7 ms·

Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And

Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life. Contrast this with "What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077" exegesis from Bloomberg this morning and I'm still not sure anyone can point to a single reason beyond "we were too ambitious". I wish this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers? Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk-2077-what-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk...

ffhhj 6y ago
It's interesting to me how the physics bugs such as characters and object getting stuck inside walls, flying cars, failed inverse kinematics and so on have been the usual bugs for so many years now, but there isn't yet a methodology to prevent gamedevs from falling in those old known pitholes. These are very difficult to detect by QA and the way to fix them is tweaking some parameters and geometry here and there. There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict.
- vvanders 6y ago
  As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing: performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be. The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" and navigate to the nearest nav node. Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind that behavior but it was just a couple of really well telegraphed "if()" checks.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    This anecdote reminds me of the AI in the original F.E.A.R game as well, which did something similar. The actual AI good on its own, but their barks did an -amazing- job telegraphing their behaviors. Like if they shout "flank him!" and then flank, you know because they announced it that the AI made the conscious decision to flank and it wasn't just some NPC incidentally wandering into a flanking position.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      There's a talk somewhere about the F.E.A.R. 1 AI and there were two key changes made in the development: 1) it was restricted so that only a handful of actors can actually attack the player at the same time 2) introducing loud radio chatter because playtesters grew frustrated dying over and over to the AI just flanking them quietly. Before these changes playtesters were frustrated because they thought the AI is cheating (which it isn't).
- programzeta 6y ago
  Some devs do focus on it - this blog post goes into detail about how someone worked through making sure you could walk everywhere in The Witness: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005
- smogcutter 6y ago
  > There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict. This is probably just me not really understanding the domain, but this sounds like a version of the halting problem? Even if it’s not, isn’t that just an extra layer doing what the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn’t you use a similar mechanism to make the original system correct to begin with? And if you can’t do that, how can you expect to make the supervisory layer correct?
  - ffhhj 6y ago
    Let's say when a cylinder of the car, a wheel, bumps into the infinitesimally sharp edge of the road, it could somehow result in a "singularity" that launches the wheel, the vehicle and its occupants to the sky, and that could be a perfectly valid result of that algorithm. The algo's task is not to determine whether that produces some "weird" animation from the player's perspective. For that reason there should be a "user level" interpretation of the physics engine results, looking ahead in time and correcting.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - smogcutter 6y ago
      What I’m failing to articulate is that it seems like if you can reliably look ahead to detect a “weird” but technically valid result of the physics engine, you’ve also detected the flaw in the physics engine that led to that result. At that point you should just... fix the bug. “Let’s monitor in real time for whether any possible combination of inputs could produce a technically valid but undesirable state” doesn’t sound any less complicated or more effective than finding bugs and fixing them.
      - smolder 6y ago
        And yet you still see that approach in the wild. In the game destiny 2, there are a slew of bugs which seem to result in failed assertions, at which point your character suddenly dies. The message which describes what killed you will read "Killed by the architects" as a catch-all. The game has been under development for years and years but somehow the players (and bungie) have come to accept random dying due to physics and netcode bugs. I'll say it's better than an outright crash, but not by a lot.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Testing things like that is a little weird - they're inherently fuzzy, so even if you compare to a ground truth like a serious MBS package you're spending needless FLOPS on accuracy no-one will notice. I guess if you are able to formulate the problem as a state machine, you could use something like bounded model checking to ensure it doesn't blow up, but the problems there are twofold: Firstly, that's way too complicated and brittle for a game codebase, and secondly your average game developer probably doesn't even know what it is to begin with.
klmadfejno 6y ago
>UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers? This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them into one node means you can comfortably make your top level view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is basically pseudocode. Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with. Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think they want jupyter notebooks for data science.
- boogies 6y ago
  > Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. It’s in (their in-house) REDengine 4 according to Wikipedia (citing https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.com/news/new-cyberpunk-2077-details-suggest-mid-2019-release-3452027/ https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.co...). But perhaps that has Blueprint-inspired visual development tools?
  - asiachick 6y ago
    node based game dev has been around decades before Blueprints. Monkey Hero (1999) used node based game dev and I'm sure they weren't the first.
  - ArtWomb 6y ago
    >>> comment seems to come out of nowhere Most definitely represents my scatterbrain state of mind as of late ;) As boogies states, this is the crux of what I was trying to get at re: tooling. Considering Cyberpunk 2077 as a massive non-linear narrative. What does the graph tying it all together look like? With hundreds of designers adding their contribution. How do you reason about the whole? Even basic algorithms such as "can I reach this node from every other node"?
