It is very trendy for Barcelona residents (I am one also) to moan about the MWC or ‘gentrification’.
It is less trendy to complain about the relatively low unemployment and well-maintained civic infrastructure; both of which are boosted by a strong international business presence which employs a lot of people and brings a lot of wealth to the city.
Losing that international presence risks turning the city back to the dirty, poor, backwater it was in the 80s. If living with a couple of major international events a year is the alternative, I know which one I’d choose.
I think the cancellation of the MWC is a disaster for the city, not just in terms of short term economic loss, but in terms of longer term strategy, as the MWC is already muttering about following other events to Madrid or elsewhere.
I find it unfair to call it moaning as is if its a childish reaction. Most of my friends can no longer afford to live in the city itself with their non-IT jobs. The gentrification process is a real thing happening right now with very real consequences.
I guess that MWC is not the problem per se. And it is part of the reason of the exploding international presence at least in the IT sector. But it is part of the problem of the worsening in the quality of life for many people.
My argument is that much of the wealth generated by tourism doesn't necessarily benefit citizens of Barcelona. I'm sure a lot of people are getting a lot of benefits, but I'm not sure it is the people that need it the most.
Of course they can take a cut, just like any physical copy second hand reseller takes a cut. The trick will be demonstrating ownership of digital goods, which is the industry is beginning to invest in things like blockchain tech.
I think I worded my question badly (or I misunderstood the person I was replying to). I thought they were suggesting Valve / Steam would be the only place the sale / transfer could happen.
Grade School: Doom 2, Quake, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Red Alert, HOMM 1-3, Total Annihilation
Jr High - High School: Tribes (started playing it late), Warcraft 3 / DOTA, Diablo 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, World Of Warcraft (beta through WOTLK)
College: Team Fortress 2, Heroes Of Newerth, League of Legends
Post-college: Civilization 5, DOTA 2, Path of Exile
I consider all of these periods equally great/golden. The number of games in each period varies, but I don't consider that a factor.
I could go back and play any of these games and enjoy them today, assuming compatibility issues are dealt with and there are servers with players for the multiplayer-focused titles (sadly not the case for Tribes, and I think HON is dead too).
I played Diablo 1 for the first time in nearly nineteen years last night on diabloweb, and it's aged incredibly well. The atmosphere is just as immersive as it was back in my childhood. I was surprised to not feel nostalgic. Instead, I was reminded of how incredibly disappointing Diablo 3 was.
I'm pretty gamed out now. Lately I only really play MTG Arena. The current Battle Royale era is the first major gaming phase I've opted out of entirely. I haven't played DOTA2 in nearly a year after playing at least one MOBA game near-daily between 2004 and 2018.
I'm tempted to try WoW Classic, but I feel like I'll either be unable to play more than a few hours before losing all interest, or it will completely take over my life again
I might disagree.... if you were a kid in the 90s, you were player at Peak 2D, (NES,SNES, Arcade, Neo Geo), and early 3D, both in PC and consoles where publishers were experimenting.
You had completely new genres of games being invented almost every other year.
Today it is the same type of games, just re-hashing of the same content, maybe with more/better graphics.
The only most recent completely new type of game is Minecraft.... and walking simulators type of games. (although some one can say that they are just like old time RPGs).
Here is a list of new types of games that has come about the last couple of years that might be worth checking out if the only one you are aware if is Minecraft (this might sound snarky but I take you at face value and you might actually not have heard of these types of games before). Some of these have characteristics of old games, but often has stuff that was simply not possible 15+ years ago.
Sandboxed MMOS (EVE, no mans sky, Elite: Dangerous)
MOBA (Dota, HoTs, LoL, Smite)
Real MOBAs (WoW Arena, WC3: Warlock, Battlerite)
Battle royale games (Apex, PUBG, Fortnite, DayZ, ETF, Battlerite Royale)
Simulators (Arma, flight sims, truck driver simulator, which are now SUPER realistic)
Online Trading Card Games (Hearthstone, Magic [1])
Rocket League (I dont know any game like it nor what genre it is "sport"?)
Fast paced RTS (WarCraft, StarCraft, Total Anihilation, Red Alert)
Auto Chess (Autochess, Dota Underlords, Teamfight Tactics)
Competitive FPS (Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Rainbow Six Siege, Overwatch)
Casual social/arena action games (JackBoxTV, Use your words, Mario party, Overcooked, Duck Game, Gang Beasts, Speedrunners, Stick Fight, Hidden in plain sight [2])
If you are feeling old/and/or out of touch of modern gaming and coming from a perspective from the 90s, at least try these genres out. And of course games in the same genre has cross pollination and are similar in some ways, but some games play very differently, so don't dismiss a genre totally because you have tried only one game!
[1] One could argue that these are not a new type of game, but the mechanics in hearthstone is not possible in a physical TCG.
[2] Boardgame-ish types of games.
Edit: Of course I have left out a TON of games and some are actually considered quite old, these were the ones that came to mind.
