diff --git a/yt/rainysrambles_scramble_editorsNotes.md b/yt/rainysrambles_scramble_editorsNotes.md index 49957e9..2371479 100644 --- a/yt/rainysrambles_scramble_editorsNotes.md +++ b/yt/rainysrambles_scramble_editorsNotes.md @@ -10,10 +10,11 @@ ## To conclude this argument, why would it serve your goals of being the best platform for entertainment, to invest in creating your Special Gaming Box™ on its own Special Architexture™ and Operating System™ that only games that you invest in or approve can join that platform, when you could just create them for the universal platform that they're ALREADY ON, and optimize them so people with hardware they've already got, or can readily upgrade, can run the game? How can any console be even a *good* place to play games, when you have to get a brand new Gaming Box™ every 5 years, and backwards compatibility isn't always guaranteed? I cannot WAIT for consoles to become a thing of the past and for Sony and Nintendo in particular to become software-only companies. The PC is evolving every single second someone iterates on the hardware, which is constant, and the software goes right along with it. Sometimes they get out of sync, and one is ahead of the other, but that spurs the other to catch up, so it's a constant dance between the two. Either way, you can still run software created in 1995 in Windows without much of a hitch, and if you do run into one, there's official and unofficial methods to get it to work. The freedom creates infinite solutions. The console evolves only when the corporation that produces it decides to replace it, and leave all games of the past generation behind, a la Nintendo. They are destined to fail. The only thing keeping corporations like these afloat, are people too enslaved to their ecosystem to hold them to account. -## To throw a bit of shade, and to go on yet another tangent, I was recently in talks with some pro-nintendo folks and I was discussing my perspective as a professional 3d artist but also as a dabbler in development. I was told that, indie devs in particular benefit greatly from Nintendo's platform, because the hardware is easy to optimize to, and the dev tools are easily accessible. That was a fucking lie. +## To throw a bit of shade, and to go on yet another tangent, I was recently in talks with some pro-nintendo folks and one of the things I discussed was my perspective as a professional 3d artist but also as a dabbler in development. I was told that, indie devs in particular benefit greatly from Nintendo's platform, because the hardware is easy to optimize to, and the dev tools are easily accessible. That was a fucking lie. -## Or, in the very least, it was an untruth and it was simply a gamble they made on their end because both parties lacked the information to support or rebut that claim. Now, it doesn't seem to be as rough as developing for Apple (for more on that, PirateSoftware has a great video explaining it) but it still seems pretty bad. First, you must apply to become a developer through your developer account, and be accepted into the Nintendo Developer Portal in order to access *official* dev tools, SDKs, and documentation. You can then install the SDK, Unity and Unreal have switch support, but of course, only for licensed developers. Once you download the Nintendo Dev Interface you can install the SDK, and this is where the fun begins. +## Or, in the very least, it was an untruth and it was simply a gamble they made on their end because both parties lacked the information to support or rebut that claim. But I had a hunch, given that I knew developing for Mac was a pretty untennable process. For more on that, PirateSoftware has a great video explaining it. First, you must apply to become a developer through your developer account, and be accepted into the Nintendo Developer Portal in order to access *official* dev tools, SDKs, and documentation. You can then install the SDK, Unity and Unreal have switch support, but of course, only for licensed developers. Once you download the Nintendo Dev Interface you can install the SDK, and this is where the fun begins. +[PirateSoftware's video on Mac development](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qRQX9fgrI4s) [Nintendo Developer Portal](https://developer.nintendo.com/tools) ## You MUST purchase or otherwise acquire a hardware devkit. This is a collection of hardware devices and other resources that allow a developer to interface with the console in order to deploy their games within a dev environment. This is absolutely unfeasible for an indie developer that isn't cool enough for Nintendo. So assuming you are approved by Nintendo, you then have to go and order a devkit, or multiple, if you have more people within your studio, and they absolutely will cost within the ballpark of a PC. These prices aren't exact, probably due to NDAs, but the standard NDEV kit is $500-$1500. A testing and debug kit is between 1500 and 2500, whereas the handheld-only kit allegedly for smaller developers is around $400-$800. And you don't even own them, you're often *leasing* them from Nintendo, which means there may be additional costs on a per-year basis. Now, I'm not saying it's unreasonable to charge for hardware and to try to ensure that your devkits don't fall into the unwashed hands of the unapproved. I'm sure that power in the wrong hands could be a potential liability if there were some kind of exploit found with the hardware. @@ -28,7 +29,7 @@ Oh, and if you acquire