It wasn’t a scam, it just kinda sucked. They fixed the suck.
That’s exactly what I want to see from a game dev. If the game sucks, make it right. Ideally don’t release a sucky game, but the next best is to fix the sucky game.
I’m envious that you get to experience it for the first time. The Quake games are so worth it. Quake 3 becomes more arena-based but is an absolute blast to play online against people. It was a good chunk of my gaming life. 1 and 2 are FPS royalty. Simple and to the point.
I played the Quake games originally on the PC, but they’re great with a controller. Just dial the sensitivity in and you’re good. That’s always my concern because I mostly play on consoles now too, but Id and Bethesda put a lot of care into their gamepad layouts and settings.
Looks amazing and I don’t know it for a fact but it feels like the devs takes the time to perfect the game and it will come out polished… Of course this just my feeling
For some reason, something as simple as using the F5/F8 as quicksave/quickload keys felt like a blast from the past. Maybe it’s been around the whole time and I stopped noticing, but it reminded me of playing old RPGs.
F9 was used in most Bethesda games for quickload. Not sure if this was a typo but AFAIK I only used quicksave before but it still counts as a hard save in BG3 which I appreciate.
Not only does it count as a hard save but there is 25 fucking slots for quick saves by default. And you can increase it. And you can quick save and quick load in the middle of a conversation, save scumming whatever skill checks you want if you’re a loser like me
Switch’s operating system is based on the OS from 3DS. The ARM architecture was already well documented and emulated. Tegra has documentation from NVidia.
With all that, making a Switch emulator was relatively “easy”. They took Citra, the 3DS emulator, and worked from there.
Xbox 360 is a different beast. Even its OS was only kinda Windows, so they couldn’t just take Wine and a PowerPC emulator and call it a day. Taking long is IMO not much of a surprise because of that.
IIRC the original Xbox has even worse emulation, to this day, despite being infamously close to a stock PC.
What makes RDR’s emulation struggles noteworthy is that it’s a highly desirable game that still took ages to unfuck. Most nightmare cases for emulators seem to be random D-list titles. Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy had incomprehensible crashes, early and reliably, for no discernible reason. True Crime New York on Gamecube was a white whale for Dolphin despite being absolute garbage.
RDR was a huge deal for its own sake - and it ran bad, looked worse, and stayed that way for a while. Back in the day it was common for emulators to only work properly for big-name games. NESticle and SNES9X absolutely cheated to run major titles. Early N64 development was nothing but. So having this killer app refuse to work, year after year, was a lingering presence in people’s minds.
Finally getting it working, only to have a nearly painless alternative drop, is pretty goddang funny.
Aside from poorly documented hardware, one reason why Xbox emulation is in such an early state was simply lack of interest. The Xbox had a meager first-party library and what exclusives there were, were already available to play on every Xbox released ever since via back compat.
I think a more tragic case would be if MGS4 was ever re-released as part of the Master Collection ports. That game was designed from the ground up for PS3, and runs terrible even on the custom RPCS3 builds designed specifically for it.
Pathing should be low hanging fruit here. Most NPCs don’t need accurate pathing, and can use a much faster algorithm to calculate. Hopefully the devs do a round of optimizations for late game content since that seems to be where most of the issues are.
We don’t know how their NPCs are built though. The pathing seems to be the same for every NPC that moves, so I bet its baked in somewhere up the inheritance tree. They already use ocular occlusion to take down some of the clutter out of view. The fact is the city probably pushes the limits of the engine in its current state.
Oh it’s certainly pushing it to the limits, which is why they need to change things. If it’s pathing, they have a ton of options to make it smoother, since most NPCs don’t need fancy pathing logic.
That’s optimal if you want to find the best path to a destination, but NPCs milling about a town don’t need the best path, they just need to move toward their goal more or less. And most go on a mostly fixed route, so you can just store the ideal path in memory and let the NPC evade up to some distance from that path.
This makes it a lot more friendly to do a multi-threaded implementation since you don’t need to figure out collision avoidance until it’s about to happen, just look a few steps ahead and course correct as needed.
Enemies should use proper pathing, but NPCs don’t need to be anywhere near that sophisticated.
But I have no idea what they’re actually doing under the hood, it’s just concerning that it gets slow when the player moves without interacting with any NPCs.
Yeah but with how optimal the game is are they really not using waypoints for jobber npcs already? This game runs extremely well. That seems like a hell of an oversight. Thats why i figured the pathfinding was baked in somewhere higher up or something.
Edit: I really don’t think it is pathing. These models have insane LoD. I’m thinking they tuned it since D:OS2 but its the same engine. I bet its just compounding factors of high polygons, environmental effects (the earthquakes) and NPCs just existing in high number on top of that. There is more than double the amount of NPCs inside the city than anywhere else in the game.
In the Digital Foundry review, they saw huge performance dips when just running in small circles, when standing still had no impact. As in, on a high end system, performance dropped from ~90FPS to mid-60s, just by moving in a tight circle (i.e. not enough to actually move the camera).
That sounds a lot like pathing to me, though other things could certainly be causing it.
It just seems like something there is poorly optimized and it shows when there are a lot of NPCs around.
And the game essentially uses last gen tech (DX11, no RTX, performance drop on Vulkan, etc), so it’s not pushing the boundaries all that much, so it’s probably not fully optimized. It should be feasible to optimize it to at least not get FPS dips when moving vs standing still in towns, if not get a bit better performance on older CPUs (e.g. Zen 2 CPUs like 3600 and whatever is in the Steam Deck). It runs pretty well, it they could probably get a bit more.
Pushing the boundaries of the engine is different than pushing the boundaries of the industry. Maybe it could be the pathfinding. But movement doesn’t necessarily mean its pathfinding. I’m sure transforming all those polygons costs more computationally than pathfinding.
But why only when the player is moving? Surely the NPCs are also moving all the time, so just moving the player and maybe nudging the party members (so like 4 new characters moving?) shouldn’t drop frames by ~30%. Something seems off there.
I hope they figure it out and patch it, because it would really impact the experience on lower end hardware, like the Steam Deck (i.e. stable 30 FPS vs stutters in the late game).
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