I remember going to EA games on a field trip for school and even back then the corporate feeling was strong. I remember this panel about developer freedom and not a single student was interested. Granted, nobody from my school was on track to do any kind of game development
Throughout the early 2000s to early 2010s most AAA game releases had midnight launches. I remember going to the midnight launch of the first WoW expansion and the queue at my local EB Games at 11:30pm was wild. Never seen so many people in a shopping centre so late. Some of the best memories were hanging out with my family in the queue for the games and the real liminal space energy the otherwise empty shopping centre gave.
The only thing similar these days are people camping out for a new iPhone.
Who would have thought that having your own team/colleagues writing/updating their own engine would rely better results (not always) than using something made from someone else…
The problem is bigger than that. Disclaimer: generalization incoming!
Most game developers are just programmers and nothing else. They know how to write high level languages like C# well enough to write the required functions and that’s it.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Yes, there were shitty games made back then , but at least the devs had my admiration. Now, not so much. But this not limited to games, Apps are the same shit. Let’s just use some Chromium framework wrapped as an app and that’s it.
Nah this isn’t true. If you gave the devs a free month I’m sure they could optimize the hell out of things. The issue is there are deadlines and higher priority items. You can technically play cities 2 unoptimized at a lower fps and graphics setting, you’ll have a much worse time playing it if features are incomplete and full of bugs.
They simply didn’t have the time to get to optimization
That’s quite true. A friend told me that the red engine from cdpr is one of the most efficient and we’ll made engine today. It didn’t surprised me because cdpr has been working on it for 2 years after cyberpunk failed to meet the technical requirements they sold it for.
That’s what it takes now for an optimized engine: 2 years on a decade old engine.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Re-using engines has been around for basically as long as game development has existed. This idea of some mythical age when game development was more "pure" is a fantasy. What has changed is that expectations on AAA titles has grown to the point where it's extremely difficult to roll your own engine if you are committed to many, many years of work.
Not to mention, it certainly doesn't guarantee that the engine performs well. Look at Starfield or Baldur's Gate 3. Both have noticeable issues with performance, and both are built on in-house engines by their respective studios.
Yeah, this guy is basically harping on the concept of re-usable code. That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly. Beyond that, everything since 2d has used an engine. Hell, to not use an engine would be wasteful and delay games. What, every game should rewrite an engine?
Even Halo CE, 2002, used an engine. The Blam! engine. Dude’s delusional if he thinks people were drawing individual pixels on the monitor.
That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.
It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.
The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.
Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.
These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc… It’s gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren’t in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.
Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you’ll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It’s just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they’re doing it as a hobby with modding instead.
It’s a pretty popular one but I’m currently playing through Disco Elysium and it’s a masterpiece of thriller detective with very strong RPG integration. Highly recommend even if you don’t like either of those genres as long as you like a good story.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
You could mitigate that by coms only being proximity and no indication of how many players each team has. Thst would also make offensive playstyles preferable.
I have a mental hangup with the very real dread of when hosted multiplayer games die, that all the time and effort I have spent, and all the things I’ve built, will just suddenly disappear. It’s why I run a private G17 Mabinogi server on my pc, rather than playing online.
Saw this trailer the other day that might interest you, it’s an offline type mmo where all the other players are simulated. Erenshor Offline MMO Trailer
I know this comes across as one of those classic phishing emails that claim to require your immediate attention or else your account will be deleted, but unfortunately in this case it’s legitimate.
Not easily. The laugh track isn’t a separate audio stream by the time you get the episode. It’s all mixed together with the dialogue and music.
Watching a sitcom with the laugh track missing seems like it would be awkward. The actors are constantly taking extended pauses between lines, or sometimes in the middle of a line, while the laugh is happening.
Just the Invidious instance I found on the official list a long time ago. I like them because they’re relatively local, super reliable, and unlike a lot of other instances they actually have the download feature enabled. But yeah, their domain name is a bit awkward, lol.
They’re music videos where the music and singing is cut and ‘ambient’ noise like squeaky shoes, breathing, grunting while doing dance moves, etc is dubbed back in. You’ll see what I mean if you watch one. It may be the same thing but I’ve just always heard of them referred to as “musicless music videos”
I did. It was quite funny listening to just the lyrics. Would have been nice if they managed to keep the original vocals but that whispering voice made it funnier.
I used to work in a nightclub. We had a TV show book the club during the day to shoot some scenes, so the cast were acting out drinking and dancing, but without any music. It’s probably the most surreal thing I’ve seen in my life.
It might make for some very choppy transitions in certain areas, you’d need a way to smooth it out to make it less abrupt while still cutting out the majority of it in the parts where hard cutting wouldn’t work well.
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