"Game Development is more complex than you understand" is an industry deflection on poor management

[Ol' Willy]

Shortcuts > menus of any kind

 

[Savecummer]

They're actually meant to, since it works with muscle memory unlike normal menus.

No they arent. Not in the way they are fanning and are selected in Toee/Nwn. It defeats the whole purpose.
You see multiple levels in modern consolitis shooters done right. Flick right, flick up - as an example.

People like Vormulak and Gregz are too dumb to realize that structure and logic with all options available at all times in the same places are the peak of control. Its not a coincidence that aircraft cockpits looks overloaded.

 

[lycanwarrior]

The problem is simple, there is a massive bubble on the financial markets around the globe while non financial, real world companies profits are mediocre to bad, meaning, there is no real growth going around. The european and US goverments are trying to fix the problem and avoiding a deflationary depression caused by the bad real world economy, adding a ton of money to the market to "estimulate" the companies, worse, the goverments take interest rate to near zero or negative in real interest terms, that means, a lot of money that would go to bonds or fixed income is diverted to the stock market instead, creating a stock market boom.

Financial companies, all of sudden, because of the low interest rates and liquidity injections, have massive amount of money that they shouldnt. Those guys know how to manage money but they dont have any clue how to make games. Those investment banks, pension funds and other companies would be buying US goverment bonds if those bonds werent so terribly shitty as they are right now, instead they are investing on video games.

Also, many real world companies have real problems to grow, a mining company, an agriculture company and traditional business have a hard time to grow when the real economy is actually suffering. A software company, however, is a very nebulous thing with abstract standards for sucess, actually right now, it is expected for software companies to spend years having losses. If you look to the S& P 500, the bulk of the valuation is carried by growth based software companies and not real world companies, this is dot com bubble on steroids.

This gives rise to pump and dump investing, the same thing that happened on 2001, what matters isnt the performance of the company over the long run, how consistent it is, how realistic and well made plans are but only one thing matters: growth. Its been this way at least since the dot com bust, 20 years of massive amounts of money that shouldnt be there going to the stock market. The only thing that matters is if the stock price is higher than it was when you bought the company.

So, the top guys come from financial markets and Wall Street, they arent CEOs that wanted to create a game company from the scratch and know video games. They being financial market guys, their demands are for growth at any cost in any way. So, the bureaucracy that actually controls those companies are happy to oblige but those financial guys have no clue how to make those games, then this bureaucracy exploiting this, acquire a life of its own, basically, the head (stock holders) are completely detached from the body (the corporate bureaucracy).

The bureaucracy, because only has some nebulous demands of growth coming from the top, dont have a long term plan for the company because those Wall Street guys at the top change all the time and because the CEO probably wont be there for long and is more worried about his career, shortsightness and corporate politics start spreading top to bottom because the idea of the company being an entity to survive the time and have a legacy disappear from the minds of those involved.

Worse, this is happening for 20 years, so it doesnt only affect large companies, executives hired from EA, Ubisoft, Activision, they all carry those bad habits to the companies that hire them. Also, smaller companies like CDPR see how the game is being played and wish to enter on the party, they dont have stabilished ips to milk like EA and Activision but they see how milking microtransactions is a really good growth strategy, so they start doing what other companies like We Work and Tesla do, pitching ideas that are too good to be true but that look like excellent growth opportunities and attract investment making their owners billionaires in short term.

Without huge amounts of money on the financial market, the nowdays gaming industry wouldnt be possible to sustain. Things will only change when the time comes for the debt cycle to turn and goverment printing money capacity is over stressed generating high real world prices inflation with interest rates raising sharply. Then the party will be over, most of those companies will die when all those 500 million dollars to finance GTA arent there anymore.

Excellent and informative post.

The whole monetary/fiat system basically consists of the banks creating money out of thin air, to which they loan it to you with interest. That's really all it is. At least gold/silver and even physical cash is something that it tangible at least.

