I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened;
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
>> Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).
The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.
It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.
Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.
A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
I think there's a much simpler/happier issue in play - MBAs. Games from big studios are increasingly being directed and driven by people who have zero interest in games and just view it as a means to revenue. So games are being rushed out the door prematurely in an unimaginably buggy state, development rushed such that repairing the mess created (after launch of course) is an endless series of half-working duct tape and shoe strings, designed to coerce endless DLC purchases, and more.
And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.
This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.
But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!
I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots.
That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.
I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU.
Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I believe it's mostly due to a global change at the lower levels. It seems similar to google never ending beta (every month basic apps change in layout, color, UX.. it's surprisingly exhausting, even when there's a good idea, which is rare, it's flooded by a bag of mistakes). The constant update model with broadband/fiber access means changing things cost zero, no cost => no pressure to provide something of high quality.
Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.
To be honest though, the Civilization games in particular are badly implemented. I had no end of similar issues with Civ V and Beyond Earth (didn’t play the earlier ones). I do agree with the general sentiment, but I find Civilization to be a kind of worst case scenario.
Meh, old software was also shit. Fucking Windows was unstable for almost a decade, and that was just the base that you run the other things on. What you describe actually matches my old experience with games, things being borked all the time, clients not seeing each other, and so on. Modern games are often as simple and right clicking my friend in Steam Friends, choose Join game, and then it even starts up my game AND joins the friend. Of course, the experience varies per game. Overwatch is smooth usually, Rainbow Six Siege often behaves strangely. But there's nothing here about modernity at all. Games are like businesses, neither is perfect, all it needs to be is to be able to sell.
The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can.
Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.
It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time.
I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.
What we need is liability, and returns like in other goods.
If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself.
The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.
ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
I’ve had a horrible experience with that game. From extremely poor performance on an expensive graphics card, to the game just refusing to start without crashing.
> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one!
Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.
This entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.
There's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.
Absolutely ... but don't forget the fun of trying to play multiplayer Command & Conquer via dial-up modem: "Wait, I thought I was calling you?", "Why is your phone engaged?", "Hold on, let me call you on my mobile" ...
Not 8 hours. More like 1. Then thinking F... it, inserting a Linux floppy, and messing with the LAN from there, unfortunately not usable for gaming then :-)
However, the instantly working IP connectivity impressed the others, and reinforced my aversion for anything from Microsoft at the time. Around 1994 to 1995 btw.
Edit: Thinking further about it, this 'demo' convinced the others to set up their IP-addresses the right way in a CLASS-C /24, statically. This accelerated the NetBIOS and IPX finding each other, so we all just checked if drivers were good, patches, levels, maps & mods for games were on the same level, and could start playing without endless rebooting. Should have done DHCP, though ;->
But then things improved and none of that had to be done to play with friends. We had it better then they ruined it again. I think that's the entire point.
Especially on consoles with limited patch sizes. Compare the experience of playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox 360 to the experience of playing the newest CoD on a console. I haven't played in a long time but just reading that the first thing you have to do is download dozens of GB to play a disc you just bought is bonkers.
And Steam is really a great piece of software when it comes to utilizing your connection. They can saturate even high capacity connections much better than any other software I know and you can play basically immediately after the download has finished.
Just getting everyone on the same patch version to play a game was a pain. We ended up just copy pasting around Half-Life folders, and you'd have to change your player name when you first started or your have the same as the source copy.
* I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!)
* Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs.
* the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
> the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.
TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.
I guess it's the glass half full or empty type situation
1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop
2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw.
3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
2. You don't need to replace all the important knobs with a screen to do this. Also, even my truck without a touchscreen shows the individual tire pressures, so...
* One reason i enjoy actual buttons on car devices, is that I can feel them when driving and not looking at them.
* I bought a new Xbox just last Xmas. I bought the physical discs, but still had to download 100GB in data, which took a couple hours, to play the game.
Not to do a console war but the "pitch" of a console to me had always been "it just works." You don't know about computers, you don't wanna know about computers, you just wanna buy the disc, come home, put it in, pick up your controller, and play. The hardest part about the experience is supposed to be plugging the correct cords in between the console and your TV.
