Ask A Game Dev! - We Are Your Friend's Uncle

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Cocoa Crispies: Jul 20, 2001; Vehicular Manslaughter!; Pillbug

ninjewtsu posted:

In the case where the game is supposed to send "unique frame, duplicate frame, unique frame, duplicate frame" but instead sends "unique frame, unique frame, duplicate frame, duplicate frame," is it sending

"unique frame 1, unique frame 2, duplicate of frame 1, duplicate of frame 2"
or
"unique frame 1, unique frame 2, duplicate of frame 2, duplicate of frame 2"

The latter; keeping frame 1 hanging around and ready to go both wastes resources and would really hurt your brain to see.

# ? Feb 13, 2018 18:49

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:14

hey girl you up: May 21, 2001; Forum Nice Guy

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Before I built tools, I was a hardware analyst, and benchmarking games was a really big part of what I did.

Measuring FPS is kind of a mess for the reasons above and more. Generally, a report is expressed as single number, but as block of numbers. The reports I generally sent out were generated from a sample of anywhere from 5 - 30 minutes of play, preferably of the 'repeatable' type (replays, etc.). From there, depending on the product, you might get a data point every second, or every frame, or over some other period. It didn't really matter other than that if the period is too long, the 'spikes' in the data get leveled out at the data-gathering layer and that needs to be considered by the stakeholders.

With the data in hand, one could generate a report. The report generally would include actual frame rate over time as a line, several percentile points (5%, 10%, 25%, 90% was pretty normal), mean FPS, standard deviation, and then something to normalize the variance exhibited by the standard deviation when frame rates were higher or lower. A simple version would be 'SampleVariance = Mean / StdDv'.

With all that in hand, the stakeholders have to interpret that all and decide what's important and what the definitions for 'acceptable' and 'problematic' are. Studios sometimes have a 'target' framerate for a product given some PC spec and settings. They'll then say that X% of samples need to be at or above that target (usually 90% - 95%). Others just want a general idea and will address issues when they see them. Consoles are different since a 30 of 60 FPS lock is often considered paramount, so in the event of a dip, you might try to trace back exactly where a dip was witnessed and attempt to fix that particular piece of the game to maintain the lock.

Measuring FPS is an interesting challenge though since it's very difficult to put hard and fast rules on any part of it and a lot of it ends up being subject to interpretation of the data.

Right, I get (almost) all of that. What I'm saying is when a game is reported/advertised as "30 FPS lock", this clearly means something different to consumers ("oh, 30 fps mean a new frame every 1/30th of a second; I shouldn't see any hitching") as opposed to stakeholders ("we will deliver 30 frames every second").

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

The report generally would include actual frame rate over time as a line, several percentile points (5%, 10%, 25%, 90% was pretty normal), mean FPS, standard deviation, and then something to normalize the variance exhibited by the standard deviation when frame rates were higher or lower. A simple version would be 'SampleVariance = Mean / StdDv'.

That said, I have no idea what you're calculating here, but it's not sample variance. It looks closest to a z-score, but it's not (and I imagine you'd want a different test in this situation). But my stats are rusty, so I could be wrong.

# ? Feb 13, 2018 21:23

ninjewtsu: Oct 9, 2012

Cocoa Crispies posted:

The latter; keeping frame 1 hanging around and ready to go both wastes resources and would really hurt your brain to see.

Do bugs ever happen that are a weird mess of previous frames jumbled out of order/being repeated in with current frames

Is that kind of thing immediately headache inducing to witness or is it just annoying

# ? Feb 14, 2018 00:01

Canine Blues Arooo: Jan 7, 2008; when you think about it...i'm the first girl you ever spent the night with; Grimey Drawer

hey girl you up posted:

Right, I get (almost) all of that. What I'm saying is when a game is reported/advertised as "30 FPS lock", this clearly means something different to consumers ("oh, 30 fps mean a new frame every 1/30th of a second; I shouldn't see any hitching") as opposed to stakeholders ("we will deliver 30 frames every second").

That said, I have no idea what you're calculating here, but it's not sample variance. It looks closest to a z-score, but it's not (and I imagine you'd want a different test in this situation). But my stats are rusty, so I could be wrong.

