nathaniel

nathaniel

@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

game developer (derogatory). Lead Systems Designer at Epic Games

2.2K followers511 following262 posts

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

disclaimer* but really the entire data center problem is extremely not new. it's just the latest case of environmental free-riding/tragedy of the commons. The costs of environmental damage need to be borne throughout the economic system (from power generation to data centers to providers to users).

Tanya X. Short@tanyaxshort.bsky.social

small reminder that if you hate datacenters, their biggest drivers (by far? it seems? but unclear) appear to be streamed video content, whether static like Netflix/YouTube or dynamic like Zoom, so... regulations to track, reduce and cap that usage would be sensible first steps

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nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

The water use issue is particularly "funny" (in a fuck the world kind of way) because at least here in California the real water use issue isn't data centes, it's industrial scale nut farms.

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

disclaimer* but really the entire data center problem is extremely not new. it's just the latest case of environmental free-riding/tragedy of the commons. The costs of environmental damage need to be borne throughout the economic system (from power generation to data centers to providers to users).

Tanya X. Short@tanyaxshort.bsky.social

small reminder that if you hate datacenters, their biggest drivers (by far? it seems? but unclear) appear to be streamed video content, whether static like Netflix/YouTube or dynamic like Zoom, so... regulations to track, reduce and cap that usage would be sensible first steps

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

*that doesn't necissarily mean a "market solution", but it IS fundamentally a market problem. Data Center operators do not use diesel generators because they hate the environment, they use it because it's cheap and fast and they aren't held liable for the damage they cause. This problem is

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Having seen this in other contexts on volunteer spaces, the idea that this kind of behavior where someone “raises concerns” and expects everyone to bend over to address them (usually by ostracizing another volunteer) are more poisonous to the org than the actual concerns being raised. It’s a trap.

Jason Imms@jasonimms.bsky.social

Now that Freeplay’s statement is out, I’ma say my peace. Note: I (sadly!) am no longer a board member and have no insider knowledge of details. My understanding of the situation is one or more speakers raised concerns at the last minute about a donor/sponsor, leaving precious little time to act.

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

i don't actually think most of these groups are actually getting infiltrated or whatever but you probably should not structure your volunteer org to be maximally vulnerable to the simple sabotage field manual, as a suggestion

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

you know as someone primed from my early career and personal tastes to be salty about Bethesda owning fallout I have to say they’ve been much better stewards of the IP they’ve bought than EA for what that’s worth

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

I was not a huge fan of NWN the game, personally. BUT the NWN toolset was a gift to the industry that the industry didn’t even accept. The fact that I’ve never worked at a studio besides Obsidian with a conversation editor half as good as NWN.. like, BioWare just left their homework out! Copy it!

Felipe Pepe@felipepepe.bsky.social

Resharing this because it's such a formative memory... To most people BioWare means Mass Effect / Dragon Age, but NWN was revolutionary - the "Western RPG Maker". It's the only entry on the CRPG Book with 4 pages, because 2 are just about its Aurora Toolset. Hell, we have The Witcher because of it!

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Really ambivalent about NWN2 because I think there were some genuinely fantastic improvements we made to the tooling and game - like full party control, metatiles and the campaign tools - but we lost that kinda magical ease of use of the original Aurora editor and had so many other issues it didn’t

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

catch on with creators the same way. I think NWN2 (especially the expansions) is on weight a better video game but I think it failed to light up people’s imaginations and creativity the way the first one did and I think that’s a bigger failing than our campaigns were a success. Personally.

nathaniel reposted

LeeDot
@leedot.bsky.social

Replying to @pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Having done my share of working at co-dev shops and being an independent contractor there’s pros and cons for each but I’ve generally found co-dev to be much less stressful because you aren’t personally on the hook for lining up new contracts constantly on top of your day to day tasks.

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

look nobody who isn't old enough to have played ultima or wing commander is allowed to be as mad at EA as old heads until they resurrect the Bioware brand for like an ad driven spyware service in their games or some shit lol

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

the year is 2003. EA shutters one of your favorite rts developers after running their brand into the ground. the year is 2004. EA shutters one of your favorite rpg developer after running their brand into the ground. the year is 2026

Jason Schreier@jasonschreier.bsky.social

BREAKING: Electronic Arts is cutting 400 jobs and shutting down BioWare, the legendary development studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.comElectronic Arts to Cut 400 Jobs, Shut Down BioWareThe next ‘Mass Effect’ will be canceled as part of the layoffs
nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

sorry but the replies here are whack. co-dev is good and healthy for the industry. co-dev means that when you finish your project, instead of laying off the surge of people you hired to finish the game, they go work on a different game with a different core team and different publisher.

