hedgewitch

Or perhaps it's just an attempt from straight men to not have to confront the fact that what they say is harmful.

Again, it's easy to say that I'm creating a straw man, but the facts are thus.

The OP said:

- My games of Catan work because we don't talk about things.

- Social media is bad because I have to confront the fact that I will disagree with people on things.

- These things that I will disagree with my Catan buddies on should either be "agree to disagree" matters or matters that don't get discussed.

- LGBTQ+ issues were one of the examples of such topics. Neither option is acceptable for LGBTQ+ people.

No examples of what sort of "LGBTQ+ political topics" either of you might mean have been given and yet I, the one providing examples and countering them, am the one creating the straw man?

All I can say is that, once again, you need to listen to the people affected when they say that what is said is harmful and stop acting like the LGBTQ+ people are the problem for telling you that it is, in fact, harmful.

EDIT: You're also defending a man who actively tried to justify using a slur. Doesn't reflect well on you, does it?

To be completely fair, if you're not a straight white man and people are regularly mistaking you for a straight white man, that generally means only one thing: you're on the wrong side of history.

And no, I think you should think a bit harder about what it is you said and how you said it. It's easy to claim that isn't what you meant, but you've yet to provide any concrete examples of what you mean, which I called you out for and you proceeded to be flippant. This is also a sign that you know your argument is lost.

You can continue to claim straw men, but you've yet to provide evidence that I've actually created a straw man.

EDIT: Moreover, if you want to say we should just not discuss LGBTQ+ issues in public and try and justify using a slur and then call LGBTQ+ people the problem when they get angry, maybe you should have the courtesy of doing that in private.

It's incredible how men, especially straight white men, can demonstrate their understanding of the point by using all of its parts in twisted fashions to support their argument, but will never concede that the point was correct.

Yes, it is unsafe to be LGBTQ+. That is exactly why you can't put it in a box and go "you're not allowed to talk about these things in social situations because my game of Catan is more important."

Really ruminate on that last point. Your game of Catan is more important to you than whether the people in that game are comfortable being around you.

So, there are two points that you've yet to address and I doubt ever will, which casts an extremely negative light on your argument:

1) You have yet to provide any concrete examples of what it is you mean. You keep going "but I swear this isn't what I mean." Thus, I can only conclude that you mean the whole.

Am I to think you're saying that LGBTQ+ people shouldn't be allowed to discuss marriage rights, even though straight people have been afforded that right and freely talk about their marriages in front of people who are affected by laws outlawing their unions?

Am I to believe that you're saying that we shouldn't talk about whether trans people should be allowed to change their names without gender/sex reassignment surgery, even though straight people regularly change their names, get plastic surgery, and what-have-you?

There are no good answers. The very fact that you've not acknowledged that there is no good answer is the problem here. You could just accept that you're wrong, that this is offensive no matter how it is interpreted. But no, you feel an incessant need to defend yourself because you, as a straight man, couldn't possibly have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and, thus, couldn't possibly be offending people.

2) You have yet to acknowledge the fact that you could just casually throw that in there without a second thought is the problem. The fact that you didn't need to think "does LGBTQ+ really belong here?" Your very doing that contributes to anti-LGBTQ+ and "don't say gay" mentalities.

This is absolutely not the situation that he has presented it as. Someone else has already stated what is going on here. These people do not identify as a slur. His entire argument hinges on this insane idea that people identify as a slur.

Reclaiming != identifying as.

The person you're defending even went on to say that his mentality has gotten him into hot water. The fact that you didn't read into that as "I have no idea what I'm talking about and these people clearly didn't want to be called this" is disconcerting.

And yes, if you are not a person of color and you use a slur traditionally used to describe a person of color to describe or talk about a person of color, you are racist. Full stop. The very fact that you're concocting some outlandish situation where you'd magically be allowed to use slurs is extremely telling, though. If you had any idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't ask that.

Maybe you should stop opining on things and listen to the parties these things affect. The usage of slurs isn't yours to have an opinion on if the slurs aren't words for you.

No, you didn't. The original person did. You then told me I was making a straw man by calling him out for it.

You could have just as easily not commented and I could have been dealing with the original commenter. You decided to comment, defending his absurdity. You don't get to now tell me I am "looking to be offended," especially when you take the side of the less reasonable position.

You can call whatever this bizarre and obviously false claim is what you want, but this entire subthread is very transparently an attempt to justify using a slur. It has very "why can't I say the n word" energy.

Nobody can stop you from trying to shut down arguments by telling people that the insinuation that their existence is somehow so controversial that people can just casually suggest that discussing it in public is akin to discussing abortion and gun laws somehow isn't a form of oppression that is above and beyond what would be called a microaggression, but, if you did, I'd hazard a guess that you aren't part of the oppressed party and aren't qualified to speak on their behalf.

You know, telling people they're acting morally superior when they're confronting the fact that people are calling aspects of their identity controversial and acting like said parts of their identity simply shouldn't be discussed in public is not a good look.

