Kerbal Space Program 2 (not dying and getting a new owner) Hype Train.

[Lisias]

24 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

TL;DR

 

• For toggling graphics settings, the most you can hope for is the toggle already comes in the game engine you're using, meaning the work is just a couple hours to get the UI to have the option, and then some small overhead of testing on every version, a bit bigger when you change unity versions.
• If the setting involves changing to different shaders, or changing to different qualities of textures or meshes, then you're looking at days of work, days of design making the lower resolution assets, and you've basically at least duplicated your testing load by having to test scenes in multiple settings. You're also now testing performance, which requires a ton of probing, measuring, and tracking of data to see if the option is having the expected impact.
• If your setting requires different rendering techniques (volumetric to static for example, as you can't outright remove clouds or fog), or LODding of meshes, or anything that requires multiple versions of assets, you're looking at months of production work to create the assets and effects, and then you're looking at rigorous testing that has to take place in different hardware configurations, driver versions, and so on.

If the gains overweight the costs, this is exactly the way to go.

It used to work in the past - there was a time in which most people didn't had a GPU card, so most games had to provide a software rendering pipeline and an OpenGL/Glide/whatever. It may sounds silly compared to nowadays technology, but at that time they had to do exactly what you described above.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

If the gains overweight the costs, this is exactly the way to go.

I think the fact this isn't done more often is the evidence needed to support the theory that the 'gains' in fact do not overweight all the extra costs.

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

 It may sounds silly

Because it is. There's zero business comparing a time back in the day where off-the-shelf engines where not a thing, to nowadays where not only are they impervious, but so is pre-packaged physics/graphics/UI middleware. Even RE-Engine on MHWilds has all the hallmark artifacts and quirks of pre-packaged upscaling and frame generation suites (and looks horrible with or without, like most gen 9 games).

Back in the day, you'd work your way up implementing something like volumetric clouds, having to do it all yourself. We could probably assume the testing overhead is the same in both cases, sure, but what'll never be the same is that nowadays you'd have to work your way down into engine/middleware (normally a black box) code to see how deep the implementation of volumetrics is to see what can even be toggled off without breaking the whole thing. It's not the same workload and the capacity to work it into the code in a modular way is not a thing unless you want to, again, dive down to disable as much as you can, and then redo it all yourself which is still more work.

When you consider that modern engines are black boxes (you need paid versions to be able to enter the source code and even then you can't just do whatever), then you'll realize the workload is completely different, and massive, and also limited by the black box scenario and that you really don't know if it's possible. Even for the two most popular engines, there's gonna be -very- little people diving into the engine source code, or worse, middleware source code to help you... both of which make the cost of development for the graphic setting and the testing overhead bigger and bigger.

 

Edited yesterday at 04:24 PM by PDCWolf

[Lisias]

53 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I think the fact this isn't done more often is the evidence needed to support the theory that the 'gains' in fact do not overweight all the extra costs.

As a matter of fact, my point of view is that it's exactly the other way around.

The Industry is crumbling with people losing jobs everywhere exactly because they didn't it when they had the workforce to do that.

I want to quote a previous post of mine:

23 hours ago, Lisias said:

Had anyone, at least once, wondered why the average age of the games played by 47% of Steam users is 7 years old? For 37% of them, it's even older.

https://www.cbr.com/players-spend-15-percent-steam-time-games-from-2024/

Dude, from all the time people have to play games, only 15% of them was spent in new games. 85% of the user's time was spent on games with an average age of 7 years. It's not a surprise that 4GB GPU cards are still used in such numbers nowadays, why buy new hardware if what you have already allows you to max out the games you play?

Game Developers are rubbing users the wrong way, it's simple like that.

Edited 23 hours ago by Lisias
Tyop! Surprised?

[PDCWolf]

19 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I want to quote a previous post of mine:

Dude, from all the time people have to play games, only 15% of them was spent in new games. 85% of the user's time was spent on games with an average age of 7 years.

Because games stopped being fun around 7 years ago. We all here play KSP1 because KSP2 is garbage, and tKSP1 is like 13 years old at least from release. No competitive shooter has beaten CS, No moba has beaten Dota and LoL. No BattleRoyale has beaten Fortnite and PUBG. No live service has beaten Destiny 2 or Warframe. No vehicle combat game has beaten War Thunder/World Of ---. No farming game has beaten Stardew Valley. No workplace sim has beaten Farming Simulator... GTA remains unbeaten too, Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the newest thing that got some traction... Civ VII failed to beat VI, Cities Skylines 2 failed to beat one. And so on and so forth but new offerings for those exist...

