> Seems to be something gamedevs are not commonly testing, and perhaps difficult to defend against when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.
> when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
> I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows.
Not exactly a repeatable testing framework, that.
> You seem to be trying really hard.
I almost strained a typing finger! /s lol
> Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
All the OSes seem to suffer from it similarly. More likely an issue that even the cross-platform graphics APIs rely heavily on shared memory buffers and most games depend on code written in languages which aren't strictly memory safe. Sharing a memory buffer between CPU and GPU (or even just multiple CPU cores) is quite difficult to do safely under all possible circumstances without proper language support.
Perhaps you're not a software developer. Most devs understand that there's a big difference between "it worked for me a few times on my development workstation" and "it's routinely tested in all possible configurations under a variety of circumstances as part of a test harness or CI/CD process".
In fairness to game devs, alt-tab'ing out of a running game would be a challenge for many testing frameworks as it's not something you can do at compile time, requires running the game for a period of time (CI servers don't typically have GPUs), requires some sort of keyboard/mouse automation, and interaction with the underlying OS in addition to the game.
Issues which aren't added to some sort of test suite/CI tend to creep back in to codebases. Especially rapidly developed codebases like games. And threading issues are notoriously challenging to reproduce. Hopefully that helps you understand the difference.
Many game devs develop on windows and for good reason in that most of their customer base are there, plus the stability of drivers there.
Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required, and with little time to set up testing frameworks because as you said they're hard to test.
I would say most game devs. That doesn't change a thing I've said.
> plus the stability of drivers there
Driver code for Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all shared across Windows and Linux these days. Have been for years. AMD's even made a point of pulling improvements from the Linux drivers back into the Windows drivers.
> Your assumption of what you've been taught in compsci circles with many resources at their disposal does not hold up in places in which fast iterations are required
I have developed games. I write libraries useful for gamedev. Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI. Contrary to your opinion, version control and CI help to iterate faster with greater confidence, and don't require lots of resources, just a GitHub account and 5 minutes.
> Every game developer I know uses version control and most use CI.
Funny because I know game developers who don't use CI. And I've developed games too. It's not as universal as you claim it to be. It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
I'm sure they're out there. A bit like publicly declaring you drive without wearing a seatbelt.
> It was never about arguing the effectiveness of CI.
The original point was that alt-tab'ing out of a game can result in unexpected behavior on any OS. Shared memory buffers in graphics APIs are the most likely culprit. And all graphics APIs on all OSes use them. I'm still not sure what exactly you're trying to argue about that.
This is called marketing and pushing a brand. It's nothing new.
It could even be faked. There was a clothing brand who said their stuff was all hand made, artisanal, only to be found out they sent their stuff to China to make. Now the Chinese workers are ranting about getting credit for their quality work.
It's why I think it's a sign of maturity to be able to get past all the narratives and spin to a product, all the while living less materialistically.
As humans, we appreciate also the process in making things, not just the end result. For art this is especially more important than for everyday, for practical use products. The more one knows about a specific kind of art and can relate to the experience of making such art, the more they are usually interested in parts of the process because the more information they can extract about the piece of art. That also often gives new perspectives in the art piece itself. Art (and many other things) is much about contextualizing. Contextualizing an art piece to a specific process of making it or a specific era that was made may help notice details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Perception is not neutral and cannot be, and art appreciation even less.
Yes it is true that some may try to trick people with fake information about the process of producing something, but that does not mean that the reason people may be interested in the process itself is marketing. It is part of the human condition and experience imo that some may try to take advantage of, but is important otherwise.
It depends what we are talking about. Are we talking about investors in a company? Or about people going to a concert? I am talking about stuff like the latter, mostly.
All else being equal, most people prefer to own things that are valuable and exclusive to things that are cheap and mass produced, and the fact that care and effort has been put into making something affects the perceived value of the product.
This is why affects like 'limited run', 'hand-made', 'artisanal' tend to imply a higher price than the equivalent temu slop.
I was in Uzbekistan one time. A granny sold a scarf to my mum. "My daughter made this. Hand made." A week later in Turkey, we found the same scarf on the street. "Made in China!" the shopkeeper said.
In Germany things are frequently labelled "Hausgemacht" or "housemade" which is designed to make you think "homemade", but actually, any kind of building is a "Haus".
I kind of disagree. The more I learn about manufacturing and crafts, the more I appreciate made objects. I used to skip old furniture in museums and now I look as close as I am allowed to. Same with art, cars, typewriters and most machines.
Considering things at face value is wasting a good opportunity to truly appreciate what’s in front of you. I think that being more discerning makes you more mindful about the things you surround yourself with. That might mean buying less junk, and loving what you end up buying.
I'm talking about the practicalities though. For example I'd really like my smartphones to be long lasting and reliable such that I only have to replace every 10 years. All that Apple marketing isn't convincing me to buy their iphones knowing that I'm going to be locked in.
Generally, the majority of humanity is too tied up in their personal troubles to think deeply about their products. So the best thing is to accept the narrative of the marketing of the best marketed product, then deviate comparisons from there.
Apple phones are typically fully supported supported for 7ish years, and security updates for longer. For example the iPhone 6s, a ten year old phone, still received security updates this fall.
