A big problem I foresee with KSP 2: pc resources

[shdwlrd]

16 minutes ago, K^2 said:

They're sold on pretty trailers.

Ain't that the truth. I'm sure there are plenty of people in this forum that have bought a game because of an awesome trailer just to realize how much the game sucks after playing it for awhile.

[mcwaffles2003]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Skyrim's only problem is a really bad, really outdated engine.

Preach!

It's been pretty much the same since Morrowind... Bethesda makes me cry.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 7/21/2021 at 3:52 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

Preach!

It's been pretty much the same since Morrowind... Bethesda makes me cry.

Anddd guess what our majesty Todd is using for starfield and TESVI after selling his company to Microsoft for 7 billion dollars?

It's gamebyro, so enjoy the next decade of 60 fps locks and muddy textures.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Anddd guess what our majesty Todd is using for starfield and TESVI after selling his company to Microsoft for 7 billion dollars?

It's gamebyro, so enjoy the next decade of 60 fps locks and muddy textures.

After? I'm pretty sure they started working on both those titles way before Microsoft even shown interest in Bethesda, and I'm also quite sure that dropping an in-house toolset your developers used for a couple of decades is not a matter of downloading a different one on their PCs. 

CE needs a lot of work, probably a rewrite of a sizeable portion of its code, but until we see Starfield running we can't say for sure if that was done.

I would love to see some higher up in Bethesda start twitting things like "we heard you and your demands and we decided to accept, we're dropping the Creation Engine, due to this Starfield will not be moddable and it's delayed at least to 2026"

[Lisias]

On 7/21/2021 at 3:28 PM, K^2 said:

Sure, but no explanation of early work is going to do anything for majority of people who might buy KSP2. The percentage of people who are going to read any kind of explanation on a forum is tiny. Most sales will be made on trailers and marketing that will be released in the last couple of months before release, and these will be tightly polished just to show the game from the best angles.

The majority of people relies nowadays on third-parties to inform themselves - some of them we call "influencers". For the good and for the evil, they are here to stay.

You talk to a few, these few talk to a lot, and every one of the latter ones will talk to another few. It works, and it's also pretty cheap.  The "good old days" of mainstream media are over (again, for the good and for the evil).

 

On 7/21/2021 at 3:28 PM, K^2 said:

It sucks, but games just aren't sold on facts.

I beg to differ.  "My friends are playing this, and they told me it's fun" is a hell of a fact.

What happens is that the "facts" that matter to the users are not usually understandable by software developers (if by anyone at all).

I once read an article about Gerry Anderson, and how he was annoyed by having "puppet show" as his most famous work, apparently he would like to be remembered by something more… "grown up", as a drama or something. The problem, as he explained once on a interview, is that you just don't have control about what's going to be a success and what's not - he said he didn't knew what made Thunderbirds such a huge success, he only knew that once it happened, how to keep things going on (at least, for some time).

Of course nowadays there're people specialised on building factoids, that so can be used to promote things and get some advantage, but usually these things just don' "stick" for much time.

Why the first Star Wars trilogy was such a huge success? Why the second trilogy was so controversial, besides technically superior (by a parsec)? The one that manages to answer these questions will probably dominate the World...

 

On 7/21/2021 at 3:28 PM, K^2 said:

They're sold on pretty trailers.

But they can be easily refunded nowadays, so the pretty trailers are not enough anymore.

There was a time in which once the sell was made, it was done. Good luck trying to get a Refund for your Windows 98.  

Now people are returning games - Steam allows you for a "no questions asked" refunding for a few hours after the buy, and some countries' legislation (as mine) demands a full refund for up to 1 month (or something) for goods considered unfit if they were bought online (and this can hurt a publisher badly if software would be considered a good, instead of an asset licensed to be used as is usually done nowadays).

 

On 7/17/2021 at 4:36 PM, K^2 said:

Do you know that there are amusement park rides that run on Unity? Yes, I'm scared too. 

