81–90 of 593 posts
Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!).…
Why did they make the game in Unity instead of UE5? I assume it's something around the likes of "Staff is more comfortable with Unity", right, so let's release a game that runs like absolute garb. because we want to use a specific engine. Next time I wanna take out my graphics card from my PC I'm going to use scissors instead of screwdrivers because I'm more comfortable with them. When did the gaming industry become…
Unity is designed more as a general engine, but it comes with a lot of baggage in terms of half-baked features and optimization difficulties. As the author mentions they really unlocked their potential with implementation of Unity's ECS framework, but they were still chained to Unity's rendering tech, which has been underdeveloped for several years now.
My observation tends to be that simulation games are the ideal case for custom engines. While there are some commonalities across games, compared to many other game genres, they don't get a lot of benefits from standardizations. Sim games often end up kneecapped by trying to conform to existing engine frameworks instead of spinning up something optimized to the way their systems work. It requires a lot more technical know-how than an action-adventure game or a platformer, and the up-front cost to developing your own tech is an order of magnitude compared to using out-of-the-box solutions. I think with the massive success of C:S, Colossal Order was in an excellent position to try something ambitious.
Maybe with open-source tools like Godot having more flexibility in their frameworks, where you can just get the parts you want (rendering approach, etc.), it'll be easier in future to develop more specialized custom tech for games.
The odd thing is I doubt a single sky line fan thought “what this really needs is graphics so intensive I can’t build a big city” It’s remarkably tone deaf
It's all about the gameplay.
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> The teeth are not the only problem > this written article from PC Games Hardware (in German) or this video from Gamers Nexus (in Americanese) Humor and a great blog design, made my day.
Isn't GN Canadian? I mean North Americanese.
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> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest…
They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch. In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city bui…
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This is why steam reviews are nice. It's fine to review something negative out of the gate and review it more favorably once it's in better shape. This helps other people more than rating it positively.
Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews" summaries.
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Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!
"Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb. > Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and so do many other countries of the world.
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Where are you getting this from? I'm literally sitting with the game open right now with the Chrome Devtools connected to it, and I'm seeing no unnecessary modifications on the DOM side of things. Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.
Directly from the article: "The last remaining draw calls are used to render all of the different UI elements, both the ones that are drawn into the world as well as the more traditional UI elements like the bottom bar and other controls. Quite a lot of draw calls are used for the Gameface-powered UI elements, though ultimately these calls are very fast compared to the rest of the rendering process. " With this minim…
Why does it matter if it's 5 render calls or 500? The developers clearly have plenty of work to do optimizing the other 70ms, it doesn't make sense for them to spend any time working on this.
It's kind of stunning that a game of this magnitude is able to go out the door without model LOD. I suppose the fact that it runs at all is stunning -- surely you could not get away with this a decade or two ago -- but perhaps it speaks to the incredible capabilities of modern hardware. This feels a bit similar to the Electron criticism, where convenience ultimately trumps performance, and users ultimately don't care…
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Don't forget the part where they use web tech and waste draw calls like crazy on the UI. These things should literally be banned. edit: not web tech should be banned, but releasing a game with horrible optimisation like this, either by the store selling the game or by the law
Where are you getting this from? I'm literally sitting with the game open right now with the Chrome Devtools connected to it, and I'm seeing no unnecessary modifications on the DOM side of things. Could be that the integrated the Gameface library incorrectly I guess? Still interested in more details from you.
Literally quoted from the article. Standard 2D UI like that can be done in as little a single draw call (or so I have read, never actually done it)