DizzyDoo

Not only did I say that but I also gave the specific Ubuntu version as well!

If the parent's main point is that indie game developers, on average, don't make tons of money, he's right: https://twitter.com/GreyAlien/status/1227557601786912769

I did? Both on the store page and in my email replies. Most people were understanding though some weren't.

However, those dollars you seem anxious I don't give up still didn't really cover the time investment of dealing with Linux - not just the support requests, but getting the build environment setup and performing the testing and all of that.

For reference, the game in question did ~75% of units sold on Windows, ~25% on Mac, and some fraction of a percent on Linux. If I hadn't of released on Ubuntu I would have probably lost less $1000, gross.

I suppose I can only speak for myself but I don't see that as an attractive option, and what you're describing is mostly what I did do for the game release I mentioned.

If I sell on Windows (I do) and Mac (I do) then I have to support a certain range of OS versions and ongoing OS releases - even if that means (for example) I have to figure out how to 'notarise' a Mac executable so that a user doesn't have a big scary Security Warning pop-up. Not ideal, but fine. The challenge with Linux is that I would have to communicate against expectations - that I would have to make it clear that when I 'support Linux' it looks different to the support for Windows or Mac. I do genuinely think that 99% of Linux people get this, it's just the 1% that's maybe less forgiving of different standards.

For me, just personally and selfishly, passing the buck to Photon or Wine is an easier sell for my business.

I published my first Steam game on Linux as well as Windows and MacOS, but I don't think I'll do it again because for a single person developer (as indie as it gets) the time spent supporting Linux doesn't pay off. Within days of publishing my game I had support request emails that said "so I'm on this specific Red Hat version, with this oddball graphics driver and three monitors and full-screen doesn't work with your game properly". As I only officially supported Ubuntu I couldn't really help each exotic (to me) setup that came into my email inbox, and there was more than a few. Which I still think is a shame.

But that was five years ago. I'm pretty sure Photon supports my Windows builds on Linux better than I was ever able to do with the native executables, and at least there's that.

For the indie computer games I make I work with a number of localisation freelancers and it's fantastic to see the creativity of people who love games and love language. My current game[0] for instance is a game with lots of made up monsters in it, that have their own made-up English names - and it's often the appropriate thing to do to create different monster names per-language that fit with their designs.

Obviously necessary for Korean/Japanese/other non-latin alphabet languages, but my Spanish localiser does a fantastic job in this too. For example: Hellion -> Infernodrilo, Grondomut -> Cienomello, Gastroquin -> Explosapo. No, they're not direct translations (if that were even possible) but they fit with the visual design of the creatures.

There's a lot of trust you have to have with the people who make sure a creative product retains meaning and expression in another region and language, but also is adapted where it needs to. It's also a lot of fun to see something I made enjoyed by people I wouldn't ordinarily be able to communicate with. Irreplaceable indeed!

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...

I've been sitting in an Ikea Marcus (not the leather one) every work day since 2016 and I find it very uncomfortable. I like the mesh back but I'm 6'2 and find it just too rigid for me. I went and tried a few cheapo Staples chairs out but didn't love them, so I think the Marcus beats those out, but I'm saving up for a more expensive chair that gives me more customisation.

About the headrest: how tall are you, and does the Atlas headrest raise up to support your head proper? I'm tall and I like a headrest on my chair, but I would prefer not to have a headrest if it only came up to the top of my neck when I'm sitting up straight.

My poor 2015 MacBook Air with FireFox went full 100% CPU on this page, I think it's the gifs.

I think Factorio itself actually runs better on this laptop than that Factorio blog post does.

What about creating music so that the people who enjoy it will enjoy it? I don't create music but I appreciate the bands and songwriters that make the stuff I really like. That's not about self-validation for you, the author, that's about making someone else's life a little better.

No, Stripe take their cut and the tax implications are down to the seller. However! They did recently acquire TaxJar (https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar) so I imagine things will become easier in this regard, reporting and filing, soon.

Unreal actually already has an automatic LOD creation system (https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/WorkingWithContent/...), and there are quite a number of 3d Content middleware solutions that run this sort of mesh reduction processes. In one sense Nanite isn't anything brand new, but what is really exciting about it is that it operates from the sculpt downwards. As in, you import from zbrush raw, with the highest raw textures, and everything is automatically handled by the engine itself, in such a way that the LOD transitions are really hard to spot.

From what I've seen on Twitter, it looks like it really delivers, even in its early stage: https://twitter.com/IonizedGames/status/1397636481913610241

I think what Enginerrrd is calling psychotic is that there's no way to, as you say, "make someone part of the same tribe" without employing a great deal of force to coerce (and crush) people.

I heard pastor/theologian John Piper recently say something like (this is my paraphrase): "The only way I can possibly be totally satisfied for an eternity, is in the presence of the infinitely good God." One of the biggest influences on my imagination in this regard has been NT Wright's focus on 'the new heavens and the new earth' - the redemption and bringing together of both - I haven't read Alcorn on this but I imagine there's a shared focus on the Bodily reality of things.

Thanks for looking that up for me! It was something I had been thinking about.

