I saw one game that was a 5 minute black screen with someone talking teenage-level philosophy. There was a handful of clicks to make in the whole playthrough.

Steam has a lot of low-quality games. The volume of stuff shipped with Synty Studios assets from Humble Bundles is crazy.

Indie games are doing great. Shovelware is doing meh as it always should be.

I don’t think you understand what “the engine supports saving at any time” entails.

Having the ability to serialise objects is not the same as handling the input and output of serialisation.

You might as well be annoyed by why aren’t all developers letting us rewind time in games? Load from our last save? No thanks. Developers are so disrespectful of our time. They just need to log all the changes that happen and play them backwards. Every engine supports that!

I recommend you try implementing a save feature in a game engine then you might have a little more respect for the difficulty of the problem you’re irritated by.

Developers aren’t being unthoughtful or lazy, you’re just trivialising a rather complex software engineering problem that isn’t easy to solve and one solution over another has trade offs / weaknesses.

I understand why people want the feature and I agree it’s amazing but the reason lots of games don’t is it requires the serialization of basically everything in the game and that can be a nightmare to maintain if you’re making lots of big changes to the game throughout development. You have you go back and rework your save code every time you change anything, and ensure older parts of the code still adhere if you need to change how save works (meaning i.e. touching so much of the same code over and over rather than getting a feature implemented and moving on).

And while it can be done with most major engines with plugins, it you’re creating your own structures/object types etc, you need to extend that plugin to support them (and maintain that code every time you make changes to the structures).

Emulators simply save the state of memory since many older consoles didn’t have much RAM to begin with dumping it entirely to disk isn’t that big of a deal (especially if only a subset of registers are marked for game state). Not so easy with modern games where there is a lot more going on in RAM.

Games that have a daily tick e.g. Stardew only need to store a set of initialisation values that are used to begin the day since no other changes would be made to state yet (since the player hasn’t made any that day). Or checkpoints where you serialise player state, quest state, etc, with enemy location etc ignored and respawned as default the next time you play.

Think of it this way. If an enemy spawns in a default location, that doesn’t need to be serialised if you load a game from a checkpoint. But if you can save anywhere? Well then you need to know the enemies, their positions, their vectors, their AI state (alerted etc), their velocity, their position in the animation timeline, and potentially so so much more. If you save mid explosion while boxes are flying all over the place, you need to serialise so much more data to resume the physics simulation. Etc.

And what about multiplayer? That’s additional players and their state and surroundings etc that need to be serialised and reserialised at load successfully.

Then there’s how you serialise. Do you go with a text markup like JSON which can get incredibly large if there’s a lot of things to serialise? Or do you make a custom binary format to compress the size but then you need to maintain that format and how you map to and from it in your engine?

It’s a lot easier if you don’t have to serialise the state of a huge number of things for saving and maintaining that saving code every time you make changes. It’s not impossible, and if you build with the feature in mind, it can be made manageable to maintain.

But if that feature isn’t essential to your game, and you’ve an acceptable alternative, it frees you up to work on other features instead.

It’s a balancing act. And for a solo developer like that of Stardew, I can completely forgive them for not wanting to implement it.

Gabe Newell talked about this years ago.

“When you look at the fact that these people have $2000 PCs and they’re spending $50 a month or more on their Internet connections, clearly they’re willing to spend money.

So, from our point of view, what we saw more and more was that piracy is a result of bad service on the part of game companies…”

Newell talked openly about this entire topic at LinuxCon years ago. It’s been 12 years and they’ve been true to their word.

The amount they’ve contributed upstream is insane, and the money they’ve provided to Linux-ecosystem contractors is also insane.

They’re profit motivated, 100%, but at least they’ve done so while being a good citizen in the FOSS movement (bar the Steam Client itself). SUSE, Canonical etc are all for-profit orgs that help push FOSS forward.

Profitability and Free and Open Source Software aren’t mutually exclusive.

From the Source engine updates analyses, I think it’s going to be voxels (thus deformable world), a physics engine to support voxels, fluid stimulation, fire simulation, acoustics simulation, NPC AI emotional simulation and adding senses like smell to NPCs.

CVEs don’t get issued “resolved” statuses… They are either reserved, published, or rejected (technically NVD have a few extra for published). That’s just junk data in that tool you’re using. Use authoritative sources like cve.org or nvd.nist.gov.

You can see the CPEs on NVD and they’re old versions of Plex (and were old when the vulns were published).

You’re aware those CVEs are only relevant for ancient versions of Plex and were fixed long ago?

You’re going to need to back up your claim otherwise you might as well be lying as there’s no CVE like this I can find nor any public disclosure.

Plex have a bug bounty program and a responsive security team too.

Post your security report.

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Sadly not, first time I’ve heard of it.

I’m still rocking my OG Steam Controller so I still use that for anything mouse-related on the couch.

What about a trackball mouse?

Steam Input can be used to turn your joystick on your existing pad into a mouse. You could add a button for a speed modifier.

It won’t be perfect or good for precision mouse stuff but it’ll unlock a lot of games for couch gameplay with your existing setup.

And they’re patching in memory so enjoy giving full system permission to their tool and excluding it from your security products as this thing is architecturally similar to malware.

If anyone from Larian is lurking, please do a GDC talk on this. I’m super interested in their approach to shipping a (native) Linux build of the game.

Interesting that one of their complaints was the first person perspective and how it limited their peripheral vision.

Also Steam already has this feature. I can bounce between Linux, Mac, and Windows with my saves. I don’t need something for Windows only…

Seconded. When this came out, I was hooked for months. Perfect FPS roguelike.

Given how immensely fun Untitled Goose Game was, I’m cautiously optimistic for this one.

Guess it’s “Patient Gamer” for me on this one.