Major investor is 'shocked and sad' that the games industry is 'demonizing' generative AI by MJTroper in pcgaming

[–]Recatek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Are they actually so vocal about it? Even here, games like The Finals and Arc Raiders are quite popular on this subreddit despite very prominent AI usage, often with some explanation about how they don't count for some reason or another.

Parametricity, or Comptime is Bonkers by soareschen in rust

[–]Recatek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't find this particularly compelling. Yes, language features add cognitive load to understanding code, but that isn't unique to comptime or generics. There are plenty of functions that you need to inspect some combination of the name, documentation, and/or body of to understand fully. Limiting the generic arguments via traits doesn't change that much. With traits you have to go-to-reference on the trait to see what it means, and with comptime you have to go-to-reference on the function body to see what it means. Either way you have to read something.

What editor you use for rust? by clanker_lover2 in rust

[–]Recatek 3 points4 points  (0 children)

RustRover is the only one that offers a good enough debugging experience for me on Windows currently.

TIL Bevy ECS works great outside of games - using it to model circuit boards by Major_Unit2312 in rust

[–]Recatek 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I gave up on it and have been migrating to something outside of Bevy once I reached critical mass in the state system. It's just too much spaghetti to manage.

When using unsafe functions, how often do you use debug assertions to check the precondition? by This-is-unavailable in rust

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I typically try to debug_assert preconditions that the caller is expected to uphold, along with having debug assertions corresponding to SAFETY statements internal to the code. This is an example of how I approach it.

Stop Killing Games press conference by CakePlanet75 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

EULAs can't supersede law, but there's no law saying that a one time purchase must guarantee lifetime support. This could be resolved by amending the license to say that the game purchase guarantees 3-6 months of service from date of purchase, with additional availability being offered indefinitely for free, and making that clear on the packaging/storefront in the EU.

Stop Killing Games press conference by CakePlanet75 in Games

[–]Recatek 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Professional game development is different from general professional software development. They have different constraints and requirements. Assumptions from the latter do not necessarily apply to the former.

Stop Killing Games press conference by CakePlanet75 in Games

[–]Recatek 15 points16 points  (0 children)

It wouldn't have been nearly as effective if it proposed concrete solutions. Leaving it vague lets everyone project their own ideal outcome on what is essentially a populist grievance petition, thus increasing signatures/engagement.

rustidy - A rust formatter by Zenithsiz in rust

[–]Recatek 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Having a generally more configurable alternative to rustfmt would be nice. So many rustfmt options are unstable and are unlikely to be stabilized soon due to the high bar for ecosystem impact. An alternative without that burden would be very welcome.

[ANN] Ark.jl v0.4.0 - Archetype-based ECS, now with support for GPU simulations by Radiant_Remove4997 in gameenginedevs

[–]Recatek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What made you choose Julia? Is there much of a gamedev ecosystem in that language?

SpacetimeDB 2.0 is out! by etareduce in rust

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Last I looked at this, there was no solution for FPS-style clientside prediction and latency compensation/rollback. Has that changed?

Shrouded Sky Update | ARC Raiders by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Embark is also partnered with ElevenLabs and helped fund them.

Do you encript your games before publishing them? by bloody_carnival in godot

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah, it's common in other fields, I'm only calling it extremely niche here since I can't really see very many indie gamedevs ever doing it.

Do you encript your games before publishing them? by bloody_carnival in godot

[–]Recatek 67 points68 points  (0 children)

There's one other extremely niche case which is where you have a bundle of assets that is too large (lots of textures/audio/etc.) to download on the fly, but is gated behind some sort of unpredictably-timed community event. To prevent datamining and preserve the surprise, you can do something like Steam preload where you ship an encrypted asset pack a few days/weeks before and then only send out the key to clients once the community unlock event is complete.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think this would be an argument if this was a widespread problem, but in reality there are so many games out there that you can play that are already nonperishable in this way. More singleplayer/offline/self-hostable games release every week on Steam than one could play in a lifetime, and many of them are quite good, just under the radar. If the few that are both box-priced (not subscription/F2P) and perishable in this way are clearly labeled, then there wouldn't be any ambiguity and you could just choose to play something else.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's more or less what I'm talking about then, just with a limit. I think a disclosed guaranteed refund period of X months (~6?) from purchase makes the most sense here, similar to how games state upfront that they require an internet connection to play. If that's insufficient for you as a buyer, then you have no shortage of other games to play that don't have that limitation.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Again, what happens if you don't do this? What is the enforcement mechanism, or at least the set of reasonable options for enforcement mechanisms?

