Offtopic

Duskthorn
09 Dec 2021, 11:10am
SakashiroCP2077 is still buggy as hell. The current patch has the NCPD issuing arrest warrants for no apparent reason. You're just driving along, minding your own business, and suddenly you're wanted and all the cops and drones start firing at you.


It happen to me when you walk from the car to Misty's for the first time. There's a netrunner that stands nearby and he got super pissed, I guess I ran too recklessly. Reloaded, happen three times in a row =)

I have ended up in combat randomly on foot, although most times with no apparent threat close by. Then it goes away after 10-15 sec.
Sometimes a group from a gang gets mad for no reason when I drive past them, no detection timer, just insta-combat. But have not yet gotten attacked by the cops since that starting bit.
Burstar
09 Dec 2021, 11:11am
SakashiroVideo game development appears to be the biggest engineering challenge out there. Too complex for human minds.


Its market forces doing this though. Not the difficulty of the coding. Once upon a time, software was published to hard media that you obtained directly from a shop. There was no option to 'patch it later' because the internet wasn't a thing, or was expensive and slow AF. You bought the original Elite. It worked. If it didn't the company went under.

Nowadays, you have 2-5 years on average to create a game and get it published. The last year of which the publisher is breathing down your neck, marketing is potentially making your job way harder with deadlines, overhype and grandiose poorly worded claims of the available features, or using feedback to shoehorn in stuff teh public wantz at the last minute. The cherry on the top is the infantile masses gobbling up whatever comes out because tHeIr PrEsCiOuS d0pAmInE.

Having base game engines that simplifies most of the work, and the GitHub helps alot I'm sure. But in the end if you aren't given enough time to get the work done, and the customers don't care that it isn't finished, what do you expect is going to happen?
Sakashiro
09 Dec 2021, 4:00pm
CDPR spent 7 years on Cyberpunk. Not sure if this can be called a rushed release.

The original Elite fit into 64K RAM. It was a manageable amount of code. AFAIK a lot of games of the 1980s were developed by very small teams, if not single developers. Today you need double or triple digit size teams, and a lot of code comes from third parties. If you don't take shortcuts and cut some content, you can easily spend a decade on a single game, see Star Citizen.

Maybe things are getting a little out of hand there. The complexity of open world games appears to be approaching a point where it becomes overwhelming. And doubling the team size does not reduce development time by the same factor.
Burstar
09 Dec 2021, 6:36pm
Star Citizen and CB2077 are outliers. Many games today are made by very small teams: Minecraft was 1 person iirc. Subnautica was by an indy dev. Complexity ofc has increased since the 80's, but again, a vast majority of most games code is already pre-written due to either a base game engine or the use of a repository. Many games are themselves basically reskins of predecessors. The recent slew of Spiderman games are all a rethemed Batman:Arkham game. Instead of a grappling hook it's a webthrower. All they need to do is code in mildly different behaviour for things like wall crawling, reskin some of the avatars and then design novel maps and do the cutscene art. So, while it may look like these games are vastly complex, most of it is smoke and mirrors. Also, don't forget most of these studios are experienced at what they do and know how to do it. There's also way more in the way of error checking and automatic optimization tools to help the programmers than there used to be.

Yes, coding modern games can be complex, but all of it is doable. The question is 'within what amount of time and with what resources?', and the programmers aren't the ones that decide that. That is the issue. Take your SC example. Nothing they've done with that game is truly novel. Flight simulators have done atmospheric effects and weather to death as well as handling and behaviour. GTA did getting in and out of vehicles in the 90's. Elite also did space to planet surface and back in the 90's. Privateer had NPC interaction and a complex trading system in that same decade. So, even SC, ambitious as it is, can be boiled down to a series of predecessors all combined into something new with just a little bit more. It also has pretty much an unlimited budget and effectively no time constraints so I'm sure it'll get done eventually. Here's the important thing though: it's a "spiritual successor" to the Wing Commander series according to the creator. A series itself that was pretty big at the time, but whose content was greatly reduced due to investor meddling.

You show me a game that is having development issues and 9 times out of 10 I can point to management or publisher as the true source of the problem. Look at Elite. Nothing about it is truly mind blowing. A lot of it has been done before, but with poorer graphics and/or less holistically. The issues we're seeing with it for years are almost all because:
  1. QC is deemed an unnecessary expense when the sycophants will do it for them for free, or better yet pay for the privilege,
  2. The sooner something is available to buy, the faster money is in the investor's hands. This is the core philosophy behind development anymore,
  3. The paying customer has done nothing to give publishers reason to doubt the two previous concepts.