EVE is from 2003. DotA is too. Magic Online was from 2002. RTS goes well back into the 90s, simulators back to the 70s, etc etc. I'll give you Battle Royale and I don't even know what Rocket League is but most of these are not recent at all.
Yeah, not all are from, but most are from after 2000.
As the person said: the only new "type" of game they know of released the last years was Minecraft, and lists games from "early 3D" era, I assume the person is not aware of all the new genres of games created the last 20 years. The only goal with my post was to list some genres that might be unknown (some of which has been around for a long time). I hope someone reads the list and finds something new that they might like, you should try out Rocket League if you are remotely interested in games. Rocket League is an insanely hard (high skill cieling) physics based football-ish kind of game.
Simulators today are a totally different breed of games, no one that plays them now would consider them even close to what was possible to achieve 20 years ago, thats why I included them.
Edit: I meant to write Planetary Annihilation, not Total Annihilation in my original post. Which is a quite unique RTS.
Rocket League is a football game which you play with cars. Depending on the mode, 1-4 players play against each other to score goals in a specific time limit. It's also not new though, Battle-Cars came before that.
Papers, please, and that dragon, cancer are both types of games that did not exist before.
Probably there's a few more indie games that I am not aware of.
If you want to stick to mainstream games only, even then there is real innovation. E.g. calling Super Mario Odyssee a rehashing of Mario Galaxy does it a misservice (in my view).
However, I'm a counterexample unfortunately. Of all the games that ardit33 talked about, I was between 12 to 18. And for me that period was the golden age of gaming.
A fun side anecdote: I remember when I played GoldenEye I had an English to Dutch dictionary, just to understand the missions! I really got caught up on the term "rendez vous with 006" (this was with the level called Facility), I couldn't find it! And my parents weren't that great in English or any other foreign language, so they didn't know either. It took me 6 months of asking some people from time to time to figure it out.
The golden age of gaming for me was between 12 to 18. I loved Warcraft 3 for example. And I felt it all went slowly downhill after the first installment of World of Warcraft.
Similar time frame for me, but I loved Warcraft 1, 2, and disliked 3. Loved the first Diablo, zero interest in the rest.
The golden age for me was perhaps a little later, LAN parties with friends, primarily FPS games with some RTS mixed in, circa 2000-2003. My biggest mistake was thinking as we got older and had more money we could do this more, but instead it was never.
There are a lot of really good games out there. Game developers (specifically indies) have learned lessons from old games. Some games are updated persistently thanks to disliked business models. The nostalgia factor is hard to overcome, but it is something that is completely invisible unless you were the one playing the game 20+ years ago.
To me it seems the "golden age" of gaming for everyone here has actually nothing to do with the games per se. I have nostalgia as well from when i was 12-18 when we did lan parties every weekend. But I actually think my golden age of gaming is still going. I have been gaming consistently through my college education and now when I am working. I have found new games (and old classics that i continue to play from time to time) and never stopped. I suspect it will end only when/if i move in together with my SO and get kids or something.
I feel in general that people are bad at keeping long friendships, and I seem very good at it (I don't know why). I have ~20 close friends that I speak to regularly that I have known for like 10 years. Many of those are people from the "golden days".
Have people that say they miss the "golden days" just not kept in touch with the friends they had at that time?
Or have they just given up on gaming because everyone else they knew stopped playing?
The age before the internet and monetization where we owned are games and internet penetration hadn't allowed companies to steal videogames functionality with drm.
The 90's AAA game modding scene was heads and shoulders above the modern AAA space because there was no internet, there was no incentive to hold back free level editors, file specs, access to contents inside the game files.
The last 20 years has undermind that hugely in big budget games. How could would have it have been to have level editing and a programming SDK for Need for speed Most wanted 2005? OR mass effect 1 + 2 for instance?
We've definitely lost a lot as game companies are forcing games into the mainframe dumb client model. AKA literally preventing you from owning the game you are buying.
Given that has always been the end goal of these companies since the beginning. Game preservation is going to be a nightmare going forward for all these server locked games.
So to say now is the golden age, means you're basically clueless about game preservation and what the mainframe/cloud model means for your basic rights.
The agenda is to turn PC into a more heavily drm'd locked down platform like mobile and control your software remotely.
Software as a service is literally a scam to invade your privacy, get you locked in and then jack up/extort you.
Look at all the DLC for SF V or Guilty Gear for instance. Huge amounts of cut content, sold back to you at ridiculously inflated prices.
Nothing like that existed in the 90's because there was no internet and analyticis to target stupid spendthrifts. Internet Analytics to target the spendthrift gamers has seriously fucked up gaming.
There are a LOT of modern games released with modding capabilities, just not most of triple A games, one I can actually think of is Skyrim which still has an active modding community. CSGO, Dota 2, StarCraft 2, Arma, is other examples.
When people say "golden age" how i understand it is that they feel like it was "better" experience playing the games then, and for me it means i enjoy playing games just as much now as i did when i was 15.