Basically, it is a FRAUD/SCAM of monumental proportions by these Central Banks. A system that snares people into debt slavery. It's given people the illusion of prosperity. It's allowed the global population to grow to numbers that cannot be supported by the environment and especially the availability of resources.

Although what this may mean for high-production value AAA games is kinda depressing to think about...

 

[Perkel]

No it is not the same as your office software.

1. Constant revenue vs one time revenue - It fundamentally puts a limit to how you make stuff. In constant revenue model like in business software you can make projection based on actual factual data from past months how much you can spend on development and hire/fire proportionally people. In one time model like games where most of the revenue comes from like 1-3 months from launch of game you have to work on game not knowing if it will sell at all and 1000 other things involved, moreover the type of work you do are multi-year projects not your 3 months projects like in some add campaigns or art work business.

2. Cost. You average business software doesn't require army of people - Games do, even small games are work of 30-40 people now over 2-3 years. That cost of work adds up quickly. Games lack that which means either you game is success or you shut down. If you had some successful games then you can eat bad game once or twice but you will still risk business failure. On other hand gass games give you small amount of content every 2-3 months not changing anything fundamentally about game because that would require rework of rest of game. So you have games that live for 5-6 years that fundamentally do not evolve past their 1.0 release.

3. Lack of maintenance revenue stream - This is why your gass and microtransactions shit came from. In normal software company makes a lot of money on just maintaining software for clients and if company is happy they can use same software 1.0 for multiple years sometimes decade or two.

4. Unpredictability vs predictability - Artwork, movie creation, music creation are all predictable avenues that CAN be properly measured and set expectations correctly. Artist who makes artwork as a pro can correctly judge how much time drawing one character will take. Creating gameplay is not predictable. Even best sounding idea on paper might be horrible in practice and by the time you actually reach that part of gameplay you need already most of game done so then any change in gameplay will have to be connected with major changes of whole game which means wasted work.

5. Improvised technology vs Tested technology - If you want to make 3D movie, you install X amount of software and you don't need pretty much any R&D or custom tooling. Even if project will take 20 years to make you can still use same software when you started and final outcome will be released without any problems. Games are not like that. Yes there are common engines like unreal or unity but even with them to make game you will have to make custom tools and your own R&D. Unless you are trying to make carbon copy sequel your tooling and R&D will be different for each game. You might start game in 2004 when PS2 was at the top but due to delay or two you might release in 2008 when PS3 is on market already and ps2 is dusting which means your game chances are shot and your great graphics look like shit now.


The only games that can be reasonably planned are soulless clones of same game without any ambition or games that modeled themselves for constant revenue stream. Or super small games that can be done in 2-3 months with barely any content.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I see nothing to suggest that studios hiring more people results in a better product being created. A more unfocused product being pulled in multiple directions, perhaps.
The Mythical Man-Month should be required reading for anyone promoted to a management position.

 

[fork]

No it is not the same as your office software.

1. Constant revenue vs one time revenue - It fundamentally puts a limit to how you make stuff. In constant revenue model like in business software you can make projection based on actual factual data from past months how much you can spend on development and hire/fire proportionally people. In one time model like games where most of the revenue comes from like 1-3 months from launch of game you have to work on game not knowing if it will sell at all and 1000 other things involved, moreover the type of work you do are multi-year projects not your 3 months projects like in some add campaigns or art work business.

2. Cost. You average business software doesn't require army of people - Games do, even small games are work of 30-40 people now over 2-3 years. That cost of work adds up quickly. Games lack that which means either you game is success or you shut down. If you had some successful games then you can eat bad game once or twice but you will still risk business failure. On other hand gass games give you small amount of content every 2-3 months not changing anything fundamentally about game because that would require rework of rest of game. So you have games that live for 5-6 years that fundamentally do not evolve past their 1.0 release.

3. Lack of maintenance revenue stream - This is why your gass and microtransactions shit came from. In normal software company makes a lot of money on just maintaining software for clients and if company is happy they can use same software 1.0 for multiple years sometimes decade or two.

