I wonder how much of it is mismanagement on behalf of Microsoft itself, and how much of it is small-time devs suddenly getting more budget than they’ve ever seen before and deciding to get super ambitious with their next project and then having to scale it back when they can’t actually handle the project?

It’s what happened with EA and Anthem. Bioware suddenly got a shitload of money, couldn’t hack it, had to scale back the project, and it all fell apart.

I 100% guarantee the people who wrote that statement don’t know or care how much effort it would take to build the infrastructure to run their server-side components.

I’m fairly confident that any AAA production uses Infrastructure As Code to spin up infrastructure in their dev and qa environments, so it’s literally just a matter of handing over the Terraform or BICEP and some binaries for any custom code they need to use. I also highly, HIGHLY doubt that the vast majority of game servers are hosted on-prem. They’re most likely either using Azure or AWS.

Unless it’s Ancient Greece! There, if you had a massive dong they’d call you a stupid barbarian.

I just wanna be one of those old timey blacksmiths hitting things on an anvil and getting paid for it. Nowadays though it’s all like “Throw the glowy thing into the bang bang thing and it does all the work for you!”. What if I wanna hit things with a hammer, huh?! What if I like the catharsis that comes with hitting something?!

I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.

Sleeping Rough != Homeless though. Granted, almost everyone who sleeps rough is homeless, but not every homeless sleeps rough. Japan only counts people sleeping rough as homeless though.

Also there’s the element of being seen sleeping rough. There are plenty of people sleeping rough out there, but they don’t want to be seen that way so they keep to themselves and stay away from the general public, getting across the idea that there aren’t many of them.

I do not trust any stats that come out of Japan in terms of homelessness. If there’s a statistic that’s embarrassing for Japanese society, you know damn well they’re gonna try to cover it up with technicalities.

In Japan, the legal definition for someone who is homeless is: “those who use city parks, riverbanks, roads, train stations and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives.”

So that doesn’t include living in your car, living in insecure housing, living in shelters, or living in internet cafés, of which in 2020 there were about 15,000 ‘net café refugees’ in Tokyo alone.

Sooo yeah, Japan can claim to officially have a super low homeless population, because they’ve narrowed the definition so much that you have to literally be sleeping on the street for it to count.

Funny, humanity contributing to the reduction of the climate crisis by increasing the number of ticks causing people to become allergic to meat, meaning less demand for meat, meaning less greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere as cattle becomes less profitable.

NATO isn’t gonna defend Taiwan or Iran. The US will defend Taiwan, Russia will defend Iran. NATO has no interest in either. NATO will defend Canada and Greenland as best they can.

Empty?

My office just used to have milk delivered so everyone had it. The benefit of everyone there drinking tea!

I can’t believe when I was in university, people would start pre-drinking at 10PM so they could go out already drunk and not have to pay for drinks at the clubs.

I think you’re allowed to be selfish when it’s your game. I paid £80 for that game, I should have the right to play it for as long as I have the hardware to run it, even if I have to do some fiddling and modding to get it to work.

Key word being “and”.

I have a small figurine of an Irishman and I’m fairly sure the hedgehog is bullying it.

I would wear suncream more often, but:

1. I’m allergic to something in most brands of suncream so if I run out I’m having to deal with rashes all over where I used it.
2. I hate how it makes me feel slimy after using it

There’s this Loreal suncream spray I like that I can’t seem to find that feels like water and when it’s dry, it doesn’t feel like you have suncream on. It’s perfect for me! I’m not allergic to it either so I can actually go in the sun without turning red and blotchy!

I would never hide my stuffed animals. I have exactly one, and it’s a hedgehog I keep on my bookshelf. Not a Sonic-style hedgehog, a British hedgehog.

I will be keeping that hedgehog until I or someone in my family has kids, at which point I will pass it down to them.

Ideally though, if this became law, you would be accounting for the fact you might have to swap out the server implementation into your initial development of the game.

Also, some of those tools you might not need for production client code. Yes it’s gonna be a pain in the arse to develop server code without those tools, but not necessarily impossible. You could release server code with those tools stripped out, or able to be configured to work with those tools if someone else has the license for them.

In essence, you could modify the client to include configuration points that can point to specific servers, and then release documentation to say “Hey, this is what tool was originally used, these are the kinds of packets the client is sending (and whether they are expecting a response), and these are the kinds of packets the server is sending to the clients”. You then leave the actual server development to whoever wants to build one. That is, effectively, how private MMO servers are made, but regardless of the type of game, you’re still sending UDP packets to a server and receiving UDP packets from the server. You just need to know the purpose of those packets.

I’ve never worked with Unreal’s server setup, but I imagine it doesn’t absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.

The point is yes, there is going to be code you can’t legally release, libraries you can’t use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can’t, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.

Even if you strip out the code you can’t legally release, that’s a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

I mean if you are required to release a server dev kit, or at least make best efforts to release one, you can release what code you have and go “Here are the interfaces, but I can’t legally release this code because I don’t own it, so someone else is going to have to create an alternative”.

It’s about making it easier for other devs to make up for the gaps, rather than going “Nope! Proprietary code, can’t do anything!”