Marvin

9secondkox2 said:

If Google actually abused their leading position (2nd place kind of leading…) to PAY developers to blackball other stores, that’s monopolistic abuse? 

Apparently it’s all in the framing.  

Having paid exclusives for the right to be sole distributor for any amount of time - even forever - is common practice everywhere since forever and is perfectly legal. 

Swag doesn’t need to offer its own console - and take the inherent risks - when they can take cash from the other guys and release their titles there. Win-win. 

This will be overturned on appeal. 

Epic does this themselves:

https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/epic-games-store-spent-1-billion-on-exclusives/z73211
https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/Epic-games-store-exclusives

They paid to have games exclusively on their store, locking other stores out.

They are hypocrites claiming to be for open access to gaming but then force people to use their store because they paid off the developers. It's not about freedom but control, they want to be the dominant store and metaverse, as does their biggest investor Tencent.

AppleInsider said:

If a thief can steal an iPhone and passcode, they can lock the user out of their Apple ID and wreak havoc within seconds, but Apple's Stolen Device Protection feature coming in iOS 17.3 will stop that from happening.

Stolen Device Protection

With Stolen Device Protection active, users won't be able to change critical portions of their Apple ID or device settings without waiting an hour first. Theoretically, a theft victim would notice their device has gone missing within the hour window, allowing them to set the iPhone to Lost Mode and stopping device access or account changes from being possible.

Since users won't be able to rely on the passcode fallback option, biometrics will be required for various actions with Stolen Device Protection enabled.

The above actions will prompt the user for biometrics like Face ID or Touch ID to continue. A thief will likely not be able to fake biometric authentication.

The security delay will appear when attempting to change critical settings like the Apple ID password. If the thief tries to access the following settings, they are met with a pop-up explaining that a one-hour delay will begin before the setting can be changed.

Security delay occurs when:

• Changing your Apple ID password
• Updating Apple ID account security settings, like removing a trusted device, trusted phone number, Recovery Key, or Recovery Contact
• Changing your iPhone passcode
• Adding or removing Face ID or Touch ID
• Turning off Find My
• Turning off Stolen Device Protection

Trusted locations learned by the system, like home or work, remove the security delay. The security delay applies even with biometrics present, so it may be inconvenient to wait an hour every time one of the above settings needs to be altered.

It's good to have some extra security. I think the time delay should be configurable to be longer. There are a lot of scenarios where 1 hour isn't enough like if someone is out for the evening and can't get back home to another device within an hour. Stealing a phone makes it harder to get a taxi. They also might have been assaulted and needing medical attention.

If they send an email out that someone attempted to reset important information and allow the user to block the change, it's possible they can block it from an Apple Watch.

They can perhaps require confirmation of changes from a second Apple device. It's unlikely that thieves will get more than one device.

BirderGuy said:

I’m not sure why this is necessary if you have two factor authentication set up.  Even if they get into the phone they would need the code sent to a trusted device.  No?  

Usually the trusted device is the phone that was stolen. Two factor authentication isn't required on an already trusted device.



What thieves have been doing is looking over people's shoulders for pin codes or passwords, then stealing the phone. Once they can unlock the phone, they can change the Apple ID and add their own biometrics. Then they can access banking apps and drain their accounts, some people have lost their life savings. They can also lock people out of their other Apple devices (Macs/iPads at home), which makes it harder to track them with Find My (which they can also disable).

Device lock should be prevented from a device that has had its Apple ID changed in suspicious circumstances.

I'd like to be able to lock banking apps inside a vault in addition to this.

It's not just for thieves but device repairs. The repair people ask for device passcodes to replace batteries as they need to check it works. Some people have stolen private photos from people this way.

The more protection on these devices the better.

InspiredCode said:

Getting a translation layer between Godot and RealityKit probably makes a lot of sense in light of Unity's unraveling for cross-platform AR games. It is one of the leading engines Unity developers are moving to. Miguel De Icaza (the lead behind Mono, Microsoft Xamarin, and GTK+/Gnome) is pushing Godot developers to use Apple's Swift programming language after apologizing for his role in making C# the development language for Unity saying that it is not a suitable language for realtime applications like video games. Godot is intended to be language neutral with support for many languages including C#, Swift, C++, and their own Python-like scripting language. There is even early work to build an alternative editor for Godot in Apple's SwiftUI.

That's interesting, Miguel talks about Swift and C# here:



One of Godot's downsides is the custom GDScript because it's not portable or fast. C# is ok and lots of games use it (Genshin Impact uses it) but Swift has a C#-like syntax and if it improves performance, that would be a plus and having it as a main language for a game engine would improve Swift adoption a lot.

beowulfschmidt said:

Marvin said:

The problem is there aren't a lot of good options to choose from, Unity and Unreal are pretty much the only two viable production-quality engines and even with the updated license options, Unity is the cheaper of the two.

There are a number of open source game engines.  The problem with most of them is that many large game developers can't afford to depend on the community for technical support, and many of these projects are run by people who aren't super fond of large companies anyway.  That's a huge generalization, of course, but one based on my experience in other open source projects.

I'm currently evaluating Godot for my project.  We shall see.

It's difficult to maintain a large-scale open source (free) project as people who work on it still need to be paid. It creates a massive resource issue. It can work out well for important projects as they get funding. Godot's funding stream is listed here:

https://fund.godotengine.org

55k euros/month is only enough to support around 20 developers and the github shows that about 20 developers have contributed most of it. They have a couple of thousand community contributors but only 50 have contributed over 10k lines of code.