4. Unpredictability vs predictability - Artwork, movie creation, music creation are all predictable avenues that CAN be properly measured and set expectations correctly. Artist who makes artwork as a pro can correctly judge how much time drawing one character will take. Creating gameplay is not predictable. Even best sounding idea on paper might be horrible in practice and by the time you actually reach that part of gameplay you need already most of game done so then any change in gameplay will have to be connected with major changes of whole game which means wasted work.

5. Improvised technology vs Tested technology - If you want to make 3D movie, you install X amount of software and you don't need pretty much any R&D or custom tooling. Even if project will take 20 years to make you can still use same software when you started and final outcome will be released without any problems. Games are not like that. Yes there are common engines like unreal or unity but even with them to make game you will have to make custom tools and your own R&D. Unless you are trying to make carbon copy sequel your tooling and R&D will be different for each game. You might start game in 2004 when PS2 was at the top but due to delay or two you might release in 2008 when PS3 is on market already and ps2 is dusting which means your game chances are shot and your great graphics look like shit now.


The only games that can be reasonably planned are soulless clones of same game without any ambition or games that modeled themselves for constant revenue stream. Or super small games that can be done in 2-3 months with barely any content.

Perkel talking out of his ass once more.

 

[J_C]

Raytracing is such a fucking joke and devs pushing it should be euthanized, along with nvidia jews.

I guess you were one of those who thought that 3D graphics is just a gimming and should go away back in the 90s.
RT might be not there yet, but it is the future, and can be a huge technological advancement. And no, it is not just about wet floors, it's about all surfaces in a game, their behaviour of reflecting and absorbing light, casting shadows. Right know all of that has to be created manually by the developers, which is a huge workload. With proper raytracing, it will be automatic and more or less realistic.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

No it is not the same as your office software.

In constant revenue model like in business software you can make projection based on actual factual data from past months how much you can spend on development and hire/fire proportionally people. In one time model like games where most of the revenue comes from like 1-3 months from launch of game you have to work on game not knowing if it will sell at all and 1000 other things involved, moreover the type of work you do are multi-year projects not your 3 months projects like in some add campaigns or art work business.

even small games are work of 30-40 people now over 2-3 years.

Lack of maintenance revenue stream - This is why your gass and microtransactions shit came from. In normal software company makes a lot of money on just maintaining software for clients and if company is happy they can use same software 1.0 for multiple years sometimes decade or two.

Creating gameplay is not predictable.

Even if project will take 20 years to make you can still use same software when you started and final outcome will be released without any problems. Games are not like that. Yes there are common engines like unreal or unity but even with them to make game you will have to make custom tools and your own R&D.


The only games that can be reasonably planned are soulless clones of same game without any ambition or games that modeled themselves for constant revenue stream. Or super small games that can be done in 2-3 months with barely any content.

On 1, in most large triple AAA you have an independent firm do various analysis on how profitable a potential game might be. You give them details like if it's an FPS, if it's sci fi, if it's from an established franchise and so on. You get factual data on how well that game could do based on current market conditions. And you use that data to convince the higher ups to make your game. It's not perfect. And has led to awful shit like that DmC reboot and Xcom briefly being rebooted as an FPS by Bioshock devs. But it IS sensible to analyse how much profit a game can make to keep the lights on. For an indie that kind of obtuse analysis doesn't matter but it still helps to look at what's going on in the industry and plan around that. I did acknowledge that plans change. But a good manager predicts all that they can and if unexpected disaster strikes they work around that as best they can.

