Editorial Swen Vincke on why Larian isn't making Facebook games

[DraQ]

In the same conversation, the guy showed what he considered to be his cultural dominance by stating that Belgium had no art history at all. I remember being quite mad about this, but I didn’t bother correcting him. Instead I rewarded him for his ignorance by immortalizing him in Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga as a particular sad character, the dude souldbound to a chicken (if you haven’t seen it, just click the link) Tbh, I still regret doing that – he didn’t deserve it.

Pity Swen never reveals names.

Still pretty of him.

 

[shihonage]

No console ports = shitty PC code in your game. You can believe me, most optimizations in games are driven by console ports.

Hello... are you fucking sane?

Actually it is true. We've forgotten how it used to be before ~2006, but while the downside of console--->PC ports is "shitty PC controls and options", the upside has been optimized framerates, from the very beginning.

In 2007 I was blown away by how well COD4 ran on my aging hardware, and it was because everything was optimized to fit the fixed limitations imposed by consoles.

The most telling case, actually, is Gears of War. The original campaign levels from the XBOX360 ran awesome on my ATI x1950 or whatever, but they also added PC-specific levels which increased scenery complexity without any notable payoff in gameplay, and those levels chopped.

Big-time developers don't optimize unless they have to. In fact, they are encouraged to not optimize. If they can drive up the sales of CPUs and graphics cards, everyone benefits except the consumer, and this used to be the "usual story" until current-gen consoles showed up.

I never really had a problem with "graphics plateau" imposed by the consoles on PC ports. It's more than good enough for me. The real problems lie with shallow gameplay mechanics. And of course poor PC controls.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yep and 95% of games released recently are not technically impressive!
Technically impressive is not always about eye candy. A really smooth optimized game, or lightning-quick loadings are criteria to judge good coding, too.
Does Divinty2 even sustain a solid 30fps on Xbox? I heard it doesn't.

Let's port Divinity 2 to my toaster, if it can't make 30 FPS on ToasterOS then the devs suck.

The fact of the matter is that not a single game runs at 30 FPS on consoles, let alone 60 FPS, without sacrificing image quality.

No console ports = shitty PC code in your game. You can believe me, most optimizations in games are driven by console ports.

Hello... are you fucking sane?

No I'm not but I have been working in AAA game developement on various platforms for the twelve last years and I stand by my statement.
You can't imagine how wasteful of resources are most PC-only games.
Lots of code is deemed fast enough for PCs then get optimized because it is too slow on consoles.
And no TRC /TCR means : "don't fix your bugs mate, it doesn't matter".

In their case they are usually correct. Whining about wasted cycles when rendering a 20 by 20 room with a max of 3 characters is a meaningless endeavor. It's like those sites that benchmark browsers to find that pages are rendered 1ms faster with X vs Y, completely missing the point that no one gives a fuck.

Also, most of the badly optimized games recently have been badly optimized specifically because they were ported. Get back to me if you ever find a way to run SR2 smoothly on a dual core system, because it's pretty much impossible.

 

[l3loodAngel]

Swen Vincke on why Larian isn't making Facebook games

He should. His new installment is really awesome, you can redecorate peoples homes or command a dragon with a jet pack. Yay!

 

[Tramboi]

Let's port Divinity 2 to my toaster, if it can't make 30 FPS on ToasterOS then the devs suck.

Exactly, you got it finally.
In fact, Divinity 2 is made to be ported to the 360 so everything is dimensioned for the 360. If not it could be much prettier on PCs. And even slower. (And more expensive to make)

The fact of the matter is that not a single game runs at 30 FPS on consoles, let alone 60 FPS, without sacrificing image quality.

Yes of course, that's the whole point of making a game engine : compromising quality, quantity and performance.
Guess what : good teams compromise less than others.
Bottom line: The fact of the matter is that not a single game runs at 30 FPS on *any platform*, let alone 60 FPS, without sacrificing image quality.

