Devs Can't Optimize: Specs for a LEGO GAME
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This is what happens when you let proper coders go and just fill your team with Unreal Engine 5 'devs' who throw every asset they can lay their hands on at it.
And then there's that whole RAM issue...which wasn't thought of at 'conception'.
I say we just use pajeets for coding until the brains start being paid for their worth in the West.
But please do stay tuned, the finest 'coders' in the industry will be around any minute to say how this LEGO game needs all these resources :p
Part of the RAM problem is Windows not having overcommit and how that interacts with the GPU.
If the game is using 8 GB of textures then that's filling up the graphic card and also reserving 8 GB of system memory that's unused unless something else uses GPU memory.
So a game with 8 GB of textures and 8 for the game itself needs 16 GB RAM, or you can run it with 8 GB RAM and 8 GB swap - which works ok because it's not actually used, unless you run two games and then the system dies from swap.
In Linux there's overcommit so you'd only need the 8 GB and if you run two copies at once one just crashes out.
You do realize that's part of how things got this bad, yes?
Nope.
Best coders 25 years ago were Argentinians, Russians and Indians. Still the best today, but there's plenty of upstarts from Philippines, China and Nigeria to keep the competition lean.
Unreal Engine 5 devs in the West were lobbying to get a union while working on boss systems, actual hungry and skilled coders were looking to maximise what they could get their hands on and live off of crumbs until the big payday came.
Survival of the fittest, and bloat isn't fashionable to get ahead.
Those working Sharepoint properly in the year 2000 are running companies today and advising governments on IT infrastructure. Those coding games on their phones using Slack today will be replaced by AI written by those companies and governments.
RAM prices going up is exactly what the games industry needed to happen to it to show that it's all fluff (And expensive fluff at that).
Tight, responsive games that work across most machines is where the money is. Always has been. You get in early there you can milk DLCs and/or microtransactions like GTA V did.
Bloatware, behind DRM gates, that lectures to people who worked hard to play it - isn't going to sell.
Pajeets are hungry, they work hard, they will find the line - just for a nibble.
The existentialist crisis coder in Vancouver will be so full up on social media drama that they wouldn't know the difference between a bit, a byte and bite.
Marxist coders versus actual communist AIs or pajeets. That's where we are :)
Or we could go back to populating game dev with people like John Carmack. If you compare the dregs of the West to the outliers of the third world then yeah they look better, but if you compare like to like then that gap is going to become vanishingly small, if not inverted.
That's EXACTLY where we should be going.
But while those in vogue decide what a game should be, those making the games just up their ante as to what the actual game is.
There's no shortage of skilled people who could be the next 'big thing'. Just a shortage of people who understand what the backbone of gaming is.
So while Tilly and Lilith enjoy their wheatgerm macchiatos telling the world that they are wrong on whatever is fashionable social media the rest of the world became the game.
This is one of the reasons I'm not all that concerned about an AI driven overlord. Any AI programmed by today's "engineers" is likely to be filled with so much spaghetti or logical contradictions that it will be functionally retarded.
I wonder how much those late game AI tokens will cost when Samir over at Saar Co-Dev Studios asks Claude code to have the game support destructible objects and then Claude completely breaks combat. Then Claude is asked to fix combat and then the UI completely changes.
LinkedIn is cancer but I do like going there to see entertaining stories like "I built and deployed a service with AI in just five hours and then signed a seven-figure contract" and "AI completely wiped out my repo and my backups." Bonus when commenters call out the OP and OP replies to every single post as if their job is to monitor and defend it all day.
As someone who's used it a lot--that will totally happen. I have gotten a lot out of it, but I can see it being shockingly dangerous on a huge codebase. It absolutely would pick around and sneak edits in places it totally doesn't belong, and it's really difficult/impossible to tell it to only work on a specific piece of code unless that's all you give it.
Games still have a long way to go I'm sure. There's a lot more complication. It's great for business though as it sits today.
I built an entire web app for a work project with Claude Code, took me maybe a week, cuts my workload on the actual work part 5x easily on something I do repeatedly. I do contract work, so that just means either more contracts or more free time. I picked through the meat of it that is in Python. Could I optimize a few things out, sure, and I might would if it wasn't a simple data analysis script. Then on top of that it gave me a nice overlay with all the Javascript and CSS that I hate doing. That stuff is very simple but extremely boring--button click actions that check a couple things and send to URLs. Prior, I'd have done something like Python myself, just fed it with some command line arguments. Or, I'd just have done some sort of manual process with a spreadsheet or piece of paper.