How much better is the cost per payment for one of Stripe's big customers? It's 2.9% + $0.30 for most, but if a company is doing, like Postmates are, millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars in sales volume, what sort of 'preferred' rates do they receive from Stripe?

What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year? I'd be interested on hearing a range of different plans; creative, personal, business, technical and so on.

An a full-time indie game developer what I find fascinating is that Steam do the opposite of this. The more you make, the less you pay Steam, but the thresholds are in the millions. If you make more than $50 million then Steam take 20% not 30%. I understand the reasoning; Steam want to keep some of the big publishers like Rockstar Games, PUBG Corp and EA happy and not so tempted to move to their own platform (or to Epic).

But if you're a developer who isn't making more than $50 million (like me!) you end up paying more than the enormous corporations. Unless you're on the App Store, where it's the opposite. It's funny how the focus is different here.

What cebert is saying, and what I absolutely agree with, is that if the copy on the website itself contains bad or clumsy English, then I'm not going to explore the samples themselves.

I have to perform a few double-takes as I read the site to try and parse the meaning out. I did duck into the samples themselves, and it's much the same there as well.

Oh no! That's awful. I'm still on Windows 7 and I moved to a Logitech keyboard that I prefer - but while I don't think I'm going to try any other Razer products in the future I'm aware many other hardware companies do this sort of thing as well.

A few years ago, I made the mistake of installing the utility software that came with my new Razor keyboard - I thought it was some special driver thing - and I had to make a new account and sign in? It's a keyboard.

A semi-related question; what is the current 'correct way' to package up Python projects and all their dependencies as native executables for Windows/OSX/Linux? I haven't done any desktop Python since 2.5 and then it was a fiddly process of 'freezing' exe's, is that still the recommended way with Python 3?

I know I watch YouTube because there's a handful of specific channels whose content I really enjoy, and those channels are based on YouTube primarily because their audience - or potential audience - is there. That sort of established, two-way relationship is weighty enough to be difficult to shift.

Absolutely. One more additional thing: the latest back-track has been the URP-is-not-a-standalone-package anymore, URP package versions going forward are going to be tied to a specific Editor version. I imagine this is going to make the ability to backport features and bug fixes incredibly difficult because the dependencies are going to be so tightly enmeshed.

I mean, I've been watching this unfold over multiple years, and I fully expect this to continue over the next two at the very least, and it applies across every slice of the engine that I'm aware of, and some that I'm not intimately familiar with (I hear second-hand that networking is somehow in a worse state?)

I guess everyone has different tolerances for what may technically be a 'temporary issue.' Yes, I have no doubt that all this engineering will lead to a better, more stable Unity, but for right now I actually have to somehow write real software and ship something to paying customers.

I really, really wish it did.

Here's just one concrete example: real-time point-light shadows in the Universal Render Pipeline. URP is the new 'default' way of rendering, the old renderer is being phased out, this is the new way of doing things - as you say; technical debt as they re-engineer. But how horrid has this process of eliminating technical debt been? You've got Unity proudly announcing that URP was 'production ready' in February 2019, but you still can't have a point-light cast real-time shadows. Currently that (let's face it, really basic) feature is planned for Unity 2020.2, which is still in alpha, but even if you download the alpha you can't access that feature yet, and they've announced they're not going to backport it, so bad luck if you're using 2019 or even 2020.1 for your game.

It's actually making me a bit sad to go into detail on what watching the URP fiasco, so I'll spare any other examples involving post-processing stacks, or 'camera stacking', or Ambient Occlusion, or...

Like some others who are commenting, I use Unity for my job every day, and it's not been a great experience these last few years, each 'part' (graphics pipelines, documentation, Editor and tooling, and so on) has been steadily deteriorating over the versions. This article from Garry (from Garry's Mod, Rust and so on) from earlier in the year is still all accurate: https://garry.tv/unity-2020

Sadly, I wonder how much the last few years of very obviously aiming at Going Public has led the company and Unity as a software to this state. When the forums are full of "what is going on with Unity" threads and the company blog is full of "we've bought this cloud company" and "we're investing in AR for automative engineering", something isn't matching up.

Sometimes using less-than-the-best tools directly leads to better products with smoother development cycles. I'm an indie games developer and I develop on a machine that is the 'Minimum Hardware Requirements' for my games. So, if you visit the Steam page for my current game, the Minimum Requirements are just the specs of my computer, which would be considered mid-range when I built it in 2016, and now is very underpowered.

The plus-side to all of this is I know my game runs well on lower spec hardware. There's a confidence that I have that it'll perform decently on 99% of computers and laptops/macbooks. If something runs slowly then I know I can't fudge things in the release build by assuming/hoping it'll run okay on the majority of computres, but I also know that if I do need to optimise something then it's not premature, unnecessary optimisation, which helps me use my time properly.

Surely the current SRP situation is exactly the reason. It's a bit of a mess right now with many basic features missing, like the absence of Ambient Occlusion out-of-the-box with URP.

Gorillaz's recent success this year with their Song Machine project has, I think, largely been because their recent songs have been some of the best material they've ever produced. Personal opinions vary, of course, but their four main releases this year have all been excellent and are probably among my favourite tracks of theirs.