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The journey to Nintendo Switch

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Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#111

Post by pdntspa »

shadowgovt wrote: post #107
pdntspa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't be very far in the game if you are stuck on that quest. Why not just start over?

There are two answers to that question. The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Sma…

I'm pretty sure everyone has had to start over because of a game-breaking save bug. I know I have (but not with CP2077)

As for the respecting time thing... does TurboTax respect my time while showing me a false progress bar when it actually completes its analysis near instantly? Does Microsoft respect my time when Edge constantly pesters me with popups asking to be the default? Does Instagram or Facebook respect my time when they pollute my feed with their business objective bullshit? Does a cop respect my time when he pulls me over and spends 15 minutes running my information? (Like WTF is he even doing... he punches my info into cop google and it spits out an answer! Where is all that time going!) What about if they arrest me? Does the radio respect my time when it airs commercials?

Another answer is: temper your expectations. Take the L and move on. The sunk cost fallacy is real.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#112

Post by Therenas »

hbn wrote: post #69
cecilpl2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used this technique in the past on various shipped Switch games. It's an API that puts the Switch into "CPU Boost Mode". It overclocks the CPU at the expense of GPU. It's suitable only for loading screens or other areas of the game where you don't need to render at more than single-digit FPS, but can produce a 20-50% improvement in loading time.

Interesting, curious if Factorio is using it then.

I work on the game, and can confirm this technique is used wherever it makes sense!

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#113

Post by shadowgovt »

pdntspa wrote: post #111
shadowgovt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two answers to that question. The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Sma…

I'm pretty sure everyone has had to start over because of a game-breaking save bug. I know I have (but not with CP2077) As for the respecting time thing... does TurboTax respect my time while showing me a false progress bar when it actually completes its analysis near instantly? Does Microsoft respect my time when Edge constantly pesters me with popups asking to be the default? Does Instagram or Facebook respect my t…

> The sunk cost fallacy is real

I agree. That's why after deciding I wasn't having enough fun-to-bugs ratio in CP2077 about halfway through the game, I gave up and played something else. I've been playing quite a bit of No Man's Sky as of late. It's also buggy, but more fun. Satisfactory is a delightfully tight experience. Kerbal Space Program hides its bugs delightfully behind the overall "Failure is the point" game mechanics. Or I could play basically anything on a Nintendo Switch (main console, not the store) and get a nearly bug-free experience because Nintendo enforces some pretty stringent quality standards.

Everyone's preferences are different. Me, I don't get the buzz from the AAA-ness of a CP2077 to offset the annoyance of the underlying mechanics being kinda boring and kinda buggy.

... I'm not sure what to make of the comparison of playing videogames (an experience I spend double- or triple-digit dollars on for entertainment) to the experience of chores in real life, so I'm setting that aside.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#114

Post by gbasp »

naranha wrote: post #56

If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.

I think the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch makes for more interesting games in general. Most of the games on my Xbox and PC tend to be FPS/Action games with very boring, brown and green "realistic" environments whereas games on my Switch tend to be bright and colorful with lots of 2D and pixel graphics and games in the vein of simulators, adventures, roguelikes etc.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#115

Post by pdntspa »

shadowgovt wrote: post #113
pdntspa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure everyone has had to start over because of a game-breaking save bug. I know I have (but not with CP2077) As for the respecting time thing... does TurboTax respect my time while showing me a false progress bar when it actually completes its analysis near instantly? Does Microsoft respect my time when Edge constantly pesters me with popups asking to be the default? Does Instagram or Facebook respect my t…

> The sunk cost fallacy is real I agree. That's why after deciding I wasn't having enough fun-to-bugs ratio in CP2077 about halfway through the game, I gave up and played something else. I've been playing quite a bit of No Man's Sky as of late. It's also buggy, but more fun. Satisfactory is a delightfully tight experience. Kerbal Space Program hides its bugs delightfully behind the overall "Failure is the point" game…

Great. Personally I think CP2077 is the bee's knees, its about the only game that made me genuinely emotional when the end credits scrolled on. Sucks that your experience sucked.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#116

Post by highwind »

hbn wrote: post #74
afterburner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that's always been Nintendo's thing, hasn't it? Cheaper, less powerful consoles, but focus on iconic gameplay

I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360) Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!

