Bethesda VP: Developing For PC is a "Headache"

[stewox]

How? PCs are less standardized than consoles. Just buying and setting up the amount of different systems necessary for just the most likely setups would be cost and time prohibitive, and that still doesn't rule out conflicts caused by other games entirely, like Rage and the Battlefield 3 Beta. Bethesda has always been ambitious, and the bigger the game, the bigger the scope for bugs and glitches.[/qoute]

You guys are so wrong, you still don't understand it's not the game that's buggy, it's all in the driver, the game can be as super-polished as it can get and if the driver is crap the whole game doesn't work.

by getting some testers. You don't need hundreds of machines and parts, and huge amounts of time. You need a group of people, a set of machines and the ability to change parts, im not asking them to check every single individual type of grapics card (for each series say 8600 there would be 4 different brands) just to check each series. Its pretty basic stuff to do and nearly every other company seems to be able to handle it just fine.

are you an industry professional?

compatability comes from the GPU driver not from the developers, they merely handle details on high-level , all low-level stuff is out of developer's reach for PC.

 

[JonnWood]

Does no one realize the Xbox is just as easy to pirate for? The whole "cry for us, PC games might be pirated" comes off as a completely ignorant statement.

Much harder, and it can potentially get your Xbox bricked.

For PC, you type ' torrent' and boom. You either have the game or tons of viruses. Or both. Or really nasty porn. Or all three.

no it can't you just don't plug it in to the internet.
And from a cost perspective a bricked xbox is what 5-6 new games cost?
thats tiny cost/value ratio that any pirater could hit in no time.

Anyway OT
I think beth just need to invest in some real product testing. They seem incapable of this.

How? PCs are less standardized than consoles. Just buying and setting up the amount of different systems necessary for just the most likely setups would be cost and time prohibitive, and that still doesn't rule out conflicts caused by other games entirely, like Rage and the Battlefield 3 Beta. Bethesda has always been ambitious, and the bigger the game, the bigger the scope for bugs and glitches.

by getting some testers. You don't need hundreds of machines and parts, and huge amounts of time. You need a group of people, a set of machines and the ability to change parts, im not asking them to check every single individual type of grapics card (for each series say 8600 there would be 4 different brands) just to check each series. Its pretty basic stuff to do and nearly every other company seems to be able to handle it just fine.

Yes, like Rage-

Like Battlefield 3-

Like Crysis 2-

Like The Witcher 2-

Hm. If I didn't know better, I'd say bugs were actually common for big, complicated PC games, especially cross-platform releases.

 

[JonnWood]

are you an industry professional?

Irrelevant. Are you?

compatability comes from the GPU driver not from the developers, they merely handle details on high-level , all low-level stuff is out of developer's reach for PC.

Citation needed. Preferably not from some PC fanboy website that starts out by denigrating consoles.

 

[YawningAngel]

are you an industry professional?

Irrelevant. Are you?

compatability comes from the GPU driver not from the developers, they merely handle details on high-level , all low-level stuff is out of developer's reach for PC.

Citation needed. Preferably not from some PC fanboy website that starts out by denigrating consoles.

Citation not needed. It's fairly easily verifiable that every AAA title in the last year that isn't RAGE uses DirectX. DirectX implementation is a problem for Microsoft and AMD/nVidia's driver writers. You can bore yourself to death verifying the fact that DirectX exists, is maintained by microsoft, and has Driver support provided by the the makers of graphics cards at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937781, http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html and http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx

 

[stewox]

msdn link doesn't work

 

[JonnWood]

Does no one realize the Xbox is just as easy to pirate for? The whole "cry for us, PC games might be pirated" comes off as a completely ignorant statement.

Much harder, and it can potentially get your Xbox bricked.

For PC, you type ' torrent' and boom. You either have the game or tons of viruses. Or both. Or really nasty porn. Or all three.

Absurdly ignorant statement. The thing is torrents and most torrent sites kill off virus filled torrents provided that they have more than 5 users. Same with porn filled torrents. The most used torrent site is probably pirate bay and i defy you to find 5 new torrents that are active and have a virus.

You either have the game or tons of viruses. Or both. Or really nasty porn. Or all three.

That means the options for what one recieves in a torrent are:

a)The game.
b)Viruses.
c)The game with a virus.
d)Porn.
e)a, b, and d.

No point was made about the frequency of each, just that they exist.

 

[JonnWood]

Citation not needed. It's fairly easily verifiable

I was asking him to prove his points with backup.

that every AAA title in the last year that isn't RAGE uses DirectX. DirectX implementation is a problem for Microsoft and AMD/nVidia's driver writers. You can bore yourself to death verifying the fact that DirectX exists, is maintained by microsoft, and has Driver support provided by the the makers of graphics cards at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937781, http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html and http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx

However, StewoX stated that problems come from the GPU, and mentioned no other cause. What I want is evidence for this claim. You have not provided it, nor has he.

 

[YawningAngel]

Citation not needed. It's fairly easily verifiable

I was asking him to prove his points with backup.

that every AAA title in the last year that isn't RAGE uses DirectX. DirectX implementation is a problem for Microsoft and AMD/nVidia's driver writers. You can bore yourself to death verifying the fact that DirectX exists, is maintained by microsoft, and has Driver support provided by the the makers of graphics cards at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937781, http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html and http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx

However, StewoX stated that problems come from the GPU, and mentioned no other cause. What I want is evidence for this claim. You have not provided it, nor has he.