Yeah, that kind of variance is not a capital V "Variance", but a rough idea of how much the frame rate bounces around relative to the mean.

As for what the player sees vs what we'd measure, it depends a lot. In the console space, there is of course the difference between the lock and average. A lot of consoles games do try to lock (or almost lock) the game to a framerate, and are generally successful in doing so. '30 FPS Lock' should, and generally means that there is a frame being delivered every 33.33ms. When people talk about bad Frame Pacing, they often mean that '30 FPS' is being delivered on average, but the individual frame times may be something like:

25ms
41ms
33ms
25ms
41ms
33ms
25ms
41ms
33ms

That's pretty bad, noticeable to even someone who's not necessarily looking for it, and I've honestly only ever seen it on the worst Digital Foundry examples, and have never seen something like that in practice. I assume it's some kind of V-sync solution gone badly? Iunno, someone on the graphics/engine side might be able to actually explain what's happening there. In the console space, I can't ever see that being acceptable (although it definitely shows up every now and then!), and we generally didn't do perf testing with V-Sync on. In cases where that ends up on the final build, I can only imagine that whomever did the testing did a bad job, the developers didn't care, or the developers didn't have time to address it.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 05:02

Hyper Crab Tank: Feb 10, 2014; The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

ninjewtsu posted:

Do bugs ever happen that are a weird mess of previous frames jumbled out of order/being repeated in with current frames

Is that kind of thing immediately headache inducing to witness or is it just annoying

So, first, yes, this can happen. Doing triple buffering wrong, for example, or doing something exotic/wrong with effects like temporal antialiasing or motion blur where you need to hang on to previously rendered frames. But 1) problems like this are extremely noticeable when they happen, 2) they tend to either happen for everything in the game or not at all, and 3) it's a fundamental part of your rendering pipeline so once you've got your implementation right it doesn't show up again. Until you decide to port your engine to a new platform and you're not quite solid on all the details of that platform's rendering API and you mess up again... but it's fairly unthinkable to release with that kind of bug in your system precisely because it's so egregiously awful to look at.

It's not the kind of bug where, oh, this particular scene is handling 50% more geometry than the rest so it starts having this kind of problem. But it could happen if, say, you've got a cool new fullscreen shader effect you want to apply and that shader holds on to old framebuffers for some reason and it's only turned on in one particular scene and maybe the user has a buggy graphics driver and the game kind of shits itself and starts showing unprocessed old frames instead of new ones.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 12:14

Cocoa Crispies: Jul 20, 2001; Vehicular Manslaughter!; Pillbug

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Yeah, that kind of variance is not a capital V "Variance", but a rough idea of how much the frame rate bounces around relative to the mean.

As for what the player sees vs what we'd measure, it depends a lot. In the console space, there is of course the difference between the lock and average. A lot of consoles games do try to lock (or almost lock) the game to a framerate, and are generally successful in doing so. '30 FPS Lock' should, and generally means that there is a frame being delivered every 33.33ms. When people talk about bad Frame Pacing, they often mean that '30 FPS' is being delivered on average, but the individual frame times may be something like:

25ms
41ms
33ms
25ms
41ms
33ms
25ms
41ms
33ms

That's pretty bad, noticeable to even someone who's not necessarily looking for it, and I've honestly only ever seen it on the worst Digital Foundry examples, and have never seen something like that in practice. I assume it's some kind of V-sync solution gone badly? Iunno, someone on the graphics/engine side might be able to actually explain what's happening there. In the console space, I can't ever see that being acceptable (although it definitely shows up every now and then!), and we generally didn't do perf testing with V-Sync on. In cases where that ends up on the final build, I can only imagine that whomever did the testing did a bad job, the developers didn't care, or the developers didn't have time to address it.

Would that be the game failing to settle on a rendering budget that nails 33ms?

