Wooo. Add some melanin and see how fast those tools get removed.

This is america.

We are going to build hellhole dormitories for workers to live on site at the kroger LONG before we acknowledge that investing in public transportation would have benefits.

Oh, and we’ll probably buy a shit ton of teslas so that every county is required to have a fleet for “special” employees.

By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want.

That is learning anything that isn’t just “ChatGPT, how do I do X?”. Also, once you learn how to use blueprints you know how to do basically anything a hobbyist game dev would want.

Which is not dissimilar to Unity or Godot. You learn the basic concepts and then it is mostly a matter of experimenting or looking up how to do isometric camera angles or whatever.

But honestly? it sounds like you don’t want a game engine. You want a framework. In that case, RPG Maker is great for making a top down square style JRPG. Unreal is great for an FPS. And so forth.

but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much

If a slow startup of the editor the first time you start it is enough to end your career in game dev: you never had one.

And any good tutorial resource will do something like “Okay. Now start up that engine. Yes, do it now. Okay. It might look like it is unresponsive but that is because it is compiling shaders. Just leave that running and let’s start talking about some core concepts…”

If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer

It is a philosophical difference. But the reason I still suggest folk “learn with” UE is that it is, mostly, consistent between all the different kinds of games you may want to make. Which… is a leading cause of said performance issues when you start pushing things but more on that in…

Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release

Now. First and foremost: That means nothing for a hobbyist learning and making a game with their kids or spending a few hours a week for a few months until they give up.

As for the A-AA space (AAA means something, god damn it): That is not something that an individual developer is going to have any say in. That is going to be a corporate decision and it is almost exclusively going to be that company’s engine (ha, Frostbite) or Unreal because UE is the industry standard and there is a lot of value in being able to rapidly onboard a new hire or a contractor.

As for performance for those corporate games? That is really no concern for the hobbyist scale and is a much more complicated question related to allocating resources and time. But if there being poorly performant games made with an engine disqualified that engine: NO engines would exist.

Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.

This gets back to the optimization side of things. You should not need to go through and migrate the critical path from gdscript to c# or even c++ just to test out your game. You want your development system to be significantly beefier than your target system so that you can rapidly iterate and debug. Get it working, profile it, and then optimize it. And… get a new respect for all the devs with “Unreal Engine games run like shit” games because you now realize that the optimization step might be months or even years of your life and you ain’t got time for that.

Other engines may or may not be more performant for debugging a specific “level” of fidelity. If you are at the point where your engine’s editor’s system requirements are limiting your ability to develop: You and your users are going to have a very bad time.

Different landfills have different policies/procedures.

Like I said, the odds aren’t great. But if there was ever any chance of finding it, this isn’t the kind of system where things are getting cubed every step of the way. And once there is a layer or two of trash above it (making finding said drive nigh impossible), it is going to be pretty protected from even heavy duty constructicons driving over it.

UE is a beast to run (and has incredibly shitty linux support if you want to use the marketplace or any plugins…). But basically everything you listed is a one time cost or just an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato.

Honestly? For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king. Godot is awesome but a lot of the core loops and flows are very much geared with 2D first and the performance of 3D games is a hotly contested issue. I would still say that Godot’s 3D “performance” is better than Unreal’s 2D but… that is an incredibly low bar.

And in terms of workflows? UE is more than a bit convoluted but with stuff like blueprints it is probably the most consistent tool out there (so long as you never try to do a 2D game). Unity is a distant second. And Godot is great but it also reeks of an open source project that is being designed and redesigned in real time (just look at how file IDs are handled…). Not the end of the world if you understand the core concepts but also not something people are generally going to learn without a lot of trips to the forums (or watching youtubes of people who did said trips for them).

I am a big supporter of godot but… it is incredibly tacky to run into a thread about layoffs and basically say “Good, they shouldn’t have jobs. Use this instead”

Time and place

I’m not saying its the right way to operate, I’m saying its how lots of people do naturally. Its unfortunately human, and its taken advantage of by design.

And a lot of people are selfish hateful assholes who never actually cared about the social good and only ever wanted an adventure and for themselves to get ahead.

Gen z are not unique. Again, millennials and even boomers have stood where you stand.

As for a lack of a future? Millennials aren’t that much older and we are just as fucked.

Its just now that they’ll happen even sooner, and now I have to worry about being put in a camp because of my prescription to estrogen.

And that alone should have been reason enough for anyone who actually gave even the slightest of shits.

Growing up is realizing you aren’t going to win. But you can lessen harm.

And a rapist openly running on project 2025 would not be any “fucking” different?

Boomers protested Vietnam. Millennials Iraq.

Kids want change. Sometimes that is for a good cause and sometimes it is about draining the swamp and hurting others.

But if you needed to be convinced that it was worth voting against a rapist fascist who hid nothing? You were never an ally.

Yes… but the meme doesn’t work if said practice is barely on the scale.

Because yeah, there are some REALLY sketchy registrars. Working with the “reputable” ones and now taking advantage of a nation’s country code for the lulz (see: .ml) keeps you pretty safe.

… if DNS is the worst capitalist practice you know of then you REALLY should spend less time shitposting and more time paying attention to the world.

Yeah…

Spend some time in the “I hate reddit and am glad I am never going back but do you think reddit still thinks about me and hey, can I take a picture of your penis and send it to show reddit that my new boyfriend is massive?” communities. LOTS of the folk around here have those “I was banned for absolutely nothing” mentalities.

And it shows with how fast people are to “clown on” folk with just blatant insults.

Those folk aren’t at all exclusive to hexbear.

Lemmy, in general, is left leaning with the lead dev and “main” instance being unabashedly tankies.

Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there. The ml crowd is generally still worth talking to. Whereas the hexbear crowd immediately jump to harassment the moment they decide you failed a purity test because you advocated for a social program rather than insisting the entire system needs to be burned down and a managed economy run by putin put in its place.

Needless to say: Anyone who spends enough time “on lemmy” is either on an instance that banned hexbear or muted them themselves.

It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”

If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.

The Internet Archive is basically under constant attack from, among other things, the US government.

And even under a good administration: Getting permission to restore to something that a random website claims is what was there is gonna be a LOT of paperwork and a LOT of lifelong bureaucrats signing off on it.

When he declares bankruptcy on the US, putin will be the “bank” that bails him out.

We live in a world of no regulation (or, to be precise, no enforcement on regulations) but…

Holy shit? Stopping is the one time you actually SHOULD look at your infotainment screen to futz with climate control or check how many minutes until the next exit and so forth.

Actually, Illusory Wall’s “How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?” video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why “I can’t play that SNES” has little to do with it.

At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.

And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.

A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level… it isn’t wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn’t that far off from what a conquistador would wear).