Skyrim Developer Says PC Development is a Headache

[buzznut]

How much money are they making on this video game? Seriously, whah fn whah.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

[citation][nom]dillonpeterliam[/nom]@amk-aka-PhantomYou hit the nail on the head with your Witcher 2 comment, It had issues but they were not as extreme as Fallout 3 or Skyrims.[/citation]

HA! Fallout 3 had its share of problems on other platforms than just the PC... It took a couple or so of updates to iron out the bugs in the PS3 version. So the hardware arguement is also weak in that respect.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

This is tangental, but I would much rather devs write games for openGL rather than directX, so they can release them on OSX and Linux as well without almost any problems.

I think the big problem is that when you develop a game for a console, you have to fine grain control every pixel buffer and bit of memory in the video card and system RAM because the resources are so constrained. When you go back to the PC, you forget that PCs are so much more powerful than consoles that using some abstraction layers like the SDL or OpenGL on top of standard library C functions is more than enough to get a game that will compile anywhere.

They are so used to the overly complex development environment for consoles, where each platform must be built almost independently of one another because they have completely different architectures, they forget on the PC you can abstract away almost all of the platform dependencies.

Sadly, MAC OS and Linux are fish that are deemed too small to mess with by most studios and developers. Only a few people even attempt to cover those platforms anymore. From what I've heard, OpenGL has its headaches in all the extensions that have to be used to make it compete on a similar DirectX level of performance. I will agree about the constraints on a console though.

Most gamers switched to consoles, abandoning the PC when consoles offered a steady platform of about 5 years per, instead of about every 6 months of something new coming out. Die-Hard PC gamers didn't bail though. THAT abandoning of the PC for games has hurt PC gaming more than piracy.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

I say it again, you have absolutely no clue where Direct3D and OpenGL fit into the engine's architecture! an engine is not built only and only using DirectX/OpenGL! You're just talking out of your arse, I'm sure you know it yourself very well!

DirectX (Direct3D IS a part of DirectX, NOT the other way around) and OpenGL are INDEED APIs for the graphics end of things. and unless you want to either mess directly with a video card (WAY too much work supporting cards as old as DX9 cards, which is about the level of graphics in the PS3 and XBox 360) THAT is where they fit.

DirectX, using XACT, XACT2, etc, handles the audio. IF you want something easier, then you go and get a license for FMOD, or implement a hit-and-miss OpenAL (if you don't provide some kind of driver interface at installation time.)

On the PC you have either an AMD or INTEL 32bit (x86) CPU (not so likely on new machines, although the OS may still be at that point) or a 64-bit CPU (x64) and OS. They run the SAME code respectively for each mode.

Physics and AI are not directly video related, thus they don't directly deal with the video, but work on objects defined in the world, adjusting properties and behaviors.

Network used to be part of DirectX (and is now depreciated), but once you have a working library or code, the only adjustments ever needed will be for data and communication protocol overhead.

Input can be tricky, but once you have something for that, that never really changes, only what you do with that input.

Now, I think I covered most subsystems of a game engine (excluding scripting). On the PC most of that is unified and seen through the same API, irregardless of what is there... other parts rely on the API and drivers to work.

Now, the PC has two sets of instructions to work with, but have a common 32-bit (x86) to reach for older systems. ALL these platforms are different in hardware, but the PC has more abstraction available. The hardest part of it all is left to having the PC scale the graphics to a higher level, and the inconvenience of a PC player likes their keyboard and mouse over a game controller.

The Problem is: These publishers see consoles as their cash cow, and PC is now that uncle you'd rather forget, except there are enough of us PC gamers left that they can't just ignore us completely. SO they resort to FUD to manipulate the public and investors into abandoning the PC platform by way of selectively burying their heads in the sand on console piracy, unless that pirate makes too much noise to hide (but go back to ignoring once that pirate is shut-down) while spending extra money for servers and DRM that doesn't stop piracy but still costs money (perhaps that is their "overcomplicated" angle... Simple, STOP putting that crap in a game and save that money.)

 

[AntiZig]

who said keyboard and mouse is an inconvenience over a game controller. What a load of subjective ****

 

[aidynphoenix]

If you do not release a game demo. gamers are not going to be willing to drop $60 to try a game. so they will download the game illegally so that they can try before they buy.
sorry i was not going to take a $60 gamble that skyrim was going to fix everything i didn't like about oblivion. and im also not going to buy it if im unsure if it will run smoothly on my pc.

other respectable company's make game demo's so that players can try the game before they buy it.
its the smart way to go.

every game i have ever bought, i had seen it played in person or tried the demo out myself.