On 2. Say what? Kenshi was made by one guy, one artist and one volunteer musician. Whilst it did take a while to come out it made a huge enough profit for Low Fi games to expand. Games can be made with big teams or small teams and YOU PLAN FOR THIS BEFOREHAND. Wages and all that. In general smaller teams are better so long as you have everyone working efficiently. And that's a lost art. I'm actually all for games having the time they need so long as they can afford it, this is communicated beforehand, and that time is USED. Often it isn't. And that's why publishers break dev's balls over deadlines. Or at least they should be.

on 3. Indies shouldn't ever do Games as a Service. They can't afford to. And if they did an cost analysis they'd agree with me. Whilst I love MMO's I wouldn't get my hypothetical company to make one because they're so expensive and my studio wouldn't be able to afford to keep it up without inconvienancing the consumer. A lot of people still don't realise Games as a Service exists as a symptom of bad financial management of the games industry causing bloating and being unsustainable traditionally. Games HAVE to have these bloated budgets because some weasel CEO said so.

on 4. I agree that certain design problems can arise when making a gameplay mechanic. But if you've planned everything out and hired the right people with the right experience they anticipate what might go wrong. And if you're doing something new you gave yourself enough time to experiment.

On 5. Have you ever heard of Middleware? You save time and money by buying a physics engine or using what comes with something like Unreal or Source. Or you go "we need something else" and you analyse whether you buy it or make it and how much that costs versus how much time you lose/save. An indie studio looking to make a profit doesn't spend over 10 years just making a custom game engine. They use Unreal or Unity. Most custom engines come out of hobbyiests doing it in their spare time. We're long past the days of Carrmack making idTech for Wolfenstien. It doesn't matter what game you are making, if it's your auter magnum opus or whatever. When you get given money by an investor and you promise results you get those results or have a good reason why not. You take responsibilty for the product you are making. Whether it's STALKER, Kenshi, CoD, or whatever. You say, "this is the game we want to make. We want these features. Based on our findings we can get it out in X amount of time. But let's give us a year or two extra leeway because this is a risky project."

I don't see why I have to even elaborate as I have beyond my original tldr. TAKE RESPONSIBLITY. That doesn't just mean owning up when things go wrong. It means BEING RESPONSIBLE so things DON'T go wrong. And if they do, you deal with them in such a way so that you maintain your efficiency. If that means cuts to content, or lay offs. So be it.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

If we can get back to normal after the plandemic, my group and I are planning on using hand drawn sprites similar to Daggerfall for our game. As that's much easier and cheaper to do than fully rendered 3D Goblin looking fuckers. And it will look really nice.

 

[Immortal]

Raytracing is such a fucking joke and devs pushing it should be euthanized, along with nvidia jews.

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

Define Ray Tracing without googling it..

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Raytracing is such a fucking joke and devs pushing it should be euthanized, along with nvidia jews.

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

Define Ray Tracing without googling it..

a rendering technique with a literal name: you trace rays of light to simulate the path of photons to generate the image. The simplest example is a forward ray tracing renderer where you trace the rays from the light source to the point of reflection to the eye-point.
Ray-tracing in terms of modern games typically means only ray-traced reflections.
haha you totally got me it's not like I've been programming for decades and have written my own toy ray trace renderers haha

 

[Immortal]

haha you totally got me it's not like I've been programming for decades and have written my own toy ray trace renderers haha

Pfbfbfbfbf Cringe.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

haha you totally got me it's not like I've been programming for decades and have written my own toy ray trace renderers haha

Pfbfbfbfbf Cringe.

yes, you are

 

[JarlFrank]

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

If we can get back to normal after the plandemic, my group and I are planning on using hand drawn sprites similar to Daggerfall for our game. As that's much easier and cheaper to do than fully rendered 3D Goblin looking fuckers. And it will look really nice.

Depends on how detailed the 3D models would be, and how much animation is involved.

3D models with a mid-00s look to them would be cheaper to animate than detailed 2D sprites, especially if you make an RPG with variable equipment slots that show up on characters paper-doll style.

 

[Serious_Business]

The problem is simple, there is a massive bubble on the financial markets around the globe while non financial, real world companies profits are mediocre to bad, meaning, there is no real growth going around. The european and US goverments are trying to fix the problem and avoiding a deflationary depression caused by the bad real world economy, adding a ton of money to the market to "estimulate" the companies, worse, the goverments take interest rate to near zero or negative in real interest terms, that means, a lot of money that would go to bonds or fixed income is diverted to the stock market instead, creating a stock market boom.

