Is there any good template/library for modern multiplayer netcode for Unreal or Unity or anything else, or is it truly everybody rolls their own as the secret sauce in their AAA games?
No, people literally still roll their own multiplayer networking in 2023. Seriously. Unreal Engine 5's out-of-the-box multiplayer code isn't production ready, and they're probably the "best" of the major engines people use today.
It pales in comparison to older engines from other game companies. It's effectively unusable.
This seems wild in the free-to-play era, where multiplayer with in game purchases is, like, the main business model. Maybe Unreal figures the multiplayer implementation is the metric on which the game studios compete, so there’s no hope to commoditizing it, or something like that?
It's also why so many multiplayer games are bad. Wanna know what's worse? Unreal Engine's architecture is unreliable by design.[1]
Basically, Tim Sweeney's approach for Actor movement wasn't to replicate state accurately, but just trust that clients would eventually get the right data. This isn't the same as eventual consistency mind you, because game state constantly changes in fast-paced games.
You can have whole time spans where Actors have absolutely no accurate player position replication.
"It’s not bad at all!! We have 6 separate central a/c units and 8 separate central heating units. We can pick & choose what parts of the building to heat/cool and to varying temperatures. Our highest gas bill this past winter was $330 and that included almost an entire month of subzero temperatures. The building is incredibly well insulated."
Wow, that's awesome! Obviously anytime someone looks at this they wanna get cynical immediately (as I did). One thing I'm curious about is the property taxes. I could find it online if I really wanted to so I truly wonder if they took that into consideration. Also the upkeep. If I were them, I would try to rent out a portion of it and then eventually turn it into a rental property.
I so wish Apple had not removed the older Sierra installer from the Mac AppStore... I need to update some machines but High Sierra does not seem ready for reliable use yet.
I know it's not helpful at all to your current situation, but this vicious cycle with proprietary OSes was one of the most beneficial thing we got when switching my dev shop to Linux. You can install a release from the late 90s if you really want to (not recommend tho lol). Nobody can ever take it away.
I just wish they had made APFS optional for SSDs (as it is if you install to spinning media). It seems like 99% of the problems I'm seeing reported for High Sierra are due to the filesystem (or apps using a brittle, hand-rolled method of disk access).
I don't understand why Apple can't just make the past few releases of OS X available to anyone who needs it. It's a free OS now, and it has tons of hardware checks to prevent it from being run on non-Apple hardware.
I don't understand their need to remove/hide the OS upgrades. I have to repair a friend's older MBP next week, and now I need to jump through hoops to get a legitimate installer.
If you fall more than 1 version of OS X behind and they remove the previous upgrade, you're screwed from upgrading to the latest version.
"macOS Sierra or later doesn't appear in the Purchased tab. Instead, use the Search field in the upper-right corner to find and open the App Store page for the current version of macOS."
Thanks a bunch! I downloaded and stashed a copy of Sierra when it first came out, but I recently bought a new Mac that came with Sierra (likely a point release and 10.12.0 likely won't install). I can restore from a netboot, but like having something I can put onto a USB drive.
You've missed the step of looking in the hidden purchases tab. If Sierra was downloaded previously, it is going to be there. There won't be a need to get copies of the software from elsewhere.
In App Store go to Store -> View My Account -> Hidden Items/Manage.
Depending on how old the OSX currently running is, some features (especially integration into other Apple devices, like unlock with watch or seamless switching to AirPods) are unavailable, but would be available in Sierra.
What if there was a spec that web browsers could submit small amounts of mining work as a micropayment system for web content? (amount determined by content provider per-page or per-session or some other better granularity, only sent if user approves)
Browsers could pre-mine/cache some amount of work so that page load times would be relatively unaffected.
Browsers could ask about payment similar to pages requesting location (yes/no/always/never) so future payments are automatically applied or denied.