My 6 year old iPhone 11 is still trucking along fine. I did opt for a new battery recently, but the old battery was still at 78%. Quite frankly, its pretty incredible that a device that lives in my pocket, has been frozen and exposed to extreme heat, has gotten wet, and is probable my most used possession is running great, and probably will be supported by the manufacturer for another 4 years.
Lock in seems exaggerated to me, but if that's what worries you, then the Fairphone is promising a decade of support, and Samsung is offering 7 years now on the s24.
> Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out of business and jobs.
Unfortunately technology has done this for centuries now, and everyone may as well quit whining get used to it, because it's not going to change. The market can "stay irrational" longer than they can afford to complain.
$50 is exaggerating it nowadays. With async trade you could buy a single merchant tab to gain access to trade (stuff sells pretty quick with async trade!), and maybe a currency and scarab tab for the bare minimum convenience. Around $20 and you've got yourself a meaty beast of a game.
Keep posting. Comments like yours bring balance to the linux ideologue that everything's all fine and dandy. We need some truth in this.
The last thing we should want is to have an innocent, how-to-pay-rent-on-his-mind, game dev develop for linux thinking it's good only to find out there's a ton more bugs to solve (and having no help for solving them) for 0.01% of his customer base.
I have a collection in my Steam library labelled 'Broken', where I group games which didn't run when I tried them. So far it contains 6 games of the 656 I own.
My mother uses Windows 11 and it's absolute misery. I had the eID stuff working under Firefox, then one day it just stopped working. After a lot of flailing about I couldn't get it working again and I eventually caved and installed Chrome. Then it worked for a few months and it stopped working again. Now I have her use Edge for eID stuff, but if that fails I'm just gonna get her a System 76 laptop with Linux Mint because it Just Works.
> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
If you think game devs are drinking koolaid, do note that there's always loud minority of linux advocates on forums like these, saying 'it works' and when expanding further it turns out they had to do a ton of tweaking and setup. Just look at the comments on getting Overwatch2 to work on linux for an example.
Fact of the matter is most of the game dev's audience is on windows, and for a time it had good tools/documentation for graphics debugging as well. That momentum carried over. It made practical sense to have main development be on windows.
The industry is failing, and there is still plenty of market to grow. Ubisoft and Capcom have realized this, others can as well. It makes no sense to leave 19% of the market on the table. It isn't 2006 anymore.
In world history, it's a common case that the number 1 is always inclined to stay at number 1 while beating down would-be contenders.
China has always been insular, and they don't think about space glories that much at the moment. It would take a couple more generations for them to care about something like that.
"Glory" can exist without comparing yourself to others. When they built the three-gorges dam they probably weren't thinking "our dam is better than those American dams". It's just impressive in its own right
They can be working on going to space without constantly bringing out the proverbial measuring tape to compare themselves to the US.
I'm not totally in the loop with the Chinese zeitgeist, so my post was a genuine question. Maybe they are comparing, maybe not. Both seem sensible reactions
Well if anything the general chinese working culture is to keep your head down and work diligently. If they do have to compare it's because of how connected everything is nowadays.
The US comparatively does boast a lot more that it's a bit of a meme on chinese social media.
I'm not sure if you even read the article nor his books, and I disagree with your interpretation of his actions because they have very extravagant presumptions, judging from your comments.
I don't think he was afraid. I think he mapped out his late age future, and wanted to fast forward to what his next adventure even in post-death while leaving his last touches on the world a good one. Leaving the world a better place than when he started, as they say.
> I’m less concerned about what was in his head than the message that he sends.
As quoted from the article: Daniel Kahneman did not want to make a statement or start a debate. "I am not ashamed of my decision," he wrote, "but I don't want it to be discussed publicly either."
Yes, presumptions is all of have, it is all we have of anyone since we cannot get inside their heads. But his actions do reveal something, about which I can make assumptions. Even a hermit is known to be a hermit, so he is not ever alone in his hermitage. So he was even a fool thinking his actions would not be debated.
I read a bit about him after I read the article. He was a behavioral economist and he treated his life like a piece of capital. This is why I do not want economists running the world. And I also saw he had a lot of trauma in his life.
His thoughts: "Predicted utility is the predicted experienced utility for a future experience."
Did he see no predicted utility in his life? Should we adapt this to judge others lives or our own? Are we as great reasoners than him? But what kind of fool tries to measure, tries to quantify, happiness! Economics is not a science, and behavioral economics is just a cold psychology.
He evens seems not to be able to live up to his own words: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."
But thank you for making me read more about him. It seems even his friends thought he was a pessimist, and who can blame him living through the holocaust.
Interesting that his son had schizophrenia, I have Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and think this is why it runs in my family. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26198764/)
I'd like to present a different perspective, abeit slightly radical.
I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums).
If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something.
You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering.
Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't.
Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?
I think what you're saying is that society would benefit from a kind of lottery system that made it easy for people to earn a sizable amount of money randomly, without any sort of gatekeeping?
I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up.
Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy?
> however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
I can guarantee you any gamedev worth his salt will have used alt-tab at some point in the game's development on windows. It's an incredibly common hotkey to use, and the devs very likely have multiple ides, notepads, image editing software running concurrently. You seem to be trying really hard.
> when a game is directly interacting with the GPU.
Most devs are using cross platform graphics APIs. OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan. Alt-tab breaking is likely an OS issue.
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