Didn't knew that, but I know about Mandalorian's virtual set using Unreal - so, not exactly a surprise.

(but amusement parks? they are using Unity to control roller coasters? Jeez… #boeingFeelings)

 

On 7/17/2021 at 4:36 PM, K^2 said:

Fortunately for Unity and unfortunately for the rest of us, they have taken in enough investments to the point where they didn't have to compete on profitability for a very long time, and maybe still don't. Which means they don't have to have a good business model. They just have to keep growing the customer base.

Been there, screwed by that. Once this happens, the company has little to no incentive to invest on technical excellence, as marketing (both good and evil), P/R stunts, and even not exactly capitalist tactics will render better results on the short run.

In essence, it's the other way around - anyway pursuing technical excellent is expelled, as he/she would be a threat to the "business model".

 

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 7/21/2021 at 3:52 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

 

 

12 hours ago, Master39 said:

After? I'm pretty sure they started working on both those titles way before Microsoft even shown interest in Bethesda, and I'm also quite sure that dropping an in-house toolset your developers used for a couple of decades is not a matter of downloading a different one on their PCs. 

CE needs a lot of work, probably a rewrite of a sizeable portion of its code, but until we see Starfield running we can't say for sure if that was done.

I would love to see some higher up in Bethesda start twitting things like "we heard you and your demands and we decided to accept, we're dropping the Creation Engine, due to this Starfield will not be moddable and it's delayed at least to 2026"

Let's not turn this into an OT bethesda bad thread, but suffice to say that if they switched engines the only reason it wouldn't be moddable is they didn't put in the work beforehand.

Also it's had three nearly complete rewrites at this point, one from Morrowind to oblivion, another from oblivion to FO3, and then another from tesV to TesV special edition (yes this was significant, not just moar graphics)

None addressed the fps limits, nor the way havok physics would bug out. None reduced the nearly crippling overhead of scripts that blows up savegames...

But yes, you're absolutely correct that I misrepresented that. Starfield and tesVI were in development before the aquisition.

But they're not lacking for resources, and that's what my point should have been.

[Alexoff]

On 7/18/2021 at 10:37 AM, The Aziz said:

How much of that you people don't get? They don't need 240 fps to show off an engine when it's not even in the game. It's still in alpha state, so go ahead, launch an early KSP version, about 0.9, slap a bunch of boosters, fire them up at once and tell me how your experience was. Because I remember having about 2 seconds per frame at times.

In general, in 0.90 I made quite large spaceships and had a consistently high FPS. And I repeat once again - the problem is not that at the moment, when developing a game, developers see low FPS on their computers, but that they do not care what we think about this presentation video with low FPS. Probably because we will always find an excuse for anything.

[Bej Kerman]

19 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

so enjoy the next decade of 60 fps locks and muddy textures

Muddy textures are one thing, but I quite frankly can't see why anyone would care about getting above 60fps when most people can't distinguish between that and 50fps.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

32 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Muddy textures are one thing, but I quite frankly can't see why anyone would care about getting above 60fps when most people can't distinguish between that and 50fps.

On 7/21/2021 at 3:52 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

 

14 hours ago, Master39 said:

 

What even is this point lel

It's not about the difference between 60 and 50, it's about the difference between 60 and 95, 60 and 144 etc.

Their games are going to be around for years, and hardware becomes easily able to run them well above 60 fps even on the low-end.

The consoles even support it now, and high refresh TVs are increasingly entering the budget space.

 

[K^2]

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

The majority of people relies nowadays on third-parties to inform themselves - some of them we call "influencers". For the good and for the evil, they are here to stay.

That's actually a great point. Yes, spending time actually providing better data to influencers is absolutely worth it. I still don't think a blog post linked from a forum is the right way to do this. A modern marketing effort should include direct outreach to influencers, and whoever's in charge of that, should be able to figure out what information is useful to provide to influencers.