For example, Splatoon 2 adjusts the final resolution to target 60 fps, but since (I believe?) the only way to know for sure how long drawing a complex frame will take is to time it, they use some kind of heuristic to guess, and tune it so that if it guesses wrong it's just going to draw something cheaper instead of something that misses the schedule.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 12:25

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Many console games will adopt a dynamic rendering solution for maintaining a consistent framerate when the system is under load, where the image is then upscaled into 1080p or whatever the display�s native resolution is set to. As far as I know this is less commonly used on PC since framerates tend to be higher and there are plentiful adaptive sync options.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 14:21

Wallet: Jun 19, 2006

exquisite tea posted:

Many console games will adopt a dynamic rendering solution for maintaining a consistent framerate when the system is under load, where the image is then upscaled into 1080p or whatever the display�s native resolution is set to. As far as I know this is less commonly used on PC since framerates tend to be higher and there are plentiful adaptive sync options.

I see downsampling as an option much more often in PC games than dynamic upscaling. The only PC game I can think of that does it is Path of Exile.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 16:25

ninjewtsu: Oct 9, 2012

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

So, first, yes, this can happen. Doing triple buffering wrong, for example, or doing something exotic/wrong with effects like temporal antialiasing or motion blur where you need to hang on to previously rendered frames. But 1) problems like this are extremely noticeable when they happen, 2) they tend to either happen for everything in the game or not at all, and 3) it's a fundamental part of your rendering pipeline so once you've got your implementation right it doesn't show up again. Until you decide to port your engine to a new platform and you're not quite solid on all the details of that platform's rendering API and you mess up again... but it's fairly unthinkable to release with that kind of bug in your system precisely because it's so egregiously awful to look at.

It's not the kind of bug where, oh, this particular scene is handling 50% more geometry than the rest so it starts having this kind of problem. But it could happen if, say, you've got a cool new fullscreen shader effect you want to apply and that shader holds on to old framebuffers for some reason and it's only turned on in one particular scene and maybe the user has a buggy graphics driver and the game kind of shits itself and starts showing unprocessed old frames instead of new ones.

This is some pretty cool information, thanks!

I'm curious to see it in action, I'm wondering if it's just obviously a mess or if it's like, bad framerates in VR and is actively, physically painful to see

# ? Feb 14, 2018 21:30

Hyper Crab Tank: Feb 10, 2014; The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

I mean, it depends on how exactly you hosed it up. It's not a common bug to see because, well, it requires screwing up in a way that's very obvious and usually easily fixed. It's not some corner case that happens when physics intersects in just the right way or anything like that. But it'd probably just look really jittery, like objects on screen were rapidly moving back and forth slightly every other frame. Have you ever had your computer bluescreen in the middle of playing a game and the screen just jitters back and forth between two frames? Imagine that except the game is still running.

# ? Feb 14, 2018 21:51

Sylink: Apr 17, 2004

Are there any coding exercise sites similar to leetcode/codewars specifically towards game dev?

# ? Feb 16, 2018 05:16

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Sylink posted:

Are there any coding exercise sites similar to leetcode/codewars specifically towards game dev?

http://www.onegameamonth.com ?

# ? Feb 16, 2018 05:38

WeedlordGoku69: Feb 12, 2015; by Cyrano4747

Wallet posted:

I see downsampling as an option much more often in PC games than dynamic upscaling. The only PC game I can think of that does it is Path of Exile.

Shadow of Mordor and GTA5 let you do it, but not dynamically- you can just scale the rendering resolution down and keep a native-res window (so the HUD doesn't look janky). I think Shadow of War upgraded SoM's implementation to be dynamic.

# ? Feb 21, 2018 22:30

TearsOfPirates: Jun 11, 2016; Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes! - Idiot of idiots, to trust what is written!

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

That brings up some really interesting memories.

I hoped to never see that clip again and I would've never expect it to be here out of all things.

Onto the question: What are the general UI design rules that make or break it? Also sans serif or serif?

# ? Mar 2, 2018 07:03

GeeCee: Dec 16, 2004; "You're going to be...amazing."

TearsOfPirates posted:

Onto the question: What are the general UI design rules that make or break it? Also sans serif or serif?

Comic sans and photoshop layer styles to emboss your buttons and give them top left drop shadows.

and for the bad rules...