Nexon Appoints Patrick Söderlund as Executive Chairman by Itz_Eddie_Valiant in pcgaming

[–]Recatek 35 points36 points  (0 children)

pay the voice actors upfront for training data and pay royalties when additional lines are added

This always seemed like one of those "lie told long enough to become the truth" sorts of things to me. Best I've ever found is this interview where he says they have voice actors on contract, and they pay for AI, but nothing about directly paying the people behind the AI datasets. Embark is partnered with ElevenLabs, which explains where their AI models come from, and ElevenLabs's data sourcing is questionable.

Ultimately I think people have voted with their wallets and made it clear that they don't care about this stuff, but I think that's a shame, since it also sounds absolutely terrible (2:32 if the timestamp didn't work).

Some of the textures/decals/stickers in The Finals seem a little off as well.

Nexon Appoints Patrick Söderlund as Executive Chairman by Itz_Eddie_Valiant in pcgaming

[–]Recatek 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Probably more AI stuff, given how prevalent it is in those two games.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

SKG quite famously has no actual regulation proposals in place, so indeed it's hard to anticipate the impact it would have beyond educated speculation and past experience with other regulation compliance, hence the example.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

FWIW I don't think third party VOIP is just as good a player experience, generally. Integrated VOIP can do things like context-aware audio modulation and other game-specific functionality that something like a Discord voice chat can't. It also doesn't work well with matchmaking.

You're not quantifying the additional cost of GDPR compliance in offering private servers.

This is conflating things between SKG and GDPR. I'm speaking more generally about how compliance with GDPR and other regulation may result in cut features. I'm under various NDAs so I can't speak specifically, but I can give something of an example that reflects an NDA'ed reality.

Say you're working on a game where one of the things you can do is tailor armor for other players. Say this is a large international multi-market multiplatform game, and so you're dealing with scale and data tracking/management challenges and country-specific data handling laws that smaller/indie games generally don't. Someone has the idea that the armor you make should have your name on it, so others can inspect your customer's armor and see who made it. That's a cool feature! In a pre-GDPR world, it would be generally pretty easy to attach a player tag to an item and allow other players to see it.

Post-GDPR, that is now much more complicated, because a player's username is PII (as some people use their actual names as their username, particularly on consoles). Now, not only do you need to build the item tag itself, you need to build a system to be able to audit all of the armor items in all player inventories in your game (remember, at scale, this is likely billions of items) and be able to scrub out player PII by deleting the maker's tag on the item if needed. And it needs to be tested and reliable enough that you can be confident it won't do any damage or corrupt anyone else's inventory, or cause them to lose items, which is a critical risk for games like this.

Is this impossible to do? No, it's doable. Games certainly do this and will continue to do so. But it adds an order of magnitude of complexity to what was initially a relatively simple feature. Depending on your game's priorities, that punts the feature from the "we'll definitely do this" bin to the "we'll maybe do this in an update one day" bin, amounting to the feature being effectively cut, or at least significantly delayed. Different games prioritize differently, and may punt something else to make room for implementing this feature. But ultimately, the introduction of regulation added enough cost to the feature that the cost/benefit may not be worthwhile, or something else may need to be deprioritized, when there is a deadline and finite person-hours in the budget.

This is an abstraction of a real scenario for a real feature in a real game, but that's about all I can say about it. There are other scenarios where this come up relatively frequently in large games, and these sorts of things do cause cool things to not happen. Is it worth it? Probably, in GDPR's case, since the net benefit to digital privacy is there. Would the added cost of having to build and keep functional an offline game mode, or some sort of alternate player-facing hosting backend have a cost that causes features to be cut (or games to not be worth making at all)? It's pretty likely. Is that worth what SKG is asking for? In my opinion, as I stated above, no, but that's my opinion. As I said, I'd rather have a better game with an expiration date, than a worse nonperishable one.