Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Calandrino]

Imagine a good horror game about furries.

All furry games are horror games, but not many are very good

No, If you aren't a certified, card carrying, grandmaster in Ninja Gaiden-esque Character Action games & Bullet Hells & Tetris & Arena Shooters & Osu!/Other rhythm games & Starcraft/Other RTS's & SF3: Third strike/Other FG's & Kaizo ROMhacks, & DCS/Other HC sim games & Retro/Arcade games (no guides and certainly no save states!) & Victoria 2/Other Grand Strategy Spreadsheet/Map Autism games like Dwarf Fortress & Rogue (the OG)/Other true Roguelikes & minesweeper & Factorio/Other resource management games à la Zachtronics titles & (perhaps most importantly of all) are able to complete a PC-98 Dating Sim game without getting a bad end, on the first try, and in the original language (I hope you did your reps /v/ro) then you're a poser faggot who should go join your goycattle brethren playing the latest Cowadoody or whatever the latest sportsball release is, you couldn't handle a REAL game even if we slathered it in yellow paint and tutorial NPCs with quippy whedonesque writing!

this but unironically

 

[Dead Lion]

Constantly trying to promote C++, C#, and Rust, while shit talking Lua and Python. I assume there's good reasons for said snobbery, but I rarely hear them.

Lua and Python are both interpreted languages, meaning a program goes line by line and executes the code (vast oversimplification probably). C++ and Rust meanwhile compile to machine code. C# is the false prophet, it's Microsoft java, compiles to microcode that then runs on a virtual machine that exist to solely to run said microcode. It sounds stupid but it works so who am I to judge.

Interpreted languages are always slower compared to compiled machine code. So you can have two identically looking and playing games optimized to perfection and the one written in python will always run worse. Another drawback is that with an interpreted language is that they are usually very easy to decompile. To decompile balatro for example you just open the .exe and the sourcecode is right there just as the dev left it. Could be a problem if that's say, your netcode.

 

[The Ugly One]

If you can't code in C, you're not a programmer, you're a jeet.

 

[Jarch6]

View attachment 9032248


Anyway, thread tax:
Likely a game dev specific opinion, but I'm surprised by how much history keeps repeating itself when it comes to engine and language snobbery, especially when it's something I'd have thought we'd have grow out of.

eg. Game engines.
"Engine X is for babies and should never be used"
*massive hit uses engine X
"Engine X is the best engine and you should use it. Don't use engine Y, engine Y is for babies and will never be taken seriously."
*massive hit uses engine Y

Just off the top of my head, we've had GameMaker (Hotline Miami) XNA (Dust An Elisian Tale) Unity (Harthstone) Phaser (Vampire Survivors) Godot (Dome keeper) and Lua/Love (Balatro).

Then there's languages. Constantly trying to promote C++, C#, and Rust, while shit talking Lua and Python. I assume there's good reasons for said snobbery, but I rarely hear them. Then there's the whole node/component based workflow that keeps not working.

While it’s true that “a bad craftsman blames his tools” that doesn’t mean that some tools aren’t better than others. You’d never use Lua or python to make a performant game because interpreted languages intrinsically run like shit (though these languages have options to make them compiled) usually it gets used in more limited ways.

If you can't code in C, you're not a programmer, you're a jeet.

This one is unironically true. Given C's influence on every langauge which followed it, you should be able to use it decently after a small adjustment from whatever your main soup de jure is. If you can't then you're, at best, a script kiddie, which is fine if you don't care to be a programmer.

 

[Judge Dredd]

You’d never use Lua or python to make a performant game because interpreted languages intrinsically run like shit (though these languages have options to make them compiled) usually it gets used in more limited ways.

Some games written in "bad" languages like Minecraft and Bolatro will run on a Raspberry Pi, or any computer of the last decade really.

Then there's Half-Life Alyx. Engine written in C++, and logic written in Lua. Performs great. Then S&Box tried to improve it by ripping out Lua and putting C# in it's place, and it runs like shit.


