badsectoracula

I'm saying nothing, i posted the link of the Wine developers claim for why not accepting contributions by ReactOS developers since the post i replied to wrote that ReactOS contributed to Wine.

No, the Wine developers refuse to accept contributions from ReactOS developers or even people who have seen ReactOS code[0]. So any improvements go one way only.

[0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide... (last "Don't" entry)

Someone else mentioned Lazarus, though that is Object/Free Pascal, not C/C++. The API is based on VCL for Delphi which was designed for the Windows API and even though Lazarus is cross-platform and can use multiple backends (actually i've been playing with writing a FLTK backend[0], though it is in primitive stages and FLTK doesn't really like exposing much of its guts), the API has some windows-isms (e.g. colors are 4 bytes where one byte is used a special marker to indicate system colors, just like in Windows) and the backends even have to implement a small subset of the Windows API to work :-P.

An alternative in C++ would be wxWidgets which has some (light) MFC inspirations, again feeling somewhat Windowsy though not full-on MFC/Win32 since from the beginning it had to work with X Windows / Motif in addition to Win32 (and AFAIK, the Motif backend still works).

Another alternative, even more lightweight would be the aforementioned FLTK. FLTK is also designed to be statically linked with your program (though it can be linked dynamically too if you want) so it only relies on common system libraries (as an example the screenshot in [0] relies only on the C library, the C++ library -because it is needed by FLTK and it is possible to also statically link to that too- and common X11 libraries like libX11, libXft, etc that existed on any Linux desktop system for decades now -- FLTK can also support Wayland, though i haven't tested that).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png

FWIW stable-diffusion.cpp[0] (which implements a lot more than just stable diffusion, despite the name) is already a MIT licensed C++ library.

[0] https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp/

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with money and plenty to do with the same reasons as people who preserve Commodore 64s, Amigas and DOS and Win9x PCs.

I haven't tried it but i saw this a few days ago: https://github.com/crazii/MINGW-toolchains-w9x

In this quote you'd be the one being inactive, not the oppressed nor the oppressor.

> The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues

TBH despite what it claims, to me it sounds like a political statement by itself.

(also it is usually the developers of a language -or other project- being judged about their actions/beliefs, not the languages/projects themselves :-P)

There is also VA which provides deep (though not pure) blacks, clear text and decent response time though you get some slight smearing on high contrast edges.

Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.

I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_3037/2002

Yeah, exactly that :-)

More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).

People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.

> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined

There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.

This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.

IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.

(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1pfl6os/zi...

99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.

The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190

Sorry but that makes no sense, there is nothing in "Microsoft's kingdom" here, Wine -as you certainly know- is independent. The most Microsoft can do is change the API in backwards incompatible ways - but that'd affect Windows too, so there is little incentive to do that (and attempts such as Metro/UWP/etc to change the core ways of working with Windows didn't prove popular with most gamedevs).

And even if Microsoft does that, it isn't any different than the 2394923th time a library breaks its API on Linux - Linux as an operating system isn't some monolithic project, it is a combination of hundreds of separate projects that for the most part work together like -sometimes misshapen- bricks on a wall. Wine/Proton is just another of those bricks (and history has shown that it tends to be among the more stable ones).

And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P

I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree. By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia much (and it wasn't that long ago).

Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).

> the entire Unity engine set of games written in garbage-collected C#, including a freaking BAFTA winner in Outer Wilds.

Some of those games (though not all of them, unfortunately) try to work around C#'s garbage collector for performance reasons using essentially adhoc memory allocators via object pools and similar approaches. This is probably what this part...

--- And if you ever do think about these, it’s usually because you are trying to do something performance-oriented and you have to pretend you are managing your own memory. It is common for many games that have been written with garbage collected languages to try to get around the inadequacies of not being able to manage your own memory ---

...is referring to.

> Casey, meanwhile, has worked on a low-level game development video series for a decade and... never actually shipped a game?

These videos are all around 90-120 minutes long, each posted with gaps between them since the previous (my guess is whenever Casey had time) and the purpose and content of these videos is pedagogical so he spends time explaining what he does - they aren't just screencasts of someone writing code.

If you combine the videos and assuming someone works on it 6h/day with workdays alone it'd take around 8-9 months to write whatever is written there but this also ignores the amount of time spent on explanations (which is the main focus of the videos).

So it is very misleading to use the series as some sort of measure for what it'd take Casey (or anyone else, really) to make a game using "low level" development.

The file format and APIs used are irrelevant as long as the games work. The games work and that is all that matter.

Imagine in R2 you ask it to write a pong game in C using SDL, in R3 you ask it to write a CMakefile, in R4 you ask it to make the paddles red and green but then around R6 you want to modify the structure and you realize what a catastrophic mistake on your sanity cmake was, so you ask it to use premake for R3 instead so that R6 will only show how to update the premake file for that, wiping clean the existence of cmake (from the discussion and your project).

Isn't discussion editing a standard feature in chat interfaces? I've been using koboldcpp since i first tried LLMs (mainly because it is written in C++ and largely self-contained) and you can edit the entire discussion as a single text buffer, but even the example HTTP server for llama.cpp allows editing the discussion.

And yeah it can be useful for coding since you can edit the LLM's response to fix mistakes (and add minor features/tweaks to the code) and pretend it was correct from the get go instead of trying to roleplay with someone who makes mistakes you then have to correct :-P

This is far from common in practice and it is only applied sporadically. Something like allocating formatted strings for the HUD is IME much more common (and done in UE5/C++ too, so not even a C# forcing GC excuse).

> If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed.

CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and while the latter had a rough start because of technical issues, they both sold very well and were positively received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).

GOG also releases many new high production value games on day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of awards in recent times) was released on it the same day as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now, which also seems to be a high production value game with relatively well reception.

The only games missing are those by companies whose business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry with microtransactions (so they need the "protection" from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies that have people making decisions based on assumptions stuck in past decades.

> AFAIK game development is also more and more about avoiding dynamic allocation.

That might have been the case ~30 years ago on platforms like the Gameboy (PC games were already starting to use C++ and higher level frameworks) but certainly not today. Pretty much all modern game engines allocate and deallocate stuff all the time. UE5's core design with its UObject system relies on allocations pretty much everywhere (and even in cases where you do not have to use it, the existing APIs still force allocations anyway) and of course Unity using C# as a gameplay language means you get allocations all over the place too.

> The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup.

Heroic Launcher can download the game files for you and any dependencies, including Wine/Proton/etc. You basically install the launcher (can be available from your distro's repository), use your GOG login in the app and it shows your library. Then click install and it'll download the files locally and after that you play the game. The experience is more or less the same like in Steam, at least as far as downloading and playing games is concerned.

I normally download the offline installers and use them with UMU Launcher (which is Proton without Steam, mainly meant to be used as a backend for projects like Lutris, Heroic, etc but you can use it directly from the command-line) but i just tried Heroic Launcher and all i had to do was run it, enter my GOG login and after it downloaded my library info, i was able to download and play a game the same way as in Steam.

I'm not sure what official GOG Galaxy for Linux would add here TBH.

TBH Heroic Launcher isn't particularly hard to get. Just download and run the AppImage file from their site, login to your GOG account and it'll download any dependencies automatically.

It isn't any harder to use Heroic Launcher than it is to use Steam and some distros have both in their repositories.

This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong).

Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.

> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money

Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.

Xorg is still being under development, there is another fork in development too (XLibre) and you're in the comment thread for a project about a brand new X server written from scratch.

Usually things which are "no longer developed" do not have (at least) three implementations in development.

As someone else mentioned this is a reference to the Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall, most likely this music video[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs35t2xFqdU