Today I had one realized just how stupid documentation has become. UIs have some how got so clunky that basic information is hidden away behind an internet connection that's always assumed to be there.
An example. I installed a custom UI for a game. It added some minor quality of life improvements, nothing major. When you open it, it's just a wall of options with vague names. "Timer", "Health" type options. None of which you can mouse over to get a description of or have any sort of tool tips explaining their purpose. But all this has been written and is accessible on a wiki dedicated to the program.
This is piss poor UI design at it's worst. All the effort was put in to document these things yet not give you access to them. If you were setting it up offline then you're shit out of luck. If the website goes down you're similarly out of luck. It's adding a weak link into the chain which doesn't need to be there.
This has been happening now for a couple of years and it's only getting worse. First documentation was moved to a PDF, now it's outside of the system entirely. It's bizarre how people are some how making UIs worse and worse and then finding ways to make it harder to get round them. I don't believe they have got more autistic because UI designers have always been autistic as fuck. Which means they're getting dumber. Is this where the diversity hires are ending up?
Meanwhile, you're scraping the old wiki before this happens.
Landon Peterson
Pretty much everything surrounding computers has been getting worse for about a decade now.
Asher Gonzalez
When only 64k was available programmers had to be skilled and make an effort. Now with 'limitless' resources any shite will do.
Carson Kelly
Its so sad ;_; and everything is so botnet! and if the servers go down, you cant use a lot of software anymore because its all webapps that can't be pointed to your self-hosted server. Imagine if things went the opposite way. We could have had comfy OSes and secure software with little to no bugs, but instead we got javascript abuse and awful bloat.
Thats actually why I support the death of net neutrality. not because I don't believe the usual "sites will be throttled" meme, but because if that talking point is true, devs might have to debloat their websites to compensate for the throttling and thus javascript would be phased out or at least reduced to a more acceptable level.
No, that wouldn't happen with net neutrality being repealed. Companies would use alternate means for you to install a 10Gb app from a DVD so you are locked into viewing their website as intended. Remember the "install RealPlayer/Macromedia Flash to view this content" from earlier days of the web.
Noah Russell
If you had 64k back then, you were living in pigshit. A whole lot of 70's and early 80's computers had less. Pic-related has 16k and 32k versions. Apple II and ZX Spectrum commonly had 48k. Atari and Tandy computers were in the same ballpark. VIC-20 had only 5k, and both the ZX-81 and Jupiter Ace had a measly 1024 bytes of RAM. Granted you could extend the memory on most of these computers, but not by all that much. And anyway people still wrote software that worked on the stock machines. Now let's see some modern "programmers" write a game or something fun or useful on one of these. They'd all shit bricks and run away in sheer terror.
Documentation is fucking underrated. At work we lose several minutes a day diving into the framework code to look up not commonly used functions because we decided documenting it was too time consuming. But it's not only that, it's that in many places documentation just sucks. How many times have you been faced with sad JavaDocs that describe what a class has, but not how it interacts with the rest of the world? No tutorial, no nothing, so you have the pieces and you are left on your own to figure how to put them together. If the devs were feeling particularly generous, you will get some uncommented example/test files that cover about 11% of the library code. Then they wonder why nobody adopts their shit library.
Not only that, but we are seriously neglecting documentation on how to contribute. Some (very few) projects have a HACKING file which gives some pointers, but for example, Krita's HACKING file expresses how they want the code, not how to actually hack the program. Okay, nice, but the program is several hundred thousands LoC split in who knows how many files that interact in who knows how many ways; I don't have the time to go header file hunting all the way down from main function, full of C-style succint variable names that only the original dev knows what it means. If I have to learn a decade of code before being able to add a button to, say, open a history of my last used pencils, I'm sorry but I will instead clutter your git issues with useless suggestions and hope someone else implements it for me. You better not wonder why the software is only being developed by the same three guys who were there since the start, though.
Brayden Hernandez
You can also make nice graphics on 8-bit. Pic is Phantasy Star on Sega Master System.
user, you are taking the words out of my mouth. Especially with the HACKING file, so many projects are opaque blocks unless you are willing to do forensic research on how everything fits together, but no one is going to do that for some small tweak to the application. I think the main problem is that comments can get out of sync with the actual code, but this is primarily a problem of discipline.
Thomas Reed
It's not bad looking but you can see that sort of art all over indie shit today. Yet the Amiga which had a similar indie dev scene shits all over modern pixel art.
Alexander Young
The art design of the Psygnosis games was always great. Even Puggsy looks great.
Julian Mitchell
Talk about stupid shit. I've wasted my entire day trying to complie fucking Aegisub. Not being an actual programmer I had to learn all the garbage about pkg-config, autoconf and half of the required dependencies more. Worse than a bad documentation is no documentation at all.
Leo Ross
They're probably the best "mind fuck" style of the era. If I can get a damn Amiga emulator to work with WHDload I've love to play them. Fuck their loading times though. Those games are way way too hard to tolerate those.
Isaiah Robinson
Why? Doesn't your distro have packages for it? It's a popular program.
Aiden Brooks
If you want something more casual check out The Adventures of Lomax.
You can play first two SotB on Sega Genesis with much better controls, and no loading times. Granted the graphics and music aren't quite on the same level, but it's good enough for me. Actually the Genesis version adds some interesting effects, like the transistion when teleporting. Anyway it's quite a bit easier to play, so I got much farther into the game this way, without needing trainer or cheats. I always liked games with weird/surreal stuff. Faxanadu is another good example.
I tried the mega drive version earlier, it's much much easier. There's a good 25% punch range extension.
The ps4 version has the original with check points at the start of each area, this seems like a good balance. It's still hard but it's not ball busting.
Dylan Garcia
In the alternate timeline in which lisp machines won, all you would have to do is hit a key / key sequence and click on the ui element and it would give you the documentation of what it is straight from the source code.
Ethan Perry
Complete agreement. I go out of my way to write "self explanatory code" as much as I can, often to the detriment of my time and I still write documentation.
Code is read more often than it is written. Don't burden your or anyone elses brain with unnessary bullshit.
I also hate it when libraries keep the same name on documentation without giving any more hooks to hold onto, like version nicknames and co. Makes looking through longstanding projects with many versions a needlessly infuriating ordeal and searching it with general search engine an ordeal several magnitude more awful.
Parker Baker
Is this that Lemmings spinoff game that was released long after the Lemmings series had jumped the shark (i.e. after the games on the original Lemmings 1/2 engine ended)?
Carter Wood
(OP)
Ah yes, the "Minecraft Paradigm" of user interface design.
Parker Robinson
Radarr dev, I'm looking at you.
Landon Johnson
Yes it's a lemmings platformer. It's not bad but it's nothing special either. One of the few 2d platformers on the system any one knows about.
Joseph Clark
The average quality of programming would jump quite a bit if all coding classes were held exlusively on old hardware and all projects evaluated on it too. Hell, Z80s at least are still ubiquitous, you could make homebrew builds at 1/10th of the cost of a modern computer, easy.
Juan Robinson
Or you could buy a used modern computer for even less than that.
Brandon Rogers
It was advertised as 5k but it only had like 2k that was actually usable. I guess it could have more if you bought those RAM expander carts.
Nathan Torres
Any modern computer (even old ones, or stuff like ARM boards) isn't going to give you the same kind of experience as the 80's home computers, where resources were extremely limited. You'd be better off to go with a microcontroller.
