Lazy Game Programmers.

[DavidNewbould 0]

May i start my rant in regards to Serious Sam:

I installed it, and it ran really badly on my rig. (Which gets 50-60fps in CS)

 

I turned all the texture detail, resolution etc down, and it still ran badly.

 

Now people may say "oh this game rocks, it runs great on my Athlon 1.2Ghz"

I see it as shite programming.

 

A game, that runs poorly even what ALL the settings are set low, which makes it look no better than a 5 year old game, compared to a game that looks great and runs great - for example Half-Life.

 

"Oh no, no no no, the half life game engine doesnt support as many polygons, and is no where near as advanced"

SO????

can you SEE A DIFFERENCE ?!??!

 

can you fück.

The only difference you see is speed.

 

So the ppl who are bringing out really slow *but new* game engines should stop and think about getting it RIGHT, not getting it done.

 

Classic example:

V-Rally2 - Installed it, played it, ran at 80fps constantly, looked great, very realistic, great.

 

Colin McRae rally 2 - Installed it, played it, ran at 15fps, looked piss, nothing felt right, car didnt handle right, shite.

 

 

Why is this??

Because the ppl who made CMR2 knew that they could make this game as slow as they liked because it would run OK on ninja spec PC's.

Lazy attitude.

 

== End Rant ==

 

Basic System Specs:

AMD K6-III 450

Asus P5A-B 100Mhz

192Mib PC100 RAM

nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 32Mb

Ensoniq PCI Audio Sound Card

48X CD-ROM

Windows 98 SE / Whistler Beta2

 

------------------

In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland,

starving and outnumbered, charged the fields at Bannockburn. They fought

like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

 

[This message has been edited by DavidNewbould (edited 11 April 2001).]

[DosFreak 2]

There's only so much crappy hardware can do.

 

nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 32Mb

 

The Serious Sam Technology test runs great on my Dual P3-1ghz@1125Mhz with a Geforce 2 GTS 64m.

 

 

Spend some money on the GOOD hardware and not on games. Geesh man. The TNT2 M64 is worse than a TNT1!

[DavidNewbould 0]

Is it really.

 

It's funny then, how my system out-preforms a PC with the same RAM, same CPU, but with a GeForce2 GTS

 

Yes, mine runs games faster.

 

How?!??!

 

Because its tweaked, tuned.

This is a software change, NOT hardware, which enables mine to be faster.

 

Next point?

[Bursar 0]

So you're basically moaning because your PC is underpowered and new games with great engines are simply too complex to run on it?

 

HalfLife is built on the Quake I engine, so it's pretty obvious that it is going to run quickly on most PCs. They did some fancy pants additions to the engine, but it's old technology (not knocking the game, it's still great).

 

Serious Sam renders huge out door areas, can handle hundreds of bad guys on screen at once, and has more effects than you can shake a stick at (lens flares, particle systems, physics and so-on).

 

It's always going to be the case that the latest games with tons of eye-candy will require a fairly hefty system in order to run at decent frame rates.

 

Serious Sam isn't out in the UK yet, and I'm playing through an 'eval' version that I downloaded. What are the minimum specs for the game? I would guess that your CPU speed is probably right on the limit, and your graphics card isn't going to be helping things out much either.

 

I know not everyone can afford top end systems (like my 1GHz P3, 512MB CAS2 RAM and GeForce 2 Ultra) but if you haven't got the hardware to run the game, it's hardly the programmers fault.

 

Maybe you think they should stop all these advances in graphics and AI technology and go back to text adventures?

[BladeRunner 0]

Ah, but would he be able to render:

 

***************************

Bad Luck!

You're Dead!

Try Again

***************************

[Xiven 0]

Yes, some game programmers are getting lazy, (much like some OS programmers ) when it comes to optimizing their code. CMR2 is just one example. However Serious Sam is not badly written, the graphics engine is excellent, the network code is nice, it's just that the amount it has to render is going to make it go slow on such an old graphics card. I suspect your problem may possibly come from the fact that your card only has 16MB of memory on board.

 

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">"It's funny then, how my system out-preforms a PC with the same RAM, same CPU, but with a GeForce2 GTS ..... Because its tweaked, tuned.

