7 ms·

> and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz. This is what gets me. Moder

> and this had to be paged in and out dynamically, without any "hitches"—loading lags where the frame rate would drop below 30 Hz. This is what gets me. Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone", and then we wind up with games that run like shit. Even on consoles.

speeder 11y ago
I was playing recently Axiom Verge... Great game, except it has NES graphics and stutters like hell. Wasteland 2 on my machine also ran really, really badly, it was unplayable (it was the first time I got pissed for kickstarting something). Kerbal Space program also has some performance issues, but not bad as the previous two. Then I go play some graphics heavy game made by some studio that like to make good tech, or play emulated Wii or PS2 games, and there are no issues and games look awesome.
- TillE 11y ago
  Two of those games use the Unity engine, and Axiom Verge apparently uses MonoGame. Garbage collection is often a big problem for real-time performance, especially on the old version of Mono that Unity has.
gambiting 11y ago
I work as a programmer in games industry,and I feel like the problem is made worse by artists and level designers who add more stuff without worrying about performance. I can make a super efficient physics system or model loader,but that only means that someone somewhere is going to add more particle effects or lights or whatever, or maybe placing too many props in the scene so PS4/X1 can't handle it. In fact, the separation is huge nowadays - I know our engine inside out, but I personally wouldn't really know how to use the editor to remove things from the scene. Likewise, a level designer will know how to put props in the scene,but they will have no idea how underlying things are wired together or what is the performance cost of doing them. It's a complicated problem, which might have been made worse by the fact that games are simply easier to make nowadays than ever before.
- nthj 11y ago
  I am not a game developer, just a developer and a gamer, so please forgive what may be a goofy question: have you seen or engineered systems that capped the level designers' resources? For a super simplified example, I think of Forge in the Halo series, and I'm pretty sure Forge had a certain amount of monopoly money that gamer-designers ran out of eventually. Would such systems be infeasible more for political reasons than technical?
  - gambiting 11y ago
    The resources are usually capped in a "soft" way. So if the scene uses too much RAM for a console to handle, it will trigger a chain of emails that is sent to everyone involved, and well.....either I will be given a new task to somehow fit all of it in memory as a programmer,or a designer will be given a task to remove some stuff to go below limit. But framerate can be really tricky to handle,because ultimately, it's not up to me whatever fps drops are acceptable or not.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      Is there no standard? Like, if fps drops below 30 on a play through - red light and fix.
      - gambiting 11y ago
        The problem is, that fps stays below 30 for 90% of the development cycle. Only in the last few months of a project everyone rips out useless code, debug code, debug overlays, loggers, extra network connections for statistic and performance servers,and finally you can produce a "nearly" final version of the game that doesn't have any debug code in - and only in that state you can see how it will run on actual hardware and start optimizing from there. So basically you arrive at a situation where you have 3-6 months before release,and you have this game running at 20fps on a console,and you have to somehow make it run at 30 or 60fps. Obviously profilers help with that a lot, but it's rarely a process which you can afford to be doing during most of development.
matt_s 11y ago
With internet based games I wonder if that loading screen/hitch is essentially finding you a server as you move from one zone to another if the server you were on was too crowded. I also wonder if they are doing the equivalent in modern consoles - pushing the limits with graphics, etc. where you simply can't avoid the hitch. It would be good to hear someone's perspective on this that works on these types of games.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  It shouldn't be, networking should always be in the background and for console games there's no reason why clients should move to another zone - loadbalancers direct new clients to available servers, they don't or shouldn't move existing clients to other servers to make room for new clients. Chances are they're not doing anywhere near the same thing with modern consoles; maybe in off-the-shelf engine code to get maximum FPS, but the games themselves, not likely. Also because modern video games are millions of lines of code - you don't want to duplicate those tenfold by squeezing every bit of performance out of it. Maybe only in the most frequently accessed codepaths.
- Retric 11y ago
  Moving from one server to another can be instantaneous. Just use the cellphone model where they do proper handoffs between base stations. As to loading assets, plenty of games used a streaming model where you can explore huge worlds without issue. PS: Skyrim is an interesting case where there is a player made patch to make city's open world where the original game has a loading screen. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8058 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8058
  - maccard 11y ago
    > As to loading assets, plenty of games used a streaming model where you can explore huge worlds without issue. The streaming model isn't simple though. You need to decide which assets to load, when, and when to discard them. You also have to consider how your level is designed, i.e. if you've got three tiles, and a player travels from tile a to b, and then b to c. When he moves from b to c, you can remove a from memory, but what if zone b + c is too big to fit, whereas a to b is okay. A really interesting presentation was given at GDC this year from Insomniac games on streaming http://s3.crashworks.org/gdc15/ElanRuskin_SunsetOverdrive_Streaming_notes.pdf http://s3.crashworks.org/gdc15/ElanRuskin_SunsetOverdrive_St...
zelos 11y ago
Most Nintendo games still seem to be locked at 60Hz (sometimes 30 maybe?). Look at the fuss when people realised that Mario Kart 8 dropped to 59Hz sometimes ;-)
- phire 11y ago
  Nintendo generally picks a framerate and sticks to it. The N64 zelda games were actually locked at 20hz. (It is possible to do 60hz on the N64, but it's really hard)
adestefan 11y ago
The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.
- timboslice 11y ago
  I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?
  - pmlamotte 11y ago
    I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.
    - motdiem 11y ago
      That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.
      - eru 11y ago
        Some fans even made patches for bugs in Master of Orion, in the binary.
        DCoder 11y ago
        Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack also received community patches (I contributed to them a lot) to its binary. When EA later released The First Decade bundle with all the old games in it, they removed the old copy-protection. Most games in the bundle were simply recompiled to remove it, but for the expansion pack they hex-edited the copy-protection to keep it community patch compatible.
balls187 11y ago
> Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone" Or just like in the PS1 days, game developers still have to make trade-offs to meet dead drop dates set by publishers. Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier with the quality, as they push to build more features closer to ship date.
- teacup50 11y ago
  "Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier ..." That just means that we get to deal with buggy crap while they tell themselves it's OK because they can ship another update. Sigh.
  - balls187 11y ago
    I'm going to give game developers the benefit of the doubt by believing they're not OK with shipping bugs.
    - teacup50 11y ago
      ... yet the bug count keeps rising.