Sure, game preservation sucks, nothing I have given any thought. But that is not what I am talking about, I thought we were talking about the quality of games and how much people enjoy playing said games, not the state of the industry at large, privacy, DRM, and the future of gaming.
Dude the fact that the industry is stealing games and openly gloats it wants to make all games "services" (aka never give you a local application). Is the end goal.
So yeah, you need to know about the state of the industry to understand where game companies are taking us and it isn't for our benefit.
I do not want every new game to be an app controlled by googles cloud and thats exactly what the game industry wants. They want to move us all to the dumb terminal model of computing.
If you can't see that, you are blind. They openly talk about it on businss sites.
interesting, yet as someone else commented this assumes things only get better over time. which is obviously and throughout history not true. we have had entire civilizations and everything they did dissipated...
we need to strive to preserve the good things. and video games is one of those areas where the best ever will often be a name from a not so distant past... sorry.
> companies have sprung up to work as a middleman doing all the boring bits for a cut of the money
This is creating a problem just as much solving one. The billions in grants that are given away every year by the EU are basically controlled by a cabal of private consultancy firms who will cherry pick companies to write grants with; and create tailor made proposals designed to fit the call perfectly. On the one hand this is good as it creates a ‘pre-filter’ to stop you from wasting your time writing a proposal; but on the other hand it puts the EU’s R&D budget into the hands of a small group of private companies.
Either way you look at it, it means that, unless you are ‘in’ with one of these consultants, getting the funding is extremely difficult (I write from experience from both sides of the coin!)
I don't know that this is generally the case. I've never been involved directly in bigger (6+ figure) grants, but I know plenty of academic spinoffs who have had no problems writing their own grant proposals (admittedly this is a specific skill you pick up in academia so maybe not relevant to the general public).
> The statistics show that Barcelona (and Madrid) are at a historical minimum of empty houses available, yet the spanish population is migrating from smaller cities to the big ones
It's a shame that any travel experiences you may have had have given you that impression. My (relatively limited) experience of travel is that it has genuinely opened my eyes to the fact that the vast majority of the world lives a very different life to my own, and those differences are something I have enjoyed learning about. Reading a magazine or seeing it on television doesn't give you the same impact.
Not everybody wants to learn about such things. That's fine, but don't hate on the people who do.
> status fencing by upper middle class people who can't gain status through thoughts or substantive actions
You deserve a bit of a flame for one of the most pompous and vacuous statements I've ever read on HN. What is status? What constitutes substantive? I'll bet my definitions are different to yours!
You've taken my comment about the status we give to travelling, and assumed that it's down to some personal problem with travelling. I love travelling, but still find the status we give it disgusting and can recognize privilege laundering. It doesn't really matter what we think is a substantive action, there's no reasonable definition that includes travelling for the sake of it.
Maybe I missed something in your question, but in every modeling package, even online ones, you have always been able to numerically specify the size, position and orientation of every object in your scene, with a precision of several decimal points. No need to rely on your ‘eye’ at all.
Yes, you can model accurately in these programs but you really have to understand how construction documents are put together. You aren't going to be able to quickly take dimensions from a drawing and convert it into an accurate 3D model with any of the big 3D model packages out there. When I was an architect, I stayed far away from 3DS max, Maya, Blender, etc because modelling in them felt like drawing with crayons. Its the difference between using pencils, rulers, and compass on a drafting board and using paint and brush on a canvas. And that is what's surprisingly lacking in the market, the accurate measured generic 3D modelling program.
WebGL, which is now supported by all modern browsers, with WebGL2 (more flexible, fewer restrictions) around the corner. Most of the professional level tools as exhibited by the OP will be using a custom engine built on top of it.
For smaller projects, the excellent Three.js [0] is an easy way into creating 3D in the browser.
WebGL2 is not around the corner. Apple has indirectly made it clear they will never be shipping WebGL2.
WebGPU is "around the corner". Apple/Mozilla/Google/Microsoft are all working on it. Google and Mozilla will ship it. Apple and Microsoft remain to be seen.
Didn't Apple kick off the whole WebGPU standardization process? I can't see why they would do that if they weren't interested in shipping it. Since Microsoft is moving to Chromium, I imagine they'll just leverage that implementation rather than doing anything with EdgeHTML.
Agree on WebGL2, it seems unlikely that they'll want to commit to supporting it forever with WebGPU on the horizon. Plus Edge will probably not add support until switching to Chromium, so WebGL2 will probably never have a chance to be supported by all browsers until WebGPU is taking off anyway.
Apple added a flag. They didn't add an implementation. There is zero code in WebKit to support WebGL2. All there is is a stub that returns a WebGL1 context when WebGL2 is asked for. Feel free to dig through the WebKit code. You'll see there is no WebGL2 code, all the functions are actually missing and no code has been added in > 3yrs. Try running the tests. (https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confo...), click off "all" then search for "conformance2", check the box and run. You'll see almost nothing passes.
