ago, which uuuuuh means bad things for preservation actually.
These days we avoid that because through expansive cascades of software and processes we made it so the only way to deploy a test or production version is through source control. The new guy is kept under control because if he doesn’t learn how the process works he cannot do his work. Which, I mean, is “normal” practice but we’ve got like three devops engineers dedicated to this and a trimestrial meeting with the big boss asking if that whole continuous integration thing is really something we need to do because look at the numbers it looks like it’d cost less to not do it.
And despite that once a product is not supported anymore our current policy is to drop the sources because hey, no one’s gonna need them ever again and it takes up expensive storage space.
Alan Wake 2 is tremendous really. I am completely in the tank for Remedy at this point, even if they made a total turd I’d still defend it, I can’t be objective any more. I don’t think anyone is doing the formal experimentation that they are in the AA space, the closest thing I can think of to their best work (Quantum Break > Control > AW2) in terms of quality, relative budget, and ambition is like… killer7.
That isn’t to say there aren’t criticisms to be made, but it is to say that they are not relevant in the sense that everyone should pay money to play this game, if they can.
It’s not about being tight on cash (although I do think it could be a factor for a lot of studios), it’s about optimization, “hey that’s great but we could also not be paying for it”.
Although there are other upkeep costs, there should be a process for retiring sources from active duty, which we don’t really have because the devops guys are already overworked. Works fine if we delete the repo though!
(Not really relevant, but for context S3 or really any foreign cloud storage, US included, is not an option for my line of work due to data protection laws, but the numbers are not fundamentally different)
how easy is it for a developer to copy all the source from their company onto usb stick or similar, is that the sort of thing that will get you into trouble these days?
i heard stories a long time ago of people joining a company and copying all the source to their famous games, not to steal it per se, but just cos it’s a famous game and it’s cool to have the source to it. i wonder if any of those copies will turn up in the years to come.
I dunno if this helps anyone, but I can confirm the Korean version of Shin-chan Shiro and the Coal Town plays in English. I think it was confirmed to get a western release earlier this year, but if it’s going to Limited Run Games like the last one, who knows how long that’ll take.
Skating close to having to reopen my quarantine thread, this time for Red Dead, but I forgot how funny the random events + RAGE physics engine + general open world wonkiness can be.
So far I have:
Been called to get a wagon from a thief, shot the offender, drove the wagon back to the person it was stolen from, and ten feet away from them hit a rock, flipping the wagon onto the horse, killing it and destroying the wagon.
Finished a mission and got bit by a rattlesnake, ragdolled, and tumbled down a cliff to my death.
Finished another mission and saw a man fleeing, screaming for help. Usually you see a few wolves, maybe coyotes, but the only thing following him were like four armadillos. Broke my heart to do it but I popped each one of them, and the guy kept running and screaming. Hogtied him and waited a while, and only then did a bobcat come racing towards him. Those poor armadillos…much funnier to imagine he was in terror of them, though.
i’ve been playing a lot of djmax, and it seems like an unfortunate sign that all the best songs in a rhythm game are dlc tracks from other rhythm games
but also like, this is the most available push many buttons rhythm game i think? everything else is swipe a screen or push one of two buttons or move lanes or something or other like that and i just want to have the cheap home version of pop’n/beatmania that can be played on a dualshock/keyboard and i get the sound feedback of having notes being played with the timing i press them.
It’s usually trivial, although of course it’s a breach of contract. Source control keeps track of who accessed what though, so if the goal is to release it later there is some obfuscation involved (if the code’s old enough to not be in source control it makes it easier. If it’s on some old DVD-R lying around it makes it trivial!). Obviously if it’s something you were working on around the time of the copy it either hides you (because it’s not an unusual access) or gives you away (because you were the only one).
Also even if you’re traceable it’s really gonna depend on whether there’s an opsec guy or team to sic on you, and the same boss who wanted to skimp on the storage budget is likely to think that’s a useless expense.
EDIT: Some companies though take that a lot more seriously, even bringing in a USB stick is asking for trouble.
Might depend on the project, too, like at my work most are of the “no one would care or notice” variety, but there’s a big one where both source control and the dev environment are hidden behind remote machines set up to prevent any form of local or external copy so if you wanna leak that one you’re looking at taking thousands of pictures.
I’ve been playing Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre, which is basically Nanaca Crash with a Lucha Libre theme and a bunch of mobile game progression systems and monetization bolted on.
It’s a little better than that sounds. Probably the two biggest wrinkles outside of the progression stuff are the opponents that start each run and the cake walls. Let me briefly explain that there are opponents and little minions to smash during each run, and they’re all candy/sweets themed for some reason.
