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That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your b
by ux266478 10mo ago
That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice?
Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.
- rovr138 10mo agoYes. They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.
- MBCook 10mo agoWas Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase? The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary. Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.
- esseph 10mo agoIt's a completely different game, engine, etc.
- jesse__ 10mo ago[flagged]
- atiedebee 10mo agoI think they meant the gameplay side of things instead of the engine
- whstl 10mo agoUnity rewrote and discontinued lots of major systems several times in a row in the last 10 years. I’d be careful before telling people to “get a grip”.
- ux266478 10mo ago[flagged]
- jesse__ 10mo ago[flagged]
- degamad 10mo ago> > you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase > You're not rewriting Unreal Do you consider the Unreal engine code to be part of "your codebase"?
- darubedarob 10mo agoGamedev engineering hours are also in endless oversupply thanks to myDreamCream brain.