I'd argue that first time Nintendo exhibited that mentality was with GameBoy.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#117

Post by Andrex »

spijdar wrote: post #106
Andrex wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a little disappointing, since one of the things I loved most about the GameCube game was the instant load times. I also enjoyed taking the disc out of the slot after the game was loaded.

Animal Crossing is an interesting game to me because of how little the series code has changed over time. The GameCube releases seems to have almost literally been the Nintendo 64 release recompiled against a different SDK for the GC platform (weighing in at only 27MB total for the GC release! An entire 1.4GB DVD for 27MB!), while the Wii and 3DS games, and seemingly the Switch one, are variants of the DS rewrite (se…

New Horizons used the standard internal game engine Nintendo deploys for most of their flagship Switch games, called LunchPak/LunchPak 2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fnfdic/nintendos_g...

Which is crazy since (having played NL and NH for a combined 1500 hours) even the little, deep details carry on from New Leaf. If I didn't know better I'd say NH was using an evolved NL engine.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#118

Post by bobthepanda »

gbasp wrote: post #114
naranha wrote: post #56

If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.

I think the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch makes for more interesting games in general. Most of the games on my Xbox and PC tend to be FPS/Action games with very boring, brown and green "realistic" environments whereas games on my Switch tend to be bright and colorful with lots of 2D and pixel graphics and games in the vein of simulators, adventures, roguelikes etc.

Most of those are hardly Switch exclusive.

I like the Switch, but it definitely chugs, and I suspect had we not had the supply chain meltdown over the pandemic we would‘ve gotten a more significant hardware refresh.

As far as simulators go, I‘m playing Two Point Campus, and it definitely chugs and crashes occasionally.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#119

Post by TrainedMonkey »

bri3d wrote: post #83
jvanderbot wrote: post #57

> Removing all uses of undefined behaviour is probably a fool's errand, as it would require significant changes throughout the code that would take time and come with a performance impact, all for no immediate practical benefit. So I just hunted down the undefined behaviour cases that actually broke determinism. This was easy enough, as we have plenty of tools we use to test determinism. By comparing the game state C…

This kind of determinism testing is a fairly common approach in games that implement shared-state multiplayer, and I think that's why it was implemented for Factorio as well. Otherwise you get drift between clients that breaks the game.

One alternative is to run everything on the server, but that introduces another set of problems.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#120

Post by spijdar »

Andrex wrote: post #117
spijdar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal Crossing is an interesting game to me because of how little the series code has changed over time. The GameCube releases seems to have almost literally been the Nintendo 64 release recompiled against a different SDK for the GC platform (weighing in at only 27MB total for the GC release! An entire 1.4GB DVD for 27MB!), while the Wii and 3DS games, and seemingly the Switch one, are variants of the DS rewrite (se…

New Horizons used the standard internal game engine Nintendo deploys for most of their flagship Switch games, called LunchPak/LunchPak 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fnfdic/nintendos_g... Which is crazy since (having played NL and NH for a combined 1500 hours) even the little, deep details carry on from New Leaf. If I didn't know better I'd say NH was using an evolved NL engine.

Hmmm, I wonder! My experience with this comes from doing some minor reverse engineering work on the Wii game back in my teens, in order to pass all the dialogue through Google translate, for great amusement [0].

My observation was the data structures/file formats were basically slight modifications of the ones used in other first party Nintendo games, primarily Mario Kart and Mario Party. So it seems like it's always drawn heavily from some internal SDK/engine, it's just not clear how much, or how much of that engine is saved between consoles.

Anecdotally, the DS and Wii (and ... maybe the GC? I don't remember now) used the same file format for the dialogue scripts, although the DS version was little-endian, and broke all my (terribly brittle) "tooling". The 3DS was totally different, and I ... Think the Switch was a variant of the 3DS format? It's been a hot minute since I've looked at any of this stuff :-)

[0] https://imgur.com/a/hFRbY

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