This is a software change, NOT hardware, which enables mine to be faster."</font>

 

Which particular machine with a GF2 GTS are you comparing it to? Clearly, whoever that is has done something seriously wrong to their machine to make it under-perform like that.

 

I have a Duron 750 and a GeForce2 MX, which according to you, should run only a little faster than your machine (ie. chug), yet with all details maxed out, this game runs SMOOOOOOTH even with 50 odd enemies on-screen.

 

I seriously recommend to you to upgrade your graphics card to at least an MX, or failing that a TNT2 Ultra (get a card with 32MB memory on board at least). They're cheap cards and your current card is "the weakest link" in your otherwise pretty good system.

 

Regards

 

Xiven

[shadowraven 0]

I play this on a voodoo 3 2000 pci, cel 500, 128mb ram and this game rocks with all settings turned up get 65-70 fps.

[Brian Frank 0]

Yeah, Ive played the game once, and love the mindless action. My only complaint was that it was too short. If you play the game straight through w/o dying, it can be done in under 6 hours.

 

Some systems it will run better on than other systems.

 

Oh yeah, the K-6 cpus suck for gaming. Plain and simple. Its mainly because of the lack of L1 and/or L2 cache. I think that is more the problem than the video card in this case.

Socket 7 and high-end gaming dont fly well from what Ive seen.

 

In the manual, it says an 800MHz cpu or faster is required for optimal gaming. Its a stellar game. And its mostly because its a brand-spankin' NEW gaming engine.

 

Id like to see you program a first person shooter with that many enemies coming at you and run it on a 300MHz cpu. And that video card will run fine for other, older games, but like the Voodoo 3 line its growing a bit long in the tooth.

 

Also, ITS ONE FRICKIN' GAME!

Id be much more concerned with the system if most of my games wouldnt play.

 

I heartily agree with what everyone else has posted.

 

Bottom line: If you dont like it, dont play it.

[DavidNewbould 0]

*sigh*

 

You're missing the point.

 

My card has 32Mb of onboard memory ffs as well.

My K6-III 450 has 256KB of L2 cache.

 

And im afraid Half-Life looks way better than serious sam at the settings needed for it to run above 10fps.

 

The GTS system i was referring to was a friends, K6-III 450, 192MB ram, GeForce2 GTS - runs TFC at about 30-50 fps, while mine runs at 40-60.

[Xiven 0]

Okay, I stand corrected on the memory issue.

 

BTW the Half-Life engine really isn't the best one to be doing benchmarking on. Try Quake 3 on your machine and his.

 

Out of interest, how does Serious Sam perform on his machine?

 

Lastly, as I said before, there must be something really wrong with his setup if your graphics card beats his. No amount of tweaking the settings is gonna make that much of a difference.

 

--

Xiven

[Brian Frank 0]

Well, still, the K-6 line in its whole have not been good gaming cpus. Even the Celeron performs better than the K-6's 2 or 3. The Cyrix chips are the only ones who are even worse, and possibly the Transmeta Crusoe chip, but I havent seen anything about that.

Not to say the K-6's are bad, but gaming was not the top thing on AMD's mind when they put it out. Its also on "old" techology--Socket 7. And yes, being that HL is based on Quake and partially on Quake 2, if Im not mistaken, thats not gonna be the best benchmarking tool to use. Ive run it, though not on Win2k with this low of ram, on a 400MHz P2 and 64MB of ram and a Voodoo 3 3000. And it still ran pretty good.

Look, as much as it would be nice to not have to upgrade somewhere along the line to take advantage of the software out there, thats not gonna fly. Lets face it, in 5 years, a 1.5 GHz cpu is gonna mean jack---as in being like the 486 is in comparison to the 1.5 GHz P4.

The Serious engine is a hefty one, and if you dont have a fairly hefty system, your not gonna have as smooth playing as someone with a 1.2GHz T-Bird. Duh.

If you are really gonna play that game, you'd do well to get a new mobo and processor, like a Duron, which is cheap but more on par with the Pentium 3 at around half the cost.

Also, Socket 7 chipsets dont have the muscle to push around games like Serious Sam.

 

Once again, if you dont like it, dont play it. Sheesh, dont play something thats more trouble than its worth for you.

