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

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Ask A Game Dev! - We Are Your Friend's Uncle

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."

When you're playing a game as a developer, what aspects or features make you go "oh this is programmed/optimized very well"? Like what games past or present are renowned within the industry for being a triumph of very elegant coding?

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 17:07

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 17:44

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."

Gearman posted:

Optimization and performance isn't necessarily a function of elegant coding, though that is a factor. It's typically a team effort among programmers, artists, and level designers. In general it's something that a studio does really well for most of their games rather than one in particular.

For example, Bungie always does a great job and they utilize S/Z transitions really well to make sure you're never seeing new areas load in while making very gorgeous locations. Horizon Zero Dawn is utterly gorgeous and packs tons of detail in to the world while performing really well. Likewise, Red Storm's The Division has an enormous amount of props in the environment and still runs great. However, there is one that stands out for me as being one of the very best.

Even as a tech artist, Quake 3 Arena's engine (idtech 3) still holds that crown for me. I can't comment on the actual programming aspects, but that iteration of the idtech engine is just awe inspiring. It ran smooth like butter even on a toaster. Idtech3 was used for some of the most memorable MP games of that era: Call of Duty, Jedi Knight 1&2, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Is a well-coded engine just something that an experienced programmer can kind of suss out from playing the game? Like you're playing some old-school shooter and think to yourself "they handle floating point arrays really well here" or something similar.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2017 09:45

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."

Of all the stupid criticism game developers get from the community at large, "the devs don't even play their own game!" is by far the weakest and lamest out there. Yes dude, the people who work 60 hours a week trying to compile a million lines of gobbledegook into the modern magic you call a video game do not share the same extremely limited perspective as you, man who spends every waking hour playing his waifu and hating it when other heroes can do stuff better than his waifu. Players can be good at identifying problems but are often very bad at proposing solutions, because they have no sense for the greater balance of interactions that follow when you adjust one seemingly minuscule aspect of the game.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 15:15

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."

Latin Pheonix posted:

Funnily enough, I was going to ask something related to this.

There are people who feel that loot-boxes are becoming quasi-gambling and I was wondering if you or other devs have felt concern that there may be a point where authorities (fairly or unfairly) clamp down on the whole practice? Is there any concern that governments may start, for example, applying gambling laws to some games or bringing in new legislation to target games that sell lootboxes for real money or otherwise enable this quasi-gambling? If this were to happen, would you be worried about this reaching further than its intended targets and impacting the gaming industry as a whole?

I think companies actually have to report lootbox droprates if they distribute to certain countries because of financial regulations.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2017 14:31

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."

DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:

There's also the tendency among some big publishers to give studios a designated game/genre to develop, which probably will create another set of closures when they try to pull a Guerrilla and switch genre/game only to fail spectacularly.

Sony has at least one major incentive to finance single-player prestige projects that don't make a ton of money off of microtransactions, and it's that at the end of the day, they still need to sell Playstations. Horizon, TLOU, Uncharted, etc. aren't going to make FIFA levels of money but they're all must-have titles for the system that attract widespread critical and player acclaim. Big publishers by contrast aren't beholden to any one platform, only what makes the most return on investment to their shareholders, and corporations like EA have seen a homogenization in recent years where all their titles offer the same kind of lootbox-based progression, regardless of genre. EA would prefer it if none of their studios had any unique identity besides whatever could most effectively produce their graphical gambling delivery service, and personnel were able to be freely moved around from project to project.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2017 14:41

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."

mutata posted:

There are people who wonder if graphics and tech have peaked every generation. Maybe we'll get there someday but not anytime in the next 10-15 years. Certainly processing and authoring power won't peak for a good loooong while either.

"Graphics will never get any better." - Me, reading the Quake 3 Arena preview article in Game Informer.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2017 18:51

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."

More like what about Tom Clancy�s Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 19:37

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."

Harrow posted:

What's surprising to me is that Assassin's Creed Origins kinda pulled it off, weirdly enough, and I wouldn't have expected that from an Ubisoft open world game. It's not quite as amazing to explore as Breath of the Wild and the moment-to-moment combat gameplay isn't nearly as good as Horizon Zero Dawn, but it all holds together really well and managed to dodge the usual open world wandering fatigue I usually get.

I'd love to see some sort of analysis about what those three games do that make their worlds fun to explore just for the hell of it. That's less true in Horizon, I think, but in the others, I'll happily just run off in a direction and explore. In Breath of the Wild, I know a major aspect is that the towers are a very active thing--you actively mark things on your map with your Sheikah telescope rather than filling the map with icons automatically, which makes a huge difference is making you feel like an explorer--but I'm sure there are a lot of design subtleties I didn't notice at work there.

In an interview with one of the Guerrilla dudes they mentioned studying Skyrim in the transition to open world and the so-called �forty second rule,� that you�re never more than forty seconds away from some point of interest on the map. Something you notice about the design of good open world games is that they only present the illusion of breadth, when in reality their proportions are quite compact. Horizon is supposed to take place across the whole expanse of Colorado and Utah but you can run from the Sacred Lands to Sunfall in under 10 minutes. Someone once calculated the entire combined landmass of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor in WoW to be about the size of Manhattan. The real world is full of a whole lot of boring empty space, and good open worlds keep you motivated to explore from point to point.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 23:10

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."

AAA is one of those terms that's only confusing if you think about it too hard, meanwhile if someone just showed you a slideshow of big budget vs. indie games anybody would be able to understand it implicitly.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 10:23

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."

Some of those pictures are also literally 25 years old and artists like Samwise have improved considerably in you know, almost three decades of craft. Nobody was expecting high quality work at the time because the demand wasn't there, now original art is probably the single most expensive element of video game production.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 15:01

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."

The art in those 90s Blizzard manuals isn't much different from what you'd see in any monster manual or D&D rulebooks from the same era, the closest analogues to video games from where they took much of their inspiration. If you're asking why the bar is set much higher now that video games are a multibillion dollar industry, then well that kinda answers its own question doesn't it.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 17:28

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 17:44

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

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Ask A Game Dev! - We Are Your Friend's Uncle