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Devnotes Tuesday: A week after the release!


SQUAD

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My two pence: A "couple" technically means 2, 2 people make a "couple", you "couple" two things together.

However, it conveys a certain sense of uncertainty, its something you say if you aren't quite certain enough to say "two".

I can easily justify using the word "couple" to mean "three of", harder to justify 4, but I think to me it mostly means "2-ish".

 

Do we know they were actually on *vacation* and weren't say, working on other things at their employers behest? A vacation from the project, so-to-speak? I only say this because not only can I only but dream of taking 3 weeks off in a row, but a whole team taking it at once? Not ridiculous by any means, just unusual to my eyes.

 

It beggars belief though, the way that some think that someones holiday is their business.

Is it unusual for a released software to be as buggy as KSP, unfortunately I'd have to say yes, but KSP is FAR (yes, I'll take that pun) from a "normal" "game". You want bug free, you can go play EA's current blockbuster.

I've got plenty of big-name games that run super-smooth, but for sooooome reason I keep on coming back to KSP. I wonder what it could be?

 

*edit*

 

3 minutes ago, Padishar said:

(if they didn't seem to be allergic to posting admissions of their flaws).

I don't mean to be confrontational at all, but you don't run a business do you?

Peace!

 

Edited by p1t1o
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1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

I don't mean to be confrontational at all, but you don't run a business do you?

No, I don't, but I'm pretty certain it would actually improve their image in a number of cases.

In addition to this, I will say that I have publicly posted, on behalf of the company I work for, both apologies for having previously given out incorrect information on the company sponsored forum, and admissions that certain areas of the company's software perform significantly worse than they should and we will try to address them as soon as is practical.  These have only ever improved the image of the company and myself in the eyes of our users...

Edited by Padishar
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1 hour ago, Kobymaru said:

In some situations, the game runs about 8 times faster than before. I really don't know what you expect here.

Two points: 1. I see nothing like "8x faster". 2 or 3x would be more accurate.
2. The vast majority of the work for 1.1 would be porting code to work on the new engine - that code can be (and likely is) just as poorly optimised as it was before, it will still run better - because the engine is now more efficient.
IMO, much of the credit for this supposed "8x faster" should be going to Unity3D... the ones who optimised the game engine and integrated the new PhysX version. Sure, porting KSPs to run on this new engine is a bunch of work, but I suspect that ~90% of the performance improvement we see is due to the new engine itself, not optimisation of Squads code.
 

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Just now, smjjames said:

@p1t1o They can do what they want on their vacation really. And yeah, I thought they had said two weeks, but it's a vacation that they really needed.

I didn't mean to imply anything at all negative, did I do that? I meant to imply that it is no business of mine/ours what they do on their time off, nor when they take it, if they want to/are able to have three weeks off, go for it!

Frankly, even if they were in the middle of a developments cycle with tons of unresolved issues, they'd *still*, IMO, be entitled to take vacation. As long as their boss OKs it and they have the leave to spare, what business is it of mine? Taking three weeks off now is three weeks they CANT take off later (unless Mexico is the land of unlimited annual leave, which I doubt). Annual leave is a part of your salary, I cant complain about their financial choices with their spending money and I cant complain if they take holiday.

It'd be like me writing to their employer with suggested pay adjustments based on how good I think KSP is. It would be just irrelevant.

Heck, I'm not even unhappy with their work, but the above is still my point. Deserved holiday or not, its their holiday to take.

Oops I ranted a bit, sorry!

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5 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Frankly, even if they were in the middle of a developments cycle with tons of unresolved issues, they'd *still*, IMO, be entitled to take vacation. As long as their boss OKs it and they have the leave to spare, what business is it of mine? Taking three weeks off now is three weeks they CANT take off later (unless Mexico is the land of unlimited annual leave, which I doubt). Annual leave is a part of your salary, I cant complain about their financial choices with their spending money and I cant complain if they take holiday.

