4 ms·

"Our previous engine would not handle that. The way memory worked in the previous engine, it never would have been able to do that." Where is bullshit man when

by scoofy 13y ago

"Our previous engine would not handle that. The way memory worked in the previous engine, it never would have been able to do that." Where is bullshit man when you need him. I don't believe this for a second. Great CoD puff piece HN.

protomyth 13y ago
I posted it because I could not figure out how their reasoning actually made any technical sense. I suspect it is a total BS job, but maybe there is an actual technical reason.
- Zergy 13y ago
  There is. To maximize sales the COD engine is designed for the weakest system for it to run on. The Xbox 360 has half a gig or ram and that is shared with the OS, memory is an extremely tight commodity. It is quite reasonable to think that another mesh, texture map, and additional sounds clips will simply not fit in the 300ish megs that XBox developers have to deal with. Of course that can be designed around by having an engine that smart about pulling things in and out of memory. But that's hard to do especially when you have to release a game every year. I should point out I'm talking about multiplayer mainly. There isn't a technical reason for the single player other than it is a lot of extra work.
lnanek2 13y ago
It's pretty common in game development to up against the wall in terms of texture memory or frame rate performance or way past your limits and needing to cut things before release. It's very believable they didn't have the spare memory for in depth customizable characters. It's much more efficient for the computer to have more characters to render that look the same. Maybe they had the exact same geometry for all players and the exact same textures and just a different label over their heads, or had only a color swap texture difference, etc.. If adding customization meant each player had to have separate data and that data didn't fit in fast caches, it could have broken the frame rate requirements. Writing games, I've spent months on optimizations to do things like draw as many objects with as few data/state/rendering changes as possible to reach frame rate requirements for a smooth game.
wetmore 13y ago
Perhaps the skeleton/rigging/animation is different for female characters.
INTPenis 13y ago
Total bullshit because they later say that the female characters are the same size in the hit boxes as the male characters. In other words they could have skipped custom character creation and just had static male and female avatars using the exact same engine.

by scoofy 13y ago

protomyth 13y ago

I posted it because I could not figure out how their reasoning actually made any technical sense. I suspect it is a total BS job, but maybe there is an actual technical reason.

Zergy 13y ago
There is. To maximize sales the COD engine is designed for the weakest system for it to run on. The Xbox 360 has half a gig or ram and that is shared with the OS, memory is an extremely tight commodity. It is quite reasonable to think that another mesh, texture map, and additional sounds clips will simply not fit in the 300ish megs that XBox developers have to deal with. Of course that can be designed around by having an engine that smart about pulling things in and out of memory. But that's hard to do especially when you have to release a game every year. I should point out I'm talking about multiplayer mainly. There isn't a technical reason for the single player other than it is a lot of extra work.

lnanek2 13y ago

It's pretty common in game development to up against the wall in terms of texture memory or frame rate performance or way past your limits and needing to cut things before release. It's very believable they didn't have the spare memory for in depth customizable characters. It's much more efficient for the computer to have more characters to render that look the same. Maybe they had the exact same geometry for all players and the exact same textures and just a different label over their heads, or had only a color swap texture difference, etc.. If adding customization meant each player had to have separate data and that data didn't fit in fast caches, it could have broken the frame rate requirements. Writing games, I've spent months on optimizations to do things like draw as many objects with as few data/state/rendering changes as possible to reach frame rate requirements for a smooth game.

wetmore 13y ago

Perhaps the skeleton/rigging/animation is different for female characters.

INTPenis 13y ago

Total bullshit because they later say that the female characters are the same size in the hit boxes as the male characters. In other words they could have skipped custom character creation and just had static male and female avatars using the exact same engine.