> Yet, there is one open question about widespread working from home: Can large products, with big
>teams that require a lot of coordination, be done as well by people who are spread out over the
> world and never meet each other?
We're (Owlcat Games) mostly work from home ever since the pandemic. We still have offices (is several countries now) for people who are not comfortable working at home (no space/small children/etc.) or when people really need to meet physically. But generally it works well enough. Of course, Pathfinder games aren't AAA with 300+ people team, but our team is large enough these days, with several projects going on in parallel.
Our management was initially wary of the idea, and we thought we'd just stay home until the virus is gone, but there were no drop in productivity, and some people (like me) are happy to stay home and walk my dog in the morning instead of wasting and hour of my time each day on commute. There is an exception, though: when the new project is starting up (like Rogue Trader did last year), its core team is required to be in office at least some days, because this stage of prototyping and global design decisions require a lot of communications.
Re: Paranoia. Doesn't software get worse ALL the time, though? I didn't notice any recent drops in quality, aside from the general increase in unnecessary system requirements and proliferation of stupid mis-features which limit functionality for power users that's been going on forever.
Regarding Halo Infinite Split Screen Co-Op, the funny thing is, it's actually in the game and works, but was locked away. It's still accessible via exploits though...
After going through the trouble of implementing it, and the above impressions being so positive, who knows why it was cancelled. Halo Infinite just getting too much positive press?
Halo: the decline of 'play game with friends in person' is a tragedy. LAN multiplayer and couch co-op are both vastly less available than they once were, and it seems a lost opportunity for a variety of reasons. Back when I had an XBox 360 the ex-wife and I looked for games we could play couch co-op on it. There was Halo, Army of Two, and Lego Star Wars. That's basically it.
Your paranoia: hard to say. I recently switched back from Outlook to Thunderbird not because it was buggy as such, but because it was poorly thought through, wanted to force me into doing things ways I didn't like, and did not give me control over basic UI elements that were necessary to making the workspace actually usable. Again, not bugs as such. But heaps of unnecessary complexity and bad decisions hidden behind shiny buttons. Which frankly I see as a metaphor for the general direction of computing and the Internet these days. I started up Windows 95 twenty years ago (because I accidentally found a computer with it on it) and was shocked even then by how fast it ran. I think there's a lot of emphasis on making things pretty and making sure they have nice transitions, and a lot less on writing something simple that works well. Put it this way...I should not be looking at dialup load times on modern Internet connections. But I often am.
Working from home: as a lawyer, I have long found your various videos about running a small creative business relevant (and law IS a creative business, oddly). Only problem is that the clients ARE the awful people, so cutting them out to preserve your mental health is a complicated process at best. Anyway, I think team coordination probably is best done in person on things where genuine collaboration is required. I also think the number of those things that actually exist are pretty damn small. Also, apparently SEC whistleblowing went through the roof during the pandemic because everyone involved was working from home. So lack of team loyalty can be a feature as much as a bug.
Re children needing to feel physics: I don't think that's what happened there. Honestly, looking at those cubes I was like "well, those should be fairly safe to jump onto, even ass first." They LOOK like they're thick and soft and safe. And I grew up on a playground that didn't even have gravel for the first few years - just dirt. Having looked up details about it, it's Adriana Chechik. Leaving aside all the porn-related jokes this permits, she tweeted about the resulting injuries after her surgery. Apparently "More fusions than expected, bones completely crushed & nerve damage to my bladder..." I'm not sure you could get injuries like that even on minimal gym padding, let alone on something that's supposed to take people being knocked onto it from above.
The train thing is...I think I'm more worried by the people not seeming to notice it's coming than I am by the people hopping through it. Waiting for freight trains to move can be a rather lengthy process, and if it was sitting there for twenty minutes I'd be very tempted to jump through myself. They don't exactly accelerate quickly.
For the software getting worse: isn't this going to be expected when the software is more and more trying to incorporate antifeatures and not tell the user what it's doing? It's trying to log user behavior and report back home and display ads and prevent attempts to avoid ads. When there are bugs that directly involve these things, they can't get reliable feedback reports from users. They get automated ones, but any process of consulting with a user to figure out what the user was doing, while denying what the app was doing, isn't going to go well. Customer support is likewise bound by policy and PR taking precedence over improving the product. like they can't say, "oh that stutter and eventual crash is caused by you opting out of sending usage data back to Apple. What that actually means is it keeps storing the usage data until you sync with itunes, then it sends it back to Apple. If you never sync up, it just keeps storing it forever. Not a bug, we have no intention of fixing it. Sync regularly and allow all reporting to ensure a better user experience!"
Unfortunately it’s not playable on my phone - the game goes way past the edges of my screen. I can’t read a lot of the text and some of the buttons are almost completely hidden.
I don’t see anything in the settings to fix this. Any advice?
Previous Halo co-op had all of you in the same world, within about 30 feet of each other (if you got too far apart, the game warped you back together again). So they only had to load one copy of the level.
