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Zaphod42 posted:E: How many modern games have "weird level design" to get around load times anyways? More than you'd think. Some are better at masking it than others but most games will do something to impede your movement or progress temporarily to give the game a chance to load without looking like that's what it's doing, and have clear dividing points within levels (e.g. a door or something that takes time to get through due to an unskippable animation and where assets on both sides of that obstacle have no interaction with each-other at all other than allowing you and likely only you to travel between them, if it's even 2-way). Think of every game that forces you down to a "walking" speed a few seconds before something major (and usually something you can't turn back from) happens, for example, or any futuristic game with an airlock. The Last of Us games have doorways separating areas (usually one-way) and there's always a cutscene of your player character slowly getting through the door (e.g. it's blocked and you need extra time to get through it, then there's an automatic cutscene of the character barricading the door behind them, stuff like that). It's probably worth having a look at the PS1 ports of some SNES-era Squaresoft games, because the data went from being very quickly accessible to very not quickly accessible it completely threw off the pace of those games where transitions in and out of battle, menus and new areas were originally a much faster affair. See also all the load screens that got introduced into PS1 versions of fighting games that were also a bad time for those games, it's a far worse experience playing those versions than it is to play the arcade or cartridge console versions of those games generally because the pacing is completely thrown off. Don't even get me started on Neo Geo MVS/AES versus Neo Geo CD, especially if you were running the single speed version. I'll also point out that if you go waaaay back to the DOS version of Mortal Kombat 3, if you had a low amount of RAM you would get pretty significant stutters with Shang Tsung because every time he would transform into a new character it would have to load data from the slow-in-those-days hard drives. You'd get stuttering during the transformation and usually some micro-stutters whenever a move was performed that generated a new audio clip. Exactly what you want in a competitive fighting game. DOS MK3 also had some specific coding where if you had 16 megs of RAM (obscenely expensive in those days) it would take like 20 seconds extra on boot and actually load all the character assets into RAM and then you'd have no stuttering with Shang Tsung. Also, if you didn't have the 16 megs of RAM, shortcuts would be made to certain friendships where ordinarily multiple characters would get loaded in, and instead you'd just have clones of the two characters you're currently playing as (you also see this done in the lower-end console ports of MK3 since those systems just aren't powerful enough to have that many unique characters processing at once). Essentially, going from cartridges to optical discs meant one problem (very low storage capacity) was traded for another (very long load times), remember Nintendo had really cold feet about transitioning to optical drives because it would require some pretty significant changes to game design that they weren't ready to transition to. The PS5 is actually going to be the first time we have very long load times paired with very high storage capacity as a normal thing, that's a pretty massive change in how things can be designed. In theory, designing the new R&C around slower platter drives or SATA SSDs would necessitate a change in how travelling through the portals works (e.g. making it a "tunnel" that lasts a few seconds or longer) and would kill some of the design elements that work around the transition being that fast and smooth. Zaphod42 posted:GTA and Spiderman manage to stream very well. GTA5 is a PS3/360 era game and it specifically did not stream very well on those systems if all the data was ran from one place, bad pop-in was just the start of problems. A few times on my PS3 digital version I drove fast enough that I got into "grey void" territory; the disc version was the only version that operated correctly on PS3 because it could pull data from the Blu-ray and the 8 gig install on the hard drive at the same time, giving it extra bandwidth over the PS3's notoriously-slow internal drive system. The 360 version had explicit instructions that you shouldn't install the play disc's data to the same drive you put the install disc data on, and that the digital version should have half its data put on a USB drive and half to another drive (either a 2nd USB or the internal hard drive). At some point one or more software engineers (that thing you are) had to figure out how to most efficiently divvy up the game's data into two halves to mitigate issues when someone's travelling around, especially if they're doing so in a fast vehicle. In a similar vein, it's possible to have an external drive on both PS4 and XB1 that's slower than the stock drive (especially 5tb+ 2.5" external drives where only USB is hooked up and there's no Y splitter or external power source), and weird things can happen when running games from those drives. Most commonly, audio will get desynced from lip movements in cutscenes, but other weird things can happen because the loading isn't working as well as it should and can lead to crashes or softlocks in extreme circumstances that wouldn't happen with a