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

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.

I'm not sure what's the right term for this, but why does the games industry seem to be so... fanatic?

For example, I'm a software dev, I work on all kinds of products I wouldn't use myself, I don't have any investment in them. I'm invested in my job and that's what I like. I doubt all the consumers and reviewers of various products have any deep attachments to them as well.
But in games everyone seems to be required to "drink the koolaid". To work in games you have to love games, to write about games you have to breathe games. Everyone is a gamer, whether they're developer, press, or customer, and that seems to encourage all kinds of bias and inner circles and what not.

Is it all just an act for marketing, a natural result of working on creative media, or something else?

SupSuper fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Sep 19, 2017

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 18:28

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 20:56

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.

cool new Metroid game posted:

why is the my documents folder still used by a poo poo ton of games to dump saves and config files? there's been a centralised place for this poo poo for ages now at %userprofile%\saved games\ yet it's rarely used. I have a gently caress ton of games installed and only 10 of them use that saved games folder, the rest are just making GBS threads up my documents. (or hidden away in %appdata%, gently caress that too)

Because people still use XP.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2017 18:37

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.

How do game devs feel about modding? It's always felt like this huge grey area that the game industry promotes with one hand and slaps with the other.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2017 11:00

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.

Mother posted:

Really? Why? I don't think I know a dev in the business who doesn't love modding.

Aside from it just being awesome that anyone loves what you worked on enough to put time into building something for it, modding has, no question, been resposible for the success / legs of a number of big games.

What do you see as the "slap"?

As has been mentioned, there have been lots of situations of companies taking it badly to their games being modified, such as bans or C&D even for harmless mods (eg. GTA5, Dark Souls 2, etc), usually under the guise that it promotes cheating or violates EULAs or something.

If that's purely a publisher thing though, then I'll ask something more dev-oriented: do you worry that mods can make you "look bad", either by deviating from the dev's vision, or making users "work for free" by fixing issues that the devs can't or don't want to?

And for those that have implemented modding tools and docs: is the implementation cost worth it compared to the benefits it may create?

SupSuper fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Oct 6, 2017

# ¿ Oct 6, 2017 01:13

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.

Yes, games are a business, they cost money and suits will go for whatever has the highest profit margins. So does everything else in capitalism. What's in it for the customer? You can't justify every decision with "it makes money" or every industry would be a dystopian nightmare. If AAA dev costs are doomed to keep rising, eventually something's gotta give, surely? Because customer wallets aren't infinite, if anything they have less time and money to spend on each game every year. There's gotta be another answer than just "keep finding more ways to milk the product".

# ¿ Nov 16, 2017 00:19

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.

Triarii posted:

Not that much of a mystery - it would make them less money, in the same way that a casino would be less profitable if they made it clear up front that you're going to lose money on average.

Fire Emblem Heroes discloses the odds and it still makes money hand over fist so I'm not sure it's that straightforward.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2017 22:31

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.

Tricky Ed posted:

If you honestly believe that consumer desires aren't driving increases in graphical fidelity, game complexity, length, size, and story, just imagine if the new Mario game reused most of the models from Galaxy, and some of the maps. It might have been an okay game. Maybe even really good. Maybe even profitable. But it wouldn't have made the impact that Odyssey did.

Isn't Nintendo the counter-example though? Their technology is always generations behind everyone, their graphics are always more style than fidelity, and they're still behind the monetization schemes of everyone else. Oddysey came out two generations after Galaxy 2, and in-between it was purely 2D Mario games mostly consisting of the same gameplay and assets. The new Zelda still runs on WiiU. Maybe they are not AAA levels of profitable, but seems to work for them.

Of course if you ask a consumer they're gonna want "bigger, better, badder", but the gap between generations is still smaller and smaller. How much further can technology go? It looks like we've peaked in graphics so everyone's going more content (open world) instead? What happens when that peaks?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2017 18:40

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

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.

Warmachine posted:

This is a general programming question, since it has been a sore spot with regards to a certain game I like. People ask for multi-threading/64-bit all of the time with Rimworld, and I tend to brush off the whole multi-threading thing because that is a can of worms I can't currently wrap my head around, and see as unnecessary compared to the constant headache of running out of addressable memory. I understand it isn't as simple as flipping a switch on the compiler, but what I don't understand is WHERE in the process it starts to become an issue. So my question boils down to two things:

1) Why ~~in TYOOL 20XX~~ since the release of Windows 7 would someone decide not to compile a game nativly to 64-bit even if initial design requirements don't predict addressing requirements to exceed the limits of 32-bit addressing.

2) What and where are the hurdles in taking a finished product from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing?

Middleware, probably. To use Rimworld as an example, it uses the Unity engine, so they are bound by whatever Unity supports (which seems to do 64-bit builds, but has very poor multithreading support). And any native libraries and plugins they use have to also support 64-bit. And now they have to support two separate builds.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 23:17

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.

https://twitter.com/ChimpyEvans/status/963310851934556160

# ¿ Oct 13, 2018 20:47

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.

You're better off modding an old game, that's how a lot of Unreal games got started, and there's probably modding communities still around.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2019 21:12

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.

Kanine posted:

Does anybody feel like there's a massive divide between the average gamer and game developers. Like it doesn't make sense to me, game development is more accessible now than ever (you can see this with the explosion of indie releases.) But It seems like the average person I see posting in SA/reddit/twitter (outside very specific spheres) seems to have a really weird and inaccurate views of game development and the realities of it?

There's no magical middle ground between consumers and creators. Once you're one you're not the other. Kickstarters and Patreons keep trying to bring consumers and creators closer together, bringing down those pesky publisher walls and letting indies making the games people want! 90% of the time this just results in both sides never wanting to touch the thing again as the harsh realities of development further split both sides apart. Case in point, this outrage was only possible because both sides are close enough to ~~harass~~ communicate each other but not necessarily understand each other.

Knowing how the sausage is made does not in fact make you relate more to the sausage. It either means you'll find out the creators of the sausage are poo poo, the consumers of the sausage are poo poo, or the whole process of making the sausage is utter poo poo and you've been complicit in it this whole time, congratulations you've been living a lie, the magic is gone, everything is horrifying capitalism. Specially in an industry that lives entirely on creating make-believe fantasies supposedly fueled by "passion" and the only thing keeping that illusion alive is all the smoke-and-mirrors.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2019 22:22

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.

Shaocaholica posted:

Does the switch GPU share any arch similarities with the top end Nvidia PC GPUs tho?

The Switch is just an Nvidia Shield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra#Tegra_X1

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 21:15

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 20:56

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.

What happens when you alt-tab a game is a complete crapshoot and varies wildly based on renderer, driver, Windows version, etc. Engines usually just make sure it doesn't explode (which is the default behaviour).

Pausing the game is just a convenience decided by the developers though.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2022 05:42

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