Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

[Lone Wandering Courier]

From the point of view of a user or as a programmer? If you'd like to make your life more difficult as a programmer to compensate, try switching out your IDE to Wordpad - comic sans, center aligned. Python is especially fun in that mode.

User. I never learned to code and probably never will. I tried learning C++ in high school but couldn't get the hang of it at all and just ended up cheating to pass the class.

 

[The Ugly One]

I really miss the days when 3D graphics were spartan enough that each new advance was just this massive change in visual fidelity, when you could look at a game and name the effects they were using. Riding that wave up was exciting, and every new technique would just get spammed in games, making them look flashy and eye-catching. I'm thinking of how Unreal used colored lighting everywhere, or how Beyond Good & Evil showed off its blended particle effects every chance it got, or how the first three Splinter Cell games were wholly designed around new lighting methods.

Those were fun times, but that era's over.

I know it was purest spergery, but I loved spending hours and hours tweaking autoexec.bat to do all sorts of dumb shit. Add to that tweaking QEMM loading of drivers and TSRs to squeeze out the max memory and you had the makings of lots of pointless entertainment.

I was just thinking, I don't want to have to go back to writing a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys to make a game work, but goddamn if I didn't feel like a wizard when, a full year after actually getting the game, I got Ultima Underworld to work in Windows 95 without rebooting to DOS mode by learning how to make it run with its own launch script in its shell environment.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

I really miss the days when 3D graphics were spartan enough that each new advance was just this massive change in visual fidelity, when you could look at a game and name the effects they were using. Riding that wave up was exciting, and every new technique would just get spammed in games, making them look flashy and eye-catching. I'm thinking of how Unreal used colored lighting everywhere, or how Beyond Good & Evil showed off its blended particle effects every chance it got, or how the first three Splinter Cell games were wholly designed around new lighting methods.

Those were fun times, but that era's over.


I was just thinking, I don't want to have to go back to writing a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys to make a game work, but goddamn if I didn't feel like a wizard when, a full year after actually getting the game, I got Ultima Underworld to work in Windows 95 without rebooting to DOS mode by learning how to make it run with its own launch script in its shell environment.

That being said, 2D is at it's peak right now.

(it's all 2D)

 

[The Ugly One]

God, you weebs like the gayest shit.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

God, you weebs like the gayest shit.

No but like, the combination of vector graphics + spritemesh + 2D graphics can yield amazing results.

Here is another example:

 

[byuu]

That being said, 2D is at it's peak right now.

(it's all 2D)

All I see are shitty Flash animations.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

All I see are shitty Flash animations.

It's not frame by frame:

Spoiler: Spritesheet

Spoiler: End Result

Which is an amazing technique.

 

[byuu]

It's not frame by frame:

Spoiler: Spritesheet

View attachment 4279571

Spoiler: End Result

View attachment 4279575

Which is an amazing technique.

Flash animations aren't frame-by-frame either.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Flash animations aren't frame-by-frame either.

This is a little bit different; sprites don't just tween, they bend and wrap.

 

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I'm going to admit something horrible, but I actually kinda miss Internet Explorer 6

You must be the Microsoftie who said that he was proud of the fact that Internet Explorer's development was so hellish, it was directly responsible for divorces and broken homes. (archve)

 

[The Ugly One]

See, that's nice and all, but it doesn't wow me like the first time I saw parallaxing backgrounds in Super Mario World.

 

[Stasi]

I hate the overall degradation in quality of modern tech either through planned obsolescence or just incompetence.

I complained about my new thinkpad keyboard crapping out with only minimal use in another thread. I was going to sell it because I couldn't be bothered to replace the keyboard but decided to do some searching online to see if there was any fix. Found some guy with another lenovo laptop with exactly the same problem who suggested reseating the keyboard ribbon cable. Maybe too early to celebrate but a few days after reseating mine the problem seems to have disappeared.

How shitty is your assembly and QC that you aren't connecting fucking ribbon cables properly out of the factory.

