Project Warlock

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Chris
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Chris »

Graf Zahl wrote:The "problem" only occurs if some people think that a game that looks like from the 90's is supposed to run on hardware from the distant past as well.
By the same token, it does seem a bit incredulous that a game that looks like from the 90s requires hardware that rivals Witcher 3 (i3-3320 vs i5-2500, 4GB RAM vs 6GB RAM, GTX 560 vs GTX 660). It's one thing if the game actually needs and uses that power, but if it's just because the core engine requires it regardless of what the game itself needs, it's the kind of software bloat people regularly and rightly complain about in other areas.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Graf Zahl »

On the other hand, you cannot expect every hobbyist to write their own engine - and the commercial ones are made for today's hardware. For their developers it'd be uneconomical to target sub-par systems.

Don't forget that even GZDoom is constantly fighting with the needs of underpowered systems. Those who complain have really no idea how costly it is to support all this legacy hardware that's still floating around.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Vostyok »

It's not like those with low-powered systems are lacking in choice. We've got the last few decades of software designed for hardware that is a little... outdated. You can't expect modern programmers to cater for every system in operation.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by dpJudas »

Chris wrote:It's one thing if the game actually needs and uses that power, but if it's just because the core engine requires it regardless of what the game itself needs, it's the kind of software bloat people regularly and rightly complain about in other areas.
People complain about lots of things. It is a simple cost/benefit analysis - by not targeting obsolete hardware you save a lot of time/money. Supporting obsolete hardware is not cheap.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Apeirogon »

I did not mean "since it looks like doom it must run on doom hardware", no. I just surprised, in a bad way, that this game need same computing power as 4K 1080p 60fps nowadays games from industry giants.

Not to mention that nowadays AAA games have same, or similar, "picture" quality like a crysis or far cry 2. I mean, that games may be launched on core 2 duo cpu with geforce 8xxx instead of videocard, while nowadays games require i7-xxx and gtx 10xx. Why do they need such power, if "picture" left same as in ten years old game?
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Graf Zahl »

They do not need so much power, but they make use of graphics features which older hardware does not have. Just like you cannot use shadowmaps in GZDoom on graphics hardware from 2010. The cards simply do not implement what this feature needs.

That aside, the Geforce 560 is a mid-range card from 2011/2012, so anything this game cannot run on is either older than 6 years or a system that simply wasn't made to play games.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by wolfmanfp »

ramon.dexter wrote:Unity is good, modern opensource engine.
It's not open source.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Apeirogon »

Graf Zahl wrote: they make use of graphics features which older hardware does not have.
It cant be done using soft?
Computer is just a couple millions of transistors which show imps only because big mbwana gzdoom says how to do so. Or not all so simple?
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by wildweasel »

It's not that the Unity engine is the Only Engine That Can Do This Stuff, it's that Unity exists as a creation tool to handle all different kinds of things. It's meant to be an extremely versatile system with a lot of features, and while it stands to reason that not all of those features are going to be used in a given game, it's easier to assume that a computer will need at least enough horsepower to handle them. Even if the end result, aesthetically, looks like it came from 1995.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by NeuralStunner »

If i can go slightly more off-topic: If you're worried about machine requirements, have a look at ECWolf. Software renderer, modding features, practically runs on a microwave. There's already a commercial game on it. Sure, it's not as far along as ZDoom yet, but there's only a few people working on it part-time. It would be great if we could make this a standard.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Graf Zahl »

Apeirogon wrote: It cant be done using soft?
That's completely irrelevant here.
Developers target the systems in the market. If the majority of the market allows such high minimum specs for new games, developers won't bother and invest more time into lower settings, because very quickly the laws of diminshing returns kick in.

Normally it looks like you will get 80% of the market with a low effort on feature reduction. Invest a bit more time and you get 90%.
Double the effort and you get 95%. Double it again and you may get 97%. You see where it is going. Every next lower iteration of hardware capabilities will require a disproportionate increase of development time while targeting an ever decreasing segment of the market.

But wait, that's not all! Not only do the market segments get ever smaller for each increase in workload, but on top of that the chance of people owning such old clunker systems actually BUYING your stuff will also decrease! And as sad as it may be for someone stuck on an underpowered computer, that's economics. In the end you cannot expect others to spend the money scaling down their software while you as the target user are unwilling to spend it on upgrading your system. Whether that is due to a financial shortage or pure unwillingness to upgrade is of no concern to the developers.

From my own experience in the field I can tell that those who are unwilling to invest into their hardware are exactly the kind of customers a small scale developer does not want. Not only do they increase primary development costs but also secondary costs like customer service, etc., because their systems are the most likely ones to exhibit problems.

So the solution is simple: Exclude them by setting the system requirements high enough so that they are left out. It both saves on development time and cost, but also reduces the need for further spendings on maintenance.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Rachael »

That is one of the most conservative positions that I've ever seen Graf take, but I nevertheless fully agree. It all makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way.