faster drive or the stock internal drive. I'll say Infamous: Second Son streams very well too, but part of that is that they specifically capped the travel speed with the "neon" running to the maximum speed at which the PS4 could keep up with loading new assets in; they explicitly said this in interviews on the subject. That was a bottleneck and they had to compromise for it. Spider-Man streams well but you also can only travel so fast in that game. They specifically demoed how fast you could move through the Spider-Man map on a PS5 in the first tech demo they showed and it wouldn't surprise me if they leveraged that somehow for Miles Morales. There's also that one game that was announced in one of the Xbox streams whose name I don't remember that lets you travel between two parallel worlds but that's working by running both versions of the world at once and both being active in RAM (i.e. the "game" proper is using less than the full amount of RAM and resources a game like it can theoretically use if the second world didn't exist). We currently have two things that we know can leverage the extra speed: the "portal" travel in Ratchet & Clank (loading, streaming, whatever you want to be pedantic about calling it, it's able to get Ratchet from one world to the next very quickly and that will be required within the gameplay design), and very fast travel across an open world area (we saw a quick Spider-Man map tech demo but don't have any confirmation that it's being used in Miles Morales or how exactly this would manifest itself if it were). I'm pretty boring and not a game designer of any stature, but off the top of my head I'm imagining a Superman game where you can legit travel across Metropolis faster than a speeding bullet. So, for example, Superman uses his super-hearing and can tell Lois Lane is falling off a building yet again somewhere across town and is able to zip across town very fast (like "crossing the entire Spider-man map in 5 seconds or thereabouts" fast) and grab her using his super-speed. Or we can port Superman 64 and make the rings more spread out with even tighter timing required.  Other ideas could include more aggressive fighting game shenanigans, like being able to have a continuous uninterrupted "ladder" fight involving dozens of different characters because their assets can be loaded that quickly. Like it would be pretty cool to see a "winner stays on" style tournament where there is literally no break between matches or something similar. It would also be nice if Tekken 7 wasn't so goddamn slow between matches, again this is a pacing issue where the game still technically works but you wind up with more downtime (loading, capped travel speed, unskippable cutscene you've seen a million times) than you should. Again, this is new territory and I'm pretty sure game designers everywhere are brainstorming what kind of things they want to do now that they have this level of speed and how that can be implemented as a fun and fair gameplay mechanic for whatever they want to put together.
univbee fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 14:23
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Blind Rasputin posted:The Xbox thread really making the PS5 the smarter purchase. This thread ain't so hot right now but I find it funny that every page of the PS4 thread is about bloodborne. For years on end.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:12
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As someone who owns just a PS4 that gets very old. Just pages and pages of SoulsBorne chat
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Aug 28, 2020 15:13
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cos they're good
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Aug 28, 2020 15:13
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FlamingLiberal posted:As someone who owns just a PS4 that gets very old. Just pages and pages of SoulsBorne chat How do you feel about the Yakuza series?
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Aug 28, 2020 15:24
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Bloodborne is where I finally admitted Fromsoft had not intentionally made a game I loved and I gave up ever buying their stuff again.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:31
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BisterdDave posted:How do you feel about the Yakuza series?
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Aug 28, 2020 15:37
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univbee posted:More than you'd think. Some are better at masking it than others but most games will do something to impede your movement or progress temporarily to give the game a chance to load without looking like that's what it's doing, and have clear dividing points within levels (e.g. a door or something that takes time to get through due to an unskippable animation and where assets on both sides of that obstacle have no interaction with each-other at all other than allowing you and likely only you to travel between them, if it's even 2-way). Think of every game that forces you down to a "walking" speed a few seconds before something major (and usually something you can't turn back from) happens, for example, or any futuristic game with an airlock. The Last of Us games have doorways separating areas (usually one-way) and there's always a cutscene of your player character slowly getting through the door (e.g. it's blocked and you need extra time to get through it, then there's an automatic cutscene of the character barricading the door behind them, stuff like that). 