However, the Steam survey clearly shows It's not hardware. 70% of people have computers that can absolutely run everything that's come out, even the RT obligatory Indiana Jones game (which was garbage). You'll probably see this picture painted more clearly when Doom TDA comes out and it's not as drowned in controversy as most modern titles, and actually gets played by a large playerbase.

It's not hardware at all, it's absolute garbage games making people stick to previous releases and classics. And to further prove that, I'm pretty sure that Avowed, the new Assassin's Creed, MHWilds, KF3 and others fail one on top of the other even though 80% of the entire steam userbase can run them.

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Because games stopped being fun around 7 years ago. <....>

Yep. And unless the user would be willing to play just a little bit some of the newer ones, why in hell he will waste money on new hardware? At very least, the user will buy a second hand one, the minimum needed to maxout the games they want to play.

This is not too different from a egg and chicken situation, kinda what we had in early 80s and 90s with sound cards.

Sound cards were hellish expensive on my country, besides not being a novelty. There're soundcards already for the Apple II, but... hell, who had the money to buy them? Everybody was trying to do anything they could to avoid them, from COVOX thingies plugged into a printer port to special device drivers to transform the crappy PC-AT's internal speaker into a PCM player. Heck, I played wave files this way my whole Windows 3.11 era.

When the PCs got powerful enough to render Amiga's MOD musics at runtime, a lot of DOS games started to use it and with the PCM driver for the PC's internal speaker, heck, I soldered a cap and a resistor and pulled a wire into my stereo from the Speaker's connector. What I had done previously on my Apple ii, by the way.

I just bought myself a Gravis Ultrasound way into the 90's, when finally a Killer Application for SoundCards became popular enough: Doom. I don't remember who authored that MIDI music, but, boy... That Soundtrack on a Gravis Ultrasound was simply something out of this world. It took me 15 years from my first computer (that already had SoundCards available) until I finally bought my first.

And the reason was Doom.

I think that we have a similar Modus Operandi nowadays. Hardware is not so cheap as people used to remember, we have way more expenses nowadays, rendering the tag price of the product not meaningful by itself to evaluate the real life cost of the thing. It's no joke, my electrical bill is two times the value I used to pay before the Pandemonium even by my consumption had dropped by half - so electrical bills are, well, four times the price I was paying a few years ago.

And so it goes. I'm not alone on this boat.

 

6 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

However, the Steam survey clearly shows It's not hardware. 70% of people have computers that can absolutely run everything that's come out <...>

But they are preferring playing games that would run fine on older hardware, and since there are the other 30% still around, targeting such hardware will increase your target audience significantly, allowing you to expend more money on eye candies for that 70%, that so will show it off for that 30%, and since they already bough the game, perhaps would consider upgrading their hardware and so, in a few years, a slightly beefier hardware will be the new normal.

Rinse, repeat.

Keep your decisions around the Bell Curve, and your chances of improving your incoming will be probably better than otherwise. Sell games for your users of today, and let your future you worry about the users of tomorrow.

 

6 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

It's not hardware at all, it's absolute garbage games making people stick to previous releases and classics. And to further prove that, I'm pretty sure that Avowed, the new Assassin's Creed, MHWilds, KF3 and others fail one on top of the other even though 80% of the entire steam userbase can run them.

It's about money. It's always about money. Most users see hardware as a way to accomplish something, not as a goal.

Unless a new killer application pushes them into buying new hardware, they will stick with whatever they have until it breaks - and probably will try a second hand slightly better hardware before considering something really new.

Draw a curve on games sales versus hardware sales - they are going opposite directions. Why? How?

Well, one possible explanation follows: everybody and the kitchen's sink upgraded their hardware in 2020 due Pandemonium, since a lot of people had to work from home. So they ditched whatever they had and bought something reasonably good at that time. At somewhat premium prices, by the way, as the supply chain was collapsing at the same time the demand was rising.