This is why i bought painkiller when it came out, it ran nice on my pc. and it was "damn fun"

Bethesda you made a game that is hard as hell to run, there is only two games that max out my processor that i have tried, skyrim and ut3. and it wouldent be the case if the game was designed for pc, > the real gaming platform. why are shadows done on the processor again rather than the gpu like they should be? getting lazy.

 

[ivyanev]

I can't see piracy as factor-lets face it :Cracked games appear hours or days after release,at least for those with solid single player.

 

[AntiZig]

If you do not release a game demo. gamers are not going to be willing to drop $60 to try a game. so they will download the game illegally so that they can try before they buy.
sorry i was not going to take a $60 gamble that skyrim was going to fix everything i didn't like about oblivion. and im also not going to buy it if im unsure if it will run smoothly on my pc.

other respectable company's make game demo's so that players can try the game before they buy it.
its the smart way to go.

every game i have ever bought, i had seen it played in person or tried the demo out myself.

This is why i bought painkiller when it came out, it ran nice on my pc. and it was "damn fun"

Bethesda you made a game that is hard as hell to run, there is only two games that max out my processor that i have tried, skyrim and ut3. and it wouldent be the case if the game was designed for pc, > the real gaming platform. why are shadows done on the processor again rather than the gpu like they should be? getting lazy.

shadows are done on CPU, because on consoles CPU is very lightly loaded with other tasks, while loading the GPU with shadows processing on console on top of everything it already has to do would bring it to a stall. They are getting lazy only in regard to designing the game engine for consoles and then not bothering to do a proper port to PC

 

[Guest]

Bah... when a dev cant even issue a LMAA executable for PC so we can use more than 2 GB of RAM that says just one thing... LAZY.

The bugs people are experiencing with Skyrim are from just a blatant lack of beta testing.

BUT...I have enjoyed the hell out of the game...all bugs and crappy UI aside.

 

[Guest]

Headache?... well this is why he makes the big buck eh? & yes, Piracy spans both consoles and PC.

 

[brandonjclark]

You'd think with the way Bethesda is complaining that they didn't just make Skyrim the best-selling video game on Steam, ever.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2295080

 

[sundragon]

They had 5 years to develop this game using Oblivions graphics engine and radiant AI - They updated it of course, but it's not made from scratch... This level of bugs from day one is redic - enough excuses.

The menu system is crap IMO - it's designed for consoles and F*ck people who have keyboards. It took a modder a short time to make an elegent replacement - Bethesda should pay him

The fact that a modder found out the one of the .dlls has ancient x87 calls instead of more efficient SSE calls is another failure without any excuse. He sait it took a simple recompile with a few check boxes to make the code more efficient - I personally noticed a 4-5 FPS increase on my lower end computer. It's not brain science - it's attention to detail.

Lastly - the number of errata (backward flying dragons, people floating, etc) should have been fixed in beta testing - I felt like I was beta testing the game and in certain cases still do. 5 years to develop??

That being said - the attention to detail must have been placed in graphics and experience because it's a beautiful game! Very enjoyable coming from MMO based games, I don't miss the lack of human interaction - though a MMO mod could be on it's way?!

Buy the game!

Bethesda should shut their mouths and not complain... It's like my professor gave us all semester to write a paper and I crammed it in the last week and now I'm complaining because he took off for simple errors that I missed because I didn't take the time to proof read...

 

[Guest]

From experience (I don't know if this is the actual cause), but downloading the 4GB RAM extension patch off of The Nexus fixed all freezing/crashing issues I had encurred to date. Since they only allowed the max RAM usage to be 2GB (why? becuase XB360 and PS3 only have a MAX of 1GB), and allowing use of 4GB of the 16GB my computer has available, and since I had experienced no performace/crashing issues since; I am going to say that perhaps it was a memory overflow error? Anyone have an opinion (of course everyone will).

 

[cichy69]

if it is so much easier to develop for consoles.. then why do they cost more than pc games? ..i understand maybe when console first comes out it would be an uphill experience developing a game, by now the prices should be on par with pc games, not $10 or $20 more.

 

[Guest]

The true headache is that PC with all the user addon mods takes the $$ out of there pockets. Cause they can't come back to the well 10 months later and make a sequel .. that is the headache. PCer's take a game to next level before authors can spend their last residual cheque.

