Dungeon Siege III: More stable than New Vegas
Dungeon Siege III: More stable than New Vegas
Interview - posted by VentilatorOfDoom on Tue 8 February 2011, 18:22:09
Tags: Dungeon Siege III; Obsidian Entertainment... which is good news I presume. Eurogamer chatted up with Obsidian's Rich Taylor:
<p class="interviewQuestion"><span class="whoistalking">Eurogamer</span>: Did the decision have anything to do with the experience Obsidian had creating Fallout: New Vegas, which had well-documented technical problems?
<p class="interviewQuestion">
<p class="interviewAnswer"><span class="whoistalking">Rich Taylor</span>: Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly. The advantage here we have over, for example Fallout, is when we have a question about how something works, I walk 10 feet outside my office door and go talk to the programmer who wrote it.
That's a lot different than trying to get someone on a mailing list, or get someone on the phone who's in a different time zone or across the country. Those sort of things have made it possible for us to stabilise things and keep things working as well as we like.
It's really made a difference on the development of this project. We've been running on consoles on the 360 and the PlayStation pretty much throughout the length of the project, so we've been staying within memory budgets, mindful of performance issues. So there's no last minute, oh, does this actually run on the PS3? Or, are we stable on the 360?
We actually had one of our internal tools developers spend a lot of time engineering crash reporting into the engine so internally, literally when anyone runs into a crash the game will shut down, it will generate a report, it will provide a stack dump and it will put it into a database, and we can be very diligent about tracking those things and solving them.
So we actually almost never have mystery crashes where we're just stumped. That's a common thing that can plague games in development. It's like, well, we don't know why it crashed. It only happens in QA, or it only happens on non-programmer machines.
Here we have the advantage of, no matter who runs into a crash issue, we're able to get it up on the screen with a stack dump and look at it and peel back the information on it, and identify exactly what happened and get it fixed. That's been a change.
We also just recently finished introducing a memory utility that shows us what's going on in memory at all times on the consoles. We can see where our memory is going. If we're seeing a problem area we can immediately pull up some charts and spreadsheets and it will show us exactly where it is and we can go balance the numbers to fit within the console memory limitations.
Here's a new trailer too.
Spotted at: Eurogamer
<p class="interviewQuestion"><span class="whoistalking">Eurogamer</span>: Did the decision have anything to do with the experience Obsidian had creating Fallout: New Vegas, which had well-documented technical problems?
<p class="interviewQuestion">
<p class="interviewAnswer"><span class="whoistalking">Rich Taylor</span>: Stability and being bug free are extremely high priorities on this project, and we actually talk about it internally constantly. The advantage here we have over, for example Fallout, is when we have a question about how something works, I walk 10 feet outside my office door and go talk to the programmer who wrote it.
That's a lot different than trying to get someone on a mailing list, or get someone on the phone who's in a different time zone or across the country. Those sort of things have made it possible for us to stabilise things and keep things working as well as we like.
It's really made a difference on the development of this project. We've been running on consoles on the 360 and the PlayStation pretty much throughout the length of the project, so we've been staying within memory budgets, mindful of performance issues. So there's no last minute, oh, does this actually run on the PS3? Or, are we stable on the 360?
We actually had one of our internal tools developers spend a lot of time engineering crash reporting into the engine so internally, literally when anyone runs into a crash the game will shut down, it will generate a report, it will provide a stack dump and it will put it into a database, and we can be very diligent about tracking those things and solving them.
So we actually almost never have mystery crashes where we're just stumped. That's a common thing that can plague games in development. It's like, well, we don't know why it crashed. It only happens in QA, or it only happens on non-programmer machines.
Here we have the advantage of, no matter who runs into a crash issue, we're able to get it up on the screen with a stack dump and look at it and peel back the information on it, and identify exactly what happened and get it fixed. That's been a change.
We also just recently finished introducing a memory utility that shows us what's going on in memory at all times on the consoles. We can see where our memory is going. If we're seeing a problem area we can immediately pull up some charts and spreadsheets and it will show us exactly where it is and we can go balance the numbers to fit within the console memory limitations.
Spotted at: Eurogamer
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