hirogdev

When you worked in games, how did your team deal with the unplanned scenarios where a feature, or even the core game, wasn’t fun and you needed to go back to the drawing board?

You’re completely missing the point I’m making - it’s nothing to do with how matchmaking works or how to get self-hosted servers to work.

Your quote about “every game before the mid 2000s” is just reinforcing what I’m trying to tell you: no modern PvP game can get away with it anymore.

The current average player who’s played any modern PvP game in recent memory expects to be able to click a PLAY button that puts them into a match. That is your default user experience expectation.

If you require players to have to dig through a server list like people had to during the pre-mid-2000s, you lose players FAST.

You dilute your player base by allowing people to play in self-hosted servers because your default user experience of clicking PLAY and getting into a game gets worse (less players means less diversity of player skill and longer queue times).

For a game and studio that has no existing reputation and players who will jump on their stuff, you don’t have the luxury of splitting your already potentially small player base.

Modern PvP games that allow you to have custom games are all well-established and already have a healthy player base.

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That’s why I specifically pointed out PvP.

While this sounds like a good idea, in the modern landscape of PvP games, it would never work.

Current player expectations for PvP games are now “click play, get into game”. Every layer of friction filters out players who don’t want to go through the hassle of being able to just play the game they bought.

It seems easy for you because you played multiplayer games in the 90s, but anyone born after that era will have to learn to filter through a megalist of servers with names like “BoB’s L33t S3rv3r”.

But let’s play devil’s advocate and say the devs could still add the self-hosted servers to their game in a couple different ways.

If devs added it to accompany the default matchmaking, there’s now the problem of their player base being siphoned away from the main matchmaking pool, which further destroys the default player experience.

If devs added self-hosted servers as a way to supplement their own matchmaking servers (e.g. officially hosted servers + player hosted servers), the player experience can now wildly vary depending on which server you connect to, especially since devs can’t guarantee the same experience on random Joe’s home ISP connection and server hardware.

There’s no winning for the devs. While your sentiment is valid, the practicality of doing it is not feasible anymore.

The sunsetting idea is good though and I wished that happened more too.

But how else will they sell you the same ‘remastered’ game 10 years from now?

Think of the corporations!

Genuine curiosity: are you a professional game developer?

Arco.

A recent and lesser known game - unique turn-based tactical combat, and a heart-wrenching story.

It’s all fun and games until the scammers use AI themselves to massively scale their operations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay

He absolutely deserved it.

Because many signing up for war are doing it for money due to the severe poverty they’re experiencing:

https://youtu.be/dVZjvOrJ0aM

I’m not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the “tricks” that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you’d still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!

Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.

Yes there is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Street value.

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Because the truth is worth knowing

This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.

What is the in the point in the truth in this article’s reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what’s ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to ‘chase the trend’? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn’t believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?

If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you’ve gleaned.

Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it’s bullshit.

But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

News like this doesn’t do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim “I can’t believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!”

All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.

The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.

Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.

Try and visit one of the underground city tours while you’re there: https://www.beneath-the-streets.com/ http://www.undergroundtour.com/

The first link is the newer tour company, which I haven’t tried myself, but I hear it’s the better experience.

Either way, it’s worth doing it at least once!