Nowadays you might as well just game on a PC because it's just as much work apparently, especially to play online.
Omfg and car screens universally have an input lag of over 1 second, so not only do i have to take my eyes off the road to interact with it but i have to extend my interaction by several more seconds for any multi step process. Screens might even be okay if it weren't for the input lag
To be honest, I find a lot of the comments here pretty disappointing - they basically are rehashing what seems to always come up when articles talk about problems with the direction of technology:
1. "You're just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses!"
2. "Modern technology is amazing, these are just whiny nitpicks!"
I don't think these comments are really wrong, but I do think they are missing the forest for the trees. A lot of optimism around technology as a force for good in, say, the mid 90s, has disappeared, even among the technologists that build the stuff. I'd argue that there is something behind this, and I think the author's list touches on a bunch of valid points.
Case in point, social networks. When Facebook first came out, I remember being so excited by it - I reconnected with friends I hadn't talked to in years, and in a good way. I remember thinking how much of a useful tool it was for "casually" keeping in touch with friends. That is, I wasn't going to email everyone I knew when I got a new job, but it was nice when I posted about my job on Facebook that people commented, and I enjoyed hearing about the new things in my friend's lives.
Obviously reams has been written about the downfall of Facebook, so I won't rehash that, only just to add that for me the utility of it has finally fallen so low that it wasn't hard to deactivate my account. That is, for years I was like "Man, Facebook is so shitty, but I worry about cancelling my account because every now and then I get a post from a friend that helps me connect with them." That's no longer true, and not just because of me, but because the vast majority of my friends must also be getting exhausted by Facebook because they rarely post stuff that I care to read.
The irony is that I still have a strong desire to have the Facebook from the mid-late 00s in my life. I don't find that there are any social networks today that actually help you keep in touch with friends. They've all gotten addicted to the likes, infinite scroll, bullshit drama, and "tiktok-ization" of mindless content that they foisted on the rest of us so much that they now actually suck for keeping in touch with people you care about.
That is what I think the author is getting at - technology has somehow forgotten what the ends are that it was supposed to be the means for.
The extension to this is shareholders have made everything worse. Instead of a company making a product that does what the customer needs driving purchasing decisions and thus revenue, companies are now being held hostage to be constantly driving revenue number growth. This is easily done by implementing subscriptions or implementing hardware technologies with a limited lifetime.
For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.
On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.
Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
If you showed someone from 30 years ago a modern video game, a Tesla, or even TikTok, it would absolutely blow their mind. So the author comes up with some nitpicks and declares "technology has gotten objectively worse". I guess the title checks out.
The point is that this isn’t evenly distributed. A Tesla would be super impressive — but they’d also rightly point out that the giant dashboard TV distracts the driver, and moving the touchscreen controls randomly in patches is unsafe.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
Modern technology is nice when it works. Except it doesn't always work.
Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
That’s like saying any UX mistakes should be ignored because the technology powering it is ubercool. I don’t see it like that. Technology is a layer below UX and in the end we should be able to compare with past UX and at least match up if not exceed.
On one hand, it provides an unlimited stream of video that's tailored to your interests that you can consume any time you want from practically anywhere.
And on the other hand, it's a platform where anyone can create something and have it reach over a billion people around the world, with the amount of exposure you get determined by how much people engage with your content.
Contrast that to 30 years ago where you might get 10 TV channels (or 50 if you paid for cable), shows come on only at specific times, you have to be sitting in front of a TV set to watch them, and all of that content is chosen by a handful of guys in suits.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make videos on a camcorder. Of course nobody watched these except us - because how would they? The thought of sharing these with the world and have them compete on their merits to gain an audience would have been completely insane.
These are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides.
Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button.
Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
It is? For whom? A few years ago, I upgraded from a 2007 Hyundai Elantra to a 2019 Subaru Legacy. The new car is better in many ways (most notably, having all wheel drive) but the HVAC situation is an absolute regression. In the old Elantra, I have physical knobs. No, not physical buttons that send digital inputs, actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms. I miss those knobs every time I have to take my eyes off the road and enter some kind of complicated input to get outside air blowing. In the old car, it was a matter of turning on the fan and making sure the toggle was set to outside air, rather than internal recirculation. In the new car, you have to turn the system on with the on/off button, set the temperature to "low" by twisting the temperature control until the temperature display reads "LO", adjust the fan speed with a +/- button, and then finally get the air blowing where you want by repeatedly pressing the button with the seat icon until the air is blowing at your face (rather than at your feet).
The crazy thing is, as bad as all that is, Subaru is one of the better automakers in this regard. They have the HVAC controls broken out into their own separate module on the dashboard, with its own display for the temperature, fan speed, vents, etc. And all the controls have physical buttons, so I can at least feel where the controls are, even if I can no longer determine their current state by feel. Other automakers, like Toyota, Honda and Ford consolidate everything into a single 8" display with capacitive controls. Oh you want to adjust the fan speed while also being able to see the Android Auto UI? Too bad, screw you.
Cars have improved in a lot of subtle ways, I'll admit. All-wheel drive has gone from being a relatively high-end option to being far more ubiquitous. For all its warts, I genuinely do appreciate the fact that Android Auto allows me to have a decent GPS and mapping solution built into my car. But if you gave me a way to bring the HVAC controls from my old car into my new car, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
> actual physical mechanical knobs connected directly to the HVAC mechanisms
I'll admit to not living in Phoenix or the like, and it did take me time to trust climate control after only having simple A/C, but I doubt I'm alone in preferring to only adjust target temperature and letting the car automatically control fan speed and vents. Dunno if Subaru is especially bad at that, but in any situation where the interior is hot enough that you're trying to get "max A/C", I know leaving it at my normal auto 72° will cause VW and Mercedes to choose max A/C and blow out of the top vents.
But yeah, designs that completely hide the still-occasionally-used buttons like defrost tend to suck. It sucked in the 2004 Prius, and still generally sucks now. If designers want more console space or minimalism, get rid of big gear shifters instead IMO.
touchscreens in cars might be ok for settings, and the kinds of things you do when you are stopped.
But touchscreens have become a mess in cars.
Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car.
Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - turn signals are touch buttons on the steering wheel. The car guesses what gear you want to be in.
Even older model S/X cars have been affected by updates - the targets have gotten smaller, and critical controls have lost dedicated positions on the screen.
for example: navigate home used to be a big button. Now it is tiny.
The defrost controls are not only on the touchscreen and tiny, now they can be moved and have state.
> but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit
I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface".
Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
I bought a new Mazda last year and it doesn't have a touch screen. Big selling point for me.
Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
I don’t mind touchscreens in cars, but there are just some controls that are used all the time and should be buttons. I think most car manufacturers are figuring out that right mix…except perhaps Tesla who is insistent on removing ever tactile button for a touchscreen or capacitive touch button.
Man vehicles are a big one. All of the infotainment crap, the 200 control computers, electronic wastegate turbos, etc. etc. are going to age so poorly. There is a reason why cars with mininal BS are fetching such a premium on the used market.
We have a 2006 Subaru Outback. I’ve rented newer cars and got late 2010s loaners a couple of times and it was quite jarring to realize that I’d actively avoid the later models due to the touchscreen UI - even if you ignore the safety issues, it was amazing how crappy the implementations were - laggy, low-precision screens; UI lag like an intercontinental Remote Desktop session; my iTunes collection broke three separate systems over USB because apparently nobody has 10k tracks; etc. It’s like being charged a couple grand for an 5 year old Android tablet which was barely mid-range when it was released.
I sorta want to replace it, because I don't really like driving my children around in it, but new cars seem incredibly complex. I'm just trying to drive here, man.
According to this article [1] you have 15-60 seconds until the electric windows stop working. Also, on most cars you can detatch the headrests and use the metal at the bottom to break the windows.
I think the most impressive way I've seen are known as "ninja rocks" - broken pieces of spark plug ceramic insulator. But basically anything that can apply a force to a tiny area of the glass can start a fracture that will propagate through the glass. They make little escape hammers and things if it's a concern.