 

[erelyes]

It's interesting that companies have cited "Piracy" as a challenge with PC over the last 15 years. Yet despite copy-protection in manuals (games got cracked), CD copy-protection (burning software circumvented that), CD keys (keygens came out), the same game companies are still alive, because they made decent games. It seems they assume everyone is out to steal their work, however the majority of people will buy the game, if it's a decent game.

 

[aidynphoenix]

[citation][nom]erelyes[/nom]It's interesting that companies have cited "Piracy" as a challenge with PC over the last 15 years. Yet despite copy-protection in manuals (games got cracked), CD copy-protection (burning software circumvented that), CD keys (keygens came out), the same game companies are still alive, because they made decent games. It seems they assume everyone is out to steal their work, however the majority of people will buy the game, if it's a decent game.[/citation]

yes if a game is good i buy it, always after trying it though... i think if Bethesda made a demo for skyrim, more players would of have decided to buy the game upon its release, instead of waiting for a cracked version.

 

[Kreelor]

I'm surprised that Peter Hines was surprised at that!
Even with the help I get from Tom's Hardware Guide and from TechGuy.org, I -STILL- cannot select and buy components to build the "cheapest/best/future-proofed/low-end/gaming machine"! My poor brain is exhausted, and my eyes are so blurry from reading thousands of contradictions and personal preferences, that I am now just 'spinning my wheels.'

 

[aidynphoenix]

[citation][nom]Kreelor[/nom]I'm surprised that Peter Hines was surprised at that!Even with the help I get from Tom's Hardware Guide and from TechGuy.org, I -STILL- cannot select and buy components to build the "cheapest/best/future-proofed/low-end/gaming machine"! My poor brain is exhausted, and my eyes are so blurry from reading thousands of contradictions and personal preferences, that I am now just 'spinning my wheels.'[/citation]

here is what i do,, i decide what kind of budget il be working with. than what games do i want to play, based on the games i want to play, i look up what processors are able to handle those games at the level i want. than pick among those processors in my price range. than pick a motherboard that is going to have all the features you want/need. next pick a graphics card that will be on the same level with the CPU and still do your games. get at least 4gb ram. find your wattage with different calculators, and add maybe 100w for insurance, and buy a good power supply with that wattage, hardrive and case are up to the builder. slap it together and you got a system.

 

[republicano]

pc should be first then downgrade to consoles, this is why we are stuck with a console user interface, luckily there are mods to make it bearable, but its a great game, glad i didnt get it on any console.knowing its vast environment killing consoles ability to process it to our expectations

 

[chromius]

Think about the very small market the PC had in its early days yet high quality games were still made. Granted because things were simpler so was development. Yet I cant help but think this is just the generational problem of wanting easy money for less work, its not just game development its in every business today. Greed and laziness but at what level is it at its worst, mostly at the top, and allowing those ideas to trickle down. No I am not crazy.

And piracy is not nearly the issue that it has been blown up to be. This is just the scapegoat excuse to the shareholders and investors, and an excuse for the movie and music industry to get tax breaks for "losses". Its a fact that the large majority of pirated material would not ever be purchased.

 

[psiboy]

What an idiot this Pete Hines guy is... PC Gaming is about programming to an API such as DirectX etc which is what Microsoft has labored hard to do, to remove the old dos days when you had to "support" different video cards and sound cards! This guys has never written a line of code in his sad useless life... Now to the topic of Piracy... I know quite a few people who despite being old school PC gamers pirate everything for their consoles, whilst still buying their PC games....

 

[billcat479]

Haven't programmed much in many years so much of this is just guessing or common sense over what I've seen over the years and if you really think about it or think at all you might get it.
Well it seems most people haven't been around that long or don't notice the area's windows threw in that never worked called "compatibility mode"/
Or the same trying to make a program work through out the windows cycle of games and the drivers that changed for each one.
Running anything on Vista was a headache and more. Trying to break out a game that was made for DX9 and try to play it today. It will not run very well and many have specific lockup area's. We def. don't work off of 100% set in stone standards and trying to write a game that takes over a year means they have to keep going back and checking to see if it will work at even 50% before it's ready to be sold and then go though it again and again to try to keep up with these changing drivers and updated and changing OS's.
How many times have you had a working computer one day just to come back to one that didn't after Microsoft threw in a few fixes? If you say never your lying out your backside or have not had a computer very long. And this is a very small part of what they have to deal with.
Sticking with Windows XP and trying to play new games today is a lot of fun. With a lot of games it's impossible. Even though they say they conform to standards they don't. They fudge and they lie.