At the start of the run you’re launching your luchador off the ropes of a ring, and how well you hit your opponent (potentially getting a crit, or after several runs, wearing down their life bar enough to knock them out) gives you a huge height/speed boost to your launch. I think crits happen if you catch the opponent in the right part of their idle animation.
The run is broken up into zones that are separated by deep walls of cake that you need to burrow through either by having enough speed built up, or getting lucky with power ups and such.
For a mobile timewaster it’s okay? Ads are I think mostly completely optional and it doesn’t hassle you to spend money all that much. I can see that progression will slow greatly at a certain point at which point I guess the temptation to spend money will kick in.
I only have access to older stuff on an emulator currently, and playing through these games has really been making me think about the “mode” in which people approach games, both in terms of development and as a player.
Originally I was thinking about how games are to either make the player suffer or to give the player pleasure, and how basically all early games are suffer-games, probably because they came out of arcade games, largely. There’s no real point to having a walking sim that you have to pay to play, either from the perspective of the player or the game developer. (And why I do I say a walking sim is a pleasure-game? Because it seems to me that it is a game that gives you progression without demanding struggle from the player, the player is unbound to interact with the game and is free to wander its halls.)
I’m not sure any game is truly sadomasochistic really, even if people like to claim it for From Software games.
To make it more about the games everybody plays, these early games seem to me to be more of an analogue to the game with self-defined limits, the game where you are 10 and you are off in the forest and you are thinking, “well, I will throw this rock at this other rock that I’ve put on this branch and if it hits the branch and knocks off the rock, that’s good, but if it’s rock-to-rock contact, that’s great and then I have to jump along this series of stones without touching the ground, and if I do, I win.” Or perhaps I was just a strange child and this was not an everyday thing for others.
There is a loneliness to the experience, not only in the actual playing, also in the mentality around choosing it as an activity.
there’s room in definitions to resolve this but the 2010s “choices matter” kind of walking sims work in a kind of narrative sadism where they overwrite your save automatically after tragedy and could, in another fork of arcade history where dragon’s lair becomes the dominant form of quarter-sucker, charge you for mulligans
in general i think branching narratives are more satisfying when they hurt and ring hollow when they reward you
set up my ps3 in my new apartment… might actually finish ico, mgs4, and dark souls one of these days (3 games which i have a lot of enthusiasm for despite having only played half of and also the only 3 ps3 discs i own lol)
which is to say that i did walk around anor londo and tranq dart some guys ln both in like 20fps ln (i’m resuming my post ornstein and smough save from last year before i moved out of my apartment and into a chaotic living situation)
ended up selling all my ps2 stuff to a local game shop last year to pay rent, regrettable in some ways but also i am not a big like Retail Disc believer in general especially for a console where i’ve been burning dvds for ten+ years and emulating for a couple idk. hope someone enjoyed paying a bunch of money for god hand / steambot chronicles / rule of rose etc. tho.
I know lots of people who perceive games along the “suffer” and “pleasure” axis, though I think it’s a flawed one, because what if I find something pleasurable that you find to be suffering?
Instead I suppose I think about games about “what is this trying to teach me?” For many games, the lesson is mainly a mechanistic one. Shoot enemies to kill them before they kill you; navigate a challenge designed to test your understanding of the platforming physics; weave a maze of five billion bullets.
It’s been on my mind especially because I was watching some game youtuber (ugh) a friend linked me talk about Barotrauma, and one of his core arguments is that when a game tests you and you fail, this is a “penalization of your time”. This youtuber take was a completely insane way to look at a game to me! It’s like saying that failing a math test is penalizing your time. The test is a measure of your competency; if you don’t meet the bar, you take the test over until you understand the lesson. The way you fail the test allows you to glean what you do not yet understand.
To loop it back around, some people (like annoying youtube man) find this act of testing the player to be suffering, where I think it’s pleasurable. All in how you approach play, I suppose.
lorelei and the laser eyes plays with repeating words, symbols, dates, etc until they’re just undifferentiated mush. thinking too hard about what they signify ordinarily is detrimental to the puzzles
Antagonist in Red Faction Guerrilla is the Earth Defense Force, I wonder if it’s the same one from the EDF games.
Gameplay wise it really is one of those mid 00’s “GTA-likes” where you can steal cars to get around, there’s ambient traffic and NPCs milling about, etc.
I don’t think Red Faction is meant to be the same universe as EDF but it is the same universe as the Saints Row games since they’re both made by Volition. The Ultor Corporation in Saints Row is the same one as in Red Faction.
