Dead Rising 3 PC Version Will Run Into Issues Above 30 FPS, Says Capcom

[lacktheknack]

They tied the physics and AI to the FRAMERATE?

WTF?

Only Dwarf Fortress gets away with that! D:

But then again, I quite enjoy "wild and crazy", so maybe it'll be worth it after all.

EDIT: lol at everyone bitching about "bad ports".

This isn't a porting issue, it's a design decision chosen at the start of the project that was made with only fixed framerates in mind. No amount of porting wizardry can fix this, they have to rewrite the physics and AI components from the ground up.

EDIT EDIT: Guys... there's actually nothing wrong with the tying other systems to the framerate, assuming that you can force a consistent framerate. Stop acting like it's a terrible decision and they should be burned for it. My Dwarf Fortress comment was meant to be humorously hypocritical.

Sure, it would be nice if they could adjust their systems to a forced 60 or even 45 FPS (and before anyone asks, NO, linear scaling is not an option), but let's not act like the game is somehow unplayable because of its 30 FPS cap.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

OT: I will say the same thing as always: as long as the frame rate is consistent then I'm fine with 30 FPS. What's the point of having a high frame rate if it jumps around wildly. 60 is nice and is better, I'm not denying that. But I don't care if I'm playing a game at 30 or 60 at all, and I adapt just fine to it.

I agree. Hell I recently beat Deadly Premonition on ps3 even it's frame rate wasn't as bad some pc games I've played that run at 45fps for one minute than shit through the floor when some AI's walk on screen and I have to tweak settings. Is it really that bad to play a game at 30fps? It would probably be more noticable on a monitor than a tv. I get that some people get motion sickness but that's not a majority of people

 

[Vareoth]

Whatever, if it runs well then I don't care. But since it's Capcom I'm not really holding my hopes up.

 

[The Lunatic]

Whatever, if it runs well then I don't care. But since it's Capcom I'm not really holding my hopes up.

Well, it's running at 30, so, there's never really "Well".

 

[Vareoth]

Whatever, if it runs well then I don't care. But since it's Capcom I'm not really holding my hopes up.

Well, it's running at 30, so, there's never really "Well".

My apologies. Perhaps I should have used the words tolerable, passable and mediocre instead.

 

[Zipa]

Why the hell would you tie stuff like physics into the FPS rate? We stopped doing that during the DOS era because its a shitty idea. Plus its quite frankly insulting that this guy thinks that we can't see the difference on PC in 2014 between 30 and 60fps.

 

[The Lunatic]

Whatever, if it runs well then I don't care. But since it's Capcom I'm not really holding my hopes up.

Well, it's running at 30, so, there's never really "Well".

My apologies. Perhaps I should have used the words tolerable, passable and mediocre instead.

Yeah, I'm kinda of the same opinion.

I'd greatly prefer a