They have a very valid point also because the stability issue shifted from the game developers to the video cards drivers developers which does add an almost limitless number of issues to get around when making any game today.
And a game being reviewed by many of the game sites all have one issue in mind first when rating a game is how much eye candy is there.
How well or how fun that game actually is comes in last in today's game ratings. And the people that produce the games keep this crap in mind when they tell everyone how this game should be when they are done.
So where does any game developer start when designing a new game?
And there is a huge difference from how today's video cards work from the ones 2 generations back that have seen 15 or so driver updates and changes or what ever so where can anyone start when they want to make a new game?
Not to mention the way old and new DLL's and tons of changes widows throws out as well, they like to butt in and make a maze out of how it can find the right path to the right video calls or sound calls or want to share the same memory.
Running any game on new installation of windows usually works better than one that is put on one that has a 6 month old OS running. It's not quite a bad today as it was in the widow's 98 era. The OS's are part of the problem and so is everyone's nit pickin FPS demands that force the video card vendor's to tailor their driver updates to the newest ones leaving older ones to fend for themselves is maybe also why game developers have such a hard time with PC's. It sees a ton of changes from when they lay out the flowcharts for the game up till it's release takes a very long time depending on the complexity of the game and in this very long time they see so many driver changes which ones do they use as a base? It's a no win scenario. The stable games now try to stick with older game engines and play it as safe as they can because they will have the best chance of working even half as well as they would like.
And those types of games are super boring, take 3 days to play and are not worth the money and they are the ones highest on the list to pirate because they are not worth paying for.
It's so sticking plain why games have such a hard time but no one takes into account the time it takes to develop them. And they all demand the latest graphic's upgrades that were not even close to being out when they were half way though making the games unless they are throw out games like the Call of Duty ones that are all the same for one big reason. It's the easy way and the safest way but it's not the end users way as they get nothing from buying each new release.
Games with no freedom of movement are easy to throw out. The type of games these guys are making take a lot more time and face a lot more challenges then the no choices games.
So there is many different levels a game designer has to deal with depending on the game they put out. And the amount of variables with a bunch of different OS's that have bugs of their own, that may or may not work well with the software released. They may make a game that works very well with Widow's XP or Vista and then you get a slew of updates from Microsoft that screws everything up and the people designed a game all of a sudden find they can't use this line of programming or that one. It's one reason I have auto update turned off, it makes things a lot easier in the long run.

It's a very screwed up world for anyone like these huge game size designers. They face a ever changing attack of changes that make their job a living nightmare. I totally agree with their point on this.

It is even worse that people throw rants at them without looking at the world of computers from their point of view because they haven't been around long enough or think past one level to see it's not a one game fits all universe. How many updates were done to hardware and drivers in a 6 month period? A ton of them and maybe that period in time 5 tons of them. It's amazing we can get any games to work 100% out the door. DX9 has been around a very long time, so why is it I can't run many of them on a modern computer without installing widow's XP? And or a certain driver set for my video and or audio?
There is supposed to be compatibility but there isn't. Or I have to write down a specific video driver version if I want to run a 2 year old program? See a lot of that.
Just check out specific game forums and you'll see a slew of changes you might have to do to run this game or that game but it's all over the place that there is very little stability with games these days and it's not the games fault most of the time.
There are some programs that have stood the test of time and are fun to play from time to time but the number of useable games has massively shrunk down because of all the changes to hardware and software.
And even with some games you have to go in and set up the sound settings a special way or you get game crashes at certain points, it was nice when everyone used Soundblaster compatible drivers but that isn't there anymore as far as I know or how much is left of it. It seems you have to know what drivers to use and have 2 or 3 different OS's installed on a computer to use what software you prefer to use. It's not easy at all.
It's way to easy to just throw stupid rants but a little bit harder to think how much changes go on from a game's starting point until it's ready to be sold. And take such a one dimensional view while your insulting them.

The folks that made this game are right on with their assessment. Making any large game is a nightmare on today's computers.
And add in using 32bit or 64bit just adds to the fun.

 

[psiboy]

Pete Hines is an Idiot.... It's called DirectX you programme to an API... Unlike the complete moron John Carmack who insists on using open GL which is why Rage was a clusterf***... Get your facts straight Pete Hines... ya doofus... PS NEVER BUYING ANOTHER ID GAME AGAIN!