- 6y ago
mhh__ 6y ago
> UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. My guess is that it probably doesn't scale all that well. I think the issue it's so much the technology but the people who use it - when you see UE4 projects labelled "Blueprint only!" what that usually means in my experience is unmaintainable, unsearchable, no version control etc. They're great for animations, but for anything vaguely structured they're just slow and RSI inducing.
Guthur 6y ago
HL to Cyberpunk 2077 is very much apples to oranges, on many levels. * The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days. * The games design choices are vastly different. HL was very on the rails, though hides it it really well by giving you the illusion of a large world, this a really great design trick and HL is rightly lauded for it. In contrast CP2077 aims to be closer to a true open world that tries to provide a linear storyline inside a large world with more open level design with many auxilary story lines and interactive world building. * HL had a single platform focus (PC) for the initial development whereas CP2077 try to straddle two very different hardware generations and a multitude of platforms. If CP2077 had, in a hypothetical world, only focused on PC and maybe current gen consoles (PS5 and XBox S) it would not have nearly the same level of negative press.
- EliRivers 6y ago
  The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days. I'm often left unconvinced by statements like this. Is it that the team size for a modern AAA title is required to be so large, or is it just that they are so large? The diminishing returning from making teams ever bigger makes me wonder if having such large teams are just a sign of low-level, dragging general incompetence somewhere in the chain of people running the whole thing. I don't have any hard evidence either way, but every so often when I see a small, well-run team of competent people turn out something really good, I wonder.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    For CP2077 vs HL it's pretty obvious why it would need to be a lot larger, with the sheer volume of art assets, story writing, level design, voice acting, game balancing and engine sophistication required. But I'll be the first to echo your sentiment that there are massive diminishing returns on team size. Of course in many ways AAAs have dug their own pit of despair with this, they throw so much investment into it that they need to make sure they appeal to as large an audience as possible and cram as much content as possible in, while also having an eye to DLC later down the line, the economics demand it. Hence why CP2077 had to desperately try to get it to work on last gen console, otherwise they'd be immediately removing a massive portion of the market. As consumers we can get as much enjoyment out of some indie level gamer. I for one have play way more hours of The Binding of Isaac than any AAA title I've played and it would have been a fraction of the development costs.
doppp 6y ago
Yes, it scales well. Also, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't use UE4.
H8crilA 6y ago
I truly don't understand the Cyberpunk2077 complainers. Has any of you/them actually played the game? I've played it on Google Stadia and loved it, the main story and major side stories were exciting (Konpeki Plaza really had me on edge), combat is complex, characters are well written, graphics are amazing. As far as bugs are concerned I had to reload an earlier save maybe 3-5 times over the span of 40 hours of gameplay, which is not good but honestly I didn't care. It does look like the console versions were worse off, though, but I didn't play these myself.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  No, many complainers haven’t played the game, because it crashes or runs terribly on their on-spec device. If your answer to that is “buy a new device”, you need to get outside more.
  - H8crilA 6y ago
    What have you tried to play it on? Genuinely curious, the whole thing feels like being gaslighted (I get that it doesn't work well on consoles).
  - rasz 6y ago
    > crashes or runs terribly on their on-spec device like which device exactly ? Most complaints were about base PS4. This is how it runs on base PS4, those are the "mayor" game breaking bugs people are crying about: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/854702029?t=00h45m00s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/854702029?t=00h45m00s [1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/857020318?t=01h09m53s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/857020318?t=01h09m53s [2] TLDR: - 30fps with drops to 20. For reference Remedy shipped Control running all the way down to 10fps [Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can see prolonged frame-rate drops in sustained combat, dropping all the way down to 10 frames per second at its absolute worst.] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-control-console-face-off https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-contr... - crashes once every 5-7 hours of continuous gameplay. Not a game breaking problem since it auto saves often. Saving game is one of the fastest of any games I played, its instant, no slowdowns when autosaving. - has problems with streaming game assets on time (geometry[1], animations[2]). Claire's races are perhaps the only problematic part of the game due to this bug. GPS markers on the ground load too slowly. ... and thats it. The rest of the game works exactly as on other platforms, including random animation glitches.
asiachick 6y ago
> And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life. Half Life has no cohesive narrative. It is just a bunch of interesting random scenes thrown together and people make up their own narrative about it. It works but it's not a "cohesive narrative"

ffhhj 6y ago

It's interesting to me how the physics bugs such as characters and object getting stuck inside walls, flying cars, failed inverse kinematics and so on have been the usual bugs for so many years now, but there isn't yet a methodology to prevent gamedevs from falling in those old known pitholes. These are very difficult to detect by QA and the way to fix them is tweaking some parameters and geometry here and there. There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict.

