Oh, right. 🤣 WAIT HE updated it with a longer one!

deleted by creator

Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).

Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.

I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…

Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?

This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.

for those not from the US, I highly recommend watching the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes” to get a better understanding of how absolutely dogshit the US is for anyone without a car.

Not only is public transit non-existent… you are nearly constantly under threat of being hit by a car as a pedestrian - as things like sidewalks, street crossing safe areas, etc. are all spotty at best… not to mention how trucks and SUVs now are bigger than ever so chances are higher than they’ve ever been before that you won’t be seen before being run over.

“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”

The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.

Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.

Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.

Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.

Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.

I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.

Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.

And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…

They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.

And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.

This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”

Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.

I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.

Said this in another thread :

First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.

Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…

So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.

Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.

I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.

This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.

For some reason I imagine that scene in of one of the first few episodes of the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, when they wade into the water near the exploded reactor and their flashlights just immediately die due to the massive amount of radiation and the episode ends in darkness with the crew’s Geiger counters just going absolute ape-shit sounding like a singular continuous tone.

No, the people who deserved it are the ones at the top with garages full of supercars and fleets of private yachts. The Bobby Koticks, the Don Mattricks, etc.

The ones who I guarantee you are NOT suffering or losing their livelihoods.

The tens of thousands of devs who got into making video games because of their deep love of them… devs who have worked countless hours and crunched over the holidays while missing out on sleep, family events and more all just because management won’t plan, can’t stop chasing trends and pivoting the project, and because they fired 10% of the team last quarter to boost the share price by $0.02.

The devs didn’t deserve any of that.

They don’t deserve to lose their jobs right after some game ships and it turns out no one wants to pay $70 plus micro transactions shoved in their faces every other round between matches.

AAA gaming is broken and many of my peers from that industry seem to be in a bad spot now at no fault of their own… but their boss’s boss’s bosses who keep steering the ship into rocks are the ones you should be throwing rotten produce at.

They should make it so you can find chaos emeralds and turn into super or maybe even “hyper” sonic to go double or triple the speed

And as Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, George Carlin’s character ensured Bill & Ted were able to meet and bring Socrates to their school for their presentation to ensure their success.

GameCube³

Is this the non-American cover? As an old Yankee, I may be forgetting a few things, but I remember the corner art (specifically the “only for” bit) looking different.

Edit: yep this is the one I remember :

https://images.nintendolife.com/b056f83e2b311/us.900x.jpg

Again, it’s a snowball effect.

Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…

They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.

The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.

Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…

Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.

I always go back to one of my favorite CollegeHumor vids literally making fun of that. 🤣

…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.

And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.

Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.

Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.

This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.

All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.

All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

No. Don’t use the TV’s built in “smart functionality.”

In fact, I would recommend blocking it from the internet altogether.

In my experience “TV software updates” never improve any functionality… they use them for better analytics and at worst, literally pushing ads.

Buy a dedicated smart device and use that for your streaming.

Specifically I recommend buying an NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019 model (the latest).

You can get them at any Best Buy or Bezos store.

Also, while we are at it, general tip for everyone here - don’t use WiFi if you can. Use the Shield’s gigabit wired Ethernet port. Specifically means you’ll get a more stable signal from whatever Plex server you are using. I personally experience zero buffering on 4K DolbyVision video with DTS-HD MA 7.1 / ATMOS audio for anything I watch on Plex.

Just so folks know, almost every single one of the TV companies who make TVs that DO have an Ethernet port cheap out and only put in a 10/100 Ethernet port… NOT an actual gigabit 10/100/1000 Ethernet port.