Readit News
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).
Here's the Apple IIc schematic:
https://archive.org/details/Schematic_Diagram_of_the_Apple_I...
The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.
It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.
Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.
A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
It's probably even simpler than that:
1. Once software stopped being distributed on discs, managers cut QA and pre-release bug-fixing, because they'll just "fix it later in a patch."
If course the patches often have problems too, which will be fixed in later patches with their own problems, ad nauseam.
It's a case where a legitimate technical advance ultimately lead to worse outcomes, because it disrupted certain social "checks and balances."
What boot camp is purporting to graduate "senior" developers after 6 months?
And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.
This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.
But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/289130/ENDLESS_Legend/
That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.
Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.
Crashes, connectivity issues, and desyncing are as old as PC computer gaming, and they were all much worse in the past.
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Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.
When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?
I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.
If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.
The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.
ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.
Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.
However, the instantly working IP connectivity impressed the others, and reinforced my aversion for anything from Microsoft at the time. Around 1994 to 1995 btw.
Edit: Thinking further about it, this 'demo' convinced the others to set up their IP-addresses the right way in a CLASS-C /24, statically. This accelerated the NetBIOS and IPX finding each other, so we all just checked if drivers were good, patches, levels, maps & mods for games were on the same level, and could start playing without endless rebooting. Should have done DHCP, though ;->
Especially on consoles with limited patch sizes. Compare the experience of playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox 360 to the experience of playing the newest CoD on a console. I haven't played in a long time but just reading that the first thing you have to do is download dozens of GB to play a disc you just bought is bonkers.
* I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!)
* Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs.
* the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.
I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.
TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.
1: https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Aether/24/683824/H2...
1. You can watch your favorite movie sitting on a bus stop
2. sure but i can listen to any song i like those that aren't on my playlist thanks to 4g instead of hearing annoying radio ads. i can frickin see the tyre pressure of each individual tyre fwiw.
3. yes but again i can watch anything i like as compared to having a tivo or even before that when you missed your favorite show at 9pm, you missed it forever.
Are you running an old version of iOS? I can run Netflix on my iPhone SE running iOS 15.7.1, which should be available for your iPhone 7+.
* I bought a new Xbox just last Xmas. I bought the physical discs, but still had to download 100GB in data, which took a couple hours, to play the game.
Nowadays you might as well just game on a PC because it's just as much work apparently, especially to play online.
1. "You're just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses!"
2. "Modern technology is amazing, these are just whiny nitpicks!"
I don't think these comments are really wrong, but I do think they are missing the forest for the trees. A lot of optimism around technology as a force for good in, say, the mid 90s, has disappeared, even among the technologists that build the stuff. I'd argue that there is something behind this, and I think the author's list touches on a bunch of valid points.
Case in point, social networks. When Facebook first came out, I remember being so excited by it - I reconnected with friends I hadn't talked to in years, and in a good way. I remember thinking how much of a useful tool it was for "casually" keeping in touch with friends. That is, I wasn't going to email everyone I knew when I got a new job, but it was nice when I posted about my job on Facebook that people commented, and I enjoyed hearing about the new things in my friend's lives.
Obviously reams has been written about the downfall of Facebook, so I won't rehash that, only just to add that for me the utility of it has finally fallen so low that it wasn't hard to deactivate my account. That is, for years I was like "Man, Facebook is so shitty, but I worry about cancelling my account because every now and then I get a post from a friend that helps me connect with them." That's no longer true, and not just because of me, but because the vast majority of my friends must also be getting exhausted by Facebook because they rarely post stuff that I care to read.
The irony is that I still have a strong desire to have the Facebook from the mid-late 00s in my life. I don't find that there are any social networks today that actually help you keep in touch with friends. They've all gotten addicted to the likes, infinite scroll, bullshit drama, and "tiktok-ization" of mindless content that they foisted on the rest of us so much that they now actually suck for keeping in touch with people you care about.
That is what I think the author is getting at - technology has somehow forgotten what the ends are that it was supposed to be the means for.
