Question What machines do games writers use

[MJS WARLORD]

This may be an odd question to ask but consider this , my custom built rig cost £3k just over 3 and a half yrs ago , it has I7 6800k running at 3.4 ghz and a gtx 1080 that had only just come out at the time. I have 16gb ram and 2 ssd plus about 9 fans on different items , no i am not bragging just saying .

At the moment their are a lot of new stuff on steam that users are reporting 100% cpu usage and my point is , a lot of users have even better set ups than me. One game i must not mention had my rig throwing out excess heat even when i was just using it for the first time , i was not even playing the game all i was doing was setting up the keys.

Another game i must not mention has had users reporting similar problems to 100% usage since it was released 4 years ago and all the devs say is turn down setting . 100% on a menu page ? Did they turn things down as they were testing it.

It seems strange that some players with lower spec pc than mine say "no problems " , i think they might not be telling the truth because as I say some users with better set ups than mine DO say they have a problem with a certain something.

Older games also throw up some oddities because I have been using some older games on windows 10 without a problem yet I see others say they wont work.

If you complain to a manufacturer the stock answers are , turn things down , send a dxlog and update drivers.

So , come clean guys if you are a game dev or writer say what gear you wrote your game on and did you get the same problems your customers are experiencing.

Steam has a good refund policy but rumour has it if you request too many refunds they will eventually refuse you.

 

[joeblowsmynose]

You need to provide more info ...

Are you having issues with games and 100% load on your PC?

If not, and you just read some steam comments that complain about this, keep in mind that many of these people are young or not enthusiasts and issues with their PCs can be from anything, such as malware for example. You seem to be basing your entire question around this, so I assume you think it is relevant.


Are you asking what type of rigs do game devs use? Well that depends on the dev -- is it a one man hobbyist working from his home sort of scenario, or is it a multi-million dollar game studio? Big difference ... you never mentioned any specific game types, or criteria.

Or are you asking us to help you with an issue with your PC running at 100% load while playing games? If so you need to be way more specific and detailed.

I've done some personal modding and dabbled in game creation, but I've never published anything. Maybe there's someone here more qualified to answer you question, but you might have to clarify.

 

[Eximo]

Way too much to go into, really. Joe covered good points.

Not all game developers run the whole game. Some are artists, some people only make the menus, etc. Development leads and testers will run the full game on appropriate hardware. Even if they do grab the latest build from time to time to mess with it, there are certain expectations. Different roles require different hardware. A lot of coding can be done on a cheap $300 machine and the project built on a server.

Obviously they can't exactly predict the hardware that will be available at time of launch. What they can do is target a cost/performance profile. Now you also have these things called producers and publishers. They will set a delivery date and get marketing and promotion set up. So what gets released to the public may not be anywhere close to what the developers wanted to deliver. And they are often on to the next project leaving only a smaller, less experienced team for maintenance and improvements.

You can look at a lot of the 'poorly optimized' games out there to see examples of this. Or they get too deep down into the game design and can't fix problems without re-writing too much, which is cost prohibitive. (Or look at game mods turned into marketed titles) Also have the examples of games that are already making money at the current user experience, no need for costly improvements.

And you have long term projects with extreme requirements now, that when the project is ready, there will hopefully be hardware available that is commonplace and cheap enough to run it.

And finally, console ports. PC is typically a much smaller market than console. Why so many bad console ports exist, minimal effort since the return isn't worth it.


Those lower spec players are running without a lot of features enabled to get it to run at speed. If you do the same thing and don't get the same/better results, something is very wrong.