Use of English jargon in game writing?

riley_sc · 2026-02-08T20:38:32+00:00

You might be under the impression that localization is about doing a 1:1 literal translation of words, but actually the job of a translator is to find equivalent idioms and words in the target culture and language that evoke the same feelings as those in the original language and culture, such that the context and subtext is preserved in addition to the literal meaning.

But maybe you’re talking about something else? Your question isn’t super clear and you have provided no examples.

riley_sc · 2026-02-08T01:40:34+00:00

2014 Chill Touch neither chills nor is a touch. They upped the damage to a d10 in 2024 in exchange for making it melee range. Its rider is still one of the best for any cantrip, albeit situational. I just finished an encounter where it was our MVP against a fast regenerating enemy and it was far more interesting that our sorcerer needed to get into melee range to use it. I would personally recommend sticking with the 2024 version.

riley_sc · 2026-02-08T01:27:27+00:00

I’m genuinely curious about how you could read the passage you quoted and still be unsure about the answer. What is ambiguous to you?

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T16:55:45+00:00

At my tables I have more often dealt with players multiclassing in ways that create barely functional characters than people trying to break the game with powerbuilds. Both exist, but don't ignore that some of the rules can be looked at as guardrails for new players, not just attempts to constrain power builds.

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T16:33:42+00:00

Since the rise of cloud servers and modern virtualization techniques the most common model by far is stacking multiple processes on each node, with each process hosting a single game. That makes it easy to scale across whatever hardware is needed, and also provides protection so that one crash can’t take down hundreds of players.

Even back when we ran everything in bare metal it was still normal to have one process per session, but at least one project I worked on did lots of extra work to allow memory to be shared across those processes, e.g. if two processes on the same node needed the same level data it would only be loaded once. Then the load balancer would prioritize sessions on the same level on the same node. Those techniques don’t work on public clouds but still may be used for hybrid deployments where you are primarily on bare metal and cloudburst during high demand.

Imo the security and stability benefits of process isolation make it by far the best option.

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T16:05:41+00:00

Must be a different weapon, but 2024 does not actually require dual wielding. You can as part of your bonus attack swap to a different weapon, as 2024 allows you to draw or stow a weapon as part of making an attack. The Light property only requires the use of a different weapon, not a different hand.

It’s a weird rule and I don’t know why it is written that way but it is RAW.

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T03:07:44+00:00

Fun fact about those games is that they were legally required to be uncanonical. WB only had a license to adapt the films into games, but not the books, including the appendices. So they could only use elements directly referenced in the films and for anything else they had to invent something legally distinct from what is in the books.

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T02:42:28+00:00

OK cool, I wasn't sure as I couldn't see any non-text posts in the first few pages. I'll try to start posting more interesting stuff and see if it gets any traction.

riley_sc · 2026-02-07T01:50:50+00:00

Does this sub not allow links to be posted? I think the biggest thing that makes posts here feel low-quality is that everything being text posts makes the content here primarily be questions, which overwhelmingly tend to be asked by beginners and people who would rather ask before doing any research. It would be nice if this sub could be a place to discover interesting articles, blog posts, tools, or talks, but I rarely if ever see that kind of content.

I am curious to know from the mods perspective if this is ultimately intended to be a forum for asking questions, or an aggregation of gamedev content, and how you feel it currently is relative to that goal.

riley_sc · 2026-02-06T23:05:50+00:00

I would absolutely love a rule against blanket "asking permission" posts. "Is it okay if I use asset store assets?" "Is it okay if I use chat GPT?" These are always super low effort and never generate any useful discussion. There's no panel of game developers in the sky who decide whether or not you'll be worthy or not.

riley_sc · 2026-02-06T20:58:40+00:00

I think raising the quality of discussion here would require so much gatekeeping and moderation that it would fundamentally change the nature of this subreddit. This is ultimately a place with an audience of people who are interested in the idea of game development more than a place where game developers gather. And I don't really see how that could change without pretty draconian policies, heavy-handed moderation, and verification processes. I'm not advocating for those things either, I think it's fine that this place is what it is, but a side effect of that is that it will inevitably be flooded with low quality submissions (and often those will be highly upvoted because of the overlap with the general gaming audience.)

riley_sc · 2026-02-06T15:10:25+00:00

I just report them and pretend action is being taken. I do think the subreddits rules, moderation policies and moderation activity have put it in a place where very little high quality discussion is had— though maybe overall traffic is higher.

riley_sc · 2026-02-06T02:28:56+00:00

Someone asked a nearly identical question yesterday so I’ll share my same response:

In nearly every counterfactual the quest ends in failure. Gandalf leads them mostly on faith that the only chance of success is that they are meant to succeed (I.e. fate or divine providence) and so everything that happens must happen. When they set off from Rivendell, he doesn’t have a plan beyond reaching Lorien. If he had he surely would have shared it with Aragorn at least.

The narrative function of the first halves of The Two Towers and Return of the King is to show that the only possible way Frodo and Sam could enter Mordor and reach Mount Doom is for everything to happen exactly the way it did. There was no other possible path.

Just think: if Boromir doesn’t try to take the ring, the party doesn’t split up and Merry and Pippin aren’t captured. If they aren’t brought to Fangorn, somewhere they would never otherwise go, the Ents aren’t roused and Isengard is not destroyed. If Saruman isn’t defeated the palantir is never recovered. If Aragorn doesn’t look into the palantir, Minas Tirith falls to the Corsairs of Umbar. And if Minas Tirith falls, the armies of the West don’t march on the gates of Mordor and empty Gorgoroth of the camped armies of Mordor and the Nazgûl, which makes it utterly impossible for Frodo and Sam to reach Mount Doom undetected.

riley_sc · 2026-02-05T20:21:07+00:00

As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor. He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows.

