How does this KEEP GETTING WORSE??
And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."
It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house, and that’s when devs decided we don’t get split screen anymore. Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house
Yeah I’ve noticed this too and it bothers me. We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs… But on modern 75+inch tvs on consoles with GBs of ram… Nah, too hard. You need to buy 4 copies of the game and have 4 separate setups… and probably need to be in 4 separate houses.
Couch co-op dying is basically when I stopped bothering with consoles all together. If I’m going to use a glorified PC, might as well just use a full fat PC and ignore consoles all together. I miss the N64 days.
We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs
And were still compute-bound. Things like the N64 pretty much used resources per pixel, mesh data being so light that the whole level could be in the limited RAM at the same time – and needed to be because there weren’t CPU cycles left over to implement asset streaming. Nowadays the only stuff that is in RAM is what you actually see, and with four perspectives, yes, you need four times the VRAM as every player can look at something completely different.
Sure you can write the game to use 1/4th the resources but then you either use that for singleplayer and get bad reviews for bad graphics, or you develop two completely different sets of assets, exploding development costs. I’m sure there also exist shady kitten-drowing marketing fucks who would object on reasons of “but hear me out, let’s just sell them four copies instead” but they don’t even get to object because production-wise split-screen isn’t an option nowadays for games which aren’t specifically focussing on that kind of thing. You can’t just add it to any random title for a tenner.
You know, a fun game doesn’t have to be built to use all available resources.
Aren’t you also effectively down-resing the 4 screens? You’re not running 4x 1080p streams, you’re running 540p, textures can be downscaled with no perceptual loss. Non-consoles are already designed to be adaptive to system resources, so I don’t see why you need two completely different sets of assets. (IANA dev)
Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
I think a lot of the blame is erroneously placed on devs, or it’s used as a colloquialism. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment as a developer knows that the developers are not the ones making the decisions. You really think that developers want to create a game that is bad, to have their name attached to something that is bad and to also know that they created something that is bad? No, developers want to make a good game, but time constraints and horrible management prioritizing the wrong things (mostly, microtransactions, monetizing the hell out of games, etc) results in bad games being created. Also, game development is more complex since games are more complex, hardware is more complex, and developers are expected to produce results in less time than ever before - it’s not exactly easy, either.
It’s an annoyance of mine and I’m sure you meant no harm by it, but as a developer (and as someone who has done game development on the side and knows a lot about the game development industry), it’s something that bothers me when people blame bad games solely on devs, and not on the management who made decisions which ended up with games in a bad state.
With that said, I agree with your sentiments about modern hardware not being able to take advantage of long-forgotten cool features like four-screen splitscreen, offline modes (mostly in online games), arcade modes, etc. I really wish these features were prioritized.
It’s not a question of capability. It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use.
Couch coop was a thing because there was no way for you to play from your own homes. Nowadays it’s a nice-to-have, because you can jump online any time and play together, anywhere in the world, without organizing everyone to show up at one house.
It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use
Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3
I would go back in time to 1995 and give John Carmack modern tools and maybe UE5 and see what happens.
Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn’t achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.
4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you’re looking at something sufficiently different than another player there’s going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game. Had they simply re-released the game that they already made, it wouldn’t be an issue. Us fans of the old games didn’t stop playing because the graphics got too bad. Even if we did, this weird half step towards updating the graphics doesn’t do anything for me. Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
My flatmates and I actually played through a galactic conquest campaign on the OG battlefront 2 like 2 months ago. It holds up.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.
How to tell me you’re not a gamedev without telling me you’re not a gamedev. You don’t just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.
Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.
So, different proposal: Don’t do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.
Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It’s texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that’s bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can’t be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.