[clutch 1]

Well, the GeForce 2 GTS is a waste on that machine anyway. It will not adequately keep up with the card. I bet that all of your Q3 benchmark scores are very similar from 640x480 up to 1280x1024. The card is working fine, it's just that the CPU doesn't have much to give. Also, I have a Celeron 300a@472 with 256MB RAM and an old GeForce SDR, and it runs SS very well. I use 8x6@16bit on this PC, but it will run 32bit just fine. All this in Win2K, the OS that some peeps say runs games slower than Win98 and WinME.

 

Here's another thing, what version of drivers are you using? It may help (actually, more of a help for the GF2GTS owner) to get version 7.x drivers. I use the 7.58 dets on both of the PCs (my main one being a P3 800 with 384MB RAM and a GeForce2 Pro 64MB).

 

In short, the game runs very well on my machines, and on several other's that I know of. But I am glad that you have single-handedly narrowed the problem down to "lazy programming", rather than outdated hardware as being the problem.

 

------------------

Regards,

 

clutch

[Brian Frank 0]

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by clutch:
In short, the game runs very well on my machines, and on several other's that I know of. But I am glad that you have single-handedly narrowed the problem down to "lazy programming", rather than outdated hardware as being the problem.

</font>

Good one, clutch. I agree.

[DavidNewbould 0]

Hardware isn't the issue here.

I'm just trying to say, that game programmers dont give a **** about tweaking the game theyre making, because they know that ppl will upgrade to play.

 

I am using 5.32 Dets btw - these are the fastest for my card (TNT2 family).

 

Anyway, all im saying is that programmers should think about designing a game to run well on lower end machines, this way it'll incorporate a wider market and keep the high-spec ppl happy, as the game will run even faster.

 

------------------

In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland,

starving and outnumbered, charged the fields at Bannockburn. They fought

like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

[clutch 1]

I can see where you are coming from, but I don't think it's valid. The reason being is these games are designed for people in a certain demographic. They like to see all the "eye candy" and have superior functionality. This comes at a price. This game would run perfectly fine on just about any PC bought new in the last 18 months provided it has a decent video card. Making a game that will appeal to a market segment known for its "power user" base and then optimizing it to run on 2+ year old hardware is not feasible, especially in a $20 game. The cost of the game is on target with "Deer Hunter" and "Barbie's Crack Shack", yet far superior in terms of functionality and includes several multiplayer modes (although the drive-by mode in BCS is cool ).

 

------------------

Regards,

 

clutch

[DavidNewbould 0]

Yes.

I can respect the fact that ppl pay a lot of money for fast machines, and want to see them reaching their full potential, in terms of eye candy.

 

But this eye candy can be achieved in different ways, aside ripping up polygon counts etc

 

Programmers should investigate more efficient ways of doing this.

 

------------------

In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland,

starving and outnumbered, charged the fields at Bannockburn. They fought

like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

[clutch 1]

They are; things like "Hardware T&L" and "Programmable Pixel Shaders" come to mind. In addition, hardware vendors try harder as well, like ATI and their "Hyper Z" implementation to speed up the rendering process. The main problem is that whatever can't be done in hardware, has to be done in the CPU. And your CPU isn't going to give as much as most (and it was never known to either). But then again, you always have "3DNow!"...

 

 

------------------

Regards,

 

clutch

[ThC 129 0]

most of these CANT be reached without the massive game engines they use. A perfect example is Tribes 2, this game would run worse than **** on your system because of the massive requirements used by it. Could Dynamix made the engine less intensive yes they couldve, but if they did you wouldnt be able to have such expansive enviornments the SUPER FINE detail the vehicles and the bases and the items have. There is NO WAY that such games as this, or upcoming titles like Doom 3 could even come close to achieving graphics levels or details like they have without massive engines or hihg polygon counts. Face it a TNT2 is a 3rd generation video card and a K6-III 450 just doesnt have the power to hold its own now. I have a PII400 and a Geforce 2 MX and I know there isnt much i can do to make it better besides upgrading my mobo and processor. So im getting a Athlon 1.33/266 and new motherboard so i can play these games that demand the power of systems like that.

[Donald2B 0]

I happen to work for a game company and I think that DavidNewbould's "Lazy Programmers" is a bunch of crap!!