vvanders 6y ago
As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing: performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be. The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" and navigate to the nearest nav node. Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind that behavior but it was just a couple of really well telegraphed "if()" checks.
- indigochill 6y ago
  This anecdote reminds me of the AI in the original F.E.A.R game as well, which did something similar. The actual AI good on its own, but their barks did an -amazing- job telegraphing their behaviors. Like if they shout "flank him!" and then flank, you know because they announced it that the AI made the conscious decision to flank and it wasn't just some NPC incidentally wandering into a flanking position.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    There's a talk somewhere about the F.E.A.R. 1 AI and there were two key changes made in the development: 1) it was restricted so that only a handful of actors can actually attack the player at the same time 2) introducing loud radio chatter because playtesters grew frustrated dying over and over to the AI just flanking them quietly. Before these changes playtesters were frustrated because they thought the AI is cheating (which it isn't).
programzeta 6y ago
Some devs do focus on it - this blog post goes into detail about how someone worked through making sure you could walk everywhere in The Witness: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005
smogcutter 6y ago
> There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict. This is probably just me not really understanding the domain, but this sounds like a version of the halting problem? Even if it’s not, isn’t that just an extra layer doing what the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn’t you use a similar mechanism to make the original system correct to begin with? And if you can’t do that, how can you expect to make the supervisory layer correct?
- ffhhj 6y ago
  Let's say when a cylinder of the car, a wheel, bumps into the infinitesimally sharp edge of the road, it could somehow result in a "singularity" that launches the wheel, the vehicle and its occupants to the sky, and that could be a perfectly valid result of that algorithm. The algo's task is not to determine whether that produces some "weird" animation from the player's perspective. For that reason there should be a "user level" interpretation of the physics engine results, looking ahead in time and correcting.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - smogcutter 6y ago
    What I’m failing to articulate is that it seems like if you can reliably look ahead to detect a “weird” but technically valid result of the physics engine, you’ve also detected the flaw in the physics engine that led to that result. At that point you should just... fix the bug. “Let’s monitor in real time for whether any possible combination of inputs could produce a technically valid but undesirable state” doesn’t sound any less complicated or more effective than finding bugs and fixing them.
    - smolder 6y ago
      And yet you still see that approach in the wild. In the game destiny 2, there are a slew of bugs which seem to result in failed assertions, at which point your character suddenly dies. The message which describes what killed you will read "Killed by the architects" as a catch-all. The game has been under development for years and years but somehow the players (and bungie) have come to accept random dying due to physics and netcode bugs. I'll say it's better than an outright crash, but not by a lot.
mhh__ 6y ago
Testing things like that is a little weird - they're inherently fuzzy, so even if you compare to a ground truth like a serious MBS package you're spending needless FLOPS on accuracy no-one will notice. I guess if you are able to formulate the problem as a state machine, you could use something like bounded model checking to ensure it doesn't blow up, but the problems there are twofold: Firstly, that's way too complicated and brittle for a game codebase, and secondly your average game developer probably doesn't even know what it is to begin with.

klmadfejno 6y ago

>UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers? This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them into one node means you can comfortably make your top level view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is basically pseudocode. Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with. Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think they want jupyter notebooks for data science.

boogies 6y ago
> Cyberpunk isn't written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. It’s in (their in-house) REDengine 4 according to Wikipedia (citing https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.com/news/new-cyberpunk-2077-details-suggest-mid-2019-release-3452027/ https://archive.today/20180405084214/https://www.gamezone.co...). But perhaps that has Blueprint-inspired visual development tools?
- asiachick 6y ago
  node based game dev has been around decades before Blueprints. Monkey Hero (1999) used node based game dev and I'm sure they weren't the first.
- ArtWomb 6y ago
  >>> comment seems to come out of nowhere Most definitely represents my scatterbrain state of mind as of late ;) As boogies states, this is the crux of what I was trying to get at re: tooling. Considering Cyberpunk 2077 as a massive non-linear narrative. What does the graph tying it all together look like? With hundreds of designers adding their contribution. How do you reason about the whole? Even basic algorithms such as "can I reach this node from every other node"?
6y ago

mhh__ 6y ago

> UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. My guess is that it probably doesn't scale all that well. I think the issue it's so much the technology but the people who use it - when you see UE4 projects labelled "Blueprint only!" what that usually means in my experience is unmaintainable, unsearchable, no version control etc. They're great for animations, but for anything vaguely structured they're just slow and RSI inducing.

