I actually felt like the Elder Scrolls games handled this elegantly. The interactable doors could be wonky but also strategic, but for cell changing doors, on today’s hardware you barely even notice the loading screen.

It felt like it kept each area of the game nice and concise, but also it still felt so connected! Especially with how characters could follow you between cell changes after Morrowind. (SURPRISE, pants-ruining Oblivion guard jumpscare!)

[Early Resident Evil Titles have entered the chat]

A browser based Doom or Quake engine world sim to run around playing with others sounds like such an awesome concept. I’d love that!! And in the 90"s no less. That would’ve been crazy impressive.

Microsoft and MMOs, man. I remember they were gonna make a really neat online fantasy one for the Xbox and canned it, too.

That’s such a wild story. Thanks for sharing that with us! I wish they wouldn’t have cold shouldered you like that…

Here’s how I was imagining that went down the whole time I was reading it lmao. Just for you.

“Cat? Dog? Pig? LOAF OF BREAD. SYSTEM ERROR!”

https://youtu.be/LaK_8-3pWKk

Haha that does sound slightly familiar! Like Mario Kart’s Lakatu on steroids. 😂

Lol okay solved! Colliding with an opening door just yeets an NPC (safely) out of the way.

Haha there needs to be a “monkey’s paw” community but around what new bugs pop up when someone proposes a fix for a mechanic.

New bug report: Essential NPC unable to be interacted with because they walk toward the door to greet the player and get clipped through the opposite wall at high speed.

Sometimes they fall through the map and the game crashes when they reach -9999 meters, other times they die intersecting the wall and it soft locks the main quest.

Fun story rq: Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the most bizarre bug where, if you talked to a gang before getting the quest to go clear them out, on the second visit one of them would just spawn… like…on the moon, apparently? (A ridiculous distance upwards, not even visible except by objective marker) Made the quest unbeatable until they patched it hahaha.

Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:

• Doors violently push anyone out of the way, possibly “crushing” them into walls or
• Force themselves back closed, turning any random NPC / obstacle on the other side into an unbeatable lock or
• Just trap an unfortunate NPC in a corner on the other side, or
• If they use the physics system to swing open, in which case they’ll look smooth but possibly bonk the player/actor going through them a few times and could potentially (and comically) insta-kill them if physics is feeling grumpy.

The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.

Gamedev is magical.

Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.

The ability to “slowly quietly open”, and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.

extremely good “search engines” or interactive versions of “stack overflow”

Which is such a decent use of them! I’ve used it on my own hardware a few times just to say “Hey give me a comparison of these things”, or “How would I write a function that does this?” Or “Please explain this more simply…more simply…more simply…”

I see it as a search engine that connects nodes of concepts together, basically.

And it’s great for that. And it’s impressive!

But all the hype monkeys out there are trying to pedestal it like some kind of techno-super-intelligence, completely ignoring what it is good for in favor of “It’ll replace all human coders” fever dreams.

It will have consumed the GigaWattHours capacity of a few suns and all the moisture in our solar system, but by Jeeves, we’ll get there!

…but it won’t be that impressive once we remember concepts like “monkey, typing, Shakespeare” were already embedded in the training data.

Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

Totally can be! Absolutely!

Although Blender’s amazingly usable now and has had lots of love in that regard! But it took a LOT of support to get this far.

Good UX is crazy important.

I think I’m more irritated at the people who seem to show up in so many FOSS discussions, expect FOSS alternatives to compete 1:1 with their billion-dollar corpo-ware of choice, demand the world of it, offer zero support, and then declare “it sucks and isn’t ready for the real world” because it’s not so perfect that Autodesk and Adobe are like “Well we’ve had a good run, guys.” and give up lol.

I sympathize because I know where the frustration comes from. They’re sick of their tools being held hostage by interests that constantly seek to screw them! But change requires flexibility, cooperation, and support.

I think a lot of people just don’t want to say “I want Maya/Photoshop/Excel/Solidworks/Windows/etc…but free and without dark-patterns!” (Don’t we all lol) Because they know that sounds unreasonable (yarr aside lol) , but people tend to get settled and comfortable with whatever got to them first.

But taking that out on the community isn’t helping anybody.

Constructive criticism of UI/UX is absolutely essential though, and requires a lot more understanding of how humans interact with things than simply “Well, billion-dollar-ware has always done it this way.” Haha

Godot is something I can still be super newb at and yet straight up admire. The nodes tree / scene system is a work of genius and I love it so much.

I do feel like a lot of inspector bits suffer from unintuitive “hard to distinguish menu to sub-sub-sub-sub menu” UX, but I think the editor’s “expand all inspector headings” (or something) option is really handy for knowing what you’re working with, and mitigates that a little.

I am sympathetic but also so damn tired of seeing what essentially translates to:

“Look, [megacorpo] bought out my school’s ecosystem so that’s all I learned. It’s “industry standard”, I can’t believe this FOSS can’t even do this one niche corporate-job feature, therefore it’s objectively terrible / not ready / inferior / useless for job work.”

Which can usually be further boiled down to:

“I tried it but it wasn’t a carbon copy of my preferred corpo-ware without any strings attached so it basically sucks.”

Except for those comedy accounts. Some of those takes are sheer genius lol.