Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Sensuki]

SSD will improve load times, and that's it.

 

[Infinitron]

2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.

 

[Ramireza]

2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.

Well, i know that noone realy likes the EE Versions of Baldurs Gate. But one thing is realy great about this Version : The multicore optimization. When i play BGEE/BGEE2 (wich lookes better then W2, much better) my CPU hits maybe 10% usage while my GPU does nearly nothing.

I am realy curious about PoE and the CPU/GPU Usage of this game...

 

[buzz]

Infinitron, refer to my last post. Also take this in consideration:
Pentium 2 - 7.5 million transistors
Frequency: 233 MHz to 450 MHz

Core 2 Duo E7500 - 230 million transistors
Frequency: 2.93 GHz

When IE games were new, they were NEW and cutting edge. PoE is an IE-style game with with some aditional pretty effects on top and bigger resolutions. I'm not saying it should work on Pentium 2, but not make a massive jump that it can only work on i3 upwards either.

If someone was to make a Wizard's Crown-type of game in 2000 and that game would take as many resources (or more) than Baldur's Gate did, wouldn't you find that ridiculous?

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not saying it'll be a massive jump, but I definitely don't expect it to work at Sensuki-approved frames per second on a crap-tier PC. You can probably expect things like awful loading times, stuttering and slowdowns when there are lots of characters on screen or lots of spells being thrown, etc. At the very least.

 

[DosBuster]

Remember, this is the Unity engine we're talking about. They may not have the source code, (it's a bitch to get for Unity) and Unity can be a bitch to work with depending on the size of the game. Unity 5 should help with this however, I think inXile will benefit from Global Illumination quite a bit.

 

[soulburner]

Installing to SSD also can reduce stuttering if a game engine heavily uses streaming data from the disk.

Regarding hardware requirements of modern games... I think a lot has to do with how their engines are programmed nowadays. I think even Baldur's Gate uses some assembly code to make some calculations faster, while today programmers use many layers of APIs to not have to deal with low level coding. Things are begining to change, though, with the introduction of things like AMD Mantle, nVidia's OpenGL extensions or DirectX 12 wich all aim to reduce API and driver overhead, plus new GPU architectures allow direct memory access and other low level stuff. Why are previous generation consoles still so powerful even today? If you'd build a similar PC to them you could never run anything looking and running like an Xbox 360 or PS3 game does. It's because programmers have direct hardware access which was pretty much absent from PC for the past decades.

So until PC developers re-learn to use low level programming, the current generation consoles which are pretty much a PC will still be capable of more performance than a comparable PC.

 

[buzz]

Yeah, you're probably right. D

I mean, here's the sys requirements for Shovel Knight on Steam, a kickstarter-funded platformer that's meant to look and feel and play like an NES game (Megaman, Ducktales etc).

Spoiler

• 
  Minimum:
  • OS: Windows XP SP2
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 ghz or equivalent
  • Memory: 2 GB RAM
  • Graphics: 2nd Generation Intel Core HD Graphics (2000/3000), 256MB
  • DirectX: Version 9.0
  • Hard Drive: 200 MB available space

Here's how the game looks:

Here are the requirements for an NES emulator for comparison

Spoiler

Processor: Pentium MMX or comparable AMD
Ram: 32MB
Video: DirectDraw 7 compatible graphic card
OS: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Software: DirectX 8.1

It isn't made in Unity but they're using C++ according to google. And I'm pretty sure that a 3DS (for which this game was ported) is weaker in processing power and memory than the minimum for PC.

EDIT: In fact, the Ducktales remaster with updated graphics requires even LESS power than this game , Pentium IV and 1Gb of RAM. This is absolutely crazy.

 

[Zombra]

W2 was always going to be an old school design made for modern systems. Even if it's simple enough to run on a C-64, that doesn't mean it was programmed to work on a C-64, and it doesn't mean that they're obligated to port it to C-64. The engine just wasn't built to do that. Get a fucking computer from this century.