# ? Mar 2, 2018 21:49

Chernabog: Apr 16, 2007

I usually prefer sans-serif unless there is a specific reason for a serif font.

# ? Mar 2, 2018 22:53

happyhippy: Feb 21, 2005; Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup; Pillbug

Why do some games allow a smooth Alt+Tab so you can access whatever, but others throw a loving fit and won't load up or go fullscreen again?

# ? Mar 4, 2018 00:46

Slayerjerman: Nov 27, 2005; by sebmojo

happyhippy posted:

Why do some games allow a smooth Alt+Tab so you can access whatever, but others throw a loving fit and won't load up or go fullscreen again?

To try and prevent 3rd party macros or dual-boxing usually. Depends on the game. It's also a minor way to stop other cheats and exploits with 3rd party programs hooking into GUIs.

# ? Mar 4, 2018 04:03

Tricky Ed: Aug 18, 2010; It is important to avoid confusion. This is the one that's okay to lick.

happyhippy posted:

Why do some games allow a smooth Alt+Tab so you can access whatever, but others throw a loving fit and won't load up or go fullscreen again?

Also sometimes it's just because handling the interaction between an application and the OS is kind of tricky, and if you don't set up your game correctly from the beginning it's nigh impossible to add later. In the old days you'd lose some ungodly amount of 3D performance in Windows if you didn't lock your application to fullscreen, but that's not a problem with more recent DirectX releases.

# ? Mar 4, 2018 04:19

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Tricky Ed posted:

Also sometimes it's just because handling the interaction between an application and the OS is kind of tricky, and if you don't set up your game correctly from the beginning it's nigh impossible to add later. In the old days you'd lose some ungodly amount of 3D performance in Windows if you didn't lock your application to fullscreen, but that's not a problem with more recent DirectX releases.

Releasing / reaquiring Graphical contexts used to have a poo poo ton of edge cases. Like a lot of engines wouldn't keep track of what was sent to the GPU already and you may need to stream things in from disk. I've been in the mobile world for too long to know if that's still true.

# ? Mar 4, 2018 15:37

ninjewtsu: Oct 9, 2012

Why did ye olde games require an installation if they were a computer game, but console games on the game cube or playstation would just play right from the disk, no installation required

# ? Mar 5, 2018 00:16

SupSuper: Apr 8, 2009; At the Heart of the city is an Alien horror, so vile and so powerful that not even death can claim it.

ninjewtsu posted:

Why did ye olde games require an installation if they were a computer game, but console games on the game cube or playstation would just play right from the disk, no installation required

Why suffer through cheap CD-ROM load speeds when you've got a perfectly good hard disk right there?

# ? Mar 5, 2018 02:30

Slayerjerman: Nov 27, 2005; by sebmojo

ninjewtsu posted:

Why did ye olde games require an installation if they were a computer game, but console games on the game cube or playstation would just play right from the disk, no installation required

Technically "installing" just meant copying the files to a faster access media as pointed out above. But also to ensure the OS had the proper SDKs and code language to run the program (DX, .Net, C++, Java etc).On consoles, these things are handled for you due to the console dev SDKs covering these needs and specific OS, firmware and hardware.

Funny story - back when Diablo1 first came out, I had a 4x cdrom, whereas my friend had a 2x cdrom, otherwise our PC's were identical. I would be able to entirely load a dungeon and run half-way through it before he even finished loading the same data. Modern games basically cease that from happening by waiting for all the other players to finish loading and "catch up" so they can sync.

Now days, with SSDs and such, the only thing faster (debatable) is installing into ram-disks, where as previously CD-ROM to HDD was how you reduced load times. Sadly with games being like 30-50gb ram drives aren't that feasible for most. I still love trying older/smaller games on a RAMDISK for the lol's. I always thought it funny when they finally let you "install" games onto the consoles but still required the physical disc as the literal cd-key.

