Well, to be fair tomorrow’s hardware is something they promised.
That’s a very Orwellian world he has constructed.
That’s why I’m getting one!
To actually be fair, it’s a very early alpha. Optimization is one of the last things that get done. We’ll have the necessary hardware when it comes out, 10 years from now.
It’s going to look really dated when it does come out. I wonder if they’ll be adding ray tracing support…
Oh, in case you ever wanted to try the Star Citizen train-wreck for yourself, and to find out first hand why we’re all consistently laughing…there’s a free fly weekend through Mon.
Also…
Please download it. Thanks.
rotflmao!! true dat :)
Wow the r/pcgaming thread is scary:
“It needs 16GB of RAM + 20GB of virtual memory just to not crash.”
“ 30-60 FPS at 4K in the PU. avg 45 or so, but frame time varience is still very high with lots of hitches.
-1080ti OC’ed
-5ghz 4790k”
On the one hand, it seems to run. And maybe it’s “normal” this far before release to not be optimized? But very top end rigs are reporting it’s not running well.
The whole “optimizations comes at the end” thing is usually not as much a truism as people think. After all, if you have a build that runs like shit, how the fuck do you test it - gameplay and graphics?
Sure, devs usually have an “ugly mode” they can run in, but most devs aren’t relying on that. You’re at least shooting for 20fps in “normal gameplay” throughout, taking a bit every few months to get back to that if you’ve been dipping. The end is where you optimize to get rid of frame spikes, hitches, lower end hardware than your dev machines, etc.
Hmmm so I haven’t touched this in probably 18 months. I load up the PU , press H to get out of bed and this happens…
My character stands up and is stuck on the bed, clipped through the ceiling and unable to get out.
Good first impression.
Maybe I haven’t bought enough ships to be allowed out of bed?
Saving optimization until the end is the worst thing. Yes, there is such a thing as inappropriate pre-optimizing, but this is not that.
Every second of time you save for your content producers piles up cumulatively into a better game.
Every bit of friction you remove from iteration improves polish.
Leaving it til the end just means you wasted an extraordinary amount of hours and potential. That was time somebody could have used to make cool stuff. Plus, the feel of your game is completely nebulous when it runs like butt. Is this fun? Who knows! It’s a slideshow.
This is just fantastic advice.
In my experience, “we’ll optimize it at the end” as well as its cousin “it’s ok that it’s a big hack because it’s a prototype we’ll rewrite later” are excuses made by bad programmers that are hoping somebody else will actually do that work for them. Most often, it results in nobody doing it unless it’s at the last minute because otherwise the game won’t ship.
It can be useful to get a minimal-effort implementation of something just to see if the concept works at all. You need to track that tech debt though and make a priority of fixing it if the concept gets people interested.
Hell, even in the capstone game studio class for our senior game developers, we have them iterate the hell out of ideas to get, eventually, to a vertical slice where, yeah, there’s a fair bit of placeholder or sub-optimal stuff that is necessary to get to that point that fast. But every team that goes forward into the next semester has to have a plan (and then, implement it the next semester!) to pay off that debt as it were. And our experience pretty much supports @tbaldtree’s points, because the teams that take the time to keep their game’s as functional as possible during the class tend to have much smoother production experiences. Like anything else, it’s a lot easier to incrementally and consistently do something than to try to backfill it all at the end.
I did once work on a game where we threw out all the code at the end of the (short, hacky) pre-production prototyping phase and wrote everything from scratch. That was a good project.
Certainly can work, especially if that’s the plan from the beginning and you build in the rewrite time.
Yeah, in this day and age of powerful visual scripting editors, a lot of naive people think you can rapidly prototype and ship a game using just that.
They are wrong. Those conspiracy theory looking script webs are great when it’s a single designer prototyping their feature. After that, it’s time for them to sit down with an engineer and get that shit working properly, preferably optimized and in code.
Most of those zealots are notorious liars. So we just ignore them when we’re not pointing and laughing.