As shown by some of our past users (emphasis past), the ones who refuse to upgrade also tend to be the most stubborn and cause the most problems when they infiltrate a community. The prevailing attitude is "I have this system, I've had it for years, why can't it do the things I want it to do? Why do I have to constantly upgrade? Why are YOU making ME buy a new system every 5 years?"

And the answer to that is - sorry, but electronic computers are very young. From a historical standpoint you're literally on the bleeding edge of technology - which opens the door to constant innovation and changes. The same thing happened 100 years ago when electricity first started becoming common (right along with people electrocuting themselves and burning down their homes). In those times, the aesthetics of a home were literally radically different even just from one decade to the next, and you constantly had to buy new things in order to stay up to date with the latest and greatest. It even took time for power grids to become standardised - before that, you couldn't even move an electrical appliance from one power provider to another just one city over because their current output settings were different. And let's not talk about how you literally plugged everything into your light socket. Not all innovation is bad! - but imagine how inconvenienced you were that you kept having to buy all new appliances every time you moved to keep up with the power grid changes until it became standardised.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Graf Zahl »

Rachael wrote: As shown by some of our past users (emphasis past), the ones who refuse to upgrade also tend to be the most stubborn and cause the most problems when they infiltrate a community. The prevailing attitude is "I have this system, I've had it for years, why can't it do the things I want it to do? Why do I have to constantly upgrade? Why are YOU making ME buy a new system every 5 years?"

Yeah, that kind exactly. But nowadays 5 years doesn't mean that much anymore. My current computer is 6 years old, it only got its HD replaced with 2 SSDs and its graphics card upgraded over the years. And the old graphics card would most likely have been able to run that game anyway. I didn't even buy the most expensive stuff back then, the only item where I made no compromise was the CPU itself, but that also only cost €100 more than the average solution - money that was well invested in hindsight.

This should send a clear message to those who feel left behind: If even a mid-range system from 6 years ago can match the minimum specs of this game, what do you have? The first lesson for buying a gaming system is: Don't go cheap! If you go cheap you have lost the moment you boot your computer for the first time. In particular, laptops with integrated graphics chipsets are not made for gaming, their graphics hardware is far too weak for that. These days even an entry level card like the Geforce 1030 got enough performance to run any game at lowered settings - and when buying a laptop, just make sure it got a real graphics solution. These models are easy to detect because those which do not mention any graphics hardware have none, save for the low performance chipset inside their CPU.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Apeirogon »

Graf Zahl wrote: That's completely irrelevant here.
Developers target...
I did not ask "why nobody dont port new features to old hardware?", I asked "Is it possible to port new features to old hardware?". Its obvious that feature that new videocard can do natively from the box would require a lot of work from programmers to get same result at old videocard.
I was more indignant about "games dont use ALL available videocard power of a new generation, while refusing to work on videocard from previous generation, which powers fit exactly for such games".

Rachael wrote: As shown by some of our past users (emphasis past), the ones who refuse to upgrade also tend to be the most stubborn and cause the most problems when they infiltrate a community. The prevailing attitude is "I have this system, I've had it for years, why can't it do the things I want it to do? Why do I have to constantly upgrade? Why are YOU making ME buy a new system every 5 years?"
Its more about welfare of a such person than anything else.
For some one 800$, price of a "conditional average nowadays computer" TM, is a normal monthly expenses at chips/snacks/bubble gum/etc. while some one can live half of a year for this money(water/gas/light/food/go with the girlfriend to the restaurant/etc).
Rachael wrote: And the answer to that is - sorry, but electronic computers are very young. From a historical standpoint you're literally on the bleeding edge of technology...
They already 100 years old, if count from first actual, existing "in flesh", computer mark-1, and almost 200 years old if count from babbage engine, first actual computing machine.
And it already standardized, IBM PC architecture.

I remember I read somewhere that this "bleeding edge of technology" almost stopped in development because of limiting the minimum size of semiconductors. Something about border where quantum properties of an electron overcome its electrical properties and stuff. Like, you still can make transistor more compact, but it require more and more work to do so.
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Re: Project Warlock

Post by Graf Zahl »

Apeirogon wrote:
Graf Zahl wrote: That's completely irrelevant here.
Developers target...
I did not ask "why nobody dont port new features to old hardware?", I asked "Is it possible to port new features to old hardware?". Its obvious that feature that new videocard can do natively from the box would require a lot of work from programmers to get same result at old videocard.
I was more indignant about "games dont use ALL available videocard power of a new generation, while refusing to work on videocard from previous generation, which powers fit exactly for such games".
Again, it's irrelevant if it is possible or not. Today's middleware, which is the only reasonable target for small developers, does not target such systems anymore.
So while it could surely be done, the added work stands in no relation to the benefit.
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