So, you may not like that the game runs piss poor and has dozens of issues, but, did you buy a skin, say for the new SRV released, or your new ED:O avatars when they came out? Then you are part of the problem, not the game's 'complexity'. Because until you stop doing this, they are not going to change their behaviour.
Iwao Kishiro
09 Dec 2021, 6:37pm
One of the factors that went into equation about Cyberpunk 2077 was partial dissolution of entire teams due to mistreatment from management (employers and shareholders according to law over here), so if I remember right a lot of developers from the start of CP2077 never made it to the end. What happened in late 2020 was this: "Release the game or we will start firing people." And so, the game was released regardless of the state.

Thing is, in Poland it is widely allowed to abuse employees and even government can do nothing about it due to some faulty legal decisions back in 1990s. Businesses are barred with so much legal BS any governmental intervention could land in the court, if the repeated-as-mantra "this is how business liberty works" quote is not enough. I do not say that these decisions back in 1990s were bad... but they had a serious crash test with very toxic behavior of the business owners.

Even Solidarity, the movement born in 1980s to fight for worker rights, cannot do much about private businesses... because they are not even partially owned by the government. A lot of unions - even in private businesses and even with Solidarity support - are not formed either, because employees are indirectly threatened into being fired.

And in case of Poland, especially right now, it is very hard to find any job in the field you've been working in. There is also a system we call "wolf's ticket" which is basically blacklisting your name so other employers might reject you off the bat, especially if they are "corporate buddies" with the guys who fired you in the first place.


If you ever wondered about my anti-Federal tendencies on Elite: Dangerous, here you go. I see Federation as extreme version of what is happening over here, in Poland.

Last edit: 09 Dec 2021, 6:47pm
Sakashiro
09 Dec 2021, 11:42pm
BurstarStar Citizen and CB2077 are outliers. Many games today are made by very small teams: Minecraft was 1 person iirc. Subnautica was by an indy dev. Complexity ofc has increased since the 80's, but again, a vast majority of most games code is already pre-written due to either a base game engine or the use of a repository. Many games are themselves basically reskins of predecessors. The recent slew of Spiderman games are all a rethemed Batman:Arkham game. Instead of a grappling hook it's a webthrower. All they need to do is code in mildly different behaviour for things like wall crawling, reskin some of the avatars and then design novel maps and do the cutscene art. So, while it may look like these games are vastly complex, most of it is smoke and mirrors. Also, don't forget most of these studios are experienced at what they do and know how to do it. There's also way more in the way of error checking and automatic optimization tools to help the programmers than there used to be.

Yes, coding modern games can be complex, but all of it is doable. The question is 'within what amount of time and with what resources?', and the programmers aren't the ones that decide that. That is the issue. Take your SC example. Nothing they've done with that game is truly novel. Flight simulators have done atmospheric effects and weather to death as well as handling and behaviour. GTA did getting in and out of vehicles in the 90's. Elite also did space to planet surface and back in the 90's. Privateer had NPC interaction and a complex trading system in that same decade. So, even SC, ambitious as it is, can be boiled down to a series of predecessors all combined into something new with just a little bit more. It also has pretty much an unlimited budget and effectively no time constraints so I'm sure it'll get done eventually. Here's the important thing though: it's a "spiritual successor" to the Wing Commander series according to the creator. A series itself that was pretty big at the time, but whose content was greatly reduced due to investor meddling.

You show me a game that is having development issues and 9 times out of 10 I can point to management or publisher as the true source of the problem. Look at Elite. Nothing about it is truly mind blowing. A lot of it has been done before, but with poorer graphics and/or less holistically. The issues we're seeing with it for years are almost all because:
  1. QC is deemed an unnecessary expense when the sycophants will do it for them for free, or better yet pay for the privilege,
  2. The sooner something is available to buy, the faster money is in the investor's hands. This is the core philosophy behind development anymore,
  3. The paying customer has done nothing to give publishers reason to doubt the two previous concepts.

So, you may not like that the game runs piss poor and has dozens of issues, but, did you buy a skin, say for the new SRV released, or your new ED:O avatars when they came out? Then you are part of the problem, not the game's 'complexity'. Because until you stop doing this, they are not going to change their behaviour.

Do you notice the double standard here? You think game development isn't that complex, yet you blame management for thinking exactly the same.

