HeyListenWatchOut

  • 0 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Steam has the best UIEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

    This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :

    Here’s that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB… (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won’t allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :

    It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.

    Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.

  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Steam has the best UIEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.

    My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.

    When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.

    …But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.

    I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can’t decode them for some reason.

    Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅

  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoGreentext@sh.itjust.works•Anon expects moreEnglish
    23·
    1 month ago

    Former game studio guy who got out and into general software dev and doubled his pay back in like 2012 and haven’t looked back…

    This is correct… that plus a couple other things :

    1. Western game studios have ZERO qualms burning through people because they believe an endless fresh crop of 20-somethings can be brought in to burn out by forcing 96-hr work weeks for garbage pay

    2. Even many of the “once-great-studios” got rid of / severely reduced the bonuses / profit-sharing you used to get when a game was successful and just lay people off or close studios right after the games ship (even when they’re “successful…”) which means if you ever want to be a home owner, or have time to set aside for a family, or just not be terrified you’re going to be financially ruined… you’re kinda screwed.

    So what this means you’ve got a bunch of people who largely have ZERO experience on each project, and are in survival mode, learning from mistakes that otherwise experienced devs would help avoid as they grew, usually making sequels to popular games that are worse than their previous entries - at least as far as tech goes (see Far Cry series where they show the tech used in FC2 vs newer entries), and when it’s done, they are laid off or have their studio shut down and then have to struggle amongst a now even more competitive job market to find another position somewhere else… or they bounce… like I did.

    The only outliers (besides tiny indie devs hoping to make a hit) among the major game companies are based outside the U.S. along with only a handful of studios in the U.S. (whose games I guarantee you love) and - surprise surprise - when you look at their teams… they’re a bunch of guys in their 50s and up who’ve been making games since the 90s and aren’t being let go after each project ships or being asked to stay at the office and work over the weekend until Sunday at 3am for the entire 4th quarter of the year.

  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•An ad giant wants to control your next TV’s OSEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    Not good enough. Any OTA updates your TV can get over the web will eventually be trying to circumvent your IP blacklists to shove in any ad-riddled garbage they can.

    Literally just blacklist your TV’s MAC address, and use a dedicated set top box of some kind to avoid this shit. My current choice is my NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019, which I installed a 3rd party WOLF launcher (there’s also F-Launcher) and turned off auto-updates so I could avoid NVIDIA and Google doing the same.

    At some point, I will probably need to switch to a NUC or other HTPC with some flavor of Linux on it, as eventually the Shield may succumb to this shit as well.