Financial companies, all of sudden, because of the low interest rates and liquidity injections, have massive amount of money that they shouldnt. Those guys know how to manage money but they dont have any clue how to make games. Those investment banks, pension funds and other companies would be buying US goverment bonds if those bonds werent so terribly shitty as they are right now, instead they are investing on video games.

Also, many real world companies have real problems to grow, a mining company, an agriculture company and traditional business have a hard time to grow when the real economy is actually suffering. A software company, however, is a very nebulous thing with abstract standards for sucess, actually right now, it is expected for software companies to spend years having losses. If you look to the S& P 500, the bulk of the valuation is carried by growth based software companies and not real world companies, this is dot com bubble on steroids.

This gives rise to pump and dump investing, the same thing that happened on 2001, what matters isnt the performance of the company over the long run, how consistent it is, how realistic and well made plans are but only one thing matters: growth. Its been this way at least since the dot com bust, 20 years of massive amounts of money that shouldnt be there going to the stock market. The only thing that matters is if the stock price is higher than it was when you bought the company.

So, the top guys come from financial markets and Wall Street, they arent CEOs that wanted to create a game company from the scratch and know video games. They being financial market guys, their demands are for growth at any cost in any way. So, the bureaucracy that actually controls those companies are happy to oblige but those financial guys have no clue how to make those games, then this bureaucracy exploiting this, acquire a life of its own, basically, the head (stock holders) are completely detached from the body (the corporate bureaucracy).

The bureaucracy, because only has some nebulous demands of growth coming from the top, dont have a long term plan for the company because those Wall Street guys at the top change all the time and because the CEO probably wont be there for long and is more worried about his career, shortsightness and corporate politics start spreading top to bottom because the idea of the company being an entity to survive the time and have a legacy disappear from the minds of those involved.

Worse, this is happening for 20 years, so it doesnt only affect large companies, executives hired from EA, Ubisoft, Activision, they all carry those bad habits to the companies that hire them. Also, smaller companies like CDPR see how the game is being played and wish to enter on the party, they dont have stabilished ips to milk like EA and Activision but they see how milking microtransactions is a really good growth strategy, so they start doing what other companies like We Work and Tesla do, pitching ideas that are too good to be true but that look like excellent growth opportunities and attract investment making their owners billionaires in short term.

Without huge amounts of money on the financial market, the nowdays gaming industry wouldnt be possible to sustain. Things will only change when the time comes for the debt cycle to turn and goverment printing money capacity is over stressed generating high real world prices inflation with interest rates raising sharply. Then the party will be over, most of those companies will die when all those 500 million dollars to finance GTA arent there anymore.

This is the only post that wasn't complete moralising reactionary nonsense in this thread. Gaming as an economic phenomenon obviously is well connected to the rise of financial capitalism, where production becomes abstract and the traditional productive economy is left behind. Indeed growth becomes and always was the goal, but the market answering "base needs" isn't enough anymore, and never in fact was for a very long time ; a capitalist economy must generate needs to stimulate growth. Obviously a crisis is coming, but we're already living it ; the crisis is structural and more or less permanent. If it had something to do with people being undisciplined pussies, well, that would be cute and nice, the problem would be easily solvable : just whip them into shape. That doesn't mean anything. People can be disciplined or not, that doesn't have any effect on how productive they actually are. Productive meaning in capitalist terms : how much they can make a profit. People who are adapted to long commited low-intensity repetitive work or worst, physical work, are effectively unproductive in today's economy, in a general sense. Meaning : they don't generate any profits. Effectively, your hard working "man's man" is today unproductive and more or less superfluous, his existence needs external sources of cash flow to be maintained as his "hard work" doesn't generate any profits. The primary economy, today, isn't doing much of anything "productive" ; certaintly it's still necessary, but it's not sustainable in itself. You need all the service, information and financial shit, and gaming is part of that. Everyone wants to have a part of this shitty pie, even the workers who in the end are exploited to make profits possible in the industry. If you feel like workers need to be exploited more to have moral fiber, fine, but that won't make better games. See Cyberpunk, for example. Wether or not a gaming company can maintain itself is hardly dependant on the discipline of its workers ; everything can be tossed away and quickly replaced, including the companies themselves. Discipline in gaming comes from feeling priviledged to "work with what you love", like everything corporate today. People don't feel like it's "work", so they keep going and going like complete idiots. That's necessary. The quality of the end product isn't proportionate to any of this.

