Cool designs are harder to scale to your 4K needs, we can scale the game itself because it is rendered or in other terms mathematically defined, it is easy to scale you essentially just times each vector by the scale you want, but with raster images such as in textures your only option is to increase the detail or take a better picture, now the UI if it was a raster image even a 4K one the size would be negligible compared to the size of the textures so that obviously isn’t the problem the problem is creating a new UI for every single possible type of resolution and aspect ratio, if size was the only factor this still wouldn’t be a problem but remember we are talking about scaling and scaling a raster image is much harder to do without losing detail or stretching it out so instead we use svg(scalable vector graphics) which are mathematically defined just like the game itself, now the question was why do we like boring UI? So why can’t we just make an SVG more appealing, well some shapes simply don’t lend themselves to proper scaling, infact anything that isn’t symmetrical will be distorted in one way or another, this greatly limits our design choices unless we want to stick to one aspect ratio. Otherwise mathematically defining a shape is simply a lot harder and more time consuming than drawing an image especially since the player usually just wants it out of his way so he can play the game.
Wish procedurally generated textures with a dynamic level-of-detail were more popular. I’m sure the artists tooling like blender may support this, but if generators were packaged with the game, end users could re-raster those textures for higher-end hardware.
It’s because studios have UX designers nowadays. Which they didn’t had 15 years ago. Some UX designers optimize the game to the dumbest play testers, or they can’t read between the lines of the play test results. Play testers say they don’t understand the UI and the UX developer interprets as UI needs to be simpler.
They don’t.
They are under so much pressure to have scrum meetings that they have to sacrifice development time in order for the scrum master to keep his meeting KPI on target.
meeting KPI
Middle manager #4 needs to justify their existence to middle manager #5
What even is this? There’s no such thing as meeting KPIs in any agile framework.
And Scrum does allow for long meeting in case of extreme situations but any self respecting team will not take more than 10% of their total time out of a sprint for this.
What even is this?
Sarcasm. But I have seen some stupid shit similar to this.
My mistake then. It flew completely over my head.
All good mate.
You don’t need to label a green bar as HP anymore. Everyone knows green bar = health
In Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, there’s a period of time between when you get your hammers and when you learn how to make small Mario/bury Luigi that the brother in back can swing their hammer and because you don’t know that move yet causes an angry Mario/Luigi animation to play like a “WTF BRO”
Those bastards removed it in the 3DS remake and I was so very disappointed when I found out, it was literally the first thing I tried after getting the hammers in the remake
It was such a small detail, but infinitely enjoyable as a kid, removed for nothing:(
There was this company called Scaleform Corporation. What they created was literally translation of any Flash UI to c++ pluggable game engine. Autodesk acquired them because it was flash games boom, best gaming times in the history of this planet. Scaleform became part of Autodesk Gameware where you literally could create game logic.
When corporation called Apple killed Flash on their phones another corporation called Adobe killed flashplayer enteirly (acquired from company called Macromedia).
After that it was just a matter of time until Autodesk killed Scaleform and Gameware.Funny thing that Adobe was company that Steve Jobs wanted to acquire. And because of his big ego he killed flash to kill the feeling of failure. Today it’s year 2025 we just didn’t realise that Steve Jobs was a biggest villan of all, it won’t be announced until 2050.
And that’s why the games are shitty guys. We need better software for creators.
List of games using scaleform https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform
Flash games and sites were a proprietary plague and its good they’re dead, even if it took another devil like Jobs to do it.
Flash sites were taking over the web with their closed source, insecure, unsearchable, unindexable, proprietary blobs of data.
Of course, (mobile) apps were the new face of evil and we should have fought against those too to keep a free and open web, but we failed very badly there.
Flash as a module in games was pretty neat though! If I recall, all the UI in Doom 3 was Flash which made for incredible interactive in-game screens.
So do we or don’t we like wasm?
You know, as a rustacean myself, I do get the joy of seeing web stuff run fast, compiling code for the web, etc. And wasm is supposed to have a human-readable format so that “View Source” is still a thing!
So in an ideal world, I like wasm. In the real world though, where they’ve been dragging feet on web-assembly-text, I’m skeptical. Will that format–stripped of names and comments possibly, probably obfuscated–even be useful? Will companies actually use it, or will this all be watered down? Hard to say at this point.
Thats some big lore claims for the death of flash games, got the sauce on where you found that info?
This letter from Steve Jobs (removed from Apple website) was a death sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash.
Steve Jobs just hated Adobe guys that made success in creative industry Jobs wanted to own. You can read how he praised proprietrary H264 format over “proprietrary” flash - flashplayer VM was opensourced in 2006 as part of Tamarin project and shaped web browsers of today. Letter was published in 2010.Steve Jobs fucked couple generations of people by blaming flashplayer as a source of intrusive ads and all bad that’s inside web and now we have that bad shit embedded in the browsers instead of external plugin. I’d say Steve Jobs fucked internet.
Steve Jobs was right about Adobe though. They gobbled up nearly every single creative tool in the market. Now everyone hates them!
Cool thanks for sharing. Flash games were a big part of my childhood. As if I didn’t have enough reason to dislike Apple and ol’ Jobby.
From a programmera perspective Scaleform was a really big pain to work in though… Though could’ve been that we had a bad setup…
Cuz most modern UIs are actually web uis in disguise, and it’s easier to modify a standard progress bar than to make a new one.
Pretty sure this is in reference to health bars in games
What is a health bar if not a progress bar for your death?
Speed run life, any %
That’s what I was talking about. Games use web UI for their UI.
Blame Material UI, the most fucking boring design timeline.
I still think material design 1 (which came out in 2014) is good, which focused on clarity with limited space. The problem started with material design 2 in 2018, which pushed for increased whitespace and homogeny in design. (And Microsoft’s Metro… shudder)
Material design 1 balanced clean and readable while maintaining depth (trying to emulate 3d space by “stacking cards of content” with shadows). But since most of MD1 was guidelines instead of, like, actual components developers could use, it was a double edged sword of forcing people to be a little creative in making their own UIs but cumbersome because you had to make it all yourself
Material design 2 tried to “fix” this by making everything simpler and shipping a ton of premade components that developers could just slap together and call it a day. Good for speeding up development, unfortunate because everything now looks the same. It’s also because of this that material design started to “break containment” and appear all over desktop applications/websites. It’s never good when a mobile design language is applied to the larger desktop space
That’s why I really don’t mind seeing material design 1 on either mobile or desktop, because it was designed to use space efficiently and interestingly. Material design 2 on the other hand favors whitespace and speed to the detriment of us all
I’d say that Microsoft’s Fluent design language is even worse. Material at least tries to use rounded shapes and animations; Fluent has been pretending that monocolored rectangles are interesting since 2010. And it has been consistently wrong.
They need to bring back aero
Bring back Microsoft Bob
To this day all five Windows machines in my house are running w10 with OpenShell and all of them use Aero themes. Any machine I set up for someone gets the same treatment. I’ve never had a complaint.
Openshell is nice but I want my colors and transparency effects 😭