Unity makes over $1b/year and employs over 7000 people. Building and maintaining a high quality rendering engine, hundreds of tools, integration with multiple platforms with 20 people is not an easy task. Godot has over 9000 open issues:

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues

This is standard for any big project but it takes way longer to fix issues with a smaller team.

Even the better demos made with Godot look like they are from over 10 years ago (especially interior at 3:00):



The bigger commercial engines can put more people into the rendering system development:





Unreal is the best and can beat in-house engines from big game studios:



In terms of rendering quality, I'd say Godot is about 4/10, Unity 8/10, Unreal 10/10.
For tools, Unity and Unreal are fairly level at 7/10, Godot 5/10.

Godot would be fine for 2D mobile games.
Unity is best for 3D mobile games and better for 2D than Godot.
Unreal is best for high-end 3D games.

An open source project really needs to be able to employ a number of highly skilled engine devs making $100k+/year. Amazon did this with their Lumberyard project (based on CryEngine) but it hasn't gained much traction.

I think the whole games industry would benefit from delivering some high quality community tools for game production. They'd benefit from employees across the industry being familiar with standard workflows. They can build it on top of USD. Open scene format that can plug in any kind of tools and rendering system.

Then it's easier for people to build different parts. You can license a high quality rendering engine and have an open source toolset or for simple projects, use all open source components. Authoring/artist tools can integrate with the open scene format. Nobody would be tied to any particular system and projects could migrate quickly to a different system. In theory, it could be as simple as a dropdown to switch from one renderer to another.

EA's been trying to get their Frostbite engine adopted more widely internally for a while but had a lot of trouble developing it for different games:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/15/ea-reveals-frostbite-go-game-engine-for-apples-ios-google-android
https://www.vg247.com/how-the-frostbite-engine-became-a-nightmare-for-ea-in-general-and-bioware-in-particular

"Frostbite is easily the worst, sh*tiest, most pain in the ass engine I've ever used in my career, and I shipped Wolfenstein off the Doom 3 tech. The exact same game design in Unreal vs. Frostbite will take dozens more engineers, money, and time on FB because of the way its architected and how far behind it is from Unreal (unless you are making BF). There is a reason I chose Unreal Engine 4 as my engine for my next project."

"We obviously had to take the Frostbite Engine, because there was the internal initiative to make sure that everybody was on the same technology, but it was an engine that was made to do first-person shooters not third-person traversal cinematic games"

Even Unreal isn't well designed for every game. It's strength is high-end 3D games. Building a small 2D game for mobile in Unreal isn't a good route to go.

If there was a modular engine with 3 main parts: renderer -> scene (USD) <- tools, it can be adapted to fit any type of game and any platform, even better than Unreal can.

9secondkox2 said:

It’s difficult to know how to feel about something like this when we know so little about the person, their actual contributions, or the reason for the departure. 

He's listed on over 270 of Apple's patents here:

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/tang-yew-tan

It looks like Apple's the only company he's ever worked at. On LinkedIn, it says he graduated in 1999 and is named on Apple's patents as early as 2000. He finished high school in 1993, likely aged 17-18, so he'd be 47-48 years old now and worked at Apple for 23-24 years.

It says here he's been VP of design for 13 years:

https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Tang-Tan/1670765886

That's a long time to be at a company, Jon Ternus has been there around 22 years and Tim Cook 25 years. After 15 iPhones, there's not much left to do and he's made enough to retire comfortably.

He had a pretty lucky break to start at Apple just after college and stay there his entire career. He's at the same level as Kevin Lynch:

https://theorg.com/org/apple/org-chart/tang-yew-tan

Given how important design is to Apple, I imagine any product design leaders would be quite impactful. Evans Hankey left last year too. It will be interesting to see where iPhone design goes from here and how much different iPhone 20 will be from iPhone 15. They've pretty much peaked every aspect of the design, except the battery.

macxpress said:

I'd bet the farm right now that Jeff Williams is the next CEO of Apple after Tim leaves. 

I don't know why people keep suggesting this, it's been pointed out a number of times that Jeff Williams is almost the same age as Cook so if Cook retires at 70 in 7 years (2030), Jeff Williams would be starting as CEO at 67. He'd end up having to do the same transition again in a few years.

Greg Joswiak would be 67.
Lisa Jackson would be 67.
Eddy Cue would be 66.
Johny Srouji would be 66.
Deirdre O'Brien would be 64.
Craig Federighi would be 61.
John Ternus would be 55.

If Tim Cook retires at 70, around the same age as Bob Iger tried to retire, he will have been CEO for just under 20 years. For a stable transition, the successor would ideally be able to lead Apple for 10 years minimum before the age of 70.

Federighi would almost manage this and would be a good fit but it feels like a long-term successor would be under 50 today, would start as CEO at 57 and be able to lead Apple for over 10 years. Tim Cook started as CEO at 51.

This could be any of the younger people that show up in the Apple events. For example Colleen Novielli has been at Apple for over 9 years and would be around 46 in 7 years:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-novielli-59a01147

People are thinking about suitable candidates for a CEO transition today but they'd be taking over in 7+ years so it has to be someone suitable 7+ years from now. Almost all the leadership currently at Apple will be retiring by then and it will be a new generation that takes over. The old leadership will be Apple Fellows, board members, consultants etc and available for guidance.