It seems like the Archive.org .zip dump’s “size” is just 12580366816. I assume that’s bytes, which is only 12½ GB. That seems way too small to include all the romhacks, doesn’t it? I thought a lot created assets and HD textures and such. But that also seems like way too much to just be website data, and most hacks are tiny files.
Does anyone know what’s in that data dump? I’m tempted to download everything, even though I’d only ever use a miniscule percentage of it.
pretty sure that’s illegal and they can sue for the maternity leave pay as well as discrimination….
lots of corps(e) don’t want to employ mothers of young children, as there’s lots of legally excused absences and they can’t press them for as much overtime….
Only illegal if the maternity leave was the reason, and it can be shown to be the reason. Over 200 people were also laid off at the same time. I have no doubt bungie added them because of the maternity leave, but it’s gonna be really hard to show in a court of law.
Bungie’s layoffs have been devastating. 220 jobs were eliminated yesterday, while other jobs had been shifted over to PlayStation Studios.
Sadly it’s all but impossible to show their layoff was because of maternity leave and not just because they were ‘part of the layoff’…
Hope there’s a paper trail adding them to the list of layoffs because of the maternity leave, but I doubt they’d be stupid enough to put it down on paper.
Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.
My work is in the process of hiring someone to replace me since I’m headed to a new job. After a recent interview, a co-worker on the hiring committee made a comment on Teams, “His age seems OK.”
Uhhh, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about age in hiring decisions. Especially on a written medium. Pretty sure that in the US, age discrimination laws starts at like 40yo, including hiring and firing. That interviewee seemed to be over 40yo, which is probably what prompted that comment.
Not that I think the candidate will sue us if we don’t hire him, but it’s just unnecessary risk. And I don’t even work in HR or legal; rather I’m in IT. Surprised HR didn’t say anything about that comment.
That whole mindset is weird to me. I’m in my mid 40s and just got hired on as a team lead for a bunch of kids who are fresh out of college. They’re exactly where I am when I started and I’m excited to share my 20 years of experience and mentor them.
They wanted to hire me on as their supervisor but I made it clear that the extra couple grand a year for that headache didn’t interest me.
It is. Additionally, my co-worker who made the comment is like 33-34. I’m 37. Another person on the committee is 40. HR is like 64. So it’s not like we’re a bunch of young guns ourselves lol. We should want experience, and with experience tends to come age.
But yeah, I getcha on the management thing. I’m technically a manager, but I don’t have any subordinates. Because I told them, they’re going to have pay me way more to become an actual manager with direct reports, especially since I’d lose my non-exempt status. To make me exempt, they’d need to make it worth my while. We’re a non-profit, so we already get paid crap (though benefits are excellent).
The head of bungie spent a shit ton on classic cars, but they’re laying people off… I really want to see wtf happened to bungie internally. It went to shit the past decade.
An interesting question is whether this would be constitutional in the US, if ever attempted here. Generally, forcing developers to code something has been considered “compelled speech”, though this defense gets deployed to varying degrees of effectiveness (i.e. refusing to code proper authentication doesn’t exempt you from liability in a breach just because requiring that auth would compel you to code it).
Frankly I have no faith we’ll ever see game makes forced into being consumer-friendly, and I’ve just begun to refuse to purchase any “Live Service” games precisely because I don’t want to be investing hours of my time into something that can be taken away at-will.
Good question. Presumably games like this will have a server that is proprietary, and the compulsion may simply be to make the server source or executables available, rather than creating anything new
If you’re talking about being forced to code as in “make the game work on it’s own without the server”, I’m thinking a “working state” includes “here’s what you need to run the server privately”, no more coding should be necessary.
Idk if you were thinking they’d be legally compelled to convert server based multiplayer games into peer-to-peer, but that’s not how I see it.
It should also not be legally possible to prosecute restoration work to make unsupported games run on private servers.
Generally, forcing developers to code something has been considered “compelled speech”
I’m European so I don’t quite understand.
Say person A paid person B to say X and had a valid contract. If B didn’t say X can person A sue person B to compel performance of contract or just money back/damages?
At least for new games wouldn’t it just be an implied part of the purchasing contract, meaning money back at least.
If B didn’t say X can person A sue person B to compel performance of contract or just money back/damages?
Well first, my question more relates to the US Constitution’s 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech from government/public interference, which is why a law could not compel someone to code something, but also, even in contract disputes between private parties, you will only be able to compel Specific Performance (doing an action) if you can show that monetary or other compensatory damages would be unable to properly compensate for the breach, and Specific Performance can never cover “personal obligations” such as continued employment.
If you had already written the code, but refused to turn it over, that might be possible to compel, but if it wasn’t yet written I don’t believe the courts would ever compel you to write that code as a form of compensation for contract breach.
I love the idea, but I can’t see it actually working. Developers would just sell even more games as subscriptions instead of selling licenses, regardless of any interactive online content or lack thereof. (Think of EA’s 2013 release of SimCity with always-on DRM, for example.) Then when they want to shut their servers down, they just stop selling subscriptions and wait until the last one expires.
I think that’s fine, tbh. Not as many customers will pay $80+ for a subscription. Then companies that sell games with more ethical business models will be more competitive, too.
there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s !pinball – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.
I just finished a long fever with Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire. Trying to build your collection of Pokemon across sessions is so addicting. I couldn’t believe how good I was by the end. I highly recommend it, just use a GBA emulator.
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