7 ms·

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazi

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rtpg 5y ago
To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…
- chungy 5y ago
  In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions. I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    They use CEF(Chromium Embedded Framework)
martinald 5y ago
Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days. This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts. I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.
- Haegin 5y ago
  Another example of this is Dan Abramov's post from 2018 about things he doesn't know - https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/ https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/ As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Let's not discount the other possibility: they outsource development to the cheapest bidder.
- vgb2k18 5y ago
  >Is that really surprising? >I was actually amazed... You countered your own argument there.
  - maven29 5y ago
    Nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. While you might be aware of the effect, you can still easily underestimate its impact.
KiranRao0 5y ago
Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required: A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched. It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performance, or else they'll be crushed in benchmarks.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  My old boss worked on the PC port of Dead Space 3. He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City). This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Can you say more about the hardcoded fix for Sim City? This sounds fascinating.
    - alxexperience 5y ago
      EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :) I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1]. > Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
guywhocodes 5y ago
Wow, my impression was the opposite. Slow and crashing: Just like every game they made. They have a uniquely high input lag and bugs is kind of their thing in general.
bathtub365 5y ago
The people with the skills and desire to work on games are working on games. Even within the games themselves, the front end is often an afterthought.
throwaway09223 5y ago
There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios. Bethesda isn't one of them. Most game studios produce poorly optimized junk and are barely managing to ship a working product.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  The question I ask is if Bethesda spent all the time on technical things would they make the amazing games they do? Give me a Bethesda game with bugs over any other smooth game with no heart any day. Every company has an attention budget to spend from.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Sure. There's nothing wrong with a non-technical focus.
  - ralusek 5y ago
    Nobody wants them to spend energy on the technical side, we want them to use an existing engine like Unreal.
    - remexre 5y ago
      The incredible moddability of their RPGs, at least, is in large part to the flexibility of their engine. How many other games have active modding communities 12 years after launch as large as New Vegas'?
      - hanselot 5y ago
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    hasn't bethesda been limping "the creation engine" which is really gamebryo along for the last 10 years? They are doing technical things, they're just doing them poorly.
dspillett 5y ago
* companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities … to show amazing graphics with complex logic … can't make a simple GUI. The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  >without too many major patches being needed in the days following release. this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?
- maccolgan 5y ago
  Two words: Fallout 76
egypturnash 5y ago
It never fails to amuse me when I am playing some sprawling open world tasklist from Ubisoft and something happens that diverts me into the weird world of achievements kept on Uplay. All this highly-optimized 3D work and lovingly-polished 2D menus is suddenly covered up by a collection of React placeholder items doing their "loading data of unknown size" pulse animation at an erratic 3-10fps. I imagine that it is implemented and maintained entirely by people who are biding their time waiting for an opening on a team where they get to do something they give half a damn about, because it is pretty clear that nobody has put any love into this stuff.
bastawhiz 5y ago
One might say the same about the AWS management console.
greggman3 5y ago
GUIs are actually a ton of work. They look simple because it's a collection of simple parts, formatted text, buttons, sliders, text input, etc... but if you go through all the various screens and ubique interactions in something like a game hub/store/user/friends etc it ads up to a huge amount of work. Often more than graphics engines

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rtpg 5y ago

To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…

chungy 5y ago
In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions. I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
- modo_mario 5y ago
  They use CEF(Chromium Embedded Framework)

martinald 5y ago

Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days. This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts. I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.

Haegin 5y ago
Another example of this is Dan Abramov's post from 2018 about things he doesn't know - https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/ https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/ As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.
mywittyname 5y ago
Let's not discount the other possibility: they outsource development to the cheapest bidder.
vgb2k18 5y ago
>Is that really surprising? >I was actually amazed... You countered your own argument there.
- maven29 5y ago
  Nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. While you might be aware of the effect, you can still easily underestimate its impact.

KiranRao0 5y ago

Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required: A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched. It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performance, or else they'll be crushed in benchmarks.

AussieWog93 5y ago
My old boss worked on the PC port of Dead Space 3. He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City). This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.
- philistine 5y ago
  Can you say more about the hardcoded fix for Sim City? This sounds fascinating.
  - alxexperience 5y ago
    EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :) I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1]. > Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

guywhocodes 5y ago

Wow, my impression was the opposite. Slow and crashing: Just like every game they made. They have a uniquely high input lag and bugs is kind of their thing in general.

bathtub365 5y ago

The people with the skills and desire to work on games are working on games. Even within the games themselves, the front end is often an afterthought.

throwaway09223 5y ago

There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios. Bethesda isn't one of them. Most game studios produce poorly optimized junk and are barely managing to ship a working product.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
The question I ask is if Bethesda spent all the time on technical things would they make the amazing games they do? Give me a Bethesda game with bugs over any other smooth game with no heart any day. Every company has an attention budget to spend from.
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Sure. There's nothing wrong with a non-technical focus.
- ralusek 5y ago
  Nobody wants them to spend energy on the technical side, we want them to use an existing engine like Unreal.
  - remexre 5y ago
    The incredible moddability of their RPGs, at least, is in large part to the flexibility of their engine. How many other games have active modding communities 12 years after launch as large as New Vegas'?
    - hanselot 5y ago
- LegitShady 5y ago
  hasn't bethesda been limping "the creation engine" which is really gamebryo along for the last 10 years? They are doing technical things, they're just doing them poorly.

dspillett 5y ago

* companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities … to show amazing graphics with complex logic … can't make a simple GUI. The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.

LegitShady 5y ago
>without too many major patches being needed in the days following release. this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?
maccolgan 5y ago
Two words: Fallout 76

egypturnash 5y ago

It never fails to amuse me when I am playing some sprawling open world tasklist from Ubisoft and something happens that diverts me into the weird world of achievements kept on Uplay. All this highly-optimized 3D work and lovingly-polished 2D menus is suddenly covered up by a collection of React placeholder items doing their "loading data of unknown size" pulse animation at an erratic 3-10fps. I imagine that it is implemented and maintained entirely by people who are biding their time waiting for an opening on a team where they get to do something they give half a damn about, because it is pretty clear that nobody has put any love into this stuff.

bastawhiz 5y ago

One might say the same about the AWS management console.

greggman3 5y ago

GUIs are actually a ton of work. They look simple because it's a collection of simple parts, formatted text, buttons, sliders, text input, etc... but if you go through all the various screens and ubique interactions in something like a game hub/store/user/friends etc it ads up to a huge amount of work. Often more than graphics engines