Why not use both? I run both in LXCs, Plex has a little more hardware since its transcoded isn’t as good but I point them both at the same NFS share. Everybody happy.
Well, not the movie studios and music labels I guess.
I use Synology which has its own Photos app. Honestly, it’s there right now. I prefer doing my own tagging but it’s able to automatically group things just fine.
I got a second Synology for Hyperbackup and send one to the other for backups. Seems to work well.
I mean unrelated since Paradox is the publisher, but Gauntlet ran like greased lightning, Helldivers ran like greased lightning, Magicka 2 ran like greased lightning…
…of course those were all built on Dragonfly/Bitsquid instead of Unity so that might be a clue about where the issue lies.
I worked at Unity on Build Automation/Cloud Build for nearly a decade. Let me assure you, that tech debt is NOT being fixed any year soon. It’s due to a fundamental disconnect between executive leadership wanting to run the company like Adobe (explicitly) and every engineer wanting to work like a large scale open source project (Kubernetes, Linux, and Apache are pretty close in style). The only way anything gets built is as a Skunkworks project and you can only do so much without funding and executive support.
Hi, I work in the games industry. I worked on a still-running and popular MMO, shipped another popular and still-running MMO, and now work for a popular game tooling company. I do primarily systems work in the DevOps sphere.
I’m underpaid. My hours aren’t great. I also find it pretty difficult to find a new job. Why? I’m pretty good at my job most of the time (I’ve spoken at tech and hacker conferences, built a lot of “first ever” things, led teams, that sort of thing) but a lot of CICD work and building pipelines is “sysadmin first, programmer distant second” type of work that requires knowing the ecosystem and how all the various pieces and priorities from hardware limitations all the way through to customer deliverables works. That is to say I do a lot of Bash, Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Terraform, GH Actions, Jenkins, all that stuff, not rip out Go for a living. Guess what a bunch of tech companies require you to do live in an interview now? And, shock upon shocks, it gets you people who do my job poorly and burn out.
Whenever we’ve onboarded a new engineer it takes about six months before they even BEGIN to be able to contribute meaningfully and we EXPECT them to be around for the long haul. If you’re doing something that’s easy to onboard a DevOps person onto then someone else has already done it for you, typically better than you can. That’s kind of the point.
So why stay in games? I’ve previously worked for non-profits, governments, militaries…and I hated it. I was still very good at what I did and I hated every second of it. No amount of monster slaying ever makes the world better, people just keep inventing new monsters. I couldn’t do it anymore as I don’t want my legacy to be a lot of highly durable, flexible, and simple-to-run systems used for violence and oppression. My work, directly, put a lot of (admittedly TERRIBLE) people in prison.
But games, up until recently anyway, are something different. I love games, always have. I love building them, playing them, buying them, sending them to people, helping make them, being around them, hearing about how they change people’s lives. I adore them. They helped me stay alive. They saved friends and even myself from suicide. They got us through the pandemic. They gave me and so many people GOOD experiences that make the world undeniably BETTER. I’ve had Make-A-Wish kids come into my old studio before because even facing down terminal illness every single day they wanted NOTHING more than to meet the people that made them happy. I DID that.
I can do this job. I can wake up in the morning and feel my work is GOOD and makes the world BETTER, safer, HAPPIER because people can build, play, and share games. Nothing any of my friends making triple my salary will EVER do at their jobs will ever exceed that level of public good. When’s the last time you heard someone doing GOOD at Oracle? When’s the last time you talked to a teenager who wanted to make a game and made it POSSIBLE? I do that every single day.
It’s not about the money. Give me a decent, reliable paycheck, a flexible schedule, remote work, and a mission and I will BUILD THE SHIT out of whatever you need automated. Games are the only way I’ve been able to live with myself when I stopped needing to survive and needed to start finding out how to live. It’s not just a dream, it’s LIFE SUPPORT for me.
And now that industry, too, has no more bright spots outside of tiny indie studios. I cannot describe how much that hurts me personally. Now it really is just awful corps the whole way down, just like every other big tech industry player.
Why stay? Where can I GO? To do what? Make some awful rich people even more rich? Doesn’t matter how much I open source, doesn’t matter how many talks I give, doesn’t matter what tools I make and give away, none of it will ever save the only thing that made my work worthwhile in the face of a depressing sinkhole of greed.
So yeah, I can’t speak for everyone but I can speak as a vet for quite a few years.
I wouldn't say it's different but rather improved. There's still a lot of passion and focus on the exciting things rather than reliability and the politics are much more befitting game companies than corporate IT (I've worked at both). That said there's much less crunch and is much more like corporate IT in that there's a regular schedule, more known goals, and more predictability in your paycheck.
Personally I love working on a game engine since it means I can help anyone who wants to build a game. At least at my company I'd say that's definitely the prevailing reason why many of us are here. The biggest drawback at a game company by comparison is that when if you have a great idea of how to fix something you're usually under NDA and cannot help any of your friends elsewhere in the industry. At the engine company your tools help thousands of studios do things better, and solving problems for one studio typically means bugfixes for problems other studios may have as well.
I dunno, that's just kinda what it's like in comparison.