In their case they are usually correct. Whining about wasted cycles when rendering a 20 by 20 room with a max of 3 characters is a meaningless endeavor. It's like those sites that benchmark browsers to find that pages are rendered 1ms faster with X vs Y, completely missing the point that no one gives a fuck.

If you don't care about your hardware being badly utilized, and are happy to throw hardware at games, more power to you. My money is finite and I prefer developers to work towards maximizing performance at constant quality (ie optimizing) so I can delay changing pieces of my rig.
I would love Cities XL to run on a PC that exists on this earth. I would love Civ5 to be crispy on my laptop. I would love all 2D games in the world to run properly at 60FPS on a small eeePC. Binding of Isaac, 2.5GHz CPU needed? Yeah?
I would love hardware requirements to be correlated to what is in the game.

Also, most of the badly optimized games recently have been badly optimized specifically because they were ported. Get back to me if you ever find a way to run SR2 smoothly on a dual core system, because it's pretty much impossible.

A dual core system? Less cores than on a Xbox360 you mean? So you really play on your Toaster with ToasterOS, then?
I keep seeing badly optimized PC-only games. You just have to have an older PC (which should be sufficient plenty enough to run them smoothly) to see it as well.
You don't have to care though. a) I work in the field b) I value the money I put in my hardware => and I so I do.

 

[Average Manatee]

I suppose you would only be happy to see every game written entirely in hand-crafted assembly, cost $1 billion and take 10 years to make then? Costs are sky high already on consoles, you want to make PC development cost even more than that?

A dual core system? Less cores than on a Xbox360 you mean? So you really play on your Toaster with ToasterOS, then?
I keep seeing badly optimized PC-only games. You just have to have an older PC (which should be sufficient plenty enough to run them smoothly) to see it as well.

Any CPU from the past few years is more than ample to run any game. Unless it's a shitty console port.

I work in the field

Does not preclude you being a retard. Probably increases the chance, actually. I hope you work on games for console peons.

 

[Infinitron]

I have to agree with Tramboi. Console ports run well on my PC. They can be glitchy, yes, but they run well.
NWN2 or Total War games, not so much.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Saint's Row 2 and GTA4 scream otherwise.

 

[Tramboi]

I suppose you would only be happy to see every game written entirely in hand-crafted assembly, cost $1 billion and take 10 years to make then? Costs are sky high already on consoles, you want to make PC development cost even more than that?

Money is wasted many times in a game development in most companies. It isn't really expensive to pay attention to performance and have an optimization pass by two experienced engineers so that your game run smoothly on more configs.
Of course indie can't do it as well.
But do you think the Total War guys don't make enough money to improve their loadings? Or that Firaxis has not the dough to improve their AI turn times by a signficant factor?
They don't need to, so they don't care.

Any CPU from the past few years is more than ample to run any game. Unless it's a shitty console port.

No. Any CPU from the past few years SHOULD be more than ample to run any game.
Fact : When console ports are slow, it almost always because of a very bad GPU utilization due to a sloppy backend.

Does not preclude you being a retard. Probably increases the chance, actually. I hope you work on games for console peons.

Actually it mainly precludes me not having a clue and saying uninformed bullshit.
Last game was a PC-only RTS, by the way.

 

[Tramboi]

I have to agree with Tramboi. Console ports run well on my PC. They can be glitchy, yes, but they run well.
NWN2 or Total War games, not so much.

Thanks, very good examples of sloppy PC programming.
I hated NWN2 with a passion on my former PC, which should have been plenty sufficient, because of this.
Total War loadings are a bane...

 

[Tramboi]

Saint's Row 2 and GTA4 scream otherwise.

Don't know about Saint's Row 2 but Rockstar is notorious for shipping shitty buggy PC ports, they just don't give a shit, and they're happy miliking PC players.
By the way Rockstar games don't have the reputation to be well programmed on consoles either.

 

[J_C]

I have to agree with Tramboi. Console ports run well on my PC. They can be glitchy, yes, but they run well.
.

