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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#471

Post by inigyou »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #58
dismalaf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been. Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along... Also any company they acqui…

>Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org. I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.

Minecraft didn't get shut down yet, only enshittified. I believe it's still very profitable due to the enshittification? I heard they sell skyblock maps for $8

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#472

Post by inigyou »

sailorganymede wrote: post #212
chilmers wrote: post #159

It's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was speci…

This is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.

You can make a fallout game yourself if you don't call it fallout.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#473

Post by teamonkey »

formerly_proven wrote: post #459
teamonkey wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case. There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime pla…

Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game state…

Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.

Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#475

Post by teamonkey »

maccard wrote: post #448
teamonkey wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite. There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins. You can’t really change the material…

You don’t need to flat out replace the render pipeline to get a wildly different look, a single new native render pass is very achievable (and if you have the skills to write your own renderer you absolutely have the skills to modify Unreal’s)

A unique look is 99% art direction.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#476

Post by lenerdenator »

tyfon wrote: post #317
lenerdenator wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk. There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subsc…

For me they are killing the goose. WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it. My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old). Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots…

I agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever.

Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#477

Post by dagmx »

Thaxll wrote: post #427
dagmx wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first statement is wrong. The new Indiana jones game is not an FPS and it uses the same engine

I'm not wrong they forked the engine and it's the same studio that worked with the same engine before, id tech is made for fps it's clear.

A lot of unreal engine games also fork the engine. If your bar is being forked then unreal doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people either.

3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#478

Post by 7bit »

ActionHank wrote: post #276
markus_zhang wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.

How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one. Doom runs like butter on the switch. Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.

I'm playing Witxhfire right now and the game runs phenomenal.

Arc Raiders runs phebomenal.

The engine is great. If games run terrible it's on the devs. Full stop.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#479

Post by pfdietz »

inigyou wrote: post #468
pfdietz wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers are willing to spend more money on it. How else do you define value?

For a game a reasonable definition of value might be based on how well people like it or how much it entertains then (as if that could ever be measured).

The way you measure that is by how much people are willing to pay for it.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#480

Post by willis936 »

Cpoll wrote: post #283
munificent wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of…

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look. To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your…

I can tell you that the fact that id tech 6 engine games look as good as they do and pump out 200+ fps is pretty novel in a way that the massive epic games and their flagship UE5 (and no painstakingly optimized case studies one may conjure) come close to matching even a decade on. The reward for lapping the entire industry? Early retirement.
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