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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#541

Post by maccard »

klik99 wrote: post #518
maccard wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.

Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s…

There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.

I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.

> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++

Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#542

Post by maccard »

andyfilms1 wrote: post #462
maccard wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.

And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers. I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, f…

I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#543

Post by raizer88 »

somat wrote: post #351
ptx wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.

In the devils advocate position. The union is a club you join with dues paid every month, in the sort of vague hope this will get you greater bargaining power with the employer. And it mostly works but there are downsides. If there is any meritocracy left in the corporation it is sucked out, replaced by seniority, that is, the only people that get ahead are those too stupid to leave. You have to maintain a bunch of u…

Too bad that "scaling down" right now is done to boost the stock and not because there is any balance sheet crisis.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#544

Post by maccard »

zetanor wrote: post #533
midnightclubbed wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100x. People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.

It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like "does it feel good to walk around in?", "does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter straight out of Overgrowth (2010)?", "does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000 PC if I turn DLSS off?" or even just "is this fun? challenging? interestin…

> It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like

You ask fair questions, but they're clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.

> does it feel good to walk around in?

This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)

> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter

Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.

> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000

What games do you have in mind there?

> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"

This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and people are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.

But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#545

Post by inigyou »

pfdietz wrote: post #479
inigyou wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter must be the most entertaining video game ever. Someone paid 44 billion dollars for it.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#546

Post by flohofwoe »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

True and this 'business strategy' has been going on for at least two decades, but this sort of hire-and-fire team-recycling also means that your games will look and feel exactly the same as any other game and all creativity and uniqueness is going down the gutter since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#547

Post by flohofwoe »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #516
danbolt wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages . I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier. Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.

For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy. The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#548

Post by AlienRobot »

inigyou wrote: post #472
sailorganymede wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fallin'

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#549

Post by theshackleford »

ironman1478 wrote: post #505
willis936 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why compare to indie games? MS family game studios aren't making indie games, they're churning out faceless UE malaise. You should be comparing id tech games to UE games.

The point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be c…

> Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.

I’ve been playing doom since the original release and I loved it. Different, but I don’t need it to the the same, because the originals and a never ending stream of wads exist.

I think I’m in a minority here. But I really enjoyed it.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#550

Post by flohofwoe »

I wonder how much a blow this will be for Vulkan on Windows. idTech was always known for strongly preferring the Khronos 3D APIs over Direct3D and the fewer native Vulkan games are released on Windows the less pressure there is on the GPU vendors to fix and optimize their Windows Vulkan drivers.
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