 

[Infinitron]

buzz I wouldn't always believe the minimum requirements you read on Steam. That might be the weakest machine they bothered to test the game on. In practice, it might work on older PCs.

 

[soulburner]

I rarely look at minimum and recommended specifications for games. They are rarely realistic - you can often run a game smoothly on below minimum specs or not have smooth framerates on a recommended spec. I have no idea who comes up with these.

 

[Sensuki]

2D backgrounds/animations requires nothing but more memory, I'm pretty sure largely system RAM rather than virtual RAM. At worst it will run around the same as Shadowrun Returns.

I'll bet an onboard Intel GPU chip will run the game no problem.

Even if it does, which I doubt, we're not talking just about GPUs. We're talking about old/crappy PCs in general. And Shadowrun, really? That's a freaking tablet game.

"2D" isn't a magic solution that makes everything fast. You weren't around to have experienced this, but when the IE games were new, my PC at the time, a Pentium 2, was rather slow at running them. These games can crawl just like anything else.

What?

I got BG1 almost right after it came out in my country which was either Dec 98 or Jan 99.

I had a Celeron 500, but my cousins ran BG1 on a Pentium 1 just fine. When BG2 came out however it struggled during mage duels on my Celeron 500, but I'm pretty sure that was largely due to the fact that I had an onboard 2MB Intel graphics card. When I got a GeForce 2 MX-200 and switched to OpenGL, BG2 did not lag.

SRR being a tablet game doesn't matter. Josh said that PE ran fine on a tablet as well. The use of huge 2D pre-rendered backgrounds only adds a higher memory footprint. Unity itself is not very resource efficient and SRR has some horrible lag during the loading of certain assets from the HDD, and even basic animations / FX do lag the game (where my FPS would drop from 120+ to 80-100 or something). That is just from poor coding.

I expect PE to perform better than Shadowrun, and I imagine that a Core2Duo with some form of video card from the last 6 years should be able to run it fairly well. The largest frame rate issues will probably come from creature animations and FX and the resource intensity behind number of units on the screen. Josh even said that the game slows down in their test level on a "don't make this encounter", meaning it's tied to what units are on the screen at the same time - and that's on a "run of the mill PC", which is probably an i5 with onboard graphics - which is the standard office computer these days.

Spells also may be another issue, if they go with big pointless lit effects and stuff.

*Hopefully* they make it so that the 3D rendering/FX and stuff is offloaded onto the GPU.

Load times in PE shouldn't be massive due to the fact that they stream in tiles. I'm probably going to install it on an SSD just in case.

 

[Infinitron]

You're a real true believer, aren't you?

We'll see.

 

[Sensuki]

Obsidian have more experience programming PC titles. If performance isn't up to scratch you can bet your money I'll be letting them know

 

[buzz]

Okay, this is getting really crazy. There's doubt that a system like mine can run an isometric cRPG fairly.
People, Core2Duo E75000 is not a SHIT processor. It was released in January 2009, five fucking years ago, not eight. It was one of the last models from the Core 2 family, which is just the last processor brand no longer researched by intel. Stop making it sound like it's fucking Celeron. I've already stated multiple times that I've played plenty of modern AAA with pretty much no problem. It's a computer I bought in late 2009, not a few decades ago.

You are literally arguing that an isometric turn-based or rtwp game, that is technologically on the same level as a game from early 2000s except it has a bigger resolution, needs more resources than fucking Witcher 2. Or than GTA IV. Or than Just Cause 2. Or than Red Faction Guerrilla. Civ 5. XCOM EU. Crysis. Any Call of Duty game. Any Stalker game. Supreme Commander. Any Assassin's Creed game to date. Any Batman Arkham game to date. Skyrim. New Vegas. Shogun Total War.
The last good isometric game that I've played was Robin Hood Legend of Sherwood (Commandos clone). That shit could run on my Pentium IV years ago smooth as butter, let alone on this computer. Even the Stasis demo with its absolutely gorgeous graphics had no problems running on my computer.