No shit, a program written for a 6 year old hardware runs well on your modern PC.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

"Optimizing a game for consoles" - cutting levels in size, poor textures, low frame rate, long loading times, pathetic view distance etc.

Why PC games don't have to "optimize"? Because they have enough power in reserve. Properly ported console ports run smooth on PC? Well la dee fucking duh.

No console ports = shitty PC code in your game.

Totally.

 

[Kane]

console is so shitty hardware-wise, that it's a no-brainer properly ported games will run smoothly. It's actually kinda funny that the expectation is that they don't and poor consoletard-devs get praised when they do a "proper-PC port". That's like praising Nintendo for making a Super Mario Bro. port from the SNES to the PC that "DOES NEVER DIP BELOW 30 FPS HONEST!!!!". If that's the level of "quality" that's expected by the customer base, I think we can safely say the shareholders won.

Also let's not forget that console games are fucking shallow and lack any depth and complexity. So ports are not just technically but also mechanically inferior to 'proper PC games'^TM, even if they magically manage to make shitty graphic run at 60 FPS on a PC.

But it's good that you are embracing the decline I guess.

 

[DraQ]

while(true) shitty code in your game.

Totally.

Fixed.

 

[Roguey]

Saint's Row 2 and GTA4 scream otherwise.

I've been told CD Projekt wasn't given access to the source for SR2 and they had to reverse engineer a lot. SR3, which wasn't outsourced, ran fine. GTA4 on release, ran better on my old PC than it did on the 360. Keep in mind these are the 360 settings:
Resolution: 1280 x 720 @ 20 -30 fps
Texture Quality: Medium
Reflection Resolution: Medium
Water Quality: Medium
Shadow Quality: High
Render Quality: Low
View Distance: 21
Detail Distance: 10
Vehicle Density: 33
Shadow Density: does not exist on the Xbox 360
Definition: off
Vsync: off

I know they did some optimizations for the episodes but as a comparison here are the benchmark stats for my latest rig:
Average FPS: 64.23
Duration: 36.31 sec
CPU Usage: 59%
System memory usage: 32%
Video memory usage: 69%

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1680 x 1050 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Shadow Quality: High
Reflection Resolution: High
Water Quality: Very High
Texture Filter Quality: Anisotropic x4
Night Shadows: Off
View Distance: 25
Detail Distance: 31

 

[Average Manatee]

I have to agree with Tramboi. Console ports run well on my PC. They can be glitchy, yes, but they run well.
NWN2 or Total War games, not so much.

Total War at least is a game that would never run on consoles anyway because they would burn up instantly. So you can't compare it to console releases. And while I would agree that the load times are ridiculous the framerate is still pretty good.

Now, let's talk about TES if we want to talk about games that look shitty for their system requirements. Funny how selling well over 10 million copies of a game means you still can't use a half decent engine. Modders even managed to double the CPU performance in the game through a few small code hacks, can't you see the level of optimization that console development brings?


Basically what we should take from this is that Tramboi believes that when PC-only games run slow it's because PCs are bad but when ported games run slow it's not a big deal. Also that Tramboi is a retard.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Who cares what the game does on XBox as long as the performance is solid on the only platform that matters - PC.

Also, I don't think there's a point in always upgrading your graphic effects whenever some new shit is invented. You don't have to have the latest super shaders in your game to do something that looks graphically impressive - art style and competent use of what you have is much more important.

Bethesda hyped their graphics in Oblivion because WE GOT BLOOM AND HDR AND DISTANT LAND AND ALL KINDS OF FUCKING SUPER EFFECT SHIT and it ended up looking like shit that has been eaten and puked out and eaten again and puked out again.
I'd rather take a game with solid graphics made in something like the source engine, with good character models, high quality textures, fluid animation and lots of little details added into the gameworld that make it feel alive rather than just pumping the most modern effects into your game in the hopes of making it visually impressive that way.

Hiring a team that can put out consistent, high quality art assets and animation is infinitely more expensive than licensing from a multitude of middle-ware engine packages out there. They'll practically suck your cock for the business these days.