That's because it's not true. Errors can come from memory, the processor, the I/O, and a load of other places. Hell, errors can come from the hard drive in the right circumstances. The fact remains, however, that it's very hard to generate this kind of error (the only example I know of off the top of my head is Heroes of Newerth running out of memory on 32-bit systems). Graphics errors, on the other hand, are easily generated either through using the drivers in ways the writers didn't originally intend (nVidia blackscreen bug, RAGE's texture popping issues) or sucking at using DirectX (every flickering shadow you've ever seen). However, I can't prove this to you save by auditing a significant fraction of every game ever made, so for obvious reasons I'm not going to. Nevertheless, I hope this has helped improve your understanding.

 

[stewox]

Citation not needed. It's fairly easily verifiable

I was asking him to prove his points with backup.

that every AAA title in the last year that isn't RAGE uses DirectX. DirectX implementation is a problem for Microsoft and AMD/nVidia's driver writers. You can bore yourself to death verifying the fact that DirectX exists, is maintained by microsoft, and has Driver support provided by the the makers of graphics cards at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937781, http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html and http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx

However, StewoX stated that problems come from the GPU, and mentioned no other cause. What I want is evidence for this claim. You have not provided it, nor has he.

search the net, im not your mom

I posted the links and directed you to the discussions. However that thread on official Rage forums is for the people who already understand what we're talking about.


Plus, this is called experience and being current with the topics, i have no means to provide sources of what i have heard/learned over the years. Many of it pertaining to Rage was discussed on Rage forums, but it's general knowledge in ID Software. Just stop acting like an escapist "tough guy" around here, relax and read on.

More than half of the actual source comes from rather ironical source: John Carmack, Did you watched QuakeCon2011 Keynote and Q&A, both about 3 hours, and i watched both about 5 times if not even more to analyze everything he said to most details.

About the actual game mehanics and the porting procedure that is a different issue (because currently Rage on PC is a sort "console port" in terms of functionality/graphics) Caramack said that it was a big mistake developing for consoles and incrementally upping for PC. Developing for PC and deploying for consoles is what we'll get in Doom4 persumably.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760

Video here (at E3 2011): http://www.computerandvideogames.com/306236/id-softwares-john-carmack-20-minute-video-interview/
Skip to minute 3:00, and then listen as he goes for about 2 minutes, lisen over an over again and be careful to catch the words "directly on the metal" ... that means "low-level access" that PCs do not have an everyone obviously wants PC to be better than a console.


QuakeCon 2011 Carmack Keynote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28
Q&A:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Q9-ftiPVQ

Another thing Carmack put into perspective about this is that not just that standardized APIs are not great for performance, but also Abstraction by drivers, DirectX pretends you can lock an rectangle of an image but in reality the drivers are doing completely different thing, so the drivers aren't doing what you think they're doing, as DX API just has these "features" that really kill you when you want to maximize performance, there are some benefits, but Carmack want performance, as again, dealing with the stuff

You have to understand that it's actually ID Software who pushed the PC gaming industry, not microsoft, microsoft just benefited from it, microsoft is a parasite in how they operate, they never do really show any passion or anything, do you see any Microsoft logos on hardcore PC tournaments ... it's mostly loyal motherboard/memory/graphics/accessory companies that have good PR people that do support the PC community at large. Gigabyte for example has it's own Starcraft 2 PRO tournament.

 

[BoogieManFL]

Because we all know you can't pirate console games. /rollseyes

Boo fucking hoo.

They said it was a problem. They never said console games are never pirated. Fact is, PC piracy is, by volume, streets ahead of console piracy by several orders of magnitude. I find it odd how the second a developer or publisher even mentions PC piracy, there are always several people who act like they said piracy never happens on consoles. That's not a logical reaction, that's a defensive, knee-jerk one, and I think it's very telling.

I've known people who pirated PC and console games, and the guys who do the console thing will have hundreds of games while the PC guys have a few here and there. And many of them will only play a game for a few hours to see if they like it, then go buy it if they do or delete it otherwise because it's not their thing. It's rare for the console guys to go buy one legit later. From my experience console piracy seems worse, hence my reaction. Maybe it's harder to track, less investigated, and the least discussed.

In any event that topic was the least substantial thing I covered in my post, and I find your fixation on that smallest aspect "very telling".

 

[Ethring]

Or, they could be marginally intelligent monkeys and simply do a google search on how to install a video card in their model of computer. They will find links to all sorts of videos and walkthroughs.

 

[mogamer]

Does no one realize the Xbox is just as easy to pirate for? The whole "cry for us, PC games might be pirated" comes off as a completely ignorant statement.

Much harder, and it can potentially get your Xbox bricked.

For PC, you type ' torrent' and boom. You either have the game or tons of viruses. Or both. Or really nasty porn. Or all three.

I take it you've never browsed the Game ads in your local craigslist, Every third ad is someone wanting to mod either a Xbox 360 or Wii. And nobody with any sense takes their modded console online or gets viruses from pc piracy.

So to pirate on console I have to go physically visit some guy, take my unit offline permanently and risk bricking it... compared to 'Use the Google.'

I think some of you aren't aware what 'easier' actually means. Protip: Easier entails less steps.

I didn't say that it was easier to pirate on a console than on a pc. I was replying to two different things.

1) It isn't "much harder" to pirate on a console. It isn't as easy, but it isn't that difficult. I guess you don't know the difference between hard and not so hard.

2) The fact that you can get viruses, malware and porn downloading games. Nobody I know uses torrents for that. Places like megaupload and rapidshare are much faster and generally safer.

 

[stiver]

I could go individual to each person who tried (and failed) to correct me, but I'll make a blanket statement.

You should learn reading comprehension, because "just as easy" =/= "easier". Modding an xbox takes 30 minutes, and afterwards each game is simply burning a DVD. That is just as easy as adding cracks to folders.

And Xbox live banning a modded xbox is not an issue, since you can't play online games that were pirated whether you are on a Pc or an Xbox so it is a non-issue.

People need to stop being contrary for the sake of it, when they clearly don't know what they are talking about.