Seriously, stop defending and arguing this shit. It's bad and inefficient programming, simple as that. It's not like any of these companies (Larian, Obsidian) were renown for their efficiency and good coding skills. Pretty much most of Codex's darlings were pieces of shit from a technical point of view, filled with bugs and oftentimes unplayable.

 

[Sensuki]

Okay, this is getting really crazy. There's doubt that a system like mine can run an isometric cRPG fairly.
People, Core2Duo E75000 is not a SHIT processor. It was released in January 2009, five fucking years ago, not eight. It was one of the last models from the Core 2 family, which is just the last processor brand no longer researched by intel. Stop making it sound like it's fucking Celeron. I've already stated multiple times that I've played plenty of modern AAA with pretty much no problem. It's a computer I bought in late 2009, not a few decades ago

E7500 was a budget Core2Duo though, it's only 1066FSB. I bought an E6850 in early 2008 which is better than it. Today's Pentium Anniversary single core chips probably beat it in most applications. IMO an E8400 would be like the lowest level CPU I'd want to be running, and even then that's still way behind.

 

[soulburner]

I guess it depends on what you understand as "no problems running on your computer". For me a good running game is when I can have 50-60 frames per second with at least medium or mixed medium-high detail settings with some form of anti-aliasing. Divinity: Original Sin barely meets this requirement as it often goes below 50 frames per second without a real visible reason to do so. I admit to downloading Wasteland 2 early access version from a torrent site as soon as it was available and it ran below 30 frames per second. That's worse than The Witcher 2 on high. I've heard there were some improvements made in the later updates but I haven't touched any leaked stuff since then and I'm hoping the final game will run similarly to D:OS.

edit - Sensuki is right. E7500 is a budget variant of the Core 2 architecture. Bear in mind that since then Intel introduced not a single new architecture, but three: Nehalem, Sandy Bridge (plus Ivy Bridge which was mostly a die shrink and only a few changes here and there) and Haswell. Intel will most likely keep the Core i3, i5 and i7 names for as long as possible and introduce new names probably when model numbers become crazy long, like Core i5 8890909070K

 

[bussinrounds]

On the other hand, old-school RPG fans are usually also PC-exclusive enthusiasts, so on the contrary, they often have newer hardware than everybody else.

Yea, if they also indulge in popamole. But if not, why should they have ?

 

[buzz]

Guys, you're still missing the point that a game which by no means should require such a massive amount of resources, does. I'm not making a case for my old-ass computer, I'm making a case for even OLDER computers. W2 looks worse than XCOM, that's a game released 2 years ago but which works on my computer like a charm.

I fail to see for what reason this game needs more power than say, Silent Storm or Freedom Force, with their fully-destructible buildings and actually open levels, games that can probably run on actual toasters and offer a whole bunch of content and gameplay features. I played those games on my Pentium IV/Geforce 2/256RAM computer.

Tell me 3 logical reasons (besides graphical fidelity) why does this game needs more power by several orders than a Pentium IV. What features does this game have that it needs 4gigs of RAM and tens of gigs of HDD space? Does it have state-of-the-art complex AI, or destructible terrain and buildings? Does it have open, sprawling levels or an over-world that's fully explorable and with plenty of content?

Tell me, DOES IT EVEN LIFT? I don't think so.

 

[FeelTheRads]

What features does this game have

A whole unity of them.

Spoiler

 

[Davaris]

 

[Raapys]

Ye, Unity is the answer you are looking for.

 

[DosBuster]

Remember, XCOM enemy unknown is a HUGE team who have pretty much unlimited resources at their disposal. And, their engine is I think Unreal Engine which I prefer to Unity.

 

[soulburner]

Can anyone tell me why is Unity so popular? It's probably developer friendly, but... so is Unreal Engine, for example. So maybe the licence is cheaper, but is it a big difference?

 

[DosBuster]

Back in 2011/2012 it was the cheapest and best solution for game development.