There’s two alternatives currently in development, inZOI from the PUBG devs, and Paralives from a smaller indie studio.

Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.

Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.

Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.

That’s a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.

Yeah, the amount of money they get from donations is so tiny compared to what they need for developing Firefox, that they don’t even divert it for Firefox.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they’ve also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don’t have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.

I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks…

Honestly also annoying as a not-so-new folk. I just thought about this yesterday, I reasonably expect to clone a random project from the internet written Java, Rust et al, and to be able to open it in my IDE and look at it.

Meanwhile, a Python project from two years ago that I helped to build, I do not expect to be able to reasonably view in an IDE at all. I remember, we gave up trying to fix all the supposedly missing dependencies at some point…

I’m guessing, they meant to write “that the language has no default way”.

I don’t know, man, far too many people seem to think that “easy to learn” means they’ll know all they need to know in relatively short time.

Like, you talk to our data scientists and they’ll tell you doing anything in Python, no problem. But you talk to our seasoned software engineers and you see the war flashbacks in their eyes, because it racks up in complexity so fucking quickly, it’s insane.

Yeah, same. The game where that screenshot is from (DCSS) also has an ASCII mode, where that skeleton dragon would probably look like this: D

The text log would say that a skeleton dragon appeared, and I could even imagine a skeleton dragon by itself quite easily, but when it comes to a whole room full of monsters, then it’s just a lot of info to keep track of. The small textures are almost like icons, in that they’re a compact way of telling me where which monster is.

Yeah, they renamed it a couple months ago. The core team got tired of copying MineCraft 1-to-1, as there’s just no creativity involved in that and you’re hardly allowed to improve on the original.

As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.

In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…

On the flipside, you give real intelligence 32 pixels and it infers photorealistic images:

(The textures are 32x32 pixels. Yes, that’s technically 1024 pixels, but shhh. 🙃)

I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Them announcing something like this looks good PR-wise, so they’ll do it, even if they don’t actually expect this effort to lead to anything.

But even if they do implement such an API, companies won’t start adopting this API until its capabilities are roughly comparable to the kernel-level solution AND it’s available on most Windows systems in the wild. So, we’re likely talking more than a decade before this sees sufficient adoption…

Many people grew up playing Flash games and may want to revisit those. I doubt, there’s many websites out there, which still require Flash…

Breath of the Wild took a somewhat novel approach to open-world in that it filled the game world with lots of interesting landmarks, then gave you lots of movement options and just let you explore on your own.

In particular, because Nintendo took a risk and introduced this novel concept into an established series, it had a big audience and enough budget to really show off that this concept works.

That’s why lots of gamedevs took inspiration and steered their open-world games into similar directions.

While I’m not aware of any titles that I would refer to as “clones”, the question isn’t far-fetched:

Multiple games have since cited Breath of the Wild as an influence. These include Genshin Impact, Ghost of Tsushima, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Halo Infinite, Elden Ring, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Horizon Forbidden West.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Breath_of_the_Wild#Legacy

Some indie titles I’d throw in, that clearly took inspiration:

• A Short Hike
• Lil Gator Game
• Tchia

I guess, their tiers weren’t already confusing enough…?

I feel like this problem might be somewhat endemic to the US?

In my experience, US culture in general is a lot more positive about everything. Like, if someone from the US is not praising the living shit out of something, that means they didn’t like it.
Whereas here in Germany, it’s usually the other way around. If you don’t find anything to grumble about, that’s the highest form of praise.
Obviously, US culture isn’t one massive blob, the extremely positive folks are probably just those I notice the most, but maybe that’s also what the video author is fed up with.

Well, and then people from the US tend to also be a lot more positive about companies in general, presumably a remainder from Cold War propaganda. The journalists/entertainers from Germany and the UK that I watch, do criticize games quite directly…

I have actually seen it in an XML file in the wild. Never quite understood why they did it. Anything they encoded into there, they could have just added a node for.
But it was an XML format that was widely used in a big company, so presumably somewhere someone wrote a shitty XML parser that can’t deal with additional nodes. Or they were just scared of touching the existing structure, I don’t know.

The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.

They’ve got a page for all the Rust stuff: https://community.kde.org/Rust