I'd agree with this if it was about one or two employees taking a vacation.  Having the entire company do so all at once, especially at a critical time like this, was a bad idea though.  Especially when they knew there still major issues like the game frequently crashing.  At the very least, keep a couple people around who can fix any serious issues like this and let them have their vacation later.

And as long as you're being at least somewhat reasonable about it, I think when you buy a product, you DO have a right to complain about things like this if the product is not working the way it's supposed to.  You shouldn't be rude about it or expect that every little detail will be EXACTLY the way you personally want it, but when they release a major update like this and then disappear for close to a month, leaving game-breaking issues unresolved, I think you at least have the right to politely say, "Hey, this probably wasn't such a good idea..:"  When something has this much of a negative impact on something that we paid money for, yes it DOES become our business.

Not to mention that an update like this will be bringing in a lot of new players and I certainly don't think they want THIS to be the first experience those new players have with the game.

Edited by Hodari
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7 minutes ago, Hodari said:

<snip>

I see what you are saying, but for me, this is the best KSP has ever been. Luckily I don't use wheels that often...

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I think that most people who are angry, have bought the game at v.1.0 or later, and most people who are more patient with SQUAD, for better or worse, are those who bought in early access and have seen it form from something far more rudimentary.

Both view points seem equally valid, so y'know, its hard.

 

11 minutes ago, Hodari said:

Having the entire company do so all at once...

Yeah, that is unusual, said so above. Is it the whole company or just the people making KSP? I know Squad has some strange setup, I'm not totally familiar with the details, or with Mexico if that could be relevant, they're in Mexico right?

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12 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

By all means do not bring anything up here. Especially anything not buried under at least 2 spoiler tags.

So what you're saying is that we should hold the conversation? Or maybe better to leave it at the door?

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6 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I see what you are saying, but for me, this is the best KSP has ever been. Luckily I don't use wheels that often...

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I think that most people who are angry, have bought the game at v.1.0 or later, and most people who are more patient with SQUAD, for better or worse, are those who bought in early access and have seen it form from something far more rudimentary.

Probably true for the most part.  The ones who bought it earlier have also been playing it long enough by now that no matter what happens, they've gotten their money's worth out of the game, so that's another reason they may be more patient.  For someone who just got the game recently and hasn't had much time to play it, it's a much bigger deal.

As for me though, I only got it a couple months ago during 1.05 and I certainly wouldn't say I'm angry about things.  But I also think it's worth pointing out to them that this was a rather bad move and not something that should be repeated.  And for me, it's not even the wheels that are the biggest problem so much as the game frequently crashing for no apparent reason, especially in the VAB.  But yeah, aside from that and a few other issues, the game overall seems to be in a good place.

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20 hours ago, Padishar said:

Get real.  For a start there aren't many situations where 1.1 runs 8 times faster and what do you actually mean by 8 times faster?  Yes it does generally run faster, but more like 2 to 3 times the framerate in my tests with large vessels.  There is still a lot of very poorly optimised code in KSP as Squad would agree (if they didn't seem to be allergic to posting admissions of their flaws).

19 hours ago, steve_v said:

Two points: 1. I see nothing like "8x faster". 2 or 3x would be more accurate.

On my system, some ships that ran at 4 FPS now run at 30 FPS. Yes, this is real.

 

19 hours ago, steve_v said:


2. The vast majority of the work for 1.1 would be porting code to work on the new engine - that code can be (and likely is) just as poorly optimised as it was before, it will still run better - because the engine is now more efficient.
IMO, much of the credit for this supposed "8x faster" should be going to Unity3D... the ones who optimised the game engine and integrated the new PhysX version. Sure, porting KSPs to run on this new engine is a bunch of work, but I suspect that ~90% of the performance improvement we see is due to the new engine itself, not optimisation of Squads code.

Honestly, I don't even care that much about who gets credit for what - I care about FPS. And what I also don't care about is the 3 milliseconds of SQUAD code, because the game is STILL - and probably always will be - physics limited.