From that point, most people are facing higher costs of living, really higher costs of living (like me), and very, really very few of them (me included) are inclined to spend money on fixing what's not broken - or updating hardware that are still cutting it perfectly, even with some compromises.

Last year my older MacCrap gone belly up - the fan died when I was sleeping while the machine was munching some numbers, the thing overheated and fried. Total loss.

My options at that time:

1. Buy a brand new Mac Mini. R$ 7900,00 (local currency)
2. Buy a brand new generic but reasonably contemporary i7 16GB Mini PC. About R$ 2700,00 (no mass storage included)
   1. And expend days rebuilding all my workflow from scratch, as 80% of all I do is relying on MacOS.
3. Buy a refurbished Mac Mini 2014 i5 16GB. R$ 3000,00 (hard disk included) - the shop was going out of business.
   1. And essentially duplicate the older HD into the new, and I would be working next day.
4. Buy a refurbished MacMini 5.2 motherboard from China for R$ 700,00.

Since I'm expending some really serious money fixing my home (and my son), what did you think I did?

Spoiler

First, I bought the motherboard, but my customs had confiscated it due some new red tape I wasn't aware of (a problem with a thingy called "Remessa Conforme", Devil take the <piiiii> that invented this <piiiii>).

This is happening more or less regularly around here, by the way - so now I'm sending goods to USA, and then paying shipping again to Brazil. Don't ask, but it works this way, so...

Obviously, I then bought the refurbished MacMini - only marginally pricier than the other MiniPC (pero no mucho, brand new 1TB hard disks costs R$ 250,00 around here, R$ 430 if NVME).

People around the World are facing choices pretty similar to mine. This is the new norm.

 

Edited 15 hours ago by Lisias
Kraken damned autocompletes...

[PDCWolf]

18 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Yep. And unless the user would be willing to play just a little bit some of the newer ones, why in hell he will waste money on new hardware? At very least, the user will buy a second hand one, the minimum needed to maxout the games they want to play.

This is not too different from a egg and chicken situation, kinda what we had in early 80s and 90s with sound cards.

Sound cards were hellish expensive on my country, besides not being a novelty. There're soundcards already for the Apple II, but... hell, who had the money to buy them? Everybody was trying to do anything they could to avoid them, from COVOX thingies plugged into a printer port to special device drivers to transform the crappy PC-AT's internal speaker into a PCM player. Heck, I played wave files this way my whole Windows 3.11 era.

I kinda was there, as an infant having to watch my dad deal with his soundblasters as his FM stations (he owned like 3, some of the first in the country, let alone the town) had him jump aboard the PC era very early for automating multiple aspects of them.

However as you talk about buying new hardware, remember we're starting from a minimum of what should be a 3060, that's a 3 years old card, and people with 2070s are still in the fight too with their 7 years old hardware. If you further discount obligatory raytracing, people with 1080ti are going on even stronger with their 8 years old cards. That's not new hardware at all, even the most recent of those is 2 generations old now. It's really not about buying new hardware, as most games really do support the 2070 or 3060 at their lowest levels (rip those who got scammed with a 4060)

31 minutes ago, Lisias said:

 as 80% of all I do is relying on MacOS.

My deepest condolences.

Remember we're neighbors and at some point our presidents were aligned in their red-tape. We still 'enjoy' having to pay up to 50% tax on purchases made to foreign sources, no matter what is bought, even books. Still... most people that upgraded during the pandemic are -just fine-, and will be fine for a good chunk of the upcoming unreal engine spam era. In fact, thanks to this and thanks to the economic conditions, the fact that new hardware isn't pushing the envelope as hard as it was back at the turn of the millennium, it's not hard to see we're about to live one of the longest generations of hardware as people are incapable of upgrading or refuse to because generational uplifts are gone whilst prices keep climbing.

Still, my point stands, we're not talking about RTX 5XXX series and RX 9XXX series, we're talking about hardware from 7 years ago still having a really good chance at not just being compatible, but being able to push games properly beyond playability. Volumetric clouds and other things talked about in this thread are nowhere near requiring current gen stuff, and it's clear the biggest majority of gamers have that hardware... which is why I don't really buy that games are failing because people don't have the hardware.

But at this point, I have two suggestions:

1. Let's not keep hogging this thread.
2. Let's wait for less controversial games people are actually looking forward to to see if it's really hardware or games being garbage or some mix or both.