GamesIndustry.biz@gibiz.bsky.social

Star Wars: Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75 people. "What we wanted to do was keep that core small, smaller than perhaps you might have done in the past, and scale capacity and capability with what we call distributed development." https://bit.ly/4hT02qg

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

There are problems, it is not perfect. but as long as games require more people when they are in production vs when they are in pre-production, co-dev will make sense and is actually a much more humane solution than "flood of contractors"

nathaniel reposted

Joel Auterson | DWG out now!
@joelotter.com

just to offer a perspective I've not seen much of On Here: I work in codev, I'm not in the "core team". I'm an employee of a codev studio. I am a full time employee with all the legal benefits that entails. I also have better job security than I might at a studio. It's pretty great. I like my job!

GamesIndustry.biz@gibiz.bsky.social

Star Wars: Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75 people. "What we wanted to do was keep that core small, smaller than perhaps you might have done in the past, and scale capacity and capability with what we call distributed development." https://bit.ly/4hT02qg

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Her soundtrack for live a live is extremely good and a ton of people missed out on it bc it was japan only for so long. Can’t recommend the remake enough

MrMKL is Melting 🫠@mrmkl.bsky.social

If you have ever enjoyed one of the musical tracks from Street Fighter 2, odds are you have this woman, Yoko Shimomura, to thank

nathaniel reposted

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮
@unormal.bsky.social

oh, if you can get even the jankiest game built and shipped you are, on average, the best programmer in any team of enterprise developers, I would bet any amount of money you want to bet

bird > /dev/null 🏳️‍⚧️🌱@birdtech.dev

this is a funny thing to post when the average game dev (through no fault of their own, they have to adhere to game dev processes) writes the worst code possible if it compiles and runs i'm sure game devs are just as skilled as normal devs but lmao it's fucking insane to say they're more skilled

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

trying to use google in the year of our lord 2026 to figure out if the stReam deck (with an R!) works with parsec is truly a nightmare. too bad quotes ini searches don't seem to mean anything anymore

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Hey, do you think it's appropriate for one of your writers to be publicly calling for the use of nuclear weapons (an 'atomic wedgie') against writers he doesn't like

jamelle@jamellebouie.net

lmao

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

The degrowth point of view here is nuts. What precisely in the history of the world would lead anyone to believe that given the choice between economic stagnation and fucking up the environment more, any reasonable society would choose economic stagnation?

Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com

I often see people argue that clean energy is not reducing emissions, because it just adds to rather than replaces fossil fuels. This argument is deeply misguided – clean energy built since 2005 has displaced 23 billion tons. I dive in over at The Climate Brink:

theclimatebrink.comWhat if the world hadn't built wind and solar?Clean energy does not simply “add to” global energy use; it displaces fossil sources that would otherwise get built.
nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

The economic hole left by the growth you might choose not to do will be filled by someone else who chooses to do it. You can dislike that, fair, but just pretending it’s not true is delusional

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Super curious if part of Capcom going public with their engine stuff is a plan to get into engine licensing. I think it would be pretty smart and really exciting to have another competitor in that space.

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Man the RE:Engine stuff that capcom is talking about is really interesting. They are using a lot of modern C++ stuff and doing decompilation from C# to convert to C++ as part of their build process. This makes IL2CPP (if you're familiar from unity) look archaic (source: x.com/mizuki_izuna...)

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

We have entered a historic moment in game development where executives and investors have become interested in directing huge amounts of time and money into dev pipelines. It is the responsibility of every technically minded designer to judo that into actually making things better for humans lol

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nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

In actuality a lightweight MCP that exposes *extremely* common tasks as tools and also has a tool for API discovery is probably the best way to go. But if you build a scriptable API vs having an LLM compose MCP calls, you have something that's still useful when Anthropic and OpenAI are down, or more

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

We have entered a historic moment in game development where executives and investors have become interested in directing huge amounts of time and money into dev pipelines. It is the responsibility of every technically minded designer to judo that into actually making things better for humans lol

nathaniel
@pedrothedagger.bsky.social

Good first step - any time you hear anyone say the words “MCP” you should say “actually, it’s more efficient for AI and token usage if we make a python API and let the AI script against it”. Which is both true and also means that humans can do more with the tool.