Considering that pretty much all multiplayer games in existence perform some sort of local prediction / state interpolation to hide the lag on the local machine, cloud only multiplayer will be considerably worse. After all you can no longer hide the lag locally, since you're not computing anything on the local machine, so the minimum precieved lag will go from 0 (for movement of your own player character) to the RT between the datacenter and your PC :/
I actually wrote a Asteroids "Clone" that uses Vector Graphics last year :) [0]
But I agree, tooling is complicated. I'm currently adding the finishing touches to the rewrite of my own Assembler / Compiler pipeline [1] and started work on a more "traditional" Metroid-like shooter, the sprite and map editor are both custom programs written in rust using imgui bindings and take care of the grunt work for generating all the data structures used in the game currently the dev efforts are 50/50 tooling/game though :D
That however goes both ways, making it also far easier to install a dictatorship etc. because you don't have to replace tens of thousands of police officers with regime loyal ones.
We're walking on razors edge here, it only takes one "election gone wrong" and we might find ourselves in a nightmare with no escape.
Dictatorships have fallen because formerly loyal police officers stopped being loyal. It's unlikely that kind of personal evolution will happen with a machine.
Ceasescu’s fall was mostly caused by part of Romanian Securitate going against him, the same Securitate that was controlling the local police force. So much so that Ceausescu was still in power on December 21st 1989 when the local police was actively repressing the anti-Ceausescu street protests but had to escape by helicopter the following day once the same police force stopped fighting and killing the Romanian protesters.
So nobody had to replace tens of thousands of police officers to change the regime?
In my opinion, that just undermines the point. Nothing would have changed if the Securitate was controlling a bunch of AI sensors and such rather than a bunch of police officers.
Pretty much every single one that fell through internal unrest. For a dictatorship to fall, it's security apparatus needs to stop performing its function of suppressing dissent and revolt.
Humans aren't machines. The police of a dictatorship, at some point, will have to confront an order to gun down protesters and the like to preserve the regime. Even if they're ideologically committed, they might recoil the order to kill and let the regime fall.
> And the use of violence by the regime under challenge, argue both Petersen and Sadiki, acts as a further crucial trigger for escalation by protesters against the regime. It is not simply because the state use of violence - whether in Bahrain or Romania, Egypt or Libya - acts as reminder of its brutal nature at a time when it is more vulnerable than it realises. It is also because the use of state violence confronts those still part of the state with a moral and strategic question: whether to tolerate the use of force and hope the regime survives, or peel away and join the opposition.
> "It is the other side of the story to that of those rebelling," says Petersen. "There are different considerations for those in the military, police or special forces, defined by their role. They are required to make a choice: whether they can switch sides and hope the people accept their new narrative in the new world after the regime, or stick by it to the end.
> "Whether you defect to the opposition depends on these differential kinds of moral calculus. Ordinary soldiers, for instance, have their own calculus. And if they decide not to fire on protesters that sends a signal to the higher-ups in the military. Then pretty soon you might see the interest of the military changing."
> Petersen, however, has one caveat. That this kind of negotiation in an organisation like the military does not necessarily hold true if there is the early and "crushing" use of violence.
AI-driven justice etc is lowering the cost of dictatorship. It's literally lowering the barrier to installing an authoritarian regime, that's what's scary about it. (ref. "The Dictator's Handbook", my favourite political book, as to why this is a problem)
Plus the fact that you can't directly write to VRAM at all times and have to wait for the corresponding access windows.
But it's also a big contributor to the general art style and gameplay limitations for which the games of that generation are known for.
However with a few tricks drawing vector like graphics is possible[1] (to some degree), even though it requires a huge amount of lookup tables to be anywhere near peforment :D
Factories in Orbit, pretty much. There might not be many products today which will benefit from this ability, but a free fall environment brings many benefits to things such as crystallization of materials.
For example, the last resupply mission of Space X to the ISS included an experiment to product optical fibers onboard the space station, the goal is that these fibers will have a much lower number of defects in their crystalline structure then their earth produced counterparts, this means less refraction, which results in less signal loss over a longer distance which reduces the number of repeaters which reduces increases the overall signal speed.
Now, of course if you wanted to deploy these things on a world wide scale you'll need to set up a bigger shop then the ISS - which most likely will go out of service within the next decade anyway...
And while the moon does not provide a free fall environment such as LEO, the gravitational influence is still much lower than on earth itself and scaling up on a surface will most likely prove easier in the long term than doing so in orbit around the earth.
They are simply ignoring the real world economic impacts though, which is stubborn to say the least.
The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run.
Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company.
Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
Currently a lot of fincancial products can be created and managed in London, since once approved there, they are automatically approved in all other EU member states, too.
This of course will have to change once the UK has left the EU, making the people involved in these processes one of the first to be moved to Franfkurt etc.
It is actually the other way around. Internal producers simply cannot compete with external ones who can produce in multiple countries, in giant quantities at very low overhead cost and then sell reject goods for a very low price.
Africa has a big problem with this. Due to trade agreements, many European meat producers sell their "leftovers" into the African market at extremely low costs, which has lead to the demise of domestic producers of live stock. Which then resulted in a loss of jobs.
Yes, some people might be able to purchase things at a lower cost now, but some other people will loose their jobs and won't be able to purchase anything at all, which also negatively affects the domestic market.
For the outside producer is not a problem, they simply can move on. But kick starting a domestic market and bringing wages back up again will be huge issue for any government in the long run.
This is a common argument but it always seems to assume that the value of increased sales to specific group of producers is somehow more important than value of the competing goods to the disbursed group of consumers.
Specific groups of producers seem to always be able to influence government policies in their favor while the disbursed interests of everyone else get discounted.
And just to be clear, I'm not talking specifically about India, this phenomena is common everywhere.
There are more factors than just goods and sales though, like the independence and autonomy of the country/community, it's level of infrastructure, social development, etc. Local producers can help with those factors, while foreign producers dumping reject goods won't.
Of course there are other factors. But that doesn't mean the dispersed interest of consumers should be valued at zero just because they don't have a lobbyist and no one donates to a politicians campaign after explaining how they should let Apple sell used iPhones.
Compared to the current situation of writing a few lines and then having to wait for a vendor specific day one graphics driver update to have your game actually running at halfway decent speed, it is simple.
The current APIs are a giant collection for graphics vendor specific driver "fixes" which had been implemented initially to cheat in benchmarks, and then later had to be implement to fix issues which arose from those initial cheats. It is a giant, ugly mess.
Also 95% of game developers will never ever touch a single line of vulkan because the engine developers of Unreal/Frostbite/CryEngine etc. will handle all of the "dirty work" for their abstractions to run on top of vulkan. All without the need of trying wo workaround vendor specific bug fixes etc.
Also cool to see myself featured there, so in case you need another homebrew game with access to the source try https://gitlab.com/BonsaiDen/vectroid.gb