We the experienced devs optimize during ALL phases of development because leaving it for the very last part of development is the very worst thing you could possibly do. Heck, even the compiler & link tools have built-in optimization support which tend to break a LOT more things, thus negating the need to even use them.
Those clowns use the “it’s alpha!” argument as a way to wave off the fact that 7 yrs later, the tech demo runs like dog shit. They’ve also been touting performance improvements since 2015; this despite the fact that with each new release, the performance just gets worse.
Don’t take my word for it; go try it yourself. It’s free.
I couldn’t figure out if the serious conversation started due to what I said, but I was mostly making a joke about the bold part.
Optimization is a tricky subject and I’m happy I don’t have to do a lot of it, but maybe if I had jobs that needed them I would find the mythical land where prototypes don’t go straight to production and start getting new feature requests right away.
It’s very easy for engineers to defer optimizations of tools and processes that they don’t use fifty times a day. It seems fast enough to them!. (and I’m an engineer) But for content developers, that stacks up really fast, and it’s often hard to convince an engineer about how big a difference it’ll make. After all, they’re just saving you a few seconds…
But let’s say it takes 5 minutes to load your build for some reason. And each content developer relaunches the game 60 times a day. If you shave one minute off that, you saved them an hour of idle time every day. Multiply times 100 developers. You just saved 100 man hours per DAY. By optimizing your bloated load times.
It is very easy as an engineer to hand-wave this away and pretend it’s too hard or not worth it, but mostly, it’s boring work nobody wants to do.
Yup. I’m not sure how good a space game Star Citizen is/will be, but it is certainly (at least currently) a great choice for a Pink Floyd music video generator.
I can actually see a segment of gamers really digging the intricacy of some of that interface, but even then it would have to be, well, a lot more functional. Beyond the dreadful performance issues, though, man, the interface is so over designed, everything is so unnecessarily high-poly and complex, and this, um, thing is generally just too much. Which as usual leads right to not enough.
Implementing that many awful design decisions is extremely expensive and time consuming! You don’t think making a trainwreck like this is easy do you? Lesser mortals would have seen their project die before it ever reached this kind of state.
Remember also that they haven’t even built 1% of the proposed game world; and performance is already in the crapper. But that’s not stopping them from continuing to sell JPEG concept ships (latest sale was last week) to gullible backers who totally believe this train-wreck actually stands a chance of getting completed.
There’s a reason why the only videos you ever see being made or shared, are not of people in actual game combat (outside of Arena Commander, which is completely separate like Star Marine fps), but just them hanging around taking pretty pictures.
It’s all just so sad tbh. Such potential - wasted. I can’t even begin to imagine what game I would have made with $192M (!) of other people’s money.
Not much there in terms of ‘game’ and I can’t personally see what part of it could be considered ‘fun.’ That said, the performance on my middling computer was much better than I expected based on videos I’ve seen and while I had a few intermittent stutters, it was pretty solid overall. I also didn’t experience any crashes, so I guess that’s a plus?
That said, the damn thing doesn’t have a freaking ‘Uninstall’ button. Well it does, but it only removes the launcher. You’re left deleting folders and removing registry keys manually.