I don't think so. In just a few years it will be insanely powerful and efficient.
Just two more weeks... (Nothing ever happens BTW)
it already is, all AI is programed by jews or by leftists at the direction of jews to reflect their leftist worldviews. Since their worldviews are completely illogical and retarded, all AI has so many caveats programmed in that make it basically useless for anything other than what a basic search engine already does. And even search engines are becoming retarded now because jews/leftists dont like the results they return
Windows 11 required is a very hard no from me.
I am NOT using that OS, ever, for anything at all. Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows I ever use.
Another game I will never touch because A) fuck Windows 11. And fuck a game that forces you to use it when they could have just made a game that works on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. And B) fuck games that require SSDs that have LEGO style graphics. And C) fuck games that require DLSS and a monster PC just to get 40 fps especially if they have LEGO style graphics. This is more Unreal Engine slop. They need to fix their shitty game. And make it be able to run on Windows 10. And make it so it runs like previous LEGO games.
And if they can't, they should all get fired and replaced by people who can.
As someone who rode Windows 7 until the wheels fell off(read: 6 months after Steam started telling me I had zero days until Steam support was dropped for W7), that OS requirement is a lot flimsier than you think it is. I would fully expect this game to run on Windows 10, along with everything else that gets released in the next five years.
So what happened after - "6 months after Steam started telling me I had zero days until Steam support was dropped for W7" - that caused you to upgrade OS?
Honestly? Street FIghter 6 used DirectX 12 and I wasn't able to hunt down a way to get it installed on Windows 7. I don't really regret the choice to jump to Windows 10 LTSC, but SF6 wasn't worth it. Could have held out longer.
Society needs to respect the true masculinity of a man who refuses to upgrade after 6 years of nagging/warnings
I know my PC isn't great, but damn if it's not barely minimum specs. Yet I can't think of any game I've tried to play that I can't get running at a fairly acceptable 1080p 60FPS.
I almost wonder what workflow they are doing in Unreal to make it such shit. I'd played around with it a decent amount, I had dumped tons of physics objects in a room with Lumen turned on and was getting 30fps on a 1660. While running around having them interact with each other. Granted almost everything I'd added to the game was either native Unreal or C++. I'm guessing they all just use blueprints. Messed with those too. Fine for simple stuff, but holy crap they get convoluted for some things.
I'd make them all develop on a crappy PC myself. That will hold them down. I've been working on a game in Godot for a while now. I'm pretty comfortable if I ever finish it the requirements will be low, because it will have never have been tested on something high spec.
I've read that one big issue is devs building stuff on what might as well be supercomputers that can run anything you throw at them, they overbuild the game because their own computer can run it just fine, hit crunch time, realize their game can't run on even a high-end PC and then try and fail at optimization. They're building games without thinking about optimization and failing at doing it when they have to right before it releases.
Part of optimization occurs at inception. Anyone can create an ugly primitive game that chokes the very best hardware available. It's not even a challenge. Optimization isn't just more efficient code. It's also designing your game to run on widely available machines.
It's also the art assets. What was that city builder game that ran like shit because the retard devs modeled all the citizens with teeth? Thousands of additional polygons, multiplied by thousands of NPCs running around. For characters that you probably couldn't even zoom in far enough to see the insides of their mouths.
Yeah. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is the root of all computing evil.
Meh, there's some truth to the sentiment, but it's more at the level of "not all projects need to be optimized", but when you're building something like this you go in knowing from the word "go" that you're going to need to optimize for performance. It should be getting baked into the preliminary design choices that "whatever we build, it needs to be extremely performant, so structure everything accordingly." Building and designing for that though? That requires genuine skill and intelligence, something which you're not allowed to select for anymore because you'd just get a room full of John Carmacks and that's simply too White and too male.
Yeah, look at anything Carmack talks about and the entire mindset starts with optimized code. His natural output is optimized.