one second-hand, you're likely involving yourself with so ## Assuming you slog through all that red tape, you're completely boned if you're using your own engine, because the building process just to get it to run on the hardware must be developed yourself. Optimization is as shit as the hardware, but we already knew that. Have fun systematically destroying your game in order to get it to run on mobile hardware. They need very careful tuning to run in docked and handheld mode, but the good news is that Nintendo doesn't seem to care if even their own games are an Eyesore in 20fps. -## Assuming you actually build and test your game to a satisfying degree, you must then pass Lot Check QA and be certified for UI behavior, crash handling, ESRB integration, and whatever else Nintendo wants. Expect to be rejected multiple times and to be sent back to various areas in the pipeline multiple times. Language support, accessibility, and compliance are to be expected from a multinational corporation with many stakeholders. But it's murder to indie devs. Localisation alone is bloody expensive. The vast majority of indie devs won't make the cut, because it's too damn expensive. And I'm not saying it doesn't have to be, [JP demand high standards, that's your thing, man.] I'm saying it's ludicrous to pretend that it's *easy* by any stretch of the imagination. +## Assuming you actually build and test your game to a satisfying degree, you must then pass Lot Check QA and be certified for UI behavior, crash handling, ESRB integration, and whatever else Nintendo wants. Expect to be rejected multiple times and to be sent back to various areas in the pipeline multiple times. Language support, accessibility, and compliance are to be expected from a multinational corporation with many stakeholders. But it's murder to indie devs. Localisation alone is bloody expensive. The vast majority of indie devs won't make the cut, because it's too damn expensive. And I'm not saying it doesn't have to be. [JP demand high standards, that's your thing, man.] I'm saying it's ludicrous to pretend that it's *easy* by any stretch of the imagination. ## You can, of course, bypass much of this via homebrew development. But this naturally means that your game will have zero access to eShop, Switch Online, or Joy-Con libraries. Though homebrew solves this problem practically automatically, because you can do all of those things yourself, with a lifetime of reverse-engineering. I'd say doing it just to spite nintendo makes it worth it. But when you develop homebrew, you're developing to homebrewers; fellow enthusiasts and professional tinkerers with a lot of passion for doing so. That's not to say money *can't* be made here, but it certainly won't get you on stage, virtue signaling at the game awards anytime soon. @@ -54,11 +55,11 @@ Oh, and if you acquire one second-hand, you're likely involving yourself with so ## The word I was searching for was Exploit. -## Wireless charging is immensely inefficient and I would recommend against it if you can avoid it. As a general rule, electromagnetic or electrothermal engineering is a pretty bad way to move around energy, be that heat or power. +## Wireless charging is immensely inefficient and I would recommend against it if you can avoid it. As a general rule, electromagnetic or electrothermal engineering is a pretty bad way to move around energy, be that heat or power. The tech just isn't there yet. ## Which is exactly why I bought my iPhone XR for $100, it has better battery life and can be dedicated for this purpose. Now, it still prevents charging and will drain, but it can go for probably 8 hours like this, which is super impressive. I wish my main phone had as good a battery and I'd love to get it serviced by a non-apple person, but it's expensive as all hell; it costs nearly as much as my backmarket XR did. I'll probably run it into the ground and upgrade once the iPhone 15 is affordable for me on backmarket. I want the 15 because USBC was finally fucking forced upon them, because apparently we have to use government to get corporations to make financially advantageous, pro-consumer business decisions... I don't buy that though. No monopolies exist that aren't government-funded, and no corporations in any industry could survive their own dogshit marketing decisions if people had some damn standards. [damstandard zbrush] -## Long story short, before I had a cellular plan I wanted to text and SMS over wifi, and there are free services for doing so. I actually ported my number from that service, which was cool. But I wanted to keep those messages backed up because I'm an information slut -I mean hoarder- which isn't entirely possible given a lot of factors. So the data for all those messages is backed up on the last backup of my OS, which was technically transferred over from my very first iPhone 4S, to my 5S, to my 6 plus which broke, to my 6, all the way to my iPhone 7 plus, all the while collecting data from about 2015-2023. So I wanted to keep the data, some of which is inaccessible even through anti-apple means, but I picked up some bug along the way from jailbreaking that screwed up the system so I had to reset. In Windows you can pretty easily fix this type of issue with some command lines, but evidently it wasn't so simple in iOS, because not even updating the stupid OS or even changing phones was an option. Pretty silly. +## Long story short, before I had a cellular plan I wanted to text and SMS over