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Aug 28, 2020 15:59
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Look tell me that ssds/loading don't effect gameplay after you die to a tree because you were going too fast and it didn't load it in time and you couldn't see it before you clipped it.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:03
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Ineffiable posted:Look tell me that ssds/loading don't effect gameplay after you die to a tree because you were going too fast and it didn't load it in time and you couldn't see it before you clipped it. Yeah, I generally crashed into an invisible thing in GTA5 on PS3 when that happened. Had to stop and wait a few seconds for the world to catch up. This is someone having a major PC issue with the PC version. The PS3 issues were more pronounced but this gives an idea.  Also here's BOTW's loading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lccL3WuP25I&t=43s
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Aug 28, 2020 17:17
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univbee posted:More than you'd think. Some are better at masking it than others but most games will do something to impede your movement or progress temporarily to give the game a chance to load without looking like that's what it's doing, and have clear dividing points within levels "Most" ? That's not very scientific. MOST games this doesn't even apply to. Football games, basketball games, racing games, beat em up games, etc. etc. etc. the vast lion's share of all genres wouldn't even benefit. We're talking a subset of open-world games at most. There are a lot of RPGs out there, but not THAT many compared to all the other games of all the other genres. And even of those, games like Spiderman, GTA, they don't have walls to impede progress, other than loading screens when you leave the overworld. The whole mass effect elevator loading screens thing didn't go over so well, plenty of games still use hard loading screens and people are generally fine with it. univbee posted:Essentially, going from cartridges to optical discs meant one problem (very low storage capacity) was traded for another (very long load times), remember Nintendo had really cold feet about transitioning to optical drives because it would require some pretty significant changes to game design that they weren't ready to transition to. The PS5 is actually going to be the first time we have very long load times paired with very high storage capacity as a normal thing, that's a pretty massive change in how things can be designed. They also liked that businesses had to buy cartridges from them and piracy was much, much harder with cartridges. Its not nearly that simple of a black/white issue as you're making it out to be. And that's what I was saying about all this. With a tech demo this sounds great but when it comes to actual game design, there are SO many more factors than just speed of your HDD/SSD or loading speeds. So for some few games, Spiderman, Ratchet and Clank, GTA5, there will be improvements from this. (But only if they target PS5 specifically, so ... maybe not GTA5 after all, but the other two) Other games though? Not necessarily. There's so many other bottlenecks to consider, let alone do you even have the art department and budget to produce a game at open world scale where everything is as detailed as to make that even necessary. Plenty of other developers would just find other ways to go about the problem. univbee posted:GTA5 is a PS3/360 era game and it specifically did not stream very well on those systems if all the data was ran from one place Yes but it runs absolutely butter smooth on a PC with an SSD which was kinda the context of the conversation. Comparing PC standards to PS5 and all that. See this is the problem is Stux and I kinda had this nebulous argument about 5 different things and now people are sniping into random parts of the conversation, and trying to talk about all this at once like its a simple yes/no issue is pointless. All of these things are complex and aren't simple. The effects they'll have and how they can be utilized are complex and not straightforward. univbee posted:We currently have two things that we know can leverage the extra speed: the "portal" travel in Ratchet & Clank (loading, streaming, whatever you want to be pedantic about calling it, it's able to get Ratchet from one world to the next very quickly and that will be required within the gameplay design), and very fast travel across an open world area (we saw a quick Spider-Man map tech demo but don't have any confirmation that it's being used in Miles Morales or how exactly this would manifest itself if it were). I'm pretty boring and not a game designer of any stature, but off the top of my head I'm imagining a Superman game where you can legit travel across Metropolis faster than a speeding bullet. So, for example, Superman uses his super-hearing and can tell Lois Lane is falling off a building yet again somewhere across town and is able to zip across town very fast (like "crossing the entire Spider-man map in 5 seconds or thereabouts" fast) and grab her using his super-speed. Or we can port Superman 64 and make the rings more spread out with even tighter timing required. My whole point was both of those things are technically loading. There's not a single gameplay example other than fast loading. And fast loading is cool, but its not THAT cool. Its not game changing. Yes, being able to leap across all of metropolis would be cool for an open world superman game. But... I can already do that in Saint's Row. or GTA5. Having a tiny bit less pop-in versus a PC SSD is cool, but not gonna sell systems on its own. I'm not sure that potential one second hitch is such a big deal, and also on the developer side of things I'm not sure it really saves them all that much work like y'all are making it out to be. Open world games are already possible, so this doesn't really change gameplay in any way, it just slightly alleviates a bottleneck and allows for more detail. More detail is great, but when we're already at high res textures and rendering at 4k, you get massive diminishing returns. Your average gamer, is he gonna really care so much if there's a couple games that have no pop in at all instead of a tiny bit of pop in? I mean most layman gamers don't notice the difference between 30fps or 60fps and don't care about things like screen space reflections.  We'll see though, I'd love to be surprised by some new breakthrough. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 17:33
