Obviously not every game is doing that level of styling, but often a lot of stuff might still be happening when a game is "paused" for various reasons e.g. aesthetics, or handling input for pause menus, which usually offer you the ability to change all the games settings, e.g. video resolution, volume levels, etc. and also provide you with audio/visual feedback when you make choices, which requires keeping the audio engine running as well as rendering to the screen @ 60 fps.
It depends. If you are using `yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(x)` then the coroutine keeps running when you set TimeScale to 0, but that's usually a feature and not a bug, since it lets you potentially use them when paused (since async/task C# stuff was usually been a bit sketchy, though it's definitely better now).
Nintendo, like all other platform-owners (e.g. Meta/Quest, Sony, Microsoft) is VERY strict about games released on their platform and have very strict requirements before anything is allowed to be sold with the Nintendo label. I very highly doubt they let devs NOT implement the pause ability. AFAIK you can't just OS-pause a game and expect it to run fine when it resumes, there are soooo many systems at play: animation, physics, sound, input, etc. that need to be cleanly stopped/resumed that I doubt it's as easy as just OS-pausing.
This used to be true, but one trip to any modern e-store front should dispell the notion. So much slop. Even for arguable non-slop, so much that just rapidly crashes and is unplayable. The extent of platform certifying these days for most titles seems to be: can launch, can back out to the console top level, and maybe doesn't crash if a controller is added/removed.
And if you pause sound in Unity using AudioListener.pause = true, which is supposed to make life easier, but ends up being useless if changing settings/clicking buttons has audio feedback, or changing the volume has audible feedback to tell you how loud, or you allow to change voice style, and on and on.
Repeat that for every system - all those edge cases for each system can waste a lot of time and energy.
Like most "difficult" problems it's only difficult when you don't design for it from the start (including when you inherit design decisions by choosing a pre-made engine). If you design things properly you will have different time contexts for things inside the game simulation and UI - and that's useful even without pause as you'll generally want to control the timescales for those separately.
Too bad they didn't ask any VR developers. It's truly another beast, especially if you're developing with Unity for the Quest platform, since setting TimeScale to 0 in Unity effectively disables the physics engine, which means things like hands/controllers no longer work, which then breaks one of the requirements to even be able to release in the Meta store (handle pause state). The workaround used by Half-Life: Alyx (as told to me by the Hurricane VR developer when I asked years ago how to deal with pausing) is to clone your hands and disable/delete all physics-related stuff (e.g. Rigidbodies) on the new "paused" hands. If you are using laser pointers, then you'll also have to switch those out as well. If you have any active effects, particles or objects that obstruct the player's vision and/or visibility of the pause/resume UI, then you'll want to either disable those out or at least dim them substantially so the player can interact with the resume button e.g. with a laser pointer. You might also want to adjust the lighting to indicate that the user is paused.
Outside of VR, Unity offers a nice "AudioListener.pause" to pause all audio, but if you have any sound effects in your pause menu like when a user changes a setting, those no longer work, further requiring more hacky fun (or just set it to true, and ignore user-complaints about no audio on menus when paused).
On top of that, you have things like Animators for characters, which also have to be paused manually by setting speed to 0 (TimeScale = 0 doesn't seem to do it). Some particle systems also don't seem to be affected by TimeScale. If you have a networked game then you also have to (obviously) send the pause command to clients. If you have things in motion, pausing/restarting the physics engine might cause weird issues with (at least angular) velocity so you might have to save/restore those on any moving objects.
Doesn't help with the current situation though but I hope the partnering between Motorola and GrapheneOS is still up and going in a few years when I'll next have to replace my phone.
It's not about owning credit card, but about being able to use it in physical shop. In one of the parent comments author of comment to which I replied said:
> Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands?
Uhm, the EU already has free instant SEPA transfers? I use it regularly, sadly not all EU banks support it (smaller ones sometimes have issues and have to resort to standard oldschool 2-day transfer, but they are also free).
True, thanks for reminding me that this is about CC replacements :)
But I honestly don't know many people with a CC here, and those who do (myself included), we don't have the same advantages/disadvantages of a CC: no points, no "free" miles, no interest and no possibility to rack up debt like in the US since Visa automatically deducts the full amount from my bank account at the end of the monthly billing period.
It does but there aren't really any SEPA transfer point of sales. It's too asynchronous. You always use card or cash there. SEPA transfer can sometimes be used when paying for things asynchronously online, and they won't ship the item until they receive the money.
SEPA instant transfers aren't guaranteed instant as they might still be withheld for fraud checks.
Yeah but now we have instant EU-wide SEPA transfers for free, so it's not all stupidity! Also it took years to implement - banks are slow at implementing new tech. WERO is still very new, if it takes off, eventually banks will hopefully support it.
Weird, I googled around and I see every bank has their own limits, and all banks I could find claim a 30-100k or no limit at all.
Whatever LLM duckduckgo is using says 10k and ability increase as more transactions are made (to increase trust) - but it's probably using outdated data.
When did you try this? I'm guessing more than a year ago.
The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).
Wow I didn't see that. Usually it's forbidden in the terms of agreement between the merchant and the payment processor to add a surcharge for using the card so everyone else ends up subsidising it.
Vienna/Austria is such a strange place wrt payment right now. Some places are cashless, many are cash only, many are card only above a certain amount. I had one lady running a ramen restaurant accept instant SEPA.
And it's going to be interesting tax wise when they remove the requirement for receipts on transactions under 35 EUR.
Taken from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47825155
Obviously not every game is doing that level of styling, but often a lot of stuff might still be happening when a game is "paused" for various reasons e.g. aesthetics, or handling input for pause menus, which usually offer you the ability to change all the games settings, e.g. video resolution, volume levels, etc. and also provide you with audio/visual feedback when you make choices, which requires keeping the audio engine running as well as rendering to the screen @ 60 fps.