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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • QuetzalcutlasstoScience Memes@mander.xyzBoop Snoots
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    4 days ago

    Every few years I think “this is true photorealism; we can’t go further”. And every few years they introduce some new technology that upheaves everything and requires a new generation of graphic engines and tech to properly show off.

    Though maybe it’s just my eyesight getting worse, but I think the first Star Wars: Battlefront reboot was close enough to reality that they could have stopped there. That or the FOX Engine - the tech demos from before Konami killed it would show a real video side-by-side with a render and they were nearly indistinguishable. (Edit: might have been this one?)

    Skin and facial animations are what’s really holding us back. Forget yet another lighting revolution, focus on the basics!





  • QuetzalcutlasstomemesGabe the GOAT Newell
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    4 days ago

    We already know a bit about Valve’s internal culture due to leaks and interviews, and it’s dysfunctional but in a completely different way from almost every other company.

    Thanks to having a small headcount plus more money than God, Valve has zero (internal) pressure to release, and has embraced a culture of freedom where developers can work on whatever they want. This has led to tons of Valve projects getting 80% finished before being abandoned once they reach the final stages of development and are no longer fun to work on. Every release they’ve managed since Steam took off has been due to a few major players with the charisma to swing others to join their pet projects and stay for the long haul.

    In a rarity for the field, I’m not aware of any toxicity issues in Valve’s workplace or a single complaint about Gabe himself. Those who’ve quit have nearly always said it’s because their passion project got canned due to it being so hard to get anything past the finish line. Other than that, employees seem to love working there (the massive paycheck probably helps too).

    Gabe seems to be held in high regard, even though the internal structure he’s cultivated is such a mess. And I still prefer this clusterfuck of inefficiency to literally any other AAA developer.



  • Kraken Express responded quickly. Days later, on April 30, the studio pushed out a “housekeeping” update addressing SSD and CPU usage, connectivity issues, missing building blocks, and various bugs.

    The results were dramatic: pre-patch, RocksDB was generating roughly 90,000 - 130,000 writes per second, while post-patch testing during sailing (one of the heavier write scenarios) showed an average of just 20 – 30 writes per second, with peaks never exceeding 60 writes/sec.

    Am I crazy for thinking 20-60 writes per second is still way too high? I know it’s small enough to no longer matter performance-wise, but wouldn’t it make way more sense to increase the database cache size further and batch write the changes to disk every few seconds? That’s still well within the margin where players wouldn’t notice the lost data in the event of a crash, while also making it so the game’s not queuing disk IO operations nearly every other frame.