speeder 11y ago

I was playing recently Axiom Verge... Great game, except it has NES graphics and stutters like hell. Wasteland 2 on my machine also ran really, really badly, it was unplayable (it was the first time I got pissed for kickstarting something). Kerbal Space program also has some performance issues, but not bad as the previous two. Then I go play some graphics heavy game made by some studio that like to make good tech, or play emulated Wii or PS2 games, and there are no issues and games look awesome.

TillE 11y ago
Two of those games use the Unity engine, and Axiom Verge apparently uses MonoGame. Garbage collection is often a big problem for real-time performance, especially on the old version of Mono that Unity has.

gambiting 11y ago

I work as a programmer in games industry,and I feel like the problem is made worse by artists and level designers who add more stuff without worrying about performance. I can make a super efficient physics system or model loader,but that only means that someone somewhere is going to add more particle effects or lights or whatever, or maybe placing too many props in the scene so PS4/X1 can't handle it. In fact, the separation is huge nowadays - I know our engine inside out, but I personally wouldn't really know how to use the editor to remove things from the scene. Likewise, a level designer will know how to put props in the scene,but they will have no idea how underlying things are wired together or what is the performance cost of doing them. It's a complicated problem, which might have been made worse by the fact that games are simply easier to make nowadays than ever before.

nthj 11y ago
I am not a game developer, just a developer and a gamer, so please forgive what may be a goofy question: have you seen or engineered systems that capped the level designers' resources? For a super simplified example, I think of Forge in the Halo series, and I'm pretty sure Forge had a certain amount of monopoly money that gamer-designers ran out of eventually. Would such systems be infeasible more for political reasons than technical?
- gambiting 11y ago
  The resources are usually capped in a "soft" way. So if the scene uses too much RAM for a console to handle, it will trigger a chain of emails that is sent to everyone involved, and well.....either I will be given a new task to somehow fit all of it in memory as a programmer,or a designer will be given a task to remove some stuff to go below limit. But framerate can be really tricky to handle,because ultimately, it's not up to me whatever fps drops are acceptable or not.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    Is there no standard? Like, if fps drops below 30 on a play through - red light and fix.
    - gambiting 11y ago
      The problem is, that fps stays below 30 for 90% of the development cycle. Only in the last few months of a project everyone rips out useless code, debug code, debug overlays, loggers, extra network connections for statistic and performance servers,and finally you can produce a "nearly" final version of the game that doesn't have any debug code in - and only in that state you can see how it will run on actual hardware and start optimizing from there. So basically you arrive at a situation where you have 3-6 months before release,and you have this game running at 20fps on a console,and you have to somehow make it run at 30 or 60fps. Obviously profilers help with that a lot, but it's rarely a process which you can afford to be doing during most of development.