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i mean basically every single player game uses masked loading screens lol
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Aug 28, 2020 17:59
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I laughed big time during the Unreal 5 PS5 demo when the character had to shimmy through a narrow crevice.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Yes but it runs absolutely butter smooth on a PC with an SSD which was kinda the context of the conversation. That's usually what happens when you're running a game originally built for consoles made in 2005 on a current high-end PC, yes.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:10
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Quantum of Phallus posted:I laughed big time during the Unreal 5 PS5 demo when the character had to shimmy through a narrow crevice. That was basically an in-joke.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:23
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they were trying to show off the audio but ya it was really poorly thought out when it's short-hand for hidden loading screen
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Aug 28, 2020 18:31
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univbee posted:That's usually what happens when you're running a game originally built for consoles made in 2005 on a current high-end PC, yes. wrt corridors - it even influences open world map design. Arkham City and Origins had their maps clearly divided into two parts with a really narrow space to travel between them, Rage had alleys with several turns dividing chunks of the world, Shadow of the Tomb Raider has a hilarious knee-deep mud puddle on the north exit out of Kuwaq Yaku that will still force a stop if you enter it from a jump.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:37
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Battletoads is not very fun
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Aug 28, 2020 19:02
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Who’s your favorite ’toad?
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Aug 28, 2020 19:04
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Zitz has my fav moves but otherwise no pref
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Aug 28, 2020 19:15
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Real hurthling! posted:Battletoads is not very fun Nah  but the originals are still goodEl_Elegante posted:Who’s your favorite ’toad? Definitely Rash. Them shades dude  He's also basically the Michelangelo of the group.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:15
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Red Warrior posted:That was basically an in-joke. Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:they were trying to show off the audio but ya it was really poorly thought out when it's short-hand for hidden loading screen So which was it? It was almost assuredly hiding a load screen. It was just a tech demo so I'm sure they still had some old limitations.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:21
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It's worse actually. Devs have gotten so used to it that they just think it's a part of gameplay that gamers enjoy.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:24
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Quantum of Phallus posted:I laughed big time during the Unreal 5 PS5 demo when the character had to shimmy through a narrow crevice. I got told off on Twitter by noted cool games person John Linneman for making fun of that.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:25
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BonoMan posted:So which was it? American McGay posted:It's worse actually. Devs have gotten so used to it that they just think it's a part of gameplay that gamers enjoy. use game design shortcuts for long enough you trick yourself into thinking that's the gold standard
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Aug 28, 2020 19:33
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I bet it's extremely tempting to record shimmying mocap to shape some crevices around if only because it makes animation systems look more responsive to the environment than they really are
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Aug 28, 2020 19:39
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Walking slowly through corridors as you talk on the radio or contorting your body to get through tight spaces is all a well deserved downtime after heavy doses of PURE GAMING.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:46
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:ya that's pretty much it, if you watch the unreal 5 reveal they were talking about the improvements to audio during the segment as they transitioned to showing the wall up close and how it affected acoustics I'm not sure, after following games even remotely, why you would just take their word for it. You think they honestly just made a gaffe like that? Or more likely that it was to hide some loading and they ret-conned it with some flowerly language about showing off the audio?
