what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed.

Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They’ve been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it’s worked, at most, thrice. Sony’s ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3.

Developers’ ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony’s ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money.

What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don’t think Sony really internalized what’s happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them.

Microsoft exiting the console market would be… what they’ve been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by not releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It’s not a sudden and definite end.

It’d be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.

Which can happen.

Theaters sure aren’t doing well. Movies soldier on without them, but with vanishing distinction from any other form of streaming video. When the superhero genre wanes, it might not be because some other bajillion-dollar trend overtook it. People can just stop caring enough to justify budgets with nine digits. What comes after that is a fallow period. Many large investments fail, capital dries up, a few pricks make headlines for declaring ‘movies are over.’

There’s been several times that making money on music was not a reliable business model. The industry flipped out about piracy… on cassettes, and then also when MP3s came along. Fortunately they solved that through commercial streaming services which also don’t pay artists anything. And now you can install a program that invents and records pop songs, just for you, in about as long as it takes to play them.

Even in '83, it’s not like Atari died. They had two more consoles that decade, plus a handheld. They marched on into the 1990s and then died. The crash simply meant a whole form of entertainment was no longer an expected feature in people’s lives.

Subscription MMOs have dwindled. The RTS genre crashed.

Fantastic, congratulations! A genuine victory for software freedom.

Now let’s ban Fortnite’s entire business model, because fuck that Skinner-box scam.

It screamed out all the angy.

There’s no sponsor in that video.

… oh god, Youtube’s fucking up the video itself to fuck with adblockers.

And they sound like death.

I mean $_.

“We wanted it to work like Perl,” said someone who should have been killed on the spot.

If you like how classic Doom sounds, there’s some long-ass playthroughs from Zero-Master (no commentary), Decino (chill commentary), and Coincident (intense commentary).

A high-effort shitpost that almost predates microprocessors.

You don’t.

But when you eventually reinstall, because Ubuntu crossed the line, Mint is just Ubuntu without the bullshit.

Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.

Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.

Just use Mint.

Export Tab URLs for occasional plaintext backups.

In case you had any doubts who they’re working for.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Engineers don’t let engineers design interfaces.

There was a tech talk about Quake 3 - surprisingly not by Carmack - which highlighted how id is technologically conservative. Quake 3 was their first game with no software renderer, and it still asked for nothing but OpenGL 1.1 and a Pentium II. It somehow featured curved surfaces, volumetric fog, and believe it or not, shadow volumes. Dynamic lighting was all Blinn-Phong from 1977. Static lighting was one (1) 128x128 lightmap, for dramatic gradients all over a stadium-sized level.

Doom 3 had steeper system requirements because it still did shadow volumes on the CPU and re-rendered most of the scene for each of them. But if you look at a screenshot with lighting disabled, the polygon count was closer to Quake 2, with bump maps adding all of the detail.

Rage, with its unique texel for every square inch of its gigantic world, could both run on an original iPhone and stream from a DVD on Xbox 360.

So it’s really fucking weird to see them demand raytracing. Look: I’ve been following real-time raytracing on GPUs since 2009, when Ray Tracey on Blogspot coerced it out of his GTX 300-series. It seemed like an obvious choice, once we figured out how to use fewer rays. (Blending with past frames was an ugly kludge; obviously that wouldn’t continue.) I had mixed feelings when Nvidia made it yet another proprietary anticompetitive gimmick. I do not understand how modern cards have hardware specifically for this thing - and it still chugs. It just uses more rays. Like your low-frequency indirect lighting needs multiple samples per-pixel, instead of updating some probes.

Quake 3’s volumetric fog used naive raymarching. By the PS3 era we’d figured out you can do it badly, per-pixel, and then blur. OpenGL 1.1 didn’t do “blur.” OpenGL 1.1 barely “per-pixel.” id Software did it the hard way, in tiny steps, on the CPU. And yet it still ran great, because they did it per vertex, and blended across wobbling triangles, and it looked fucking great.

I’m tempted toward an “eat hot chip and lie” rant about modern developers who can’t imagine doing anything only a thousand times per frame.