matt_s 11y ago

With internet based games I wonder if that loading screen/hitch is essentially finding you a server as you move from one zone to another if the server you were on was too crowded. I also wonder if they are doing the equivalent in modern consoles - pushing the limits with graphics, etc. where you simply can't avoid the hitch. It would be good to hear someone's perspective on this that works on these types of games.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
It shouldn't be, networking should always be in the background and for console games there's no reason why clients should move to another zone - loadbalancers direct new clients to available servers, they don't or shouldn't move existing clients to other servers to make room for new clients. Chances are they're not doing anywhere near the same thing with modern consoles; maybe in off-the-shelf engine code to get maximum FPS, but the games themselves, not likely. Also because modern video games are millions of lines of code - you don't want to duplicate those tenfold by squeezing every bit of performance out of it. Maybe only in the most frequently accessed codepaths.
Retric 11y ago
Moving from one server to another can be instantaneous. Just use the cellphone model where they do proper handoffs between base stations. As to loading assets, plenty of games used a streaming model where you can explore huge worlds without issue. PS: Skyrim is an interesting case where there is a player made patch to make city's open world where the original game has a loading screen. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8058 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8058
- maccard 11y ago
  > As to loading assets, plenty of games used a streaming model where you can explore huge worlds without issue. The streaming model isn't simple though. You need to decide which assets to load, when, and when to discard them. You also have to consider how your level is designed, i.e. if you've got three tiles, and a player travels from tile a to b, and then b to c. When he moves from b to c, you can remove a from memory, but what if zone b + c is too big to fit, whereas a to b is okay. A really interesting presentation was given at GDC this year from Insomniac games on streaming http://s3.crashworks.org/gdc15/ElanRuskin_SunsetOverdrive_Streaming_notes.pdf http://s3.crashworks.org/gdc15/ElanRuskin_SunsetOverdrive_St...

zelos 11y ago

Most Nintendo games still seem to be locked at 60Hz (sometimes 30 maybe?). Look at the fuss when people realised that Mario Kart 8 dropped to 59Hz sometimes ;-)

phire 11y ago
Nintendo generally picks a framerate and sticks to it. The N64 zelda games were actually locked at 20hz. (It is possible to do 60hz on the N64, but it's really hard)

adestefan 11y ago

The worse thing that ever happened to game development was the on-demand updates. There is nothing worse than buying a game on release day only to wait for it to download a patch.

timboslice 11y ago
I get the sentiment (they should have tested more thoroughly), but I for one appreciate the on-demand update mechanism. Would you rather play a game with previously unknown bugs, or have them smashed on launch day and get a patch to make your experience more stable?
- pmlamotte 11y ago
  I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.
  - motdiem 11y ago
    That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.
    - eru 11y ago
      Some fans even made patches for bugs in Master of Orion, in the binary.
      - DCoder 11y ago
        Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack also received community patches (I contributed to them a lot) to its binary. When EA later released The First Decade bundle with all the old games in it, they removed the old copy-protection. Most games in the bundle were simply recompiled to remove it, but for the expansion pack they hex-edited the copy-protection to keep it community patch compatible.

balls187 11y ago

> Modern game development seems to say "eh, a little hitching won't hurt anyone" Or just like in the PS1 days, game developers still have to make trade-offs to meet dead drop dates set by publishers. Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier with the quality, as they push to build more features closer to ship date.

teacup50 11y ago
"Online enabled patches can allow developers to be a little more cavalier ..." That just means that we get to deal with buggy crap while they tell themselves it's OK because they can ship another update. Sigh.
- balls187 11y ago
  I'm going to give game developers the benefit of the doubt by believing they're not OK with shipping bugs.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    ... yet the bug count keeps rising.