With the way they described Halo Infinite co-op, both of you could be on opposite sides of the map. Probably too much for the game to handle. Might work in a tech demo, but wouldn't handle all the edge cases which make the game interesting.
(There actually is a straightforward solution, but as soon as I say it you'll realise what the drawbacks are: 343 could make it work via streaming from the fancy Xbox Cloud Gaming service.)
Declining quality of software significantly predates the pandemic. I blame agile development.
In theory it's a good idea, but it's coincided with a shift towards software that's primarily concerned with making money rather than accommodating the user. The end result is software that ships even more unfinished than ever before (see Cyberpunk 2049), and that changes on a regular basis to accommodate the whims of a business.
See also Windows 11 (needlessly trying to increase hardware sales) and anything on a mobile phone.
Ultimately I think companies are trying to reduce costs and complexity when those are the very things that sell software to many people.
Software getting worse: I'm not necessarily seeing buggier (all software is buggy crap, as you may know), but what I am seeing is that software is all changing to be more cloud/on-line/service related. MS Word, for instance, no longer will auto-save unless your file is on your OneDrive. This necessarilly makes the software work worse (because whatever the on-line component is may have intermittent issues).
Work from home: I don't think there's any real question about whether teams can work without being physically in one spot - there's plenty of companies that seem to do just fine, and most of the chatter I hear about there being problems seems more to be coming from insecure managers who actually don't have a reason to exist in their organization, which the work-from-home thing is making a little too obvious.
Playgrounds: I'm not buying that she jumped into that pit because she didn't fall enough on playgrounds. I could be wrong (it may be she makes assumptions about things always being built safely, which, perhaps, is related to playgrounds), but I honestly think she's more likely just not that smart, and is the kind of person who repeatedly slams into thing sitting around their home because they just don't bother to move them out of the way. In any case, I hope she's OK in the end.
I love Vampire Survivors and common sense, intelligence and independent thought (clearly and sadly lacking via Twitch-related and comparable escapades). [ Edit: And via alleged grown-ups mismanaging matters regarding those they're supposed to care for ]
Vampire Survivor you say? ... Maybe I'll have to give that a shot.
Sadly, it seems "vampire" based games as of late have come under something of a curse. I hated Vampyr, doubly so for Code Vein, and VtM2...? The development has apparently turned into a garbage truck on fire crashing into the set of the Gong Show.
> Yet, there is one open question about widespread working from home: Can large products, with big
>teams that require a lot of coordination, be done as well by people who are spread out over the
> world and never meet each other?
We're (Owlcat Games) mostly work from home ever since the pandemic. We still have offices (is several countries now) for people who are not comfortable working at home (no space/small children/etc.) or when people really need to meet physically. But generally it works well enough. Of course, Pathfinder games aren't AAA with 300+ people team, but our team is large enough these days, with several projects going on in parallel.
Our management was initially wary of the idea, and we thought we'd just stay home until the virus is gone, but there were no drop in productivity, and some people (like me) are happy to stay home and walk my dog in the morning instead of wasting and hour of my time each day on commute. There is an exception, though: when the new project is starting up (like Rogue Trader did last year), its core team is required to be in office at least some days, because this stage of prototyping and global design decisions require a lot of communications.
Re: Paranoia. Doesn't software get worse ALL the time, though? I didn't notice any recent drops in quality, aside from the general increase in unnecessary system requirements and proliferation of stupid mis-features which limit functionality for power users that's been going on forever.
Regarding Halo Infinite Split Screen Co-Op, the funny thing is, it's actually in the game and works, but was locked away. It's still accessible via exploits though...
https://youtu.be/dnmKzYME8BM
After going through the trouble of implementing it, and the above impressions being so positive, who knows why it was cancelled. Halo Infinite just getting too much positive press?
Thoughts in order:
Halo: the decline of 'play game with friends in person' is a tragedy. LAN multiplayer and couch co-op are both vastly less available than they once were, and it seems a lost opportunity for a variety of reasons. Back when I had an XBox 360 the ex-wife and I looked for games we could play couch co-op on it. There was Halo, Army of Two, and Lego Star Wars. That's basically it.
Your paranoia: hard to say. I recently switched back from Outlook to Thunderbird not because it was buggy as such, but because it was poorly thought through, wanted to force me into doing things ways I didn't like, and did not give me control over basic UI elements that were necessary to making the workspace actually usable. Again, not bugs as such. But heaps of unnecessary complexity and bad decisions hidden behind shiny buttons. Which frankly I see as a metaphor for the general direction of computing and the Internet these days. I started up Windows 95 twenty years ago (because I accidentally found a computer with it on it) and was shocked even then by how fast it ran. I think there's a lot of emphasis on making things pretty and making sure they have nice transitions, and a lot less on writing something simple that works well. Put it this way...I should not be looking at dialup load times on modern Internet connections. But I often am.
