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This is everything wrong with both (sweatshop) games and programming! This is 180 of how people programmed for the older consoles in the most fun and creative

This is everything wrong with both (sweatshop) games and programming! This is 180 of how people programmed for the older consoles in the most fun and creative ways to squeeze the most out of smaller hardware. Take a look at this for comparison: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/war-stories-how-crash-bandicoot-hacked-the-original-playstation/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/war-stories-how-crash... Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus. I absolutely hate this way of doing things, because for me all art, all engineering, all creativity is about boundaries, dogmas, and squeezing and optimising the hell out of your _elegant_ systems. I mean even in my small webgl/threejs projects the fun part was getting every last bit of eye candy out of the smallest file sizes i could, simplifying geometry, lowering resolution, while maintaining great looks. 100k vertice log piles and hundreds of people with teeth? Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Is it 100% shitty work conditions? How could single devs and small studios create relatively large games with love 20 years ago for small money?

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Pay peanuts get monkeys. Game dev has been infamous for taking in young, fresh college graduates, promise them "credits" and "fun life" and then run them through the grinder for shit pay. And eventually, even those who survived the grinder and ended up living long enough to become seniors burn out, and that's how you get this kind of clusterfuck in the end. Game dev seriously needs to follow the VFX industry and unionize. I have zero trust left in fellow gamers to not buy games from unethical producers.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      "Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb. > Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and so do many other countries of the world.
      - ajmurmann 3y ago
        What won't happen?
        mschuster91 3y ago
        As long as the government doesn't ban employing people for 12 hours and more straight for weeks, and actually enforces that ban, there will always be enough employers doing so, and enough people willing to go through with it "for the credits".
        ajmurmann 3y ago
        Especially in am industry that sees depressed wages because it's the dream job for many. I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't happen.
      - anticensor 3y ago
        Colossal Order is in Finland and Paradox Interactive is in Sweden, both of which have strong employment laws.
  - chc 3y ago
Dalewyn 3y ago
We make faster hardware and software will bloat to consume it.[1][2][3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
QuickMinuteOats 3y ago
Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and deadlines. Producing well-optimized, “clever” code usually requires magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution. Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are typically the only ones that can afford to spend time optimizing like you describe.
- kossTKR 3y ago
  I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have no discretionary time left and are even working weekends. Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I told them every time that they should than prioritize the pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I wouldn't have done that if I had already had to work nights and weekends.
    - jokethrowaway 3y ago
      Working overtime is just insane to me. Why can't you just ignore the PM and do it during normal hours? What are they going to do? Fire you?
    - kossTKR 3y ago
      Not blaming the engineers! The problem is structural or from managers and higher ups. This is why most non technical business school types can fuck right off, i’ve rarely seen them make anything better. Managers with either dev or design experience is the only thing that works.
- imiric 3y ago
ajmurmann 3y ago
> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest rates being high. Calling out that something is "easy" and "fun" is likely insulting to the developers who are frequently working 70-80hour weeks sand ruining their family life in the process.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch. In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke) This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.
    - stylepoints 3y ago
      And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.
  - habinero 3y ago
    Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features. Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have. Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected. It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know. But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see. If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.
capableweb 3y ago
> Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus. Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI, from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road tools and everything in-between. And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason for the performance issues in the game, so not sure how it's even relevant.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  I think parent meant to imply there is a similarly wasteful culture in frontend development so of course they'd use react for menus and labels.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lozenge 3y ago
Most of the revenue comes in after, long after release. So it now makes sense to release an unfinished game and use the revenue to pay for the improvements.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.

mschuster91 3y ago
Pay peanuts get monkeys. Game dev has been infamous for taking in young, fresh college graduates, promise them "credits" and "fun life" and then run them through the grinder for shit pay. And eventually, even those who survived the grinder and ended up living long enough to become seniors burn out, and that's how you get this kind of clusterfuck in the end. Game dev seriously needs to follow the VFX industry and unionize. I have zero trust left in fellow gamers to not buy games from unethical producers.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    "Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb. > Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and so do many other countries of the world.
    - ajmurmann 3y ago
      What won't happen?
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        As long as the government doesn't ban employing people for 12 hours and more straight for weeks, and actually enforces that ban, there will always be enough employers doing so, and enough people willing to go through with it "for the credits".
        ajmurmann 3y ago
        Especially in am industry that sees depressed wages because it's the dream job for many. I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't happen.
    - anticensor 3y ago
      Colossal Order is in Finland and Paradox Interactive is in Sweden, both of which have strong employment laws.
- chc 3y ago

Dalewyn 3y ago

We make faster hardware and software will bloat to consume it.[1][2][3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

QuickMinuteOats 3y ago

Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and deadlines. Producing well-optimized, “clever” code usually requires magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution. Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are typically the only ones that can afford to spend time optimizing like you describe.

kossTKR 3y ago
I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have no discretionary time left and are even working weekends. Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I told them every time that they should than prioritize the pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I wouldn't have done that if I had already had to work nights and weekends.
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    Working overtime is just insane to me. Why can't you just ignore the PM and do it during normal hours? What are they going to do? Fire you?
  - kossTKR 3y ago
    Not blaming the engineers! The problem is structural or from managers and higher ups. This is why most non technical business school types can fuck right off, i’ve rarely seen them make anything better. Managers with either dev or design experience is the only thing that works.
imiric 3y ago

ajmurmann 3y ago

> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest rates being high. Calling out that something is "easy" and "fun" is likely insulting to the developers who are frequently working 70-80hour weeks sand ruining their family life in the process.

Pannoniae 3y ago
They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch. In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke) This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.
  - stylepoints 3y ago
    And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.
- habinero 3y ago
  Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features. Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have. Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected. It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know. But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see. If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.

capableweb 3y ago

> Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus. Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI, from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road tools and everything in-between. And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason for the performance issues in the game, so not sure how it's even relevant.

jokethrowaway 3y ago
I think parent meant to imply there is a similarly wasteful culture in frontend development so of course they'd use react for menus and labels.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lozenge 3y ago

Most of the revenue comes in after, long after release. So it now makes sense to release an unfinished game and use the revenue to pay for the improvements.