If you don't understand that the problem is that detractors have made simply being LGBTQ+ a political issue, you are not qualified to have an opinion here.

I'm curious what you think you mean because there is no good answer.

I also wouldn't have had to comment at all if people weren't casually asking people to instate don't ask don't tell in social settings.

Humanity either needs to "agree to disagree" on wide swaths of things we care a whole bunch about ([...] lgbtq [...]) or we need to go back to not discussing those things in public or polite company.

Does this cut both ways, where LGBTQ+ people also don't have to listen to how straight everyone is? I doubt it. So yeah, how about no? How about there is agreement or nothing? Because there's no way straight people are going to agree to disagree about whether they should be allowed to discuss their sexuality.

If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).

Okay, so what is your suggestion here? Make it legal to make the copies? You know that that will only make more companies implement more aggressive DRM, right? Because, if you can't legally stop people from copying your software, you have to stop those who copy it from being able to run it.

This is also why cloud applications with web interfaces are on the rise. They don't have to worry about piracy because it's literally impossible unless people break into their servers, which I'm sure no one is going to argue isn't a crime.

And what you're missing is that "perpetuity" is a lie.

You are now actively misrepresenting my point, which was that someone is going to have to reverse engineer something in order to maintain software. Disks don't last forever. They rot. Your copy of whatever in your PS2 for 30 years will potentially not come out unscathed. Other media has its own issues. PC games from that era simultaneously are getting harder to run and have their own DRMs that need removed.

Emulators are the only future-proof solution and they will undoubtedly need to be ported to new architectures in the future. The maintenance cost is somewhere. In this case, it's in removing ore reverse engineering the online-only components. You don't even have to reverse engineer everything - just enough to get it running. Look at Teknoparrot. Multiple games only barely work because they don't emulate the entire multiplayer backend.

This isn't an insurmountable task and you weren't about to be the one writing a PS2 emulator, so I'm not sure why you're so insistent that it's different. For you, anyways.

I can list the two I've played: Elite Dangerous and Planetary Annihilation. Another one I can name is The Crew.

I don't know enough about Planetary Annihilation, but Elite: Dangerous and The Crew were definitively designed to instance you to make it feel like things were going on around you. The only functional difference between them and MMOs is the amount of players you see at once. They were made to be played online, allowing you to seamlessly move from going it alone to playing with others. This goes back to my "people want the interconnectedness" point. Allowing you to instance yourself out doesn't change that.

You're responding to a specific example rather than the underlying point.

No, you're missing my point entirely, which is that there's a maintenance cost to perpetuity. It's just placed somewhere else in this case.

Hardly. Diablo 3 is probably the most famous example (partly because it's so popular, partly because it's direct predecessor didn't have an always-online requirement), but hardly the only one. Google "online only single player game" and you're bound to find a list.

If this is that big of an issue, shouldn't you already know the examples and be able to list them off?

If I have a disc or any other physical item I can at least take measures to protect it. I could conceivably put the console with the disc inside it in a closet, come back in thirty years, and play the game. I could back it up and wait for someone to make an emulator for the console. If the game needs a remote server to be up to run, there is nothing I can do to ensure I can continue playing the game in the future (other than painstakingly reverse-engineer the server). That's difference between owning something and not: control.

Ah, yes, so instead of waiting for someone to reverse engineer the server, you're waiting for someone to reverse engineer the console so that it remains playable in perpetuity. That's definitely different.

I mean, I know it's convenient for companies, but there are other ways to look at this, namely that it obsoletes actual DRM and provides you with something in return, which DRM doesn't. Or, to say it another way, there are worse fates.

That being said, even now, there are few genuinely single-player games that require an online connection to play. It's not a fast-growing trend by any means and, thus, not a threat. People love to bandy Diablo 3 about, but the thing is that it's the only game that they can reasonably bandy about and that was released 10 years ago in May. Or, to say it another way, if you're going to complain about something, maybe you'd better keep your references up to date.

Most games these days are on Steam. You can trivially make any game that uses only Steam's DRM playable without Steam and even trivially remove SteamStub. That emulator that I mentioned even lets you play "online" with friends via P2P, sans Steam or any third-party server. Is it entirely legal? No, but neither is making old games that forced you to keep the CD in the drive that new computers no longer have playable without the CD. Or, to say it another way, if you're so committed to that ideal, why aren't you doing what you can to make it possible to stay committed to that ideal?

Can't you use the auction house from single-player? If so, this is part of my point. This isn't some grand conspiracy to limit ownership of games. This is the kind of thing that more people want. They want the interconnectedness and that is an understated part of why gaming has been taking off as of the last decade.

There are a lot of things that are designed to limit how you can use your software, but gaming is one of the places that companies genuinely don't have to do that because the features that necessitate limiting how you use said software (eg. introducing anti-cheats and forcing you to be online) is stuff that people actually want.