 

[lycanwarrior]

The problem is simple, there is a massive bubble on the financial markets around the globe while non financial, real world companies profits are mediocre to bad, meaning, there is no real growth going around. The european and US goverments are trying to fix the problem and avoiding a deflationary depression caused by the bad real world economy, adding a ton of money to the market to "estimulate" the companies, worse, the goverments take interest rate to near zero or negative in real interest terms, that means, a lot of money that would go to bonds or fixed income is diverted to the stock market instead, creating a stock market boom.

Financial companies, all of sudden, because of the low interest rates and liquidity injections, have massive amount of money that they shouldnt. Those guys know how to manage money but they dont have any clue how to make games. Those investment banks, pension funds and other companies would be buying US goverment bonds if those bonds werent so terribly shitty as they are right now, instead they are investing on video games.

Also, many real world companies have real problems to grow, a mining company, an agriculture company and traditional business have a hard time to grow when the real economy is actually suffering. A software company, however, is a very nebulous thing with abstract standards for sucess, actually right now, it is expected for software companies to spend years having losses. If you look to the S& P 500, the bulk of the valuation is carried by growth based software companies and not real world companies, this is dot com bubble on steroids.

This gives rise to pump and dump investing, the same thing that happened on 2001, what matters isnt the performance of the company over the long run, how consistent it is, how realistic and well made plans are but only one thing matters: growth. Its been this way at least since the dot com bust, 20 years of massive amounts of money that shouldnt be there going to the stock market. The only thing that matters is if the stock price is higher than it was when you bought the company.

So, the top guys come from financial markets and Wall Street, they arent CEOs that wanted to create a game company from the scratch and know video games. They being financial market guys, their demands are for growth at any cost in any way. So, the bureaucracy that actually controls those companies are happy to oblige but those financial guys have no clue how to make those games, then this bureaucracy exploiting this, acquire a life of its own, basically, the head (stock holders) are completely detached from the body (the corporate bureaucracy).

The bureaucracy, because only has some nebulous demands of growth coming from the top, dont have a long term plan for the company because those Wall Street guys at the top change all the time and because the CEO probably wont be there for long and is more worried about his career, shortsightness and corporate politics start spreading top to bottom because the idea of the company being an entity to survive the time and have a legacy disappear from the minds of those involved.

Worse, this is happening for 20 years, so it doesnt only affect large companies, executives hired from EA, Ubisoft, Activision, they all carry those bad habits to the companies that hire them. Also, smaller companies like CDPR see how the game is being played and wish to enter on the party, they dont have stabilished ips to milk like EA and Activision but they see how milking microtransactions is a really good growth strategy, so they start doing what other companies like We Work and Tesla do, pitching ideas that are too good to be true but that look like excellent growth opportunities and attract investment making their owners billionaires in short term.

Without huge amounts of money on the financial market, the nowdays gaming industry wouldnt be possible to sustain. Things will only change when the time comes for the debt cycle to turn and goverment printing money capacity is over stressed generating high real world prices inflation with interest rates raising sharply. Then the party will be over, most of those companies will die when all those 500 million dollars to finance GTA arent there anymore.