Working from home: as a lawyer, I have long found your various videos about running a small creative business relevant (and law IS a creative business, oddly). Only problem is that the clients ARE the awful people, so cutting them out to preserve your mental health is a complicated process at best. Anyway, I think team coordination probably is best done in person on things where genuine collaboration is required. I also think the number of those things that actually exist are pretty damn small. Also, apparently SEC whistleblowing went through the roof during the pandemic because everyone involved was working from home. So lack of team loyalty can be a feature as much as a bug.
Re children needing to feel physics: I don't think that's what happened there. Honestly, looking at those cubes I was like "well, those should be fairly safe to jump onto, even ass first." They LOOK like they're thick and soft and safe. And I grew up on a playground that didn't even have gravel for the first few years - just dirt. Having looked up details about it, it's Adriana Chechik. Leaving aside all the porn-related jokes this permits, she tweeted about the resulting injuries after her surgery. Apparently "More fusions than expected, bones completely crushed & nerve damage to my bladder..." I'm not sure you could get injuries like that even on minimal gym padding, let alone on something that's supposed to take people being knocked onto it from above.
The train thing is...I think I'm more worried by the people not seeming to notice it's coming than I am by the people hopping through it. Waiting for freight trains to move can be a rather lengthy process, and if it was sitting there for twenty minutes I'd be very tempted to jump through myself. They don't exactly accelerate quickly.
For the software getting worse: isn't this going to be expected when the software is more and more trying to incorporate antifeatures and not tell the user what it's doing? It's trying to log user behavior and report back home and display ads and prevent attempts to avoid ads. When there are bugs that directly involve these things, they can't get reliable feedback reports from users. They get automated ones, but any process of consulting with a user to figure out what the user was doing, while denying what the app was doing, isn't going to go well. Customer support is likewise bound by policy and PR taking precedence over improving the product. like they can't say, "oh that stutter and eventual crash is caused by you opting out of sending usage data back to Apple. What that actually means is it keeps storing the usage data until you sync with itunes, then it sends it back to Apple. If you never sync up, it just keeps storing it forever. Not a bug, we have no intention of fixing it. Sync regularly and allow all reporting to ensure a better user experience!"
Downloaded! Really like the music.
Unfortunately it’s not playable on my phone - the game goes way past the edges of my screen. I can’t read a lot of the text and some of the buttons are almost completely hidden.
I don’t see anything in the settings to fix this. Any advice?
Regarding Halo Infinite co-op mode:
Previous Halo co-op had all of you in the same world, within about 30 feet of each other (if you got too far apart, the game warped you back together again). So they only had to load one copy of the level.
With the way they described Halo Infinite co-op, both of you could be on opposite sides of the map. Probably too much for the game to handle. Might work in a tech demo, but wouldn't handle all the edge cases which make the game interesting.
(There actually is a straightforward solution, but as soon as I say it you'll realise what the drawbacks are: 343 could make it work via streaming from the fancy Xbox Cloud Gaming service.)
Declining quality of software significantly predates the pandemic. I blame agile development.
In theory it's a good idea, but it's coincided with a shift towards software that's primarily concerned with making money rather than accommodating the user. The end result is software that ships even more unfinished than ever before (see Cyberpunk 2049), and that changes on a regular basis to accommodate the whims of a business.
See also Windows 11 (needlessly trying to increase hardware sales) and anything on a mobile phone.
Ultimately I think companies are trying to reduce costs and complexity when those are the very things that sell software to many people.
Software getting worse: I'm not necessarily seeing buggier (all software is buggy crap, as you may know), but what I am seeing is that software is all changing to be more cloud/on-line/service related. MS Word, for instance, no longer will auto-save unless your file is on your OneDrive. This necessarilly makes the software work worse (because whatever the on-line component is may have intermittent issues).
Work from home: I don't think there's any real question about whether teams can work without being physically in one spot - there's plenty of companies that seem to do just fine, and most of the chatter I hear about there being problems seems more to be coming from insecure managers who actually don't have a reason to exist in their organization, which the work-from-home thing is making a little too obvious.
Playgrounds: I'm not buying that she jumped into that pit because she didn't fall enough on playgrounds. I could be wrong (it may be she makes assumptions about things always being built safely, which, perhaps, is related to playgrounds), but I honestly think she's more likely just not that smart, and is the kind of person who repeatedly slams into thing sitting around their home because they just don't bother to move them out of the way. In any case, I hope she's OK in the end.
I love Vampire Survivors and common sense, intelligence and independent thought (clearly and sadly lacking via Twitch-related and comparable escapades). [ Edit: And via alleged grown-ups mismanaging matters regarding those they're supposed to care for ]
Some communities are bucking the trend on playground safety. Check out this one I took my 5 year old to recently: https://www.510families.com/profile-adventure-playground/
Vampire Survivor you say? ... Maybe I'll have to give that a shot.
Sadly, it seems "vampire" based games as of late have come under something of a curse. I hated Vampyr, doubly so for Code Vein, and VtM2...? The development has apparently turned into a garbage truck on fire crashing into the set of the Gong Show.
If it wasn't for Elden Ring, Vampire Survivor would be my Game Of The Year. It's that good.