Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era
They had Unreal Tournament 4 in development around 2018 but it never gained much traction in the pre-alpha phase. Once Fortnite blew up they seemed to just focus on that and their app store.
Halo Infinite is the closest I've gotten to the UT feeling nowadays. Simple arena, equal playing field, drop in drop out, tools-not-loadouts design. It's a shame how a variable and strong design gets put off into the corner to wither.
I wanted to play UT2004 for some nostalgia recently. Turns out even though I own it on the Epic game store, I can't play it because Epic removed it from the Epic game store.
They removed all UT games from online stores and added UT 3X which is a free version of UT3 with Epic Online Services baked instead of original ones.
The only way one could legally get UT99 is to buy physical. And it's been like that for many years prior to an event above, which also disabled the server browser after 22 years of running intact.
Same reason valve doesn't make games anymore. They followed the money and licensing their engine did a lot more than making games. Any games they made were to showcase the engine.
They just happened to hit the goldmine with Fortnite.
I think the problem is also that there are many FPS multiplayer CTF games even if they are not all great, they all compete for attention in a crowded market. Destiny, Call of Duty and all their variants.
most likely, there seems there are plenty of devs from nearly all major tech companies on HN, they often don't chime in as much anymore when it comes to problems, I've wondered if they get some kind of guidance on not commenting on "problems".
The general guidance is likely what I was told when I worked at Apple: essentially, as an employee, people will read what you write as though you are repenting Apple whether you are or are not.
So in short, I kept my mouth shut. I assumed I would lose my job if my public comment reached the right people.
To this day, even retired, I send bug reports to co-workers I know that are still at Apple. (I've sent a few image files that were problematic to the top engineer on the ImageIO team for example. I worked with him for over two decades before I retired.)
Apple is a very different place than it was when I started in 1995. Over the decades since I started, I have seen numerous changes I dislike. Sadly many of the changes were seen across the whole industry though so I would be no better off anywhere else.
I'm happy to have retired though. The industry lost a lot of what used to be fun.
Half the point of "AI" is to squeeze the labor market. This is why you don't see people chiming in. It's a nearly fully corrupt and monopolized system.
Azure and felt overwhelmed? As a student or first- time user to cloud computing, I've been there too. The idea of creating a chatbot or search app using GPT sounds exciting, but the process of setting up everything right from the vector database, provisioning OpenAl models, to integrating them,
Feel free to create an alternative. Keep in mind it's completely illegal and you will get the book thrown at you if you are caught. You will also end up using your captcha page to DDOS people who are trying to unmask you.
We are close to landing our first customer - an enterprise-level one at that! We're Geneva Business Messaging, a tool to centralize, persist, and if necessary escalate critical interactions between large companies and their partners. For actual collaborative cross-company work in fields like engineering, logistics, or security - not spam, marketing, sales, or the other frequent purposes of B2B apps.
We're at genevabm.com if you want to check it out!
Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up:
No read receipts
Need to know exact address to write to
Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments)
Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you)
Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together
Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks
I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!
I've always wondered about those grimy palm reading or fortune telling shops you'll find across major streets in Manhattan or New York. How are they making rent, even during the retail apocalypse?
What if superintelligence isn't even a thing? I was watching an interview with a Chinese-American specialist the other day (I'm sure it's been shared here on HN at some point) and she explained in the Chinese AI community they don't operate under the assumption that something such as AGI or superintelligence exists, and therefore don't work toward that goal. I'm sure people in this community can comment to a much more informed extent on this than I though
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