There's an annoying manifestation of this where some games only partially allow remapping controls. For example, when Cyberpunk 2077 was released, it was not possible to rebind to some keys or rebind some actions.
Another pattern I've noticed is some games do not respect Windows' mouse button settings. If other left handed mousers are like me and swap the primary and secondary mouse buttons, they'll probably have noticed that some games ignore this setting and seemingly hard code primary and secondary mouse buttons to be left and right click respectively. The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact.
Wherever I rebind my keys, I usually start with movement from WASD to IJKL. For everything else, I basically mirror what the default setting is to the right side of the keyboard.
F > H
E > U
R > Y
Q > O
C > N
L Tab > any of P, Colon, Apostrophe, L square bracket
L Shift> any of whatever I didn't use for L Tab
X > Comma or M (though comma makes more sense because my right middle finger would type that so it matches developer intention for default setting)
There's actually more keys to choose from on the right side of the keyboard that you can reach with your pinky. This is significant because in some games being able to press buttons while maintaining movement can be advantageous.
> The key bindings are understandable to me because nowhere in Windows does it let me set IJKL as my WASD. But I know it's possible to get the primary and secondary mouse button config from the OS but some games ignore or are ignorant of this fact.
I'll chip in. As a developer, Unity and Unreal don't really expose that information, and generally devs will not fetch it on their own because that requires dealing with linking to Windows libraries, rather than letting the platform deal with that. Using Windows specific libraries seems like an anti-pattern with Unity too, because now your game is no longer cross platform.
You'd think that rather than getting low-level events for "LMB Click" / "RMB Click", the Windows DirectInput API would be handing Unity events for "Primary Mouse Button Click" / "Secondary Mouse Button Click." OSes don't emit raw un-keymapped keysyms to apps, so why are they emitting raw un-mapped mouse-syms?
Big sprawling projects will do it themselves, with a proper action dispatch pattern somewhere, and small indie projects will do it the basic way, like so:
Meanwhile Unity has tried releasing several different input management solutions, none of which are particularly popular. With more exotic stuff like XR/VR or Steam Input it's even more of a mess.
I genuinely was not aware that Windows lets you swap the left and right mouse buttons, and I've been building Windows games for nearly 20 years. Thanks for calling that out.
Accuracy? Always worth striving for. For example it’s akin to saying “the police made me go through a metal detector” if building security did or “the nurse gave me CPR” when a lifeguard did.
They’re....close but it isn’t the same.
In case you were asking literally: security are the people that make you throw out liquids due to bomb threats and check for weapons. Customs see you after the plane across a border and check that you didn’t bring anything that requires payment of border tax. If you do, they will make you pay the tax at the border before entry.
There's a weird recursive bug I found on dendron.so where if I click the "Blog" heading, go to "Film" on the left, choose "Agents of Shield", click one of the notes to get a tooltip saying "This page has not sprouted yet", and then click the "Dendron" link in that tooltip. What I'm seeing is dendron.so within dendron.so. This process can be repeated using the inner frame.
I remember when Netflix started automatically playing trailers (or their own version of one) whenever you rested on a title for longer than a few seconds. And I remember looking up how to disable this feature but you can't. I'm sure there will be "well actually"'s for this but when I checked, you couldn't and I don't bother every day checking to see if it's there.
I noticed the Netflix app on some older smart televisions don't have this feature which I can only speculate why but it's like an upgrade watching on those old versions.
I think it's clever, it gets the content they paid for playing on television sets sooner. Trailers can draw people in to watch something they might not have the same way the beginning of a book can suck you in sometimes. And for users that don't like this feature, it keeps them scrolling. Cause every time you scroll over to the next title, the trailer stops and you reliably get about 2 seconds before the next trailer starts playing.
So I started scrolling faster. I think what happened next was that I realized there was nothing interesting to watch much sooner than I would if I wasn't scrolling as fast to avoid the automatically playing trailers.
Their original content comes out so fast and different people in my social circles are so excited about completely different ones and recommending them to me all the time that they just all seem the "same". Something about not having months of hype and advertisements, big reveals, franchises, etc. makes the Netflix originals feel like the product of an assembly line than legitimate inspiration. Like they're doing sprints for creative work. There was a thread a while back on HN about "Bright" when it came out. I remember there was a comment suggesting that the plot/setting/actors/world seems like it was generated with neural nets or something. That's how they all feel to me.
Also the recommendation algorithm gets some things right about me. Most things probably. But it's noticeably more exciting to use when scrolling through someone else's profile. Because it's all new stuff. It's completely tailored for someone else. You're likely to find titles you wouldn't bother to search for specifically (typing in the title) but you're surprised it's on their and you want to watch it immediately. I like The Incredibles but I don't want to watch the Emoji Movie.
So I think they're getting eaten from a couple of angles. original programming is soylent green, other media companies are taking their balls home, the interface is designed in a way that reveals the lack of interesting stuff quicker, their price went up.