Fortunately, most influencers that actually reach high popularity know that having access to information is helpful to their career, and treat NDAs very diligently. So you can usually trust them with information about the game, knowing that they'll be able to build up hype without saying anything you ask them not to share too early.

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

I beg to differ.  "My friends are playing this, and they told me it's fun" is a hell of a fact.

Yeah, and it's a factor, but it tends to work as a multiplier. Prior to game's release, the only place where overwhelming majority of word of mouth originates is still marketing material. Again, very few people will have special insight into how the game is made, so most of the people saying, "Wow, take a look at this game, it seems fun!" are going to be influenced primarily by trailers. So the fact that word of mouth helps the information spread doesn't change your marketing tactics.

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

But they can be easily refunded nowadays, so the pretty trailers are not enough anymore.

In practice, very few people do. Ability to refund certainly helps, and very public disasters like Cyberpunk release help to improve the landscape, but the numbers still show that trailers and marketing sell the games.

Just because numbers on this ended up fairly public, number of pre-sales of Cyberpunk that were not refunded was enough to cover cost of development, despite it being the most refunded (in absolute quantity) game on record. Any sales they made on top of pre-sales are cherry on top. It's very important cherry, so fortunately, there is still an incentive to make a good game, but marketing is so much more important to game's sales.

And I'm saying this as someone firmly on the dev side of making games, absolutely loathing the fact that good marketing sells more games than good production. But I'm also involved in enough meetings where marketing numbers are shared to know that this is absolutely the case. And almost all of the marketing return is from trailers. How these trailers are shown to people still matters a lot, but it starts with a sequence of pretty pictures.

 

I should probably add that I'm mostly talking about the sort of things that game creators have control over. Sometimes a game blows up because it became popular with streamers, and sometimes it's purely on good game mechanics. Games like Among Us absolutely deserve it, but it's also not something anyone can possibly take as an example of doing things right. And sometimes something becomes popular just because it's a meme. Either way, it's not something that helps you figure out what information you should or shouldn't share about the game in development, unfortunately. The only rule of thumb that's been developed is that it's more damaging to share too much than too little. And in that light, I'm actually glad whenever developers take a bit of a risk and give us some early previews.

[Bej Kerman]

12 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

It's not about the difference between 60 and 50, it's about the difference between 60 and 95, 60 and 144 etc.

Their games are going to be around for years, and hardware becomes easily able to run them well above 60 fps even on the low-end.

The consoles even support it now, and high refresh TVs are increasingly entering the budget space.

60fps+ will be supported better in the future but it's not like human senses will be upgraded to notice the change better. 60fps+ will be overwhelmingly pointless for the time being.

[OHara]

About the worry about increased minimum computer specifications,
KSP1 has an option that I appreciate, as someone using a general-purpose computer as opposed to gaming computer.

"Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" lets us set the minimum rate of rendered frames.   It has a strange name.  It sets the inverse of the frame rate, so 0.1 s means 10 fps, and it sets that frame rate in terms of game-physics simulation time rather than real time.

For me, the CPU can always run the physics simulation at real-time (at KSP1's fixed 20 ms per physics frame, but my AMD R7M360 GPU can only render planets with oceans at 20 fps.  My in-game clock would turn yellow whenever the surface of Kerbin filled more than 25% of the screen, indicating that physics simulation was slowed to keep the default 0.04 simulated seconds per frame. Then I installed EVE because I appreciate clouds for situational awareness, making the problem worse.

So I turn "Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame" to 0.1  s so the frame rate can go down to 10 fps without slowing down the physics simulation.

Sure, people can perceive frame rates faster than 60 Hz, largely by noticing strobe effects as they scan their eyes across the screen, but the electrical response of the nerves takes 50 ms so the 10--20 fps that I use only delays my response time by another 50 ms and that does not bother me one bit.

[Jacke]

13 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Let's not turn this into an OT bethesda bad thread, but suffice to say that if they switched engines the only reason it wouldn't be moddable is they didn't put in the work beforehand.

