#and treating its userbase like garbage. so. yeah

[nhaneh]

wow yeah that definitely is some absolute dogshit commentary and I'm thinking it's gonna take surgery to get that boot out of their seagullet.

And since this is kind of my wheelhouse, look: while there's absolutely some things that you can only really address by throwing more CPU cycles, GPU cycles, or RAM at it - typically very processing-heavy things like video encoding, sound processing, graphical filters and what have you - most of those are actually not behind what makes bloatware be so bloated and sluggish.

Like, when people talk about Adobe products, for example, being bloatware, they usually don't (to my knowledge, anyway) talk about how certain visual filters take too long to process or how applying blur is too slow, they talk about the program itself and its interface chugging along at an impressively sluggish rate. Likewise, when people talk about games chugging along, it typically isn't because the actual game mechanics and simulation is being too slow (though those do happen - end game Stellaris is always going to be processing-heavy due to how the game works, even though there's definitely optimization they can, and to some extents are, doing), but because someone decided that a particular random object needed about a billion triangles and 8k textures for some reason.

Look, even modern day graphics cards have concepts like minimum optimal triangle size where polygons smaller than that incur drastic performance costs to rendering at absolutely no increase to fidelity whatsoever - there's a point to which polycount and texture resolution just actively becomes a flat out performance drain with minimal if any gains in visual quality, and sometimes just outright loss of quality. Efficient use of polygons and texture space and what have you is absolutely a skill, and not bothering is basically just the graphical equivalent of releasing a buggy mess of a game that just can't stop crashing.

And sure, I'm well aware that there are diminishing returns to optimization and bugfixing. Software development can be a really large and complicated affair and there are some very real limits to what degree of efficiency is achievable, both in economic and in practical terms. But also, there is no shortage of examples of developers/publishers/etc that could absolutely have afforded giving something a bit more work before throwing it out the door. Adobe, especially, could absolutely afford rewriting several parts of their software suites to not just absolutely suck ass and maybe also support just a tiny bit of multithreading as a treat. Likewise, there's loads of shit Microsoft could easily do to make Windows less of a hampered, ambling beast - it would simply be a question of not forcing so much unwanted garbage on their users and instead give them the option to disable a bunch of useless shite that they don't want.

tl;dr: bloatware exists primarily because some devs/publishers figured it'd be cheaper to outsource processing to their userbase, just as they also tend to outsource more and more beta testing to their user base. And while there definitely are limits to how much older and slower hardware can keep up with increasing demands, there's also absolutely an extent to which they're just being cheap, and people like the one screenshotted above are basically just easy marks who got conned into paying 2-4 times as much money for a performance increase that can sometimes barely reach higher than 10%

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

[bullywug]

i'm gonna be skedaddling outta here before tomorrow, mates

gonna be following some mutuals on twitter throughout the day. you see a furry with an @jackaloppy handle follow you, that me. haven't posted anything yet tho.

catch y'all on the flipside!!