 

[AmpleApricots]

How shitty is your assembly and QC that you aren't connecting fucking ribbon cables properly out of the factory.

Cheap flat flex connectors are not really that vibration proof and usually need to be secured with glue, which nobody does because it's another manufacturing step. This happens literally all the time now, in a plethora of devices. The ironic thing is that it could be avoided altogether with a different design of the same connector which is widely available but a bit more expensive. This stuff even starts to creep into expensive high-end devices and it fucking sucks.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

This is a little bit different; sprites don't just tween, they bend and wrap.

What's the point if it needs to be rigged like 3D(those titties aren't going to slosh around like that by themselves), looks like cel-shaded 3D and have none of the benefits of just doing it as 3D from the start?

Something that I kind of miss is that if you wanted to make your computer different you had to do it yourself. As much as I dislike the crap going on now I think I'm going to make some stencils and buy some spray cans.

 

[PlugsPugs]

I miss Netscape Navigator, circa the mid 90s. More specifically I miss the splash screen - the ship's wheel etched with constellations, rising above the horizon: The harbinger of an certain voyage into uncharted virtual waters, along the brackish estuarial swampland of somebody's Korn tribute page, and the densely forested coastlines of early blogs, before a stream of coloured text, flashing on and off like a wrecker's beacons, yielded the inevitable crash onto digital rocks.

Now the Internet is like Manhattan - noisy and obnoxious. There is no sense of discovery anymore.

View attachment 4263366

I aspire to, one day, have the kind of command over the English language that is proudly displayed here.

Absolute pottery.

 

[A-Stump]

I hate the overall degradation in quality of modern tech either through planned obsolescence or just incompetence.

I complained about my new thinkpad keyboard crapping out with only minimal use in another thread. I was going to sell it because I couldn't be bothered to replace the keyboard but decided to do some searching online to see if there was any fix. Found some guy with another lenovo laptop with exactly the same problem who suggested reseating the keyboard ribbon cable. Maybe too early to celebrate but a few days after reseating mine the problem seems to have disappeared.

How shitty is your assembly and QC that you aren't connecting fucking ribbon cables properly out of the factory.

I have an $11 Logitech keyboard I've puked on, thrown, spilled countless beers on, and smacked against the wall trying to kill a bug and it's chugged on for years

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I really miss the days when 3D graphics were spartan enough that each new advance was just this massive change in visual fidelity, when you could look at a game and name the effects they were using. Riding that wave up was exciting, and every new technique would just get spammed in games, making them look flashy and eye-catching. I'm thinking of how Unreal used colored lighting everywhere, or how Beyond Good & Evil showed off its blended particle effects every chance it got, or how the first three Splinter Cell games were wholly designed around new lighting methods.

Those were fun times, but that era's over.

What's always a little sad about that is that it killed off crazy software rendering ideas. As impressive as Unreal 1 is the software rendering is something to behold even to this day.

 

[Toolbox]

Every home customization electronic, LED RGB device, switch etc being IOT and controlled by an app. I actually don't mind the general idea behind what these products aim to deliver but them being forcefully connected to proprietary software and being online at the same time makes them increasingly worthless on top of being a security hazard. Yeah, it'd be more expensive, but I'd honestly prefer some company to start starndardizing these things while providing a universal remote with a screen and software you can mess with. Give you the option to make your own control system, provide the tools to do so, allow it to be entirely offline and controlled at some local pc on a chip. But no, everything must be as simple as possible for them to produce and give them the option of harvesting your data because continual hardware sales just aren't enough.

 

[byuu]

Give you the option to make your own control system, provide the tools to do so, allow it to be entirely offline and controlled at some local pc on a chip.

You can do that with ZigBee.

 

[Toolbox]

You can do that with ZigBee.

I know there are DIY options, but they are the minority and without a lot of design knowledge to make your own things, the stock products available in that category generally seem crappier. Looking into this though it appears you can use at least some products from companies that try to push a proprietary hub or app, how hit or miss is this?