I think the only reason a game by Bethesda wouldn't be moddable is because they were so irritated they couldn't properly milk benefit from selling mods on games like Skyrim and FO4 because the free competition was better.  'Course, this sort of behaviour isn't limited to Bethesda and it is getting off-topic.  But moddability is such a big part of their past games that I think it's going to be a toss-up whether Starfield will be or not.

On-topic, I'm just happy that KSP 2 will be moddable.  It was vital with KSP to make it a game I truly enjoyed.

[Bej Kerman]

14 hours ago, OHara said:

but the electrical response of the nerves takes 50 ms so the 10--20 fps that I use only delays my response time by another 50 ms and that does not bother me one bit.

50ms can be huge when you're not having to take things slow. Runway landings can be especially tedious with low reaction times.

[Lisias]

21 hours ago, K^2 said:

Fortunately, most influencers that actually reach high popularity know that having access to information is helpful to their career, and treat NDAs very diligently. So you can usually trust them with information about the game, knowing that they'll be able to build up hype without saying anything you ask them not to share too early.

that's the point in which I think things are going to change. Once you sign anm NDA and agree to oy share what they want you to share, the influencer reliability is co.promised. it's interesting to see how youtubers are being forced to specify every possible relationship with the promoted product. 

The point is: once you sign an NDA or have some other profit from the product maker, the influencer's credibility is somewhat hindered - who would expose an inconvenient true if this would hinder a profitable relationship with the product maker?

This is exactly what lead the old media to lose public confidence at first place.

 

21 hours ago, K^2 said:

In practice, very few people do. Ability to refund certainly helps, and very public disasters like Cyberpunk release help to improve the landscape, but the numbers still show that trailers and marketing sell the games.

on the other hand, my friends that bought the game told me that they were going to wait for the game to be stable instead of asking a refund because they liked the game very much.

What would be the point to ask for a refund if they were going to buy the game again later?

No trailer would do that.

 

22 hours ago, K^2 said:

The only rule of thumb that's been developed is that it's more damaging to share too much than too little. And in that light, I'm actually glad whenever developers take a bit of a risk and give us some early previews.

on that, we have an agreement. Me too.

[K^2]

29 minutes ago, Lisias said:

that's the point in which I think things are going to change. Once you sign anm NDA and agree to oy share what they want you to share, the influencer reliability is co.promised.

That depends on nature of NDA and relationship between influencer and company. There are definitely examples of companies going exceptionally heavy-handed on this, but there are also examples of high-caliber influencers pushing back on that.

The purpose of an NDA between a publisher and influencer is to make sure critical information that's meant to be revealed in due time isn't shared early. An NDA that prevents an influencer from actually sharing their opinion of the game is garbage, and it's not even an NDA at that point.

[Snark]

A lengthy but interesting side discussion ensued from this point, regarding the nature of human perception, how frame rates affect that, how high a frame rate can we "see", etc.

It's a worthwhile discussion, but at this point it became utterly unrelated to the original topic of this thread (it was about human perception and frame rates in general, nothing to do with KSP 2, or with PC resources consumption).

So we've split it off into a separate topic of its own, which anyone who's interested can follow and discuss here:

We now return you to your original thread, already in progress.    Please try to stay on topic, thanks!

[Lisias]

On 7/17/2021 at 3:43 PM, Incarnation of Chaos said:

You still have plenty of time to save up for a upgrade in the meantime.

Unfortunately,  an upgrade may be more problematic than expected...

https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-warns-of-cpu-stock-shortages-in-near-future

Not sure if this is going to affect only Intel or everybody,  but in a way or another upgrading CPUs will be a problem. And this will affect the prices for used CPUs too...

[Dazpoet]

KSP2 is the sole reason I went with 64GB of RAM for my new pc. Hoping that'll mean I won't have to think about modding to my hearts content