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Aug 28, 2020 20:14
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because it makes no sense for your ps5 tech demo to need a lengthy loading segment when we already know whats in there and how it works.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:36
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Stux posted:because it makes no sense for your ps5 tech demo to need a lengthy loading segment when we already know whats in there and how it works. Huh? My point is that, even working on a dev kit or whatever - and considering UE5 is still in the works - that it's possible they ran into a tech limitation they needed to bypass temporarily (with the idea that it should work fine on release). edit: I mean the idea that they used the most common load-hiding maneuver right before going to a big new area but it was just an accident and was actually supposed to just show close-up details just seems really unlikely to me. In the end it doesn't matter, but I am a little surprised at the just instant "welp that solves it it was an accident" from all the articles read. Like... what about past game development has ever lead to taking a dev at face value? BonoMan fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:39
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BonoMan posted:Huh? My point is that, even working on a dev kit or whatever - and considering UE5 is still in the works - that it's possible they ran into a tech limitation they needed to bypass temporarily (with the idea that it should work fine on release). it was a tech demo specifically designed to run on the ps5, so theres no technical reason they would need a loading screen there at all. if you can suggest what the technical limitation would be when we've already seen actual games running that seem to have no problem loading full scenes instantly, that would probably help your case.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:44
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Stux posted:it was a tech demo specifically designed to run on the ps5, so theres no technical reason they would need a loading screen there at all. if you can suggest what the technical limitation would be when we've already seen actual games running that seem to have no problem loading full scenes instantly, that would probably help your case. I don't have any specific limitation that I can think of I'll admit. But I just figured since both things are still in the works - and given that Unreal Engine is designed for so much more than games now-a-days, I just figured it's possible two in development architectures aren't 100% polished. And what games have we seen running this scene in the UE5 eninge? edit: I'm also going to refer to my edit above your post which was: quote:edit: I mean the idea that they used the most common load-hiding maneuver right before going to a big new area but it was just an accident and was actually supposed to just show close-up details just seems really unlikely to me. In the end it doesn't matter, but I am a little surprised at the just instant "welp that solves it it was an accident" from all the articles read. Like... what about past game development has ever lead to taking a dev at face value? edit 2: I'll also point out I don't care one way or the other. It's still impressive. And I'm fine with being wrong. Just that I've learned never to trust anybody in video games. BonoMan fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:46
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BonoMan posted:I'm not sure, after following games even remotely, why you would just take their word for it. You think they honestly just made a gaffe like that? Or more likely that it was to hide some loading and they ret-conned it with some flowerly language about showing off the audio? BonoMan posted:Huh? My point is that, even working on a dev kit or whatever - and considering UE5 is still in the works - that it's possible they ran into a tech limitation they needed to bypass temporarily (with the idea that it should work fine on release). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw&t=201s okay strictly speaking it was a combination of up-close details, sound, lighting, and their effects system, but you should get my point. i just don't see why there would need to be a hidden loading screen to cover that change compared to 7:47 in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw&t=467s this is less about taking devs at their words and more about how the practicals of the engine shown don't line up with the suspicions people have about it. i'm not going around reading dev interviews after the event, that was my impression from the first watch and people talking about it being a hidden loading screen looked insane to me then as well
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Aug 28, 2020 21:25
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:well it was a transition from a small cave, through that alcove, and then into a larger outcropping where they scale before exploring the much larger and detailed environment. just before going through they're talking about the audio features they've been working on, listen at 3:21 here: Well I figured the bloom was hiding something there as well and it didn't start asset streaming until you got closer to it (at which point it de-blooms to show a properly filled scene)  It's fine. I just think I've been taught to be suspicious of tech demos and I'll just have to see it to believe it to be honest.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:34
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For some reason Tell Me Why is making me feel really nostalgic for my childhood in a way few things do.
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Aug 29, 2020 01:57
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i mean it still was something specifically for ps5 and most ue5 engine games will end up being multiplatform inc pc, so it might not be something we actually see a ton from ue5 itself as most ps5 exclusives are first party and sony have plenty of inhouse engines to use
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Aug 29, 2020 02:17
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Also I swear to goodness it leaked somewhere that the UE5 demo was at a 780 meg data rate, so not even close to the full power of what a PS5 much less a SeX can bring
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Aug 29, 2020 06:24
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UnfortunateSexFart posted:This thread ain't so hot right now but I find it funny that every page of the PS4 thread is about bloodborne. For years on end. People would talk about those great xbox exclusives too if it had any
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Aug 29, 2020 06:41
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I played battletoads (fail) and grounded (survival early access no point playing for a year or more until updates cause all its got now is bad minecraft style combat) this week and im hoping wasteland 3 is good now cause i cant run fs2020 on my decent computer at any sort of stable frame rate with urban detail on the ground on low settings Thank you microsoft for this feast of gaming. Wasteland 3 does look like a huge step up for inexile even tho its nowhere near what larian is putting out it seems impressive from where the last entry was in terms of quality and im excited yo give it a fair shot when i have time for a high concentration game Real hurthling! fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 29, 2020 07:17
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Hello, I have an opinion. Halo 5 Warzone is fantastic. Goodbye.
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Aug 29, 2020 19:38
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