 

Regardless of what anyone says, money drives the game. If your game runs long, and runs out of money, I don't care how good the programmers are, the first thing to go is optimizations for older hardware. Does this suck? YES. Unfortunately the turn over on games is getting shorter and shorter and to go out and buy a fully optimized and bug free game is almost unheard of.

 

The point is, it takes a LOT to get a game from design document to retail shelves, and if it doesn't work on your machine at full speed well tough. There are so many hardware combinations around today that there is no way a game can be optimized for all of these. So you take the most popular cards and go from there. We do the best we can with the given amount of time. There is nothing worse than seeing a game you have put your heart into for over a year and get shipped with known bugs, and optimization problems. But when time and money dictate schedule, quality usually is the first thing to take the hit.

 

~end rant~

 

PS. I have a TNT2 M64 card as well and there is a huge performance difference from it to the Geforce and GeForce2 cards. I have had almost every flavor of nVidia card in my machine at one point in time.

 

------------------

System Specs:

Asus P2B-D

Dual PIII 700MHz

1 Gig PC100 CAS 2 RAM

Hercules GeForce2 Pro 64MB Video Card

Promise Ultra66 Controller

WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM

WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM

Asus 50x CD-ROM

Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW

SB Live! Platinum 5.1

Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse

Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet

SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

[Brian Frank 0]

Okay, off the Serious Sam box, here are the minimum requirements:

 

AMD K6-3 400MHz or Intel Celeron 300A

64MB RAM

Fully Open GL compliant 3D accelerator

100% Windows compatible sound card

Win95 OSR2,Win98/ME/NT4.0 SP5/2k

150MB HDD space

 

Recommended:

Athlon or P3 550MHz

128MB RAM

GeForce 256,GeForce 2, Power VR Kyro,S3 Savage 2000,Voodoo5, ATI Radeon

450MB HDD space

Creative Labs sound card

 

David, if you'll look, your cpu is barely above the minimum for the K6 cpu, so yes, you will not have the best speed that a GHz+ rig will have. Its not lazy programming. In order to move forward in a fashionable way, the older technology has to be left behind, or you might have to get a game with several cd's when your brand in' new box needs only the info on the first cd.

 

Heres the solution for smooth game play: Get a new mobo and cpu. Either that or shut up about this "lazy programming" crap!

 

Do you honestly want programmers to support all the technology back to the 86 cpu (Intel 8086) era? I sure dont.

[DavidNewbould 0]

Argh!

 

Listen, i can understand technology is moving forward, all im saying is slow down!!!! Game developers are requesting more and more faster and faster - faster than a lot of people can upgrade.

 

Eye candy can be achieved in faster and more efficient ways than they are currently - NOT T&L and such things, but basic techniques.

 

Sheesh...

 

------------------

In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland,

starving and outnumbered, charged the fields at Bannockburn. They fought

like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

[GHackmann 0]

*Sigh* Game programmers are not lazy. Anyone who could make that claim has obviously never actually tried to sit down and program a 3D game. I dare you to read through the DOOM source code, the Quake source code, the Descent source code, or any other publicly available source code out there and still call the programmers lazy.

 

The problem is your video card. Serious Sam has large textures (which many games, like Half-Life did not support!), and your TNT2 M64 is throttling the performance. M64s have only a 64-bit memory path (as opposed to most video cards' 256-bit bus, including the "standard" TNT2), which makes it choke on large textures. Games like Half-Life and V-Rally 2 run well because either they are built on technology designed to work on Voodoo 2s, which had a limit on texture size (like Half-Life) or they were ports from consoles like the PSX that had similar limitations on texture size (like V-Rally 2).

 

It is not fair to call programmers lazy for not supporting a 3D card based on 2-year-old technology that was targeted for people who don't people who don't do much 3D gaming. (Why do you think the M64 is so much cheaper than a standard TNT2?) Serious Sam is not a game targeted towards people who play 3D games occasionally -- it's targeted towards hard-code FPS players.

[Almghty 0]

I program more than just games ..in industries where speed is everything ...i go from banks to hospitals where every ounce of speed is required. The same can be same for games.

