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cRPG developers please stop using Unity.

Citizen

Guest
wtf are you talking about, ATOM has more content than PoE

Not content in ingame sense, but the amount of stuff on the map. PoE2 has much more units running around, stuff floating in water, visual effects an so on. Just compare a huge city district maps from PoE2 and tiny maps from ATOM

But yeah, it's funny how being so much smaller visually, ATOM contains a lot more of interesting stuff to do
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
wtf are you talking about, ATOM has more content than PoE

Not content in ingame sense, but the amount of stuff on the map. PoE2 has much more units running around, stuff floating in water, visual effects an so on. Just compare a huge city district maps from PoE2 and tiny maps from ATOM

But yeah, it's funny how being so much smaller visually, ATOM contains a lot more of interesting stuff to do

Haven't played PoE2 yet and it's been years since I played PoE1, but ATOM has some pretty large maps (mostly the city) with plenty of NPCs running around. Also, ATOM has 3D objects everywhere, while PoE has all the background objects pre-rendered and/or hand drawn, so technically ATOM is loading more individual objects into the memory.
 

Citizen

Guest
Haven't played PoE2 yet and it's been years since I played PoE1, but ATOM has some pretty large maps (mostly the city) with plenty of NPCs running around. Also, ATOM has 3D objects everywhere, while PoE has all the background objects pre-rendered and/or hand drawn, so technically ATOM is loading more individual objects into the memory.

Map is prerendered but there are still 3d surfaces around everywhere, how else would dynamic lighting work. It's just that instead of textures on 3d objects there's a prerendered background image
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
So many declinians shilling for Epic and its abominable video game engine on codex.
You can't hide from the Clown World.
 

Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
1,196
Location
South Africa
Haven't played PoE2 yet and it's been years since I played PoE1, but ATOM has some pretty large maps (mostly the city) with plenty of NPCs running around. Also, ATOM has 3D objects everywhere, while PoE has all the background objects pre-rendered and/or hand drawn, so technically ATOM is loading more individual objects into the memory.

Texture memory and 3d geometry are extremely different when it comes to memory management. In a game where you use 3D geometry, most of that geometry can be instanced. So if you have a library scene the engine only loads a single bookshelf, and then those bookshelves are instanced around. A library scene with 1 bookshelf takes the same memory to load as a scene with 100 of them.

When you prerender things you are loading unique shaders for each scene so often you cannot even hold things in memory for other scenes. The shaders themselves are also often comprised of multiple textures to get your 3D effects. I think that the POE engine has 5 or 6 different layers to its shaders. Each layer of the shader adds another layer of load on your memory foorprint.

Basically its not really the amount of individual objects, but the amount of unique objects that has the largest impact on loading scenes.
 

Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
Joined
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Messages
1,196
Location
South Africa
Map is prerendered but there are still 3d surfaces around everywhere, how else would dynamic lighting work. It's just that instead of textures on 3d objects there's a prerendered background image

AFAIK the dynamic lighting is all shader based. They use a depth map and shadow occlusion passes to get it to look like that. It really is quite beautiful stuff! The only '3D' in the engine is the particle effects and characters. They may also have some 3D objects like doors and 'props' that you interact with. I do think that the ships in POE 2 were entirely 3D.
 

Event Horizon

Event Horizon
Developer
Joined
Aug 29, 2019
Messages
4
Unity is slowly improving the toolkit and features -- so, as a developer, I can say the difference between Unity and UE is closing fast.
New Unity (2019) is a big upgrade on rendering front - Unity games can really look on par with UE now, if done correctly.
 

Mustawd

Guest
In contrast, older engines were hard to learn but also hard to master, though on the upside it gave good performance from the get go.


Wot.


Is everyone here taking stupid pills? Ghost of a Tale is a great looking and performing game, and was developed in Unity. Of course it’s an issue of developers implementation versus the engine.
 

deama

Prophet
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
4,352
Location
UK
In contrast, older engines were hard to learn but also hard to master, though on the upside it gave good performance from the get go.


Wot.


Is everyone here taking stupid pills? Ghost of a Tale is a great looking and performing game, and was developed in Unity. Of course it’s an issue of developers implementation versus the engine.
Ran like shit to me, capping it at 40 fps made my GPU sound like a jet engine, so I decided to uninstall it.
 

ProphetSword

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Messages
1,755
Location
Monkey Island
Holy shit, people complaining about loading times on modern games would have lost their shit in the 1980s trying to play CRPGs in that era.

"Pool of Radiance" on the Commodore 64 in 1988 without a fast-loader cartridge, for instance, took almost 5 minutes of load time between areas (and several disk swaps) and going into combat took about 3 minutes. God help you if you wanted to save your game, which required another disk swap and another 3 minutes or more.

Get some fucking perspective, people!
 

DraQ

Arcane
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Holy shit, people complaining about loading times on modern games would have lost their shit in the 1980s trying to play CRPGs in that era.