Slayerjerman fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Mar 5, 2018

# ? Mar 5, 2018 08:57

Hyper Crab Tank: Feb 10, 2014; The 16-bit retro-future of crustacean-based transportation

Also remember that games need somewhere to store savegames, configuration files (remember how you always had to tell the setup program you had a Sound Blaster 16 compatible sound card at 220h?), etc. On gaming consoles, you have a dedicated mechanism/save cards for that, but on ye olde PCs, you needed to know where on the user's harddrive you could store that stuff. A lot of games supported a "Minimal" install mode that needed the CD to load all the big data files from, but kept a directory somewhere for savegames and sundries. Usually you could also opt for a "Full" installation that improved load times by placing it all on your disk, as already explained.

Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Mar 5, 2018

# ? Mar 5, 2018 20:19

mbt: Aug 13, 2012

how is work usually divided in teams?

for systems programming do X people focus on the inventory system for 2 years and another Y people on the combat (etc) or is it more 'everyone works on whatever it is we need to get done'? I'm sure this varies depending on the company but I have no idea.

for art I would assume one person modelling buildings exclusively would get pretty boring, but I'm not sure on that either.

# ? Mar 6, 2018 00:12

Chernabog: Apr 16, 2007

In art, if you are at a AAA company then they do have the "building guys" and the "human guys" and the animators and the lighting people and so on. In small teams you get people doing a bunch of different things.

# ? Mar 6, 2018 00:24

Slayerjerman: Nov 27, 2005; by sebmojo

Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:

how is work usually divided in teams?

for systems programming do X people focus on the inventory system for 2 years and another Y people on the combat (etc) or is it more 'everyone works on whatever it is we need to get done'? I'm sure this varies depending on the company but I have no idea.

for art I would assume one person modelling buildings exclusively would get pretty boring, but I'm not sure on that either.

Usually the big features are broken down into smaller tasks and those small tasks are handed out to the staff best suited to accomplish them. In many cases a single task will fall across the desk of nearly every department. For example, a UI task might originate from a project manager, for simplicity lets say we have to build an inventory UI. That task then floats down to the designer(s) to begin documentation and wireframing what this UI needs to do/have. The task is then floated over to the art department (or specific artist) to skin and make visual assets. It's then handed off to the programming department to code/implement (and usually back to the designers/artists for tweaks, fixes or revisions and VFX/animation). Finally the task flows down to QA to test the final result and debug it further since the programmer's time is more valuable and they needed to move onto something else.

So it's essential that you understand how tasking flows through the entire team and who all needs to be involved. Its rarely ever just one person and can wildly vary. More than that, tasks are not one-directional, its very common for a task to bounce between departments or individuals working on it until it's "done" and ready for QA.

In the case of art assets - it can get really messy and most teams have dedicated "2d" guys, "3d" guys, "animators" and "vfx/effects" guys that are completely separated from the cutscene guys and/or the level art guys. Often the direct-game asset artists (characters, props, environments) are in-house to work along side the designers and coders, where as the "CGI/cutscene" teams are usually offsite doing their own thing.

Slayerjerman fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Mar 6, 2018

# ? Mar 6, 2018 02:06

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

SupSuper posted:

Why suffer through cheap CD-ROM load speeds when you've got a perfectly good hard disk right there?

Well, there have also been significant stretches of time when optical storage was a significant fraction of what hard disks could store, and a lot of games made during that period were heavily seek-optimized, which eliminates the main drawback of optical. I do think that it's kind of unusual that running off of the disc with a minimal install hasn't really even been an option since before DVD-ROMs were out, especially given the number of games that required the disc to be in the drive for copy protection anyway.

That said, a lot of early CD-ROM games did run off of the disc.

# ? Mar 6, 2018 03:12

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

I think the tipping point for that was around 2001-2002 when RPGs outgrew a single CD with heavy compression and DVD-ROM hadn't penetrated the market yet.

E: either UT2004 or o.g. WoW are the first titles I remember seeing with a boxed DVD option

shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Mar 6, 2018

# ? Mar 6, 2018 05:44

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

shame on an IGA posted:

I think the tipping point for that was around 2001-2002 when RPGs outgrew a single CD with heavy compression and DVD-ROM hadn't penetrated the market yet.

E: either UT2004 or o.g. WoW are the first titles I remember seeing with a boxed DVD option

Baldurs gate was 4 cds in 1998...

# ? Mar 6, 2018 07:15

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

shame on an IGA posted:

I think the tipping point for that was around 2001-2002 when RPGs outgrew a single CD with heavy compression and DVD-ROM hadn't penetrated the market yet.

Well, I'll give some historical points from things like archived Best Buy flyers because there were several things changing over at different points in time.

A typical new computer sold in 1996 had a hard drive capacity of 1.6-2GB. In 1997, Riven was released on 5 CDs, so at that point, there were still some games that were too large to even install.

It depended a bit on the type of game though. The two main things that caused a game to use large amounts of CD space were using red book audio (a.k.a. uncompressed CD tracks) for music, and FMVs. Games that didn't do either of those were typically much smaller and could be installed to disk, even if they were on CD.

In 2001, a "gaming PC" had a hard drive capacity of about 80GB, so at that point, there was more than enough capacity for installs to disk to be the norm.

DVD-ROMs weren't available until 2000 or so and it took a while for them to penetrate the PC market. There are a few reasons for that, but it was partly cheapskatery and partly because it was often a choice between a DVD-ROM or a CD-RW drive. The iPod didn't come out until 2001, 99% of people listened to music off of CDs, MP3 piracy was the hottest poo poo in town, and CDs were by far the easiest way to move large amounts of data between PCs, so CD-RWs were often the more attractive option. Most PC games were shipping on CD in the mid-2000's even as the Xbox 360 and PS3 were launching, although that was about the time that games were starting to change over to shipping on both formats or occasionally DVD only.

That problem also coincided not so much with RPGs but with games shifting away from pre-rendered and FMV-heavy content towards game designs that were much harder to split up across discs. There's a reason that there are a lot of multi-CD games but not very many multi-DVD games.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 6, 2018

# ? Mar 6, 2018 10:36

WeedlordGoku69: Feb 12, 2015; by Cyrano4747

OneEightHundred posted:

There's a reason that there are a lot of multi-CD games but not very many multi-DVD games.

There were a few on the 360, though I don't think any PC ones (because digital distro became the norm for PC games by the time games started outgrowing DVDs regularly).

e: actually, apparently nearly every AAA game from a certain point (along with nearly every JRPG on the system) had multiple discs. the implementation of this varies and is apparently a headache for people with modded consoles trying to either install backups or pirate games; some games used an install disc that you'd use once and never touch again unless you got a new console or deleted the install (think what MGS4 does while Snake's smoking a cig), some games had the game content split up across multiple "play" discs, and then there were some real loving oddballs like Wolfenstein: The New Order that did both.

WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Mar 8, 2018

# ? Mar 7, 2018 23:58

happyhippy: Feb 21, 2005; Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup; Pillbug

Back in 1999 I was at uni and my thesis was comparing some data compression methods for images.
I compared a few but the main new ones at the time was Fractal Image Compression.
But has glaring problems and did not get wide spread use.

My point of mentioning this is this. With Fractal, compressing an image could take several hours, ONE IMAGE, on a top of the line 300Mhz machine back then. This was the flaw.
But you could get insanely really high compression rates. Better than jpeg at the time in some situations.
But decompressing was super fast. So you only needed to wait the time compressing it once, and that was the only major overhead. Well worth it when space itself was limited.
Microsoft Encarta used this type of compression for the fuckton of videos it had on its CDs back in the day.

happyhippy fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Mar 9, 2018

# ? Mar 9, 2018 18:11

Captain Foo: May 11, 2004; we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

happyhippy posted:

Back in 1999 I was at uni and my thesis was comparing some data compression methods for images.
I compared a few but the main new ones at the time was Fractal Image Compression.
But has glaring problems and did not get wide spread use.

My point of mentioning this is this. With Fractal, compressing an image could take several hours, ONE IMAGE, on a top of the line 300Mhz machine back then. This was the flaw.
But you could get insanely really high compression rates. Better than jpeg at the time in some situations.
But decompressing was super fast. So you only needed to wait the time compressing it once, and that was the only major overhead. Well worth it when space itself was limited.
Microsoft Encarta used this type of compression for the fuckton of videos it had on its CDs back in the day.

That's very cool!

# ? Mar 11, 2018 22:47

Yak Shaves Dot Com: Jan 5, 2009

Yak Shaves Dot Com fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 4, 2018

# ? Mar 20, 2018 02:15

AP: Jul 12, 2004; One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them; Grimey Drawer

# ? Apr 10, 2018 20:15

GeeCee: Dec 16, 2004; "You're going to be...amazing."

Genuine question. What is your commute like and what do you do on lunchbreaks?

For myself, I can walk the whole eight minutes down the road into work no big deal as I live city centre, but how far out are you all commuting? Does this mean you have to stay in a more expensive city hub or is living further out in the burbs an option for you?

As for lunches, we don't have any on-site catering and I'm lazy so more often than not I'm off getting lunch in the centre of dundee, coffee shop, baked potato, Boots sandwich, I could probably save a lot of money packing my lunches. But some of y'all work in these huge office campuses and often have on-site catering and food courts and stuff.

Tell me about the not-work related aspects of your job.

# ? Apr 22, 2018 11:52

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

GC_ChrisReeves posted:

Genuine question. What is your commute like and what do you do on lunchbreaks?

For myself, I can walk the whole eight minutes down the road into work no big deal as I live city centre, but how far out are you all commuting? Does this mean you have to stay in a more expensive city hub or is living further out in the burbs an option for you?

As for lunches, we don't have any on-site catering and I'm lazy so more often than not I'm off getting lunch in the centre of dundee, coffee shop, baked potato, Boots sandwich, I could probably save a lot of money packing my lunches. But some of y'all work in these huge office campuses and often have on-site catering and food courts and stuff.

Tell me about the not-work related aspects of your job.

30 Minute commute. Office is in the burbs, so I�m considering reducing my rent and commute by moving closer.

There�s a cafe in our building, but it�s not great. Have to drive for something better.

# ? Apr 22, 2018 13:09

floofyscorp: Feb 12, 2007

My commute takes a little over an hour. Five minute walk, sit on the train for an hour, five minute walk to the office at the other end. I live right at the end of the train line so I always get a seat in the morning, which is not so bad. Nice countryside to look at(especially this time of year!) and I get a lot of reading done. I miss being able to cycle to work though, and the price of the annual train ticket(�4500 this year!!) is a gut-punch every time. Still works out cheaper than living closer to, though! Especially because my husband just walks to work here.

At lunchtime I usually eat a sandwich at my desk(so lazy) or pop outside because my office is right in the middle of Guildford center, buy a burrito or a pasta salad, then... come back and eat it at my desk. In nice weather I go down by the riverside, which is very pretty and the further you go aong the towpath from the city centre the quieter and lovelier it is. On Fridays we often go to a local pub for lunch, and there's no lack of those to choose from(although most of them are ridiculously expensive so I always push for the one that does sandwich+chips for just over a fiver).

# ? Apr 22, 2018 13:36

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:14

Falcorum: Oct 21, 2010

GC_ChrisReeves posted:

Genuine question. What is your commute like and what do you do on lunchbreaks?

For myself, I can walk the whole eight minutes down the road into work no big deal as I live city centre, but how far out are you all commuting? Does this mean you have to stay in a more expensive city hub or is living further out in the burbs an option for you?

As for lunches, we don't have any on-site catering and I'm lazy so more often than not I'm off getting lunch in the centre of dundee, coffee shop, baked potato, Boots sandwich, I could probably save a lot of money packing my lunches. But some of y'all work in these huge office campuses and often have on-site catering and food courts and stuff.

Tell me about the not-work related aspects of your job.

30 minute walk here, only real faster alternative would be cycling (or finding a place that's closer but the only options so far have been of lower quality and higher rent) but I never felt the need for it.

As for lunch breaks, the building we recently moved to has a cafeteria area which is quite expensive and is in general worse than the food options we had previously, there's also nothing nearby of any significance, so I mostly spend my lunchbreaks wishing they were optional so I could leave an hour earlier instead of faffing about.

# ? Apr 22, 2018 17:29

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