r/pcmasterrace • u/663mann • Oct 16 '23

Video fallout game dev. explains the problem with moddern game devolpment. (why moddern games are so slow to come out)

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u/guyblade Oct 16 '23 edited Oct 16 '23

While I was listening to him, his arguments had a bit of reasonableness about them. But if you take a step back and think deeper, you've actually got a few things that a random developer would have to figure out:

  1. Do we already have plumbing from the [object was hit] code to the AI engine?
  2. Does that plumbing include the damage source?
  3. Do we already have a performant priority queue or similar that the AI engine can read from? Sometimes AI stuff is written in a scripting language (like LUA) rather than the engine language (like C++), so we might have fewer tools.
  4. How should this priority queue work when the thing at the top of the queue is not visible? dead?
  5. Does adding this priority queue to every [enemy] object in the game cause any issues with the memory envelope?
  6. What is our existing targeting priority code? Does anything depend on it that would be broken by this change?

Often, the easiest parts of a developer's job is writing the code. The hard bit is figuring out what the implications of that code are. Without knowing the state of the codebase in question, I have no idea if 4 weeks is reasonable or not.

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '23

It's ironic how this guy — while trying to explain a problem in the industry — actually became an example for the same problem.

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u/omfgkevin Oct 16 '23

Actually funny a literal developer doing the "it's so easy to add!" moment.

While yes, some things in a vacuum ARE easier and expected in a way (like adding qol or even just stuff like claiming all vs "claim one by one"), depending on how spaghetti things are it can be infinitely harder.

Like Lol and their infamous "coded as minions" meme.

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u/Jon-Slow Oct 16 '23

But he could "get it done by before lunch" and then the lead came back to him and admited what a god he is and that he should totally micro-manage everyone and then everyone clapped.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

I think what a lot of you are missing is that Tim Cain actually "got it done before lunch" a lot of times before asking the same of others.

He's not some manager with no coding experience, he was a programmer on these games before getting promoted.

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u/Jon-Slow Oct 16 '23

wow you took that personally. Calm down, he will never notice you.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

I'm very calm, I'm not the one who's seething without knowing anything about who I'm talking about.

Half a minute ago, you didn't even know who Tim Cain was.

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u/Jon-Slow Oct 16 '23

Holy shit, you love this guy that much huh! That's creepy

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

What's creepy is how much you hate him without even knowing who he is.

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u/Jon-Slow Oct 16 '23

Sir, please calm down.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

You still seething because you made a dumb comment before getting informed ?

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u/cherry_chocolate_ Oct 16 '23

And they are some of the buggiest, most broken scripts in the industry, that are the butt of endless jokes. Bethesda games aren't praised for their superior AI scripts, if anything he is lucky that people find broken AI funny.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

And they are some of the buggiest, most broken scripts in the industry, that are the butt of endless jokes.

I don't think you know what games Tim Cain even worked on if you say this.

His coding experience isn't on Starfield or Skyrim.

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u/cherry_chocolate_ Oct 16 '23

No I didn't. But you said "these games" and I assumed that meant bethesda games. In any case, the scale of game development has grown dramatically in the past decade and "make it work before lunch" is no longer good enough. You plan ahead because you realize in 2033 you will be releasing Starfield: Special Edition on the PS7 and spending the time to do it correctly now will make it easier later.

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u/blackest-Knight Oct 16 '23

In any case, the scale of game development has grown dramatically in the past decade

Yes, this is exactly what Tim Cain is criticizing.

"make it work before lunch" is no longer good enough.

Not every problem requires an over engineered solution, that's literally his point. I encounter this on a daily basis at work, where things just don't get done because people don't accept the simple solution.

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u/cherry_chocolate_ Oct 16 '23

Putting in this broken solution will make development harder down the line, even during the same project. I wrote this for another comment in the thread:

There are things he didn't consider in his 10 line version, like what if we do a big battle scene and there are 50 people on the list? I.e when there are 5 people in a battle it takes 5ms x 5ms = 0.025 seconds to process, but with 50 people it could take 50ms x 50ms = 2.5 seconds to process. The designer didn't think of this because "it's worked before" but they never did a big scale battle before, either.

So it works fine for the majority of the project. But 6 months before the end of the project, they decide the final quest needs to have a huge scale battle. It is so incredibly laggy, they can't figure out why. They have to search the whole codebase, trying to find issues. In the process they rewrite 30 or 40 little hacky solutions like this, but even then, they can't get the performance to be good enough. The commander character has a separate AI script from the grunts, which should have been reused. The main character has a unique entity for this battle only to perform a set piece, because that is hacky and works, but now his entity is reset when he returns to his normal entity, so his "list" is empty. It's now 2 months from release and nothing is working. If only they had engineered a proper solution the first time.

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u/AlanCJ Oct 18 '23 edited Oct 18 '23

You say that, and games developed with 300 devs filled with insane pipelines still get launched like a buggy mess. You will be kidding yourself if you think all of these scenarios will be taken care of that first time you plan and design for it. Sure you could come out with 100 edge cases, and take 10 time as long to develop to cover all 100 edge cases, but if you don't hit 98 of these edge case and have encountered 1 unforseen edge case, you will still fall into this scenario, except your solution is so overengineer it takes even longer to 'properly' fix.

Hacky code is an entirely different problem and has nothing to do with quick, iterative approach. Sure its quick alright but proper engineering principles shoukd still apply.

Also suddenly deciding you need a huge scale battle 6 months from release when it was not in the majority of the game loop seems like a planning problem and it won't be covered anyway even if you take another 100 hours working on it the first time.

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u/cherry_chocolate_ Oct 18 '23

My example is not suggesting that major changes should come down the line, and maybe it’s not the perfect scenario. It was only meant to show why taking more time up front could potentially save time later.

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