It's white guys and old guys that can even do it anymore. The rest are Indians who don't know anything, and young ones who have never dealt with resources being the limiting factor. Not even as a coder, I remember having to optimize stupid ass drivers in DOS and pick through what I really needed so I could have enough RAM free to run Doom on a PC it totally shouldn't have run on. Adding more wasn't an option and getting a new PC was cost-prohibitive for a kid.
If I was going to design a learning-track for a good programmer, one of the things I'd make them do is a functional Gameboy game with a list of things they have to make it do. In assembly. Give them an understanding of how everything moves around in a rather easy to build and debug system. Learn to make things work in 8K of RAM.
Another thing too, they probably don't have the mindset to think through it ever at all.
As an example, I've played around with AI-generated 3D art a lot lately, because coding is my forte, not artwork. It's surprisingly good for a lot of things. Something I was just doing, I'm designing a harbor scene, and all the little props that need to lay around, moorings, rope, a life preserver, whatever I'm just letting AI make. They can be plug and play but the AI generated assets are HUGELY unoptimized. Tiny little object that should be no more than 500 polygons is 70,000. That's a massive performance hit. I'm sure AAA studios would swear they never do that and only use the real confirmed castrated alphabet artists, but they are all lying. They are totally using AI.
If I gave a dump of my raw AI prop library to someone who doesn't understand what they are doing on a super high end development PC, they'd just dump them all in there and then at the last minute wonder why everything runs like crap. It's because every little object you have is massively un-optimized. I've been cleaning them up, but it's tedious. It's just a better workflow for me because my mind really just has no concept of how I'd get from "I need a model of an old style metal desk" to an actual model that looks any good. I'd end up with an engineering drawing.
It has to be the models being terrible. Either that or the game is loading the entire map, because idiots are making it.
Unreal I believe can stream huge maps built-in. It's really quite a nice engine. I blame a lot of the problems attributed to Unreal to the developers. There seems to just be a penchant for making the same old shiny rubber console game. Something I've noticed is every single time I use a texture, like a generic thing everyone uses, some rock, some dirt, etc., it's always a bit shiny by default. I'm using lots of little point lights, street lights, things of that nature and shiny looks so wrong. But it seems to be the default for some reason.
I really think the secret trick would be just to force developers on lower end machines. I mean I know because I'm starting so low that if I do ever finish this game that suddenly I release it and it's already good for Steam Deck or whatever. I didn't have to optimize it much because it was optimized in process. If I do something that kills performance I go fix it before it's ballooned. They will never do that though.
Nah, it's overuse of Lumen. Lumen is cpu bound so it slows everything down as the draw has to now wait even longer for the CPU each frame. Since most games are already CPU bottlenecked it just makes everything so much worse.
Depending on the level of destructability and ability to construct things I can see it. Also a lot of people seem to forget system requirements aren't just what the program needs. It's sitting on top of Windows 11's demands.
There was destructibility in games in the 2000s with potato computers.Windows 10 could run on computers with a couple of gigs of ram.
I repeat, "the level of destructibility" first, and second compare system requirements for windows XP vs 11. Subtract 4 gigs of ram from the game to find what the game itself needs. Windows 11 uses more than 2 orders of magnitude more ram on its own than XP. Running mspaint on 11 will have minimum requirements of 4 gigs or ram. You're not comparing apples with apples.
How much is loaded at once? How big are areas? How much is being prefetched? Those matter. If you're comparing a contiguous open world with dense actors to Red Faction ps2 levels (and likely simultaneously complaining about graphics not advancing enough while demanding higher resolutions and exponentially increasing the requirements in the process)
Arkham Knight looked better, ran smoother, and had more detail than this when it was was released on base PS4 consoles. It ran on Unreal engine 3.
The Arkham Trilogy were, and still are, some of the best looking games ever made. And once they cleared up the issues with whatever DRM they were using (Denuvo?) causing framerates to drop on loading zones, they ran really well too.
The first 2 games actually had GFWL, which was later removed. Unlike Gearbox who re-released Bulletstorm at a massively inflated price for the GFWL removal, WB/Rocksteady just upgraded all existing customers to the GOTY versions in an update, which was nice.
Knight had Denuvo, as I understand, but I didn't get around to that game until long after it was removed and long after all the issues were fixed with Iron Galaxy's shitshow of a port.
DEI script kiddie devs + UE5, this is the result.