 

From ASM to Java ..from VGA mem calls to high level libs like opengl.

 

The original post has a point and that is that programmers are indeed lazy. Some companies perhaps do spend the extra effort to churn out decent code but alot are relying on too much upper layer and they dont delve enough to the lower layer ..the layer closest to the hardware.

 

When people program using DirectX or Opengl they are sitting so far above the graphic card it is not funny. Take into consideration the PS1 and PS2 ..now I have yet to work on the PS2 but with the PS1 it came with its default libs. I challenge everybody whos done games for that console ..are any of you using it? NO i didn't think so ..redid your own to get every possible ounce of speed.

 

Never say that because its slow lets wait for Geforce 9. What sort of attitude is that? Before the advent of graphic accelerators we were doing ASM calls, writing our own peeks/pokes into graphic cards and getting every ounce of speed that we could. Games from that era could be seen from those that were written with C (average) and those who were written mostly in C with many vital calls in ASM (blindingly fast).

 

Tricks are there to speed up routines, polygon count CAN be reduced so that the load on the card is reduced. Does the texture really need to be that big? Why the f*#k should it draw all the polygons of a truck that is 10km away when the engine should just erase it?

 

I consider Black/White to be very well written ..from the lowly (m64) it zooms in and out very well and handles the polygon gracefully.

 

 

Why the heck should we have to invest in some dual athlon 2.4 ghz with a geforce 999 to play a game that is so sophisticated it might as well have been sold to the army for its simulations.

[DavidNewbould 0]

Almghty...Totally...

 

In referall to previous posts...Why not make a game to work on 2 year old technology?

As long as it LOOKS good, which can be easily achieved on 2 year old technology.

 

A basic example.

3D Mark2001.

In "game mode", at LOW detail setting, the game looks terrible. I mean really, really terrible. It looks like its 5 years old. BUT, if you look at the source code, you can see that the polygon count is far superior to anything seen before, etc etc.

Switch it to looking good, and it barely runs. On £1000 PC's, it struggles.

 

And yet we switch over to another game, not neccesarily Half-Life, but any;- Lets take Kingpin. You can play this game on a low-end machine, at high resolution, high texture detail, so it looks really good. It LOOKS really good. And it goes like a rocket.

 

So.

We have something that runs bad and looks even worse.

And we have something that runs fast and looks great.

 

Although the technology behind the games may be different, the output is what counts.

 

Remember, these are examples, it applies to many games.

 

------------------

In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland,

starving and outnumbered, charged the fields at Bannockburn. They fought

like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.

 

[This message has been edited by DavidNewbould (edited 14 April 2001).]

[Mike Zamarocy 1]

Anyone remember when Wing Commander III came out? Or was it Prophecy? Not sure, but on the box and in ALL the ads for it - it said PENTIUM REQUIRED! That one single game KILLED the 486 chip. As game programers create more realistic enviornments in the games, you MUST have the horsepower to run it as it was meant to be played. And as I have been around for quite some time, I HAVE seen games go from tiny blips on a screen (PONG), to moving aliens (Space Invaders), to barrels and monkeys (Donkey Kong), to damn near photorealistic air combat (MS Flight sim) and ground action (Counterstrike). And you know what? I WILL keep upgrading to attain the more realism, cause I LOVE it! And would I want to have a programmer DUMB a game down for 2 year old hardware - NO! I WANT MORE REALISM! Sounds to me that you'd also be the type to try and race a VW up against a Ferrari and still claim FOUL! Get with the program, soldier!

 

And thin on this too folks, . . . . it is the GAME industry that pushes the limits on computer equipment, NOT the business industry! Sure, SQL or some number crunching programs need HP, but just how much faster can MS Word pop up on the screen??? But to combat aliens in a photo-like world, and then even be Online as well - that pushes the envelope to extremes. A long time ago they thought games were just for kids and laughed at it - computers were for work only. Ha ha ha on them! Even Bill Gates finaly realized that to make Win9X sell, it HAD to be a GAME platform as well - and he now has made all forms of WIN to BE gaming OS's. Look even at Win2K (why we are all here even) - they even saw they screwed up on this by not making it game friendly, and are rushing to fix that!

 

Well, on the good side - that VW does get better MPG than a Ferrari