Okay, have fun in your alternate reality where users host all of your data and you regularly lose characters or accounts you've spent months on because they decide they can't be arsed to host the server that you were on anymore. After all, you can't allow users to brings their characters/accounts cross-server because that's a cheating risk. :)

I literally didn't say the network code was different. But server load, internet requirements (have fun hosting an Ultima Online server for your friends on a 56K modem), and more make it impractical for any single user to host a server.

Quake II is literally not the same as an MMO. You have a small map with a maximum of, what, 32 players? MMOs can have thousands. Most modern MMOs can handle hundreds in the same zone before they become unplayably laggy. Most can't handle thousands in one zone, even on the machines the servers were built for. You can't do that as a consumer.

It's not about the code. It's about the game itself and its requirements.

Emulating servers doesn't change that.

Again, it's all about being able to connect everyone that is playing and the difficult parts being managed for you. You never have to worry about spinning up a dedicated server to play with your friends. You just load in, invite them to party, and queue up. These conveniences are why this model is popular, not because of this bizarre conspiracy you're pushing.

So we know the ability to have dedicated servers and in game server browser exists inside the engine.

You can continue to spout conspiracy theories if you want, but the fact of the matter is that dedicated servers are a completely different archetype. If you connect to a server, your connection is retained until you disconnect, meaning that you are in the player pool until you disconnect, which means no one else can take your slot in the player pool until you disconnect. This worked when communities were smaller, but it's completely incompatible with having 100k+ people online at any one time. The server lists would be massive, especially in a game like Halo Infinite, where lobbies cap at 16. No one wants to deal with that.

Sigh, go listen to the post mortem devs of ultima online, as soon as UO beta was successful, Ultima 9 (the local app) was axed, for client-server ultima, aka "MMO's" are just back ended rpgs, they re not some different kind of game.

Ultima IX was, from the ground up, awful. Not to mention, you're completely misrepresenting this. It's not like they killed Ultima IX and reused its code in Ultima Online. They're completely different games.

And yes, MMOs are different. They literally have different mechanics. No Ultima game played like Ultima Online except Ultima Online. The entire appeal is that the entire userbase is all on one server.

But, more importantly, at any given time, the servers are too complex to manage for individuals and, at the time that Ultima Online was released, it would have been literally impossible to run on the average desktop computer. A RasPi can barely manage 8 people on a Minecraft server. You think that your 1997 Pentium could have managed Ultima's server? Alternatively, look at Ryzom's open-source release. There are like four different interconnected servers. What average user is going to be able to adequately manage that for other users?

Ummm...more and more games are forcing you to be online during play because, in reality, that's what people want. People want their universal auction houses that connect with other players and feel more "alive." People want their Wonder Trades and other seemingly inane social features. Do all games need it (eg. the StarCraft and WarCraft III remasters)? No, but that has less to do with "ONLINE GAMES ARE EVIL" and more to do with them wanting to keep people firmly in the Battle.net ecosystem. There's an entire player retention strategy that goes into that that has nothing to do with piracy.

Moreover, MMOs in general necessitate a central server. They're a completely different genre that is isolated from the fears you're expressing and, more to the point, they're not a particularly popular genre when compared to session-oriented competitive multiplayer games, so they're not actually why those games are forcing you to connect to a central server.

The main thing you're missing when complaining about the "loss of dedicated servers" is that centralized services consolidate the userbase, allow them to programmatically split the userbase by region, and ensure that, as long as people are playing, they can always be found. But, more importantly, you're never locked out of the "populated" servers for an arbitrary amount of time because they're perpetually full, which has been a problem in a number of games with dedicated servers.

Also, you have to remember that the games industry is approximately 5x larger (by revenue, probably more by userbase, especially considering the rise of f2p games and increasing prevalence of deep discounts) now than it was in 2000. What the majority wants inevitably changed because "the majority" changed purely by virtue of there are 5x+ more people with their own opinions.

So, sure, things are changing and are moving away from self-hosting, but there are a lot of cultural factors (and undeniable conveniences) that have influenced it far more than "companies are evil and they just want to control us."

Why do any rightsholders care about anything? Because it's about risk management and looking like they're actively protecting their IPs.

Steam

This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue).

Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.

...to push the narrative that piracy is evil and they need to take more measures against it.

I think this is the wrong way to be looking at it.

WINE is an open-source project that explicitly wants to run as much Windows software as accurately as possible on non-Windows systems. If something's broken, anyone can fix it.

This isn't true for the proprietary software that is Windows and C&C, albeit C&C Remastered is partially source-available now, so that could improve matters somewhat.

Not sure if this would help in this exact case, but I've used OTVDM to run some old games successfully.

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

That it would. I don't have access to a Mac or time to get it building elsewhere, so a video would be great.

...except the non-deterministic parallelism that this offers.

That's the thing. Smalltalk is historically extremely bad at utilizing multiple cores (not because it can't be done, but because no one has - multiple people have thought that an actor-oriented VM might be a good fit). This utilized multiple cores by embracing non-determinism. No other Smalltalk VM offers that.

It changes daily...like Wordle.

Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general).

If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.