 

You guys need to get real for a second. This is the typical 80-20 scenario: 80% of improvement with 20% of the work, the rest with 80% of the work. It just makes no sense at all for such a tiny team as SQUAD to start optimizing their code to death, when there are so many other areas of improvement that require attention.

I feel like many of the people here think that SQUAD is as big as Microsoft, with 100 developers working on the core of the game and 500 on the assets. This is not the case.

They have about 3 coders in their office, and now around 5 additional ones that were previously modders. That's a good crowd, but not nearly enough for what people are expecting here.ac

Edited by Kobymaru
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10 hours ago, Hodari said:

The ones who bought it earlier have also been playing it long enough by now that no matter what happens, they've gotten their money's worth out of the game, so that's another reason they may be more patient.

Rather than "more patient", I suspect that some people that have been playing for a long time have become so irritated by Squad's apparent inability to fix their processes despite the huge amount of constructive advice given to them over several (note: several, in this context, should be taken to mean, basically, since the project began) years by people with considerable, relevant experience, that they have given up trying to change things for the better and have already moved on to other things.  Yes, KSP is a very good game, but I know I'm fast approaching this point myself and recent events have only served to accelerate it.

3 hours ago, Kobymaru said:
On 24/05/2016 at 1:14 PM, Padishar said:

Get real.  For a start there aren't many situations where 1.1 runs 8 times faster and what do you actually mean by 8 times faster?  Yes it does generally run faster, but more like 2 to 3 times the framerate in my tests with large vessels.  There is still a lot of very poorly optimised code in KSP as Squad would agree (if they didn't seem to be allergic to posting admissions of their flaws).

On my system, some ships that ran at 4 FPS now run at 30 FPS. Yes, this is real.

The "Get real" part was referring to your suggestion that I expected a netbook to manage 120fps with a 5000 part vessel.  That was just ridiculous hyperbole.

I never claimed there weren't situations that ran 8 times faster (whatever definition of faster is used), what I said was a pretty direct implication that there are.  I simply said there aren't many, which, compared to the number of situations that don't, is totally true.

3 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

And what I also don't care about is the 3 milliseconds of SQUAD code, because the game is STILL - and probably always will be - physics limited.

This is not actually true.  The game is currently limited by the inefficient KSP code.

3 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

It just makes no sense at all for such a tiny team as SQUAD to start optimizing their code to death, when there are so many other areas of improvement that require attention.

Nobody has said (or even implied) they should optimise anything "to death".  Yes, during early development, inefficient code tends to get written because it is usually "easier" to write such code.  However, with a project as large and complex as KSP, if steps aren't taken to replace the problem code before release then this practice will result in a huge number of bits of code that are inefficient and they add up until they result in a program that performs significantly more poorly than it should.

3 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

I feel like many of the people here think that SQUAD is as big as Microsoft, with 100 developers working on the core of the game and 500 on the assets. This is not the case.

They have about 3 coders in their office, and now around 5 additional ones that were previously modders. That's a good crowd, but not nearly enough for what people are expecting here.

Whatever makes you feel that?  I would put the proportion of forum users that think anything like that at less than 1%.  None of the things I expect (of any quality released software) require more than a single developer.  I expect the program to not be constantly allocating and discarding a huge amount of memory on every frame, this situation has arisen due to complacency during the development process not because of a lack of developer numbers (the "we'll fix it before release" method which then doesn't happen because the release is forced from above, read this and then consider how little of it doesn't apply to Squad/KSP).  I expect the program to not repeatedly waste time repeating complex calculations on every frame (or even multiple times per frame) when nothing significant has changed.  Same cause as above.  I expect updates to the program to not be released when there are a significant number of (what should be classed as) "showstopper" bugs (i.e. the hard crashes).

To summarise that bit, the issue isn't really with the number of developers (or, really, with the quality of their work), it is with the project "management" that forces releases to go ahead before they are ready...

Edited by Padishar
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