It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
There were a bunch of game company closures in Australia in the 2000s and now there are a bunch of Australian indie devs, as an example. The cycle takes a long time though.
I don’t think it’s a death, it’s more of a transition. Firstly, a lot of XBox games have been coming to PC, intentionally, because Microsoft basically own the market*. They’ve also created XCloud + Game pass, possibly the most convenient way to play games, and you don’t need an XBox.
The real people who’ve turned on the device itself has been devs. Some of the stuff they’ve been saying at GDC have been at the same level as the stuff they say about Linux as a target. Like your game shouldn’t be that dependent on platform, it hurts things like archival.
Hello. The Verge is shit and manipulative in the way they framed this, but SBI is a beat up. It’s the usual gamers not really knowing how games are made.
I’m using Monado with my WMR device. It’s still very early days but progress is good. The big issue is that you’ll need to have up-to-date firmware, and the only way to do that is on Windows.
6dof works via basalt (and there’s hand tracking as well I believe) but right now the experience is very Janky. eg if I put the headset down it gets confused and starts drifting heavily, forcing a restart. It used to crash sometimes on some types of motion as well. My WMR controllers aren’t being detected and 6dofing properly even though they should be. But the bones are there.
Here’s a video of Monado being used and doing the tracking.
Disappointed that gmtk doesn’t address the fact that this wouldn’t really be an issue with physical media because it can be re-sold and kept in a library.
While, yes, Steam doing this is… OK… The resale is what matters. Technically passing it on via Gog’s download is “piracy”, but having some sort of physical identifier for the thing makes it legal to resell.
I play a mix and generally want to create a distance between me and the character. I’m not thinking “what would I do?” I’m thinking “what would this person do?”
Having said that, if I pick a girl I won’t pick a heterosexual romance option. Romance in games is strange.
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
100% this. The whole process of creation and critique goes way back to the dawn of film and probably before. The entire construction of positions and job titles (creative director, design lead, etc) all draw from these theories. This requires the critique to be separate from the process of creation.
I think this is less corruption and more vanity. There are a lot of charitable organisations out there who will routinely donate over a million dollars. They’ll get a hospital wing or entrance or statue or something named after them. I think compared to those charities, open hand is incredibly small.
My guess is their strategy was to do a bulk donation to get some kind of recognition for their mum. They were probably hoping they’d have much larger sums in a shorter time, and then time just kept on going.
The problem is, that would have been fine if it was their money they were doing this with, but they’re doing these shenanigans with other people’s money, and now open hand is probably done for as a charity.
it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
what is the benefit over just using classical algorithms
Utilisation. A CPU isn’t really built for deep AI code, so it can’t really do realistic AI given the frame budget of doing other things. This is famously why games have bad AI. Training AI via AI algorithms could make the NPCs more realistic or smarter, and you could do this within reasonable frame budgets.
I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:...
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example
who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.
Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.
My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.
OK so this is now offtopic for the conversation, but…
However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work.
To some extent, it’s authoring tools which affect how they work. A procedural materials pipeline can help them compose on top of already procedural content. In a way, you could see PBR as a part of that pipeline because PBR materials are physics modelled. Having said that I do take your point, even building out that pipeline takes time. Creating a PBR materials library is not super easy, and obviously organic stuff is very hard to model as a material.
meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage
From watching blender modelling, I thought the pattern was to have minimal rigging on the base mesh and then tesselation via normal maps + subdivision (apparently this is very doable even with sculpting). Obviously for animation you need a certain quality but beyond that I thought everything would be normal maps, reflection maps, etc etc.
TIL for no tessellation on skeletal meshes. I hope over time Unreal / Epic will put some effort in on minimising memory usage, even though I know they “just” got done with Nanite and friends.
If Rambo The Video Game (2014) was made with the tech of today, it would look much better while costing the devs the same amount of time.
I don’t think this is quite correct. A while back devs were talking about a AAApocalypse. Basically as budgets keep on growing, having a game make its money back is exceedingly hard. This is why today’s games need all sorts of monetisation, are always sequels, have low-risk game mechanics, and ship in half broken states. Regardless of the industry basically abandoning novel game engines to focus on Unreal (which is also a bad thing for other reasons), game production times are increasing, and the reason is that while some of the time is amortised, the greater graphical fidelity makes the lower fidelity work stand out. I believe an “indie” or even AA game could look better today for the same amount of effort than 10 years ago, but not a AAA game.
For example, you could not build Baldur’s Gate 3 in Unreal. This is an unhealthy state for the industry to be in.
From the notoriously flat structure of Valve to the support of free software to the extremely laissez faire way of running steam to the main Dota tournament being named “The International”… Is Gabe Newell a card carrying Anarchist?
Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? angielski
It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
Opinion: Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Let's discuss: Tetris (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder (www.theverge.com) angielski
Evidently on a posting tear today. What happens when you’re stuck in a Dr.'s waiting room, I guess…
Petition: make WMR (VR stack for Reverb G2 headsets) open source (www.change.org)
cross-posted from: feddit.nl/post/11027166...
Why Spec Ops: The Line Mattered (yt.artemislena.eu) angielski
Male players: Why do you play female characters? (kbin.social) angielski
Got the idea of posting this when I watched this YouTube video that talks about reasons men love playing as girls....
Activision Blizzard settles sex discrimination lawsuit for £44m (www.eurogamer.net)
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
YouTuber The Completionist's Open Hand Foundation Accused of Keeping Charitable Donations - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Karl Jobst’s video...
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What type of game you want to see that doesn't fully exist yet?
PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Xbox at the Crossroads | Opinion by Rob Fahey (www.gamesindustry.biz)
I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:...
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Larian drops Series S split-screen as "solution" to bring Baldur's Gate 3 to Xbox this year (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Should put this whole issue to rest (for a while, at least 😉).
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29 Best Retro Handhelds Of 2023 [All Reviewed] (retrododo.com)
Do you have one of these? Do you use it? I want one but I’m afraid it’s going to end up another plastic brick in a drawer.
Is Gabe Newell a hardcore anarchist? angielski
From the notoriously flat structure of Valve to the support of free software to the extremely laissez faire way of running steam to the main Dota tournament being named “The International”… Is Gabe Newell a card carrying Anarchist?