FDev and CDPR happen to have one thing in common: an in-house engine. Maybe CDPR's management did indeed think that Witcher 3 could be reskinned into Cyberpunk 2077, just like all Bethesda RPGs are basically reskins of Morrowind. Maybe REDengine wasn't quite up to the job. Whatever the reason, I think we all agree that the developers didn't just twiddle their thumbs for half a decade but were facing problems they could not solve with the tools and deadlines they were given. Meanwhile small indie teams manage to pull off games like The Forest or Subnautica in record time because they focus on scripting and asset creation and simply outsource all the big-brain stuff to Unreal or Unity instead of wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel. Besides, if you do need to enlarge your dev team, it's probably easier to recruit people familiar with those engines than to train them to become familiar with yours. I think this is the problem that both FDev and CDPR are facing.
Burstar
10 Dec 2021, 12:43am
Sakashiro
Do you notice the double standard here? You think game development isn't that complex, yet you blame management for thinking exactly the same.

That wasn't what I said.

Sakashirobut were facing problems they could not solve with the tools and deadlines they were given

This is what I was talking about. It is complex enough that it requires hard work, but, it is managements job to provide the tools and resources to do it, and they aren't. They are prioritizing getting it out the door asap no matter what. The distinction is you were saying it is TOO complex and I'm say no, it's 'too complex to do in an arbitrary set in stone x amount of time deadline with random surprise changes based on polling thrown in at the last minute,

Sakashiro... instead of wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel.

Again, a management issue. But we agree on this. Designing your own engine specifically for a particular game seems to be a recipe for problems. Space Engineers is another example of this. 8 years in and it is still buggy af. Cobra Engine.

The problem is it might be necessary to do what is needed for that game as no Engine available at the time or near future is capable. Still, it is a good predictor of games those of us less tolerant of the BS might want to avoid in the future...

Last edit: 10 Dec 2021, 9:26am
Burstar
10 Dec 2021, 12:38pm
Light-HawkHaven't seen it yet but here's to hoping the new live action version of Cowboy Bebop isn't terrible!

Sad horn noises
Bruno B
11 Dec 2021, 11:32am
SakashiroCDPR spent 7 years on Cyberpunk. Not sure if this can be called a rushed release.


Not quite, they announced it years before actually assigning most of their devs to the project. Seems 2016 was when development really started, which would make it about 4 years of "full" development. I'm guessing at this point, but I'd assume that any work pre-2016 was just concept art, design concepts and storyboards.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/16/22234452/cyberpunk-2077-development-2016-pc-console-projekt-red
Aleksander Majjam
12 Dec 2021, 6:33am
Anyone here with an Xbox S/X or PS5, I implore you to download this Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo. It's the most impressive thing I've seen on console and it's all real time. No photomode, all real time. This is me controlling the camera and trying to be cinematic. This little video doesn't do justice to what you actually see.















Last edit: 12 Dec 2021, 7:03am
Light-Hawk
12 Dec 2021, 8:10am
Aleksander MajjamAnyone here with an Xbox S/X or PS5, I implore you to download this Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo. It's the most impressive thing I've seen on console and it's all real time. No photomode, all real time. This is me controlling the camera and trying to be cinematic. This little video doesn't do justice to what you actually see.


I get a kick out of some of the other videos on youtube I have seen related to unreal engine 5. It is seriously impressive. Practically convinced nearly all new first person games need to be made with unreal 5. I know that's not realistic, but it is awesome.
Aleksander Majjam
12 Dec 2021, 7:52pm
Light-Hawk
Aleksander MajjamAnyone here with an Xbox S/X or PS5, I implore you to download this Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo. It's the most impressive thing I've seen on console and it's all real time. No photomode, all real time. This is me controlling the camera and trying to be cinematic. This little video doesn't do justice to what you actually see.



I get a kick out of some of the other videos on youtube I have seen related to unreal engine 5. It is seriously impressive. Practically convinced nearly all new first person games need to be made with unreal 5. I know that's not realistic, but it is awesome.


I know of 2 Xbox only games that will release next year with UE5.





As far as PC is concerned, can you imagine a UE5 game that utilizes DLSS? 2022 and beyond is going to be very interesting for gaming. As far as Elite is concerned, if the UE5 team could put together a 2+ hour tech demo for consoles, then Odyssey can for sure run on them. I have no doubt of this now.
Lightmun
12 Dec 2021, 9:58pm
Ladies, Gentlement,

I would be very grateful for any useful information about squadron identifying themselves as WEGA on PC.

It seems my own investigation has hit the dead end and I would be grateful for any contribution. Please send via private message not to cause any nuisance here.

Fly safe,
Warm regards,

o7
Sakashiro
13 Dec 2021, 1:34pm
Well, that didn't take long. Omicron emergency declared in the UK. 20-40fold decrease in vaccine-induced neutralizing activity reported by the UKHSA. If you haven't received a shot within the last three months, consider yourself unvaccinated.
Amata Lirein
14 Dec 2021, 7:50pm
Out of curiosity: Is there anyone here who's aware of what "Hololive" is or has even fallen down that rabbit hole?

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