"Pool of Radiance" on the Commodore 64 in 1988 without a fast-loader cartridge, for instance, took almost 5 minutes of load time between areas (and several disk swaps) and going into combat took about 3 minutes. God help you if you wanted to save your game, which required another disk swap and another 3 minutes or more.

Get some fucking perspective, people!
...also get off my lawn!
 
Joined
Dec 12, 2013
Messages
4,229
Haven't played PoE2 yet and it's been years since I played PoE1, but ATOM has some pretty large maps (mostly the city) with plenty of NPCs running around. Also, ATOM has 3D objects everywhere, while PoE has all the background objects pre-rendered and/or hand drawn, so technically ATOM is loading more individual objects into the memory.

Texture memory and 3d geometry are extremely different when it comes to memory management. In a game where you use 3D geometry, most of that geometry can be instanced. So if you have a library scene the engine only loads a single bookshelf, and then those bookshelves are instanced around. A library scene with 1 bookshelf takes the same memory to load as a scene with 100 of them.

When you prerender things you are loading unique shaders for each scene so often you cannot even hold things in memory for other scenes. The shaders themselves are also often comprised of multiple textures to get your 3D effects. I think that the POE engine has 5 or 6 different layers to its shaders. Each layer of the shader adds another layer of load on your memory foorprint.

Basically its not really the amount of individual objects, but the amount of unique objects that has the largest impact on loading scenes.

So how do you optimize your games?
 

jf8350143

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 14, 2018
Messages
1,277
Pathfinder's loading time is fine at the beginning of the game, but as the story progress the loading time get much worse.

Deadfire on the other hand has long loading time from the very beginning but never gets any longer.
 

Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
1,196
Location
South Africa
So how do you optimize your games?

Things that get carried over to scenes get pooled. So things like particle effects all come from the same pool. You don't have to reload your 'fire' effects for each level if you use the same, or similar, effects throughout the game.

See where you can load lower resolution textures. Our normal maps are half the size of our albedo (Albedo being the map that gives you the colours - the actual texture). Some maps can go down to even smaller sizes.

Don't use mipmaps if possible. Mipmaps are maps that scale according to camera distance. In locked off 2D games you generally have fixed cameras (within a couple of zoom levels). Having a texture loading up multiple states becomes unnecessary.

You also have to play around with what you can pool. We pool all of our footstep sounds, and most of our background sounds, and then mix those live as the level is played. So they are always there, they just have their volumes altered depending on the level.

Honestly it just comes down to shaving seconds off of some things. We stream most of our external data 'live'. So all of our text is streamed from external resource files as you play the game. That way there is 0 loading when you come into a level. There is a payoff in that there may be a cycle or two pause as it loads the streaming data when you call it, but you can cover that with fades and transitions. Some people leave optimization to the end of development because it takes time you can end up optimizing things that get cut. We prefer to optimize as we go along.

There are also psychological tricks you can use. We don't have loading screens, but rather a black screen with a little loading icon so we know the game hasn't jammed. That way we aren't drawing attention to the fact that the game is *****LOADING*****. Its more like its loading.

Its also a good idea to carry over music from the previous screen over the loading page. Even if its background sounds it keeps the continuity of whats happening. Your brain edits out the loading screen because you are still engaged in the game.

Im sure Im missing out on like a billion things, but Im not a programmer. These are just the ones that I know that we use!
 

Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
Joined
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Messages
1,196
Location
South Africa
Ori and the Blind Forrest is a fucking masterclass in asset pooling and using Unity. Im amazed that that game even exists.
 

Cat Dude

Savant
Joined
Nov 5, 2018
Messages
497
Unity engine also ruined Dreamfall Chapters which is the finale of my favourite adventure game franchise The Longest Journey.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Ori and the Blind Forrest is a fucking masterclass in asset pooling and using Unity. Im amazed that that game even exists.
It's such a rare find - not only it's an absolute joy to play, but it's a game where everything was clearly thought through down to even the most minute detail and everyone knew what they were doing which is pretty much a major miracle in games industry.
As the result you can't really find anything to bitch about even if pedantic nitpicking is your default modus operandi. Maybe apart from the game being too short.

Also fixed.
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
1,307
ATOM RPG is great but it's so very basic resource-wise compared to something like PoE2 or Kingmaker.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
If you have SSD, loading times are not a problem. 5 seconds tops in Deadfire or Tyranny.

Not by endgame when you have a megabytes-large save file.
Hello, I am an rpgcodex. I would like to have real persistent consequences in my games - not the scripted weaksauce shit, mind you, but the real thing, deeply rooted in the systems and mechanics. Scripting is for storyfags, you know? I would also like the saves to be <1MB size because long loading times are bad for my ADHD.
Oh, while we are at that, could you also keep all the wymbyn and niggard characters out of the game (unless they have -4 STR and INT modifiers respectively), you dirty librul?
Herp derp.
:deathclaw:
Jesus fucking christ.
 

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