Does anyone know if Embark are still using a lot of rust in their production games? They seem to be a very well funded studio (lots of employees, big fancy office, competes with other AAA FPS-games). I wonder if these experimental-sounding projects have given way to more classic tech in the churn of building games that are profitable.
According to the article, Rust is (or was) used in the kajiya renderer and in the "creative platform", not in their production games:
> Our Rust project has different requirements than a video game. It’s a platform that will enable everyone — not just professional game makers — to build new small interactive experiences.
The "creative platform" is now apparently available under wim.live (and has a twitter account called @createplaywim): https://wim.live/en/ - but the website only seems to play a video, I couldn't find any other functionality.
One obstacle is that at least one of the major console vendors prohibits using anything other than C++ plus their official compiler. So shipping on that platform using i.e. Rust, Swift, C# is currently against the rules. (Unity gets an out here since they compile C# down to C++ using IL2CPP.)
I expect some studios are just quietly breaking the rule and not telling anyone, but I'd be worried, personally.
People outside of the industry woudn't believe how it is to work with first party such as Sony, just to get SDK / api / documentation / forums access you need to have a very complicated process that involves public IP whitelisting etc..
Even NVidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service is like that. I tried to get a developer account and they wanted US$10,000 just to talk. It's not like getting an AWS account.
CrossCode was written in JS/HTML5 and was ported over to consoles just fine, though.
They mention stuff like "an interpreter which translates the [JavaScript] code but locks it up in a cage"¹, their presentation² mention JS interpreters and a JS AoT compiler, so I'm not really sure how they did it
My gut says Nintendo, because Microsoft doesn't give a shit what you use as long as you write for them, and Sony doesn't feel like they'd be that petty.
This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.
Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.
This. If your company is on two floors, you have a remote company anyway.
In my experience, it's not _entirely_ that simple though. For some people, chatting and video calls feel super awkward and makes them avoid communication. For other people, in-person is super awkward and has the same effect. There are a lot of nuances. I suspect RTO happens in companies run by the former type, and remote happens in companies run by the latter. As a CTO (did that for more than a decade), I always tried to give the team what they need. But even then, when in doubt, I suppose I often went for what I would need, if I was them.
In my experience, meeting people in person at the coffee machine or at lunch creates way more social cohesion compared to exclusively using mail, chat, and video conferencing.
This is important even in bigger organizations, because you want to catch errors early on. It helps if people bounce ideas off colleagues to see if there is anything they missed.
With people you barely know, if it is not your responsibility to comment, why bother? Better to get get some work done, then to read the chat all day.
Personally, I think about two days per week at the office is best for this purpose. But that may very from person to person.
I am in a big company >100k employees and I don't care what the other million people do, because obvious reasons. I work for remote clients and my team is scattered all over the world, so there's no high bandwidth input possible from them. My local colleagues work in totally unrelated projects so beyond a bit of fun there's no shared information needed or required. I still go in the office for this banter like once a week, but I guarantee you my productivity is like the half - there's always somebody walking around with a coffee interrupting me for some "high bandwidth information exchange". Morals? Please stop assuming everybody works like you.
I worked in the robotics lab at my university for a few months. That was a really nice way of making software more tangible. Seeing things move through physical space made it more real.
I miss working in robotics, in part due to this. Also implenting a complex path algorithm is so much more rewarding than moving data around. The field testing trips were the cherry on top.
Perhaps semi-off topic, but it will be interesting to see if silicon anodes (like https://www.silanano.com develops) will take off. They promise up to 20% increased capacity from switching from carbon anodes alone, which sounds amazing.
This sounds sane to me. I don't think people in general have a good understanding of how these generative AI products produce their answers, and I think many would assume hallucinated information to be true.
This is bad in all cases, but certainly misinformation in the democratic process is up there with the worst. Of course, perhaps more importantly for Google, it's a PR disaster waiting to happen when Gemini starts touting incorrect information seemingly supporting one political party or another.
>This is bad in all cases, but certainly misinformation in the democratic process is up there with the worst.
So many commenters saying, "misinformation is bad, it needs to go!"
Some of the greatest threats we've seen in the past few years have been from politicians claiming things were misinformation that were not. How do you propose we deal with that?
Because it's not true? Anyone who has ever been close to the customer support role knows that there is a constant battle to help the customers answer questions on their own, and you will never be completely successful.
It seems some people prefer calling/chatting to finding info on their own. Even trivial info.
https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors