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Big K of Justice posted:One side effect of WFH is finding out the house i"m renting has insufficient wiring for amperage and lazy contractors piggybacked too many rooms on one circuit. A bunch of workstations, dev kit + TV's and monitors in one room overwhelm a residential 15Amp circuit pretty drat quick. Interesting. I don’t work on the game dev side of the industry myself so I know very little about dev kits. I assumed they were top secret, stay in a faraday cage in a room type deals, and certainly not something you would be able to take home
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Jun 28, 2020 06:39
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I think things have changed a lot over time but it did used to be kind of like that. I suspect you still get bosses that are incredibly protective of kit. One of the earliest dev jobs I had (a bit over 15 years ago) we had to unhook all the PS2 kits and put them in a fireproof safe whenever we locked up the office. The boss always said it was in the Sony contract but that was horseshit because at the previous job we just left the kits on people's desks. Nintendo used to get antsy if you signed up as a dev house from an address that was not an actual office address, but I don't imagine them being so hung up on that since the surge of indie titles on their last few consoles. The main thing I'm noticing with WFH is the enormous increase in my electricity bill, and lack of aircon.
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Jun 28, 2020 14:13
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Devkits have lots of stipulations in their contracts, but it's worse for unreleased consoles, and I think it was worse in the past. The first devs to get the PS3 devkits had a ton of weird poo poo they had to do for security. MagicLeap had a bunch of rules too like you had to keep it in a locked room with these types of locks and that style of security cameras and crap.
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Jun 28, 2020 14:24
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They also cost between $5,000-$10,000 each depending on which one it is, and most standard business insurance will not cover an employee lugging that much kit to and fro. If you crash your car on the way to work and break one, that's a hefty bill to replace that your insurance will not help with. That alone is usually enough to make most managers rather twitchy. Besides, with decent broadband these days you can remote dev PS4/xbox devkits from home while they stay in the office as long as there's someone there to occasionally reboot something when it locks up good.
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Jul 1, 2020 18:05
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I'll say this COVID rendered a bunch of old practices kinda moot. I'm looking forward to WFH forever at this point, I'll just have to make sure I have a dedicated room and sufficient internet. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 05:08
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Big K of Justice posted:I'll say this COVID rendered a bunch of old practices kinda moot. I'm looking forward to WFH forever at this point, I'll just have to make sure I have a dedicated room and sufficient internet. This. Let me also tell you what a pain in the rear end it is getting VPN setup for a console devkit at home.
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Jul 3, 2020 07:07
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Big K of Justice posted:I'll say this COVID rendered a bunch of old practices kinda moot. I'm looking forward to WFH forever at this point, I'll just have to make sure I have a dedicated room and sufficient internet. I already have a coworker railing against WFH with the argument that it's not possible to police your staff to a satisfactory amount. I had a coworker with similar opinions at my last job. Somehow both these people are just regular non-management workers whose work is 0% affected by the coworkers whose productivity they are worried about.
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Jul 3, 2020 10:17
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What is hiring looking like right now? I just graduated and normally I would have felt pretty good about my odds of getting a job but in the year of our lord 2020 I have no clue
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Jul 3, 2020 10:31
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Big K of Justice posted:I'll say this COVID rendered a bunch of old practices kinda moot. I'm looking forward to WFH forever at this point, I'll just have to make sure I have a dedicated room and sufficient internet. Yep, one of my guys was like, "BTW: I'll be WFH 3000 miles in November." and my only reply was, "Ok. In theory we're back in the office then but ok." RazzleDazzleHour posted:What is hiring looking like right now? I just graduated and normally I would have felt pretty good about my odds of getting a job but in the year of our lord 2020 I have no clue Hiring like mad, but mid/sr/principal/lead only atm I'm afraid.
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Jul 3, 2020 16:26
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:What is hiring looking like right now? I just graduated and normally I would have felt pretty good about my odds of getting a job but in the year of our lord 2020 I have no clue We put on a freeze at the start until we had more clarity, but listings are back up. My department brought in 4 new hires over the wfh time and that's probably more than most because we had those interviews rolling before poo poo went bad. I need 1-3 more headcount on my team specifically over the next few years but I probably won't have anyone until early next year at this rate.
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Jul 3, 2020 16:37
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Assuming you are american, do not apply in Japan, currently, the border lockout is no joke and there are people in 6+ month holding patterns due to it.
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Jul 3, 2020 17:24
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Hmm. Unfortunate! But also yeah I wasn't gonna apply internationally, I've had a job as an essential worker this whole time so I'm gonna stay in my designated containment country. I asked like, a full year ago what a popular entry-level job opening was and so I'd been looking into Environment Artist jobs and at the time I noticed there were an absolute ton. but now the numbers are way thinner
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Jul 4, 2020 03:37
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What kind of base OS/kernel are the consoles running? Xbox is probably based on windows kernel right? But what about PS? Switch would be based on linux right?
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Jul 10, 2020 19:10
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Shaocaholica posted:What kind of base OS/kernel are the consoles running? Xbox is probably based on windows kernel right? But what about PS? Switch would be based on linux right? Xbox One runs a modified Windows 10 inside Hyper-V Playstation 4 and Switch run derivatives of FreeBSD They'll never touch Linux due to its license
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Jul 10, 2020 20:23
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repiv posted:Xbox One runs a modified Windows 10 inside Hyper-V So are Xbox games running in a VM or bare metal? Or is the Win10 component just the dashboard stuff? Also I guess there are FreeBSD console versions of graphics drivers for AMD at least. I wonder how much of that code is shared with the linux driver.
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Jul 10, 2020 20:45
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My understanding is that everything runs inside Hyper-V, and they juggle two different VMs for different purposes. There's a VM running fairly stock Windows 10 that handles the dashboard, UWP apps, etc, and a second VM for games that still runs a Windows kernel but is stripped down to the absolute bare minimum with no userland as we know it. I don't know about the PS4 but the Switch probably uses Nvidia's existing driver, it's known to support OpenGL and Vulkan in addition to their custom API and there's no way they'd waste their time rolling a brand new OpenGL driver repiv fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 21:01
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VM makes sense if you want your games to gracefully crash. And for backwards compatibility but I don't know how much MS has used it for backwards compatibility. Does the switch GPU share any arch similarities with the top end Nvidia PC GPUs tho?
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Jul 10, 2020 21:04
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Also makes sense if you want to prevent people using game bugs to hack the console
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Jul 10, 2020 21:11
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Shaocaholica posted:Does the switch GPU share any arch similarities with the top end Nvidia PC GPUs tho? The Switch GPU is plain old Maxwell AFAIK, just with a few mobile-centric extensions like ASTC support. The Switch uses unmodified Tegra X1 silicon so that's all public information. taqueso posted:Also makes sense if you want to prevent people using game bugs to hack the console yep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
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Jul 10, 2020 21:13
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Shaocaholica posted:Does the switch GPU share any arch similarities with the top end Nvidia PC GPUs tho?
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Jul 10, 2020 21:15
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repiv posted:The Switch GPU is plain old Maxwell AFAIK, just with a few mobile-centric extensions like ASTC support. The Switch uses unmodified Tegra X1 silicon so that's all public information. Whoa I had not seen that video before. Thanks E: I’m curious about the Xbox’s game VM not having a real userland, but maybe that’s covered in the video dads friend steve fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jul 10, 2020 |
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Jul 10, 2020 21:29
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The userland question really depends on whether you're looking for a specific or generic answer. The specific answer is really going to be proprietary and involve things like "C:\Windows\ exists but only includes the following files", "The following svchost.exe processes will be running" and other stuff which it doesn't really matter if everyone knows but NDAs gotta NDA. In the general sense running no userspace in a VM is just stripping out all the stuff that you're not going to use. So in POSIX terms, the first process run when the system boots is PID 1 and it's what determines what services get started and how, starting and stopping them in order. This is what System V init, Berkeley init, Systemd, Upstart and all those other tools do. But the important thing is that it's really just a process. You can run anything as that process, you just don't have a crontab, anything listening for network connections, anything listening for a terminal connection and all those other things. So Docker does exactly this. When you start a container, it just starts the ENTRYPOINT as PID 1 and that's that. You can base it off a full Linux distro so that you can do normal Linuxy things in the container, use a very limited setup like Alpine Linux or just slap your binary and any files it requires in there. I imagine that Microsoft sticks in the latest versions of any DLLs that it provides but everything else is up to the game developer.
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Jul 11, 2020 17:40
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Wow thanks for all that. My understanding of how OSes really work is pretty superficial. I was more curious if “no real userland” also implied everything in that VM runs as root / in ring 0 / whatever. I suppose if you can trust the VM to properly sandbox you, maybe? With a possible side effect being ever so slightly better performance since you don’t need to switch between user mode and kernel mode? But I sure as hell don’t trust Docker to be a perfect sandbox, and game consoles need much more integrity protection that the stuff I work on
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Jul 11, 2020 18:38
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Yeah "no userland as we know it" was just my interpretation of how MS has described it, there's not really any hard information on what it looks like outside of NDAs. I'm guessing the game runs as the Windows equivalent of PID 1 but until someone jailbreaks the XB1 we'll never get any real specifics on the Game VM.
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Jul 11, 2020 18:55
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Makes sense.
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Jul 11, 2020 18:58
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I could imagine the XB1 games essentially packing their own purpose-built OS, with just the features they need. That would be similar to how Microsoft's development kits kits for Windows Embedded (and earlier Windows CE) integrators work. You pick and choose the components you want to add onto the barebones kernel, just the parts you want for your specific purpose. That model also wouldn't be much different from most classic (1980's) personal computer architectures, where you have a base system in ROM and then boot into whatever: C64 Kernal (boots from cartridge, or into Basic and load a program there), IBM PC BIOS (boots from a disk or an option ROM), Macintosh ROM (boots system software from disk).
nielsm fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jul 11, 2020 |
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Jul 11, 2020 22:38
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The Sega Dreamcast was an overrated console with no good games that deserved to fail and had no impact on the gaming world of today.
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Jul 19, 2020 23:41
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The Mighty Moltres posted:The Sega Dreamcast was an overrated console with no good games that deserved to fail and had no impact on the gaming world of today. Not true - it serves as a very real reminder of what happens if your console security is bad and arguably was the onus for what ended up being a pretty substantial security effort starting on the 7th Generation of game consoles. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 23:44
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The Mighty Moltres posted:The Sega Dreamcast was an overrated console with no good games that deserved to fail and had no impact on the gaming world of today. First console with hardware normal mapping support.  (And I am pretty sure zero real world examples of it being used outside of tech demos lol)
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Jul 20, 2020 00:03
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Yeah, normal mapping was kinda pointless in games until we got better lighting models that'd come a couple years later with real time programmable shaders, everything would look plastic, plus game makers didn't really figure out what to do with normal maps until the idea of baking higher poly models came about, plus the DC's normal mapping implementation was problematic (slow and only usable on flat planes).
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Jul 20, 2020 00:27
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And now I'm down a rabbit hole about how Shrek for Xbox was the first game with deferred shading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ijgJNFAD4&t=466s Apparently this was made by a team later known as ... DICE?  They seem to disavow it though.
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Jul 20, 2020 05:05
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Ranzear posted:And now I'm down a rabbit hole about how Shrek for Xbox was the first game with deferred shading. Programmer on that is now chief architect at Oculus.
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Jul 20, 2020 23:30
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Dewgy posted:First console with hardware normal mapping support. First (and only) console with that lovely Toshiba(?) CPU that was the actual worst thing to optimise for, coming up against the first generation of consoles with proper HW transform. Yeah, it was an outdated crock of poo poo before the first production model even landed in a consumers hands. OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 08:36
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Hitachi SH4, Saturn and 32X used SH2s so there was at least some precedent.
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Jul 21, 2020 10:51
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recruiter spam:quote:My name is SoAndSo, a Tech Recruiter with SuchAndSuch. Im connecting you for a potential job opportunity with one of our client at Redmond, WA (On-site when COVID subsides) area for a Sr. Game Producer to join their team on an extendable contract of 12+ Months. Is "Producer" just an extremely overloaded term in gamedev - because this looks like a "Program Manager" role in Microsoft terminology aka "Project Manager" or "Jira Janitor" - if it's critical team leading work, why would they be contracting this poo poo out instead of leaving it to a core team? repiv posted:Yeah "no userland as we know it" Coffee Jones fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 18:28
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Yes, “Producer” in game development is basically just “Project Manager” in software dev. It’s Jira wrangling, coordinating team schedules, facilitating work, and so on. It has nothing to do with producers in other parts of the entertainment industry. You’d be surprised to learn just how many crucial roles are contracted out at big studios. Contracts allow them to staff up temporarily so they can launch a game and then let those people go when the game’s shipped without having to go through the trouble and expense of laying people off. A good producer is essential to ship a game, but once you’re done shipping the game and you’re letting go of all the contractors they were managing, why keep them around?
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Jul 22, 2020 19:08
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Contracting out a Producer seems like an extremely questionable decision. The whole point of a Producer is to have a someone who has a high level view of what's happening as well as context - both current and historical - to the decisions being made. It seems very strange that'd a studio would be interested in the idea of a 'temporary producer', especially at the Senior level.
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Jul 22, 2020 19:12
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Contracted program management explains so much about the colossal failures of planning/resource management I've noticed in some AAA games.
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Jul 22, 2020 20:13
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Contracting an associate producer is probably fine for some subset of the project, though "Sr" seems a little questionable. Producers in film are different? I thought they were actually pretty similar? ("Executive" Producers notwithstanding)
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Jul 23, 2020 06:12
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Discendo Vox posted:Contracted program management explains so much about the colossal failures of planning/resource management I've noticed in some AAA games. Or the ND route of no producers at all
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Jul 23, 2020 15:10
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