Guthur 6y ago

HL to Cyberpunk 2077 is very much apples to oranges, on many levels. * The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days. * The games design choices are vastly different. HL was very on the rails, though hides it it really well by giving you the illusion of a large world, this a really great design trick and HL is rightly lauded for it. In contrast CP2077 aims to be closer to a true open world that tries to provide a linear storyline inside a large world with more open level design with many auxilary story lines and interactive world building. * HL had a single platform focus (PC) for the initial development whereas CP2077 try to straddle two very different hardware generations and a multitude of platforms. If CP2077 had, in a hypothetical world, only focused on PC and maybe current gen consoles (PS5 and XBox S) it would not have nearly the same level of negative press.

EliRivers 6y ago
The team size required for a modern day AAA title is significantly higher than that of HL days. I'm often left unconvinced by statements like this. Is it that the team size for a modern AAA title is required to be so large, or is it just that they are so large? The diminishing returning from making teams ever bigger makes me wonder if having such large teams are just a sign of low-level, dragging general incompetence somewhere in the chain of people running the whole thing. I don't have any hard evidence either way, but every so often when I see a small, well-run team of competent people turn out something really good, I wonder.
- Guthur 6y ago
  For CP2077 vs HL it's pretty obvious why it would need to be a lot larger, with the sheer volume of art assets, story writing, level design, voice acting, game balancing and engine sophistication required. But I'll be the first to echo your sentiment that there are massive diminishing returns on team size. Of course in many ways AAAs have dug their own pit of despair with this, they throw so much investment into it that they need to make sure they appeal to as large an audience as possible and cram as much content as possible in, while also having an eye to DLC later down the line, the economics demand it. Hence why CP2077 had to desperately try to get it to work on last gen console, otherwise they'd be immediately removing a massive portion of the market. As consumers we can get as much enjoyment out of some indie level gamer. I for one have play way more hours of The Binding of Isaac than any AAA title I've played and it would have been a fraction of the development costs.

doppp 6y ago

Yes, it scales well. Also, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't use UE4.

H8crilA 6y ago

I truly don't understand the Cyberpunk2077 complainers. Has any of you/them actually played the game? I've played it on Google Stadia and loved it, the main story and major side stories were exciting (Konpeki Plaza really had me on edge), combat is complex, characters are well written, graphics are amazing. As far as bugs are concerned I had to reload an earlier save maybe 3-5 times over the span of 40 hours of gameplay, which is not good but honestly I didn't care. It does look like the console versions were worse off, though, but I didn't play these myself.

vermilingua 6y ago
No, many complainers haven’t played the game, because it crashes or runs terribly on their on-spec device. If your answer to that is “buy a new device”, you need to get outside more.
- H8crilA 6y ago
  What have you tried to play it on? Genuinely curious, the whole thing feels like being gaslighted (I get that it doesn't work well on consoles).
- rasz 6y ago
  > crashes or runs terribly on their on-spec device like which device exactly ? Most complaints were about base PS4. This is how it runs on base PS4, those are the "mayor" game breaking bugs people are crying about: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/854702029?t=00h45m00s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/854702029?t=00h45m00s [1] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/857020318?t=01h09m53s https://www.twitch.tv/videos/857020318?t=01h09m53s [2] TLDR: - 30fps with drops to 20. For reference Remedy shipped Control running all the way down to 10fps [Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One can see prolonged frame-rate drops in sustained combat, dropping all the way down to 10 frames per second at its absolute worst.] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-control-console-face-off https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-contr... - crashes once every 5-7 hours of continuous gameplay. Not a game breaking problem since it auto saves often. Saving game is one of the fastest of any games I played, its instant, no slowdowns when autosaving. - has problems with streaming game assets on time (geometry[1], animations[2]). Claire's races are perhaps the only problematic part of the game due to this bug. GPS markers on the ground load too slowly. ... and thats it. The rest of the game works exactly as on other platforms, including random animation glitches.

asiachick 6y ago

> And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life. Half Life has no cohesive narrative. It is just a bunch of interesting random scenes thrown together and people make up their own narrative about it. It works but it's not a "cohesive narrative"