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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).

    It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:

    similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time

    The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.

    On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.

    What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.


  • But the game is “finished”. there is no need for alterations.

    If only that was the case. But there is no chance a game built for windows 95 could run unaltered on an android phone. Things like the rendering systems, input handling, and sound output will need to be adapted to work on a new platform.


  • You could, but there isn’t much benefit. The purpose of all that extra information is generally to make the program easier to understand for a human. The computer doesn’t need any of it, that’s why it’s not preserved in compilation. So it is possible to automatically translate assembly to C++, but the resulting program would not be much (if any) easier for a human to understand and work with.

    To give a bad analogy, imagine some driving directions: turn left at 9th street, enter the highway at ramp 36, go right when you’re past the burger king, etc. These are translated into physical control inputs by the driver to actually take the car to its destination. Now we could look at the driver’s physical inputs and turn that back into a written list of instructions: turn the wheel left 70 degrees, turn it right 70 degrees, push the gas for 10 seconds, and so on.

    All the street name references are now gone. There are no abstracted instructions like “enter the highway” or even “take the second left.” It would be quite difficult for a person to look at these instructions and figure out the trip’s destination. Let alone make some alterations to it because there is roadwork along the way and a detour is needed.



  • Fun quote from an interview with Chris Sawyer:

    Latterly the machine code came back to haunt us when the decision was made to re-launch the original game on mobile platforms as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic a few years ago, and it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.










  • Reddit would become just another instance with no API control

    Being that large of an instance gives a lot of api control all by itself. Theoretically Chrome is just another browser and member of WHATWG. in practice, if they implement something it immediately becomes a de facto standard. Reddit would be the same.

    I wouldn’t bet on Huffman’s exit doing anything of consequence either. Reddit is now under the control of investors who want a return. One way or another, monetisation of users will increase.