This is the only post that wasn't complete moralising reactionary nonsense in this thread. Gaming as an economic phenomenon obviously is well connected to the rise of financial capitalism, where production becomes abstract and the traditional productive economy is left behind. Indeed growth becomes and always was the goal, but the market answering "base needs" isn't enough anymore, and never in fact was for a very long time ; a capitalist economy must generate needs to stimulate growth. Obviously a crisis is coming, but we're already living it ; the crisis is structural and more or less permanent. If it had something to do with people being undisciplined pussies, well, that would be cute and nice, the problem would be easily solvable : just whip them into shape. That doesn't mean anything. People can be disciplined or not, that doesn't have any effect on how productive they actually are. Productive meaning in capitalist terms : how much they can make a profit. People who are adapted to long commited low-intensity repetitive work or worst, physical work, are effectively unproductive in today's economy, in a general sense. Meaning : they don't generate any profits. Effectively, your hard working "man's man" is today unproductive and more or less superfluous, his existence needs external sources of cash flow to be maintained as his "hard work" doesn't generate any profits. The primary economy, today, isn't doing much of anything "productive" ; certaintly it's still necessary, but it's not sustainable in itself. You need all the service, information and financial shit, and gaming is part of that. Everyone wants to have a part of this shitty pie, even the workers who in the end are exploited to make profits possible in the industry. If you feel like workers need to be exploited more to have moral fiber, fine, but that won't make better games. See Cyberpunk, for example. Wether or not a gaming company can maintain itself is hardly dependant on the discipline of its workers ; everything can be tossed away and quickly replaced, including the companies themselves. Discipline in gaming comes from feeling priviledged to "work with what you love", like everything corporate today. People don't feel like it's "work", so they keep going and going like complete idiots. That's necessary. The quality of the end product isn't proportionate to any of this.

The "infinite growth" model is more likely an outcome from the debt-based financial system that is propped up by the Central Banks.

Even Adam Smith (godfather of capitalism) did not believe unlimited growth was possible due to geographic constraints, saturation and limited resources.

 

[Nutria]

3D models with a mid-00s look to them would be cheaper to animate than detailed 2D sprites, especially if you make an RPG with variable equipment slots that show up on characters paper-doll style.

This was one of the most surprising revelations from Chris Avellone's May of Rage for me. He said they had to strictly limit the number and types of weapons in Planescape: Torment because it was too expensive to draw the sprites. At that time, I guess I had this naive idea that if the hardware for 3D is more expensive then the development must be too. But I guess one of the reasons why everything went 3D at that time was actually to save money?

 

[J_C]

I'd rather play a good game with stick figures than shitty games with raytracing

Let me blow your mind. I'd rather play a good game with raytracing than a shitty game with raytracing.

 

[JarlFrank]

3D models with a mid-00s look to them would be cheaper to animate than detailed 2D sprites, especially if you make an RPG with variable equipment slots that show up on characters paper-doll style.

This was one of the most surprising revelations from Chris Avellone's May of Rage for me. He said they had to strictly limit the number and types of weapons in Planescape: Torment because it was too expensive to draw the sprites. At that time, I guess I had this naive idea that if the hardware for 3D is more expensive then the development must be too. But I guess one of the reasons why everything went 3D at that time was actually to save money?

Yes, 3D is in fact MUCH cheaper than 2D depending on tech level, especially today. A decent-quality 3D asset (decent meaning not top notch AAA with 50 different shaders applied to it and ten billion polygons, but something that looks like it could have been in Half Life 2) may be a little more expensive than a decent-quality 2D asset, BUT it's way more flexible. Infinitely more flexible.

With a 2D object, you have to manually draw every variation of it. Want a chair that has two directions, front and back? That's two chairs that have to be drawn by the artist. To save costs, isometric games had object and character sprites only drawn in two directions, front and back, and then mirrored them for left and right. That's why in games like Arcanum you have this weird quirk of characters holding their weapon either in their left or right hand depending on which direction they're looking into: the left-facing sprite is just a mirror of the right-facing one.

Meanwhile with a 3D object, you make it once and you can rotate it into any direction you want. You can also easily stick them together and combine them, and you can easily animate them. Let's say you have an RPG with equipment visible on your character. Any clothes, armor, and weapons you equip on your character can easily be placed on the 3D model. And you can use a downscaled version of the model that appears on the character as the inventory icon. And with modern tech you can even add some fun visual effects like the cloth of a skirt or a cloak moving around as you walk. Wanna do that with 2D art? Yeah that's a LOT of spritework your artist needs to create. These days there's some methods to do modular stuff with 2D art too, but it's still much easier in 3D.