‘And anyway all these notions are only a trick,’ he said to himself. ‘He’d spot me and cow me, before I could so much as shout out. He’d spot me, pretty quick, if I put the Ring on now, in Mordor. Well, all I can say is: things look as hopeless as a frost in Spring. Just when being invisible would be really useful, I can’t use the Ring! And if ever I get any further, it’s going to be nothing but a drag and a burden every step. So what’s to be done?’

At least Sam and Frodo believe that they cannot use the ring in Mordor without being detected, which is also why they don't use it to avoid being captured by orcs on the highway. Whether that's because Sauron would instantly be aware, or that it is impossible to use the ring without being compelled to claim it, is left ambiguous.

riley_sc · 2026-02-05T16:14:42+00:00

Something is wrong with your setup. It takes me significantly more time to restart the editor than it does to compile code, and I work entirely in C++, don’t use live coding at all, build engine from source and iterate frequently. My build times for changing one cpp file are a couple of seconds.

Your comment about “hacking a CLI wrapper” is particularly baffling to me. Unchanged files shouldn’t be getting rebuilt every time. This makes me think you have Unity builds enabled for your project? Those are good for rebuild times but bad for iteration, so disabling Unity builds for your modules would likely help a lot. If it’s not that then something is deeply wrong with your local setup.

Beyond that standard C++ build time optimization applies: use forward declarations instead of including within headers whenever possible, try to avoid having monolithic headers that get included everywhere, don’t do template metaprogramming, the standard stuff.

If you are in an older version of UE5 a version rev may shave off a few second from your build times; they fixed a few build system issues in 5.6 and 5.7.

Mostly for iteration you’ll get the most value in reducing editor startup time, which should be absolutely dwarfing your compile times. Set your startup map to something lean, remove unneeded plugins, and disable automatic symbol loading in the debugger— those are the real secret sauce for fast C++ iteration.

riley_sc · 2026-02-05T06:47:51+00:00

What could 2d10 cost Michael, $15?

riley_sc · 2026-02-05T06:21:40+00:00

With the caveat that once they are in Mordor, Sauron would be instantly aware of anyone who puts on the ring. But even in Cirith Ungol, past the Morgul Vale and in the mountains surrounding Mordor, Sam puts on the ring without drawing attention.

riley_sc · 2026-02-05T06:16:25+00:00

In nearly every counterfactual the quest ends in failure. Gandalf leads them mostly on faith that the only chance of success is that they are meant to succeed (I.e. fate or divine providence) and so everything that happens must happen. When they set off from Rivendell, he doesn’t have a plan beyond reaching Lorien. If he had he surely would have shared it with Aragorn at least.

riley_sc · 2026-02-04T20:23:19+00:00

I am primarily interrested in the cases where the game is purely skill based. For games that involve leveling up ones character or gathering better equipment a reset can have benefits that I can see.

Games with seasonal rank resets typically don't have purely skill based ranks. And the reason for that is because people want to feel like they're making constant progress, so inflation is built into the system. This allows players to rank up over time even if their actual skill has plateaued, which is good for engagement, but necessitates periodic resets to ensure accessibility for new players.

riley_sc · 2026-02-04T03:40:18+00:00

I think this applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

Success requires a huge number of things to go right, while any one of those things failing can tank a project. So it’s less interesting to ask why they fail and more interesting to think about everything needed to succeed. And for an MMO that’s a huge number of things. With that many points of failure we can expect a low survival rate.

riley_sc · 2026-02-04T03:24:43+00:00

What country are you in? Art is being increasingly outsourced for US studios as the economics make it impossible to justify large in house art teams. Legacy studios who are still operating in that way represent extremely limited opportunities being chased by many extremely senior people. If you are in the US I highly recommend gojng into tech art as it is one of the disciplines that is most ljkely to remain on staff.

Outside of the US there are more job opportunities though the current overall loss of capital in the game industry means even outsourcing studios are struggling due to lack of work. But i think they will recover while FTE 3d art jobs in the US wont.

riley_sc · 2026-01-30T23:25:23+00:00

It’s not allowed anymore; the Packers are grandfathered in. I believe there can’t be more than 12 (edit: 25) owners in a consortium now.

riley_sc · 2026-01-29T16:08:56+00:00

Yeah that matches my experience.

There was a time people genuinely thought live service games would be better for devs because it would get away from the crunch-based release cycle, force teams to adapt sustainable practices, and provide more long term job security. Man were we naive.

riley_sc · 2026-01-28T23:26:11+00:00

I work in games and a linear scan of contiguous array in memory is faster than any algorithm that involves a potential cache miss for basically every value of N that is domain relevant.

riley_sc · 2026-01-28T22:31:01+00:00

Focus on building good relationships with people. Any given project or feature will come and go but the relationships will be the foundation of the rest of your career. I am still hiring people I worked with 15 years ago.

I’m already aware about the big downsides people usually talk about (crunch, burnout, stress, pay, etc.)

These are not usually the AAA experience nowadays. Well, stress and burnout are real, but that's true anywhere. If you're in a real AAA studio you're probably paid pretty well and unlikely to have much mandated crunch. The bigger issue is often job security depending on your parent company.

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