wifi, and there are free services for doing so. I actually ported my number from that service, which was cool. But I wanted to keep those messages backed up because I'm an information slut -I mean hoarder- which isn't entirely possible given a lot of factors. So the data for all those messages is backed up on the last backup of my OS, which was technically transferred over from my very first iPhone 4S, to my 5S, to my 6 plus which broke, to my 6, all the way to my iPhone 7 plus, all the while collecting data from about 2015-2023. So I wanted to keep the data, some of which is inaccessible even through anti-apple means, but I picked up some bug along the way from jailbreaking that screwed up the system so I had to reset. I wish you could `sfc /scannow` on iOS. But even swapping phones and using that weird local device transfer over bluetooth or whatever couldn't fix this kernel-level bug I accrued. Pretty silly. ## And could potentially turn my phone into an explosive... @@ -68,4 +69,4 @@ Oh, and if you acquire one second-hand, you're likely involving yourself with so ## I've changed my perspective pretty significantly as I've learned more about this. My views on government were naive when I said this nearly two years ago, and I'm vehemently anti-antitrust now. It is not the role of government to "do stuff" for constituents. Of course politics involves understanding how the people vote on certain issues, but it isn't within the legitimate purview of government to destroy business for the sake of the scare quotes "little guy". If the people continue to reward business practices that are bad, they can't go running to Daddy Government™ when the consequences are bad. We don't need government to slap businesses for making business decisions that are rewarded by the free market. And we especially don't need government to slap businessess for choosing to push an advantage the the government LITERALLY handed them on a silver platter moments before. We need people to agree to stop rewarding those decisions. If everyone said to Apple, we're not going to buy your shit if you don't go with the newest greatest standard that literally everyone else is using just so we're forced to purchase your specific cables, then Apple would be forced to cater to that crowd. And I don't think you need a plurality to do this, either. If just 30% of their sales declined due to this, I don't think they'd continue to put up with it. It was controversial when Apple removed the headphone jack. But their sales hardly dropped and the iPhone 7 was still successful, and in the long term, they won. If you don't want them to win with their anti-consumer practices, don't buy their damn stuff. You can see I'm in the process of coming around to this realization. -## Certainly not putting effort into revamping Premiere and After Effects by changing them from largely CPU-based programs to more GPU-intensive ones. Premiere can't decode a damn H.264 without proxies if you want it to decode perfectly, and half of the damn effects in AE are CPU-based, which means if you don't have an EPYC or some shit, you're piss out of luck if you just want to upscale, which is a feature I use all the time. Why the hell would you want to do that when AI upscaling exists right now? What the hell does anyone pay Adobe for when they aren't putting any effort into bringing their programs up to speed with the most efficient hardware? You wouldn't need a 64 core hyperthreaded Xeon processor if you just made your damn program use the command set of the highly efficient GPU I have in my system. It would be very difficult to crunch the numbers on this, but I'd wager this has lead to significant increases in carbon emissions and many millions of dollars worth of people's and corporation's electrical bills. The industry needs to work on moving to more efficient command sets, because when they do, as we've seen with Apple's silicon, one of the few good steps Apple has ever taken even if they didn't launch it very well, everyone will profit immensely from it. Same concept applies to nuclear, but I digress. \ No newline at end of file +## Certainly not putting effort into revamping Premiere and After Effects by changing them from largely CPU-based programs to more GPU-intensive ones. Premiere can't decode a damn H.264 without proxies if you want it to decode perfectly and efficiently, and half of the damn effects in AE are CPU-based, which means if you don't have an EPYC or some shit, you're piss out of luck if you just want to upscale, which is a feature I use all the time. Why the hell would you want to do that when AI upscaling exists right now? What the hell does anyone pay Adobe for when they aren't putting any effort into bringing their programs up to speed with the most efficient hardware? You wouldn't need a 64 core hyperthreaded Xeon processor if you just made your damn program use the command set of the highly efficient GPU I have in my system. It would be very difficult to crunch the numbers on this, but I'd wager this has lead to significant increases in carbon emissions and many billions of dollars worth of individual and corporate electrical bills. The industry needs to work on moving to more efficient command sets, because when they do, as we've seen with Apple's silicon, one of the few good steps Apple has ever taken even if they didn't launch it very well, everyone will profit immensely from it. Same concept applies to nuclear, but I digress. \ No newline at end of file