The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

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Rachael
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by Rachael »

What was old will become new again. As people age and die off, what was once "cheesy" becomes popular. This happens every few decades or so. So yes, we'll see beveled buttons make a return. And the "flatland" UI design we have today that got old even in the 80's will re-emerge again, after that.

The capabilities of technology and what devices are popular at the time will ultimately dictate what shape they will take when they make their re-emergence, but trends never actually die.
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by gramps »

There's definitely a lot of truth to that, but I don't think these design cycles are actually exact repetitions of earlier cycles. More like an "homage" maybe.

Forget software for a minute, we can look at this with almost any kind of design.

Take men's jeans in the 70's -- huge wide bellbottoms.

In the 80's -- skinny, punky jeans.

In the 90's -- back to wide jeans. But not exactly the bellbottoms of the 70's.

2000's -- back to skinny jeans, but not exactly the ones from the 80's.

Setting aside things that are intentionally "retro," I think you'll find more nuance to these design cycles than simple repetition. Maybe that's splitting hairs, but I think it points to a definite sort of progression, not just purely going in circles.
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Rachael
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by Rachael »

In a way, that is a bit what I was saying. That's what I was trying to imply in my statement that the capabilities of technology and what devices are popular at the time will ultimately dictate what shape they will take when they make their re-emergence. You are right that they are ultimately different every time they take form again, but there's still always going to be people who, for example, prefer more buttons in the toolbar of their browser, and others who want absolutely nothing at all except tabs and a title bar. This holds true even with your jeans example - there will be people who always wear baggy jeans no matter what, and people who always wear slim jeans no matter what.

The migration away from a clunky browser UI is simply a migration away from what was the only option available at the time.
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by gramps »

Yeah, I agree with everything you wrote there.

I think part of the disconnect is we've been lumping two different things together. There's functional design, the kind of thing where you could apply for a design patent. This is like the zipper on jeans; it largely replaces whatever was there before, because it's considered to be an overall improvement; it doesn't really go in cycles. It just hangs around until it's replaced by something else. And then there's aesthetic design, which is pretty whimsical and totally goes in cycles.

The assumption I was making was that clunkiness-removal is an example of a functional design improvement, not an aesthetic trend. I think this is what you were referring to when you said I was stating an opinion as fact. And you're right, the line between functional and aesthetic design can be blurry and it can be hard to be sure which is which sometimes.

And of course an aesthetic trend can override a functional design. I have a pair of "designer jeans" with a button-up fly. They cost a lot more than my usual $20 jeans, though, and I wouldn't expect to be able to find the usual jeans at the usual price with that button-up fly instead of a zipper.
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by leileilol »

This isn't about browser UIs though. this is about their engines under the hood not being able to drive on the same roads it used to so soon. Some of the browsers broken had 2018 releases so it's not some crazy legacy vintage thing here like trying to web on IE6. It's more of a Javascript negligence from the webmaster, or sometimes, simply just breaking their js functions on older browser agents (like Github for a while which had to require fake user agents to restore full functionality), Chrome and Firefox Quantum are awful though. Also K-Meleon is awful, thought i'd mention that one as it's often a blind 'expert' suggestion in some places.

and when Firefox came out it was ironically more memory hoggy and leaky than the mozilla suite around 2004. Don't miss the terminating of the browser occassionally
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by NeuralStunner »

Pale Moon is still doing pretty well, there are former Firefox addon devs now switching to it. Only issue is it still has to spoof itself as Firefox (and probably will forever). Nobody's actually going to put any pressure on webdevs to stop being so closed market about browser support. (I can only roll my eyes at Mozilla for whining about Edge's switch to chromium hurting the "free open web".)

What bothers me most often about GUIs is everything using some toolkit to give itself a different look & feel than the system's. Steam would be the best example, though they were doing it for years before it was really trendy. :P
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by InsanityBringer »

I find it really hilarious that so many devs have decided to take up web dev and making their things run in browsers using JS for portability reasons (in this case I'm thinking of a certain RTS project...), and yet we end up with this severe mess of browser specific hacks in order to actually make things work, and smaller browsers just get shut out because no one wants to deal with any specific quirks to them (even if they aren't that much differen't than the big ones...)
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by gramps »

Hmm, I checked that game out and it downloaded it fine for me with Firefox v.64... Not sure what's up with it (decent game btw, I remember playing this one back in the day).

Some of this stuff probably comes from incomplete support for features in the browser paired with incomplete feature-checking in the script. Like, checking that some method exists, but not checking that it actually takes that second argument or whatever. Hopefully the spoofing doesn't matter much these days, everyone should have learned their lessons about feature checking by now.

This kind of stuff is why I always stuck to ES3 featureset well into ES5, and stuck with ES5 after that (and mostly refuse to mess with it at all these days).

On the topic of making stuff run in browsers, though: one area where that's actually pretty useful is collaborative editing, like Google docs / sheets / etc. Have been thinking lately that a collaborative map editor could actually be not a complete pipe dream...
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by wildweasel »

gramps wrote:On the topic of making stuff run in browsers, though: one area where that's actually pretty useful is collaborative editing, like Google docs / sheets / etc. Have been thinking lately that a collaborative map editor could actually be not a complete pipe dream...
I seem to recall that was one of the primary goals of the Cube/Sauerbraten project, but I forget if that particular part of it got off the ground.
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by gramps »

Man, that would have been sweet, never heard about that.

I've often wondered if Sauer maps could be exported as Doom maps somehow. I mean, I'm sure they could at some level, but not sure how hard that would be. Someone posted some screenshots recently that brought that back, really reminded me of some of those old Sauer maps. Can't find the thread now though :?

Ahh, here it is: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=62891&p=1083678#p1083678
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by NeuralStunner »

InsanityBringer wrote:I find it really hilarious that so many devs have decided to take up web dev and making their things run in browsers using JS for portability reasons (in this case I'm thinking of a certain RTS project...), and yet we end up with this severe mess of browser specific hacks in order to actually make things work, and smaller browsers just get shut out because no one wants to deal with any specific quirks to them (even if they aren't that much differen't than the big ones...)
HTML5 was supposed to fix a lot of these problems, but OF COURSE everyone wants to support their own standards for it, so...
Spoiler:
wildweasel wrote:I seem to recall that was one of the primary goals of the Cube/Sauerbraten project, but I forget if that particular part of it got off the ground.
It has! It's pretty neat. Only downside is that triggers are (for some reason) handled as console scripts, and thus no doors or buttons (etc.) are possible in multiplayer.
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Re: The "Fresh Free Game Deals" issues [Split]

Post by NeuralStunner »

So I hate to sound like I'm pimping a proprietary platform (alliteration adds appeal) but GOG Galaxy of course doesn't have problems with the giveaways working. IIRC it's just a minimal chromium browser anyway so this isn't surprising.
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