Anything related to animations, viewing objects from multiple directions, and layering visible equipment over a moving entity is much easier to do in 3D.

 

[Vormulak]

They're actually meant to, since it works with muscle memory unlike normal menus.

No they arent. Not in the way they are fanning and are selected in Toee/Nwn. It defeats the whole purpose.
You see multiple levels in modern consolitis shooters done right. Flick right, flick up - as an example.

People like Vormulak and Gregz are too dumb to realize that structure and logic with all options available at all times in the same places are the peak of control. Its not a coincidence that aircraft cockpits looks overloaded.

>he unironically wants to got through this shit every single time he wants to use a spell
No thanks nigga, I'd rather use the radial dial menu with the optional full sized menu for when i wanna switch out spells, scrolls, potions etc.

 

[Mustawd]

You average business software doesn't require army of people

What? You saying MS Excel is 3 Indian dudes in Seattle?

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Elon Musky, the Chris R of the software wurld, waiting for patch 3.14 with world sharding!

December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."

January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"

June 2016: "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year," Musk said.

March 2017: "I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a tesla] is about two years"

March 2018: "I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person."

Nov 15, 2018: "Probably technically be able to [self deliver Teslas to customers doors] in about a year then its up to the regulators"

Feb 19 2019: "We will be feature complete full self driving this year. The car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I'm certain of that. That is not a question mark. It will be essentially safe to fall asleep and wake up at their destination towards the end of next year"

April 12th 2019: "I'd be shocked if not next year, at the latest that having the person, having human intervene will decrease safety. DECREASE! (in response to human supervision and adding driver monitoring system)"

April 22nd 2019: "We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year."

April 22nd 2019: “We will have more than one million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything."

May 9th 2019: "We could have gamed an LA/NY Autopilot journey last year, but when we do it this year, everyone with Tesla Full Self-Driving will be able to do it too"

Dec 1, 2020: “I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. But I think at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year.”

Even with delays, that's an amazing time scale for the development for a self driving car.

 

[DeepOcean]

Are you a programmer? Dont have an artist friend to carry your artistic challenged person?Dont worrry, go for 3d, learn shader math and some procedural texture generation methods, those complex subjects will fit right on your autistic brain and you wont need to touch a pencil to save your life. There is alot of lighting and post processing tricks to make your shittty low poly 3d look organic and besides, maybe you are an ugly mothefucker, but at distance, everyone is beautiful, so you dont need 2d to make an iso game look decent for example.

Are you an artist? Did you avoid all math classes and dont know what a Vector is or dont wish to learn? Go for pixel art. You will spend days drawing endless sprite sheets with thousands of sprites and will spend days doing frame by frame animation because you are a fag and want everything to look pretty. Sure, you spend days doing slightly different versions of the same thing that would make a normal human going slowly insane but at least you dont need to remember what scary stuff like what a cosine or a sine are.

Third option, have a good friend that you can afford to lose, that you can bamboozle into believing on your silly project ideas and that can do one of the two things above, well, eventually he will be sick of seeing your face, get demotivated and give up on your project when your promises of getting rich with niche RPGs that sell 5000 copies wont work out. But hey, at least he made something on the mean time right? Besides, you can always hire a lawyer for when his lawsuit comes.

Fourth option, have money and hire an artist that know that stuff, so, how to do it? "Hey mister artist, I wanna pay you chinese minimum wage style, deal?", artist: what you want? "I want AAA style complex 3d model with multiple texture layers or high resolution 2d digital painting quality art, deal?" Artist:"Fuck you, bye." So, if you gonna pay chinese minimum wage style, you can only expect chinese minimum wage results, so pixel art 32 bits and low poly, pray for Jesus for it to be good when you recieve the models back.

Fifth option: Abstract as much as you can and push the costs as much as possible for the player imagination, that is free, your dollars on your wallet are not.

In reality, you must do all of the five on some level.