And I might as well ask, what's the deal with Rust? I think it was answered elsewhere on the farms, but I keep hearing how it's the best, or the worst, but when I try and get details it's just troon shit and behind the scenes drama.

 

[big pauper]

Noita is an unholy amalgamation of obfuscated executable and all of the game data and logic being in lua files - further proof that lua is actually the ideal solution to most problems but people just don't like other people being able to steal their code

 

[Vhailor]

There is a belief that zoomers and RTS are incompatible, but in my opinion zoomers should excel in playing RTS since the genre rewards constantly switching attention. I can see a future where we'll get massive hit RTS (likely watered down and/or downsized) being popular among zoomers (it sort of happened with arena shooters and Ultrakill), but I am probably too .

while shit talking Lua and Python. I assume there's good reasons for said snobbery, but I rarely hear them.

I believe Python has weird concurrency (which includes stuff like parallelism, multi-threading and multi-processing) which requires some tricks for high performance and I believe some of them are writing modules in C/C++ so at this point it is just easier to skip Python and write whole game in C/C++.

 

[Frightened Rabbit]

And I might as well ask, what's the deal with Rust? I think it was answered elsewhere on the farms, but I keep hearing how it's the best, or the worst, but when I try and get details it's just troon shit and behind the scenes drama.

It's a troon language made to try and substitute C and make coding in it easier for jeets, that runs worse than C, and is more cagy than it, with no actual benefits as long as you know what you're doing in C.

...further proof that lua is actually the ideal solution to most problems but people just don't like other people being able to steal their code

I've had good interactions with LUA from messing with Stalker scripts but I wouldn't use it to code an entire game, game logic tho, it's great, even better if you use JIT.

 

[SIMON THE PIEMAN]

Likely a game dev specific opinion, but I'm surprised by how much history keeps repeating itself when it comes to engine and language snobbery, especially when it's something I'd have thought we'd have grow out of.

The most successful indie game ever created was written in Java, so my opinion regarding the never ending discussions about game engines is that everyone involved should just shut the fuck up and actually make a video game

 

[big pauper]

And I might as well ask, what's the deal with Rust? I think it was answered elsewhere on the farms, but I keep hearing how it's the best, or the worst, but when I try and get details it's just troon shit and behind the scenes drama.

i decided to try and figure this out because i didn't know either. rust kind of presents itself as a re-invention of C that's a memory safe language like java but that compiles directly into assembly, "making sure programmers don't have to choose between speed and memory safety." but the language is totally different from C because it forces you explicitly declare variables AND who owns them, so... it's just forcing you to use memory safe programming techniques and then patting the compiler on the back? there's a lot of low level optimization that rust can apparently do by disregarding the memory safe subroutine but that kind of begs the question why you would bother using it at all if you have to give up it's singular benefit to use it in many use cases.

i definitely understand why people call it a troon language

 

[Frightened Rabbit]

i definitely understand why people call it a troon language

Like you said before, the language doesn't present any worthwhile changes to C that make it a better options, it could be achieved by using Fil-C or writting good code, however, the majority of people who use and push Rust are troons, its marked as a Troon Language because it's pushed mainly by troons and corpos. It's not very complicated.

 

[big pauper]

Like you said before, the language doesn't present any worthwhile changes to C that make it a better options, it could be achieved by using Fil-C or writting good code, however, the majority of people who use and push Rust are troons, its marked as a Troon Language because it's pushed mainly by troons and corpos. It's not very complicated.

well it actually kind of is complicated. my net of experience is being a script kiddie for video games so i largely don't have any experience with anything modern or complex. when people write these long ass technical diatribes about how one language is better than the other for kernel development or some shit i legitimately have no basis of comparison to know whether they're blowing smoke up my ass or not.

It took me asking gemini like four separate sets of questions to get explanations because it had to be coaxed to present any downsides or criticism lol, it's probably more of a compliance ritual than anything resembling an engineering decision.