Comment by ux266478
1 day ago
That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice?
Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.
> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch
The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.
Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase?
The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.
Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.
It's a completely different game, engine, etc.
Yes.
They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.
Gamedev engineering hours are also in endless oversupply thanks to myDreamCream brain.
> It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year
Tell me you don't work on game engines without telling me..
----
Modern engines are the cumulative result of hundreds of thousands of engine-programmer hours. You're not rewriting Unreal in several years, let alone multiple times in one year. Get a grip dude.
Unity rewrote and discontinued lots of major systems several times in a row in the last 10 years.
I’d be careful before telling people to “get a grip”.
I think they meant the gameplay side of things instead of the engine