For example, companies weren't happy with just having to replace your phone every 3 or so years so they removed the headphone jacks from phones to drive the sales of Bluetooth headphones that have built in batteries. Those batteries have a limited lifetime before the device has to be replaced, while a pair of wired headphones could theoretically last decades if cared for or repaired.
On the software side any device or software that has to connect to a server to work properly is merely a rental dependent on how long a company wants to continue supporting it.
Now, I'm not against this in cases where it is only realistic to use it for a limited period of time and the cloud provides meaningful usefulness, but there is no excuse for why many devices have any sort of smart or cloud connections.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.
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Did old technology work flawlessly? No, it didn't. Memory protection in operating systems is relatively new and older computers came with dedicated reset buttons for a reason. But there was a point when it was balanced. Software was stable enough, built mostly by people who actually knew what they were doing, used the hardware more or less to the full extent, and was actually empowering users by being a useful tool, not doing everything to get some product manager a promotion.
And on the other hand, it's a platform where anyone can create something and have it reach over a billion people around the world, with the amount of exposure you get determined by how much people engage with your content.
Contrast that to 30 years ago where you might get 10 TV channels (or 50 if you paid for cable), shows come on only at specific times, you have to be sitting in front of a TV set to watch them, and all of that content is chosen by a handful of guys in suits.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make videos on a camcorder. Of course nobody watched these except us - because how would they? The thought of sharing these with the world and have them compete on their merits to gain an audience would have been completely insane.
Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and an "ok" button.
Similarly, games have traded off fast startup time for richer textures and assets, and the ability to patch bugs.
The crazy thing is, as bad as all that is, Subaru is one of the better automakers in this regard. They have the HVAC controls broken out into their own separate module on the dashboard, with its own display for the temperature, fan speed, vents, etc. And all the controls have physical buttons, so I can at least feel where the controls are, even if I can no longer determine their current state by feel. Other automakers, like Toyota, Honda and Ford consolidate everything into a single 8" display with capacitive controls. Oh you want to adjust the fan speed while also being able to see the Android Auto UI? Too bad, screw you.
Cars have improved in a lot of subtle ways, I'll admit. All-wheel drive has gone from being a relatively high-end option to being far more ubiquitous. For all its warts, I genuinely do appreciate the fact that Android Auto allows me to have a decent GPS and mapping solution built into my car. But if you gave me a way to bring the HVAC controls from my old car into my new car, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
I'll admit to not living in Phoenix or the like, and it did take me time to trust climate control after only having simple A/C, but I doubt I'm alone in preferring to only adjust target temperature and letting the car automatically control fan speed and vents. Dunno if Subaru is especially bad at that, but in any situation where the interior is hot enough that you're trying to get "max A/C", I know leaving it at my normal auto 72° will cause VW and Mercedes to choose max A/C and blow out of the top vents.
But yeah, designs that completely hide the still-occasionally-used buttons like defrost tend to suck. It sucked in the 2004 Prius, and still generally sucks now. If designers want more console space or minimalism, get rid of big gear shifters instead IMO.
When trade-offs are being evaluated what are they in service of? I'm going to suggest it's something other than a great user experience.
But touchscreens have become a mess in cars.
Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car.
Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - turn signals are touch buttons on the steering wheel. The car guesses what gear you want to be in.
Even older model S/X cars have been affected by updates - the targets have gotten smaller, and critical controls have lost dedicated positions on the screen.
for example: navigate home used to be a big button. Now it is tiny.
The defrost controls are not only on the touchscreen and tiny, now they can be moved and have state.
TBF, most automatic transmissions do this, and I think that Teslas only have one gear anyways.
Unless...please tell me they don't guess whether you want Park, Drive, Neutral, or Reverse?
I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface".
Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.
Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.
Sadly, even stuff like radio and AC controls in some cars have moved to touchscreens, and that sucks a lot.
I’m looking for a 1997-2000 LS400 at the moment.
I sorta want to replace it, because I don't really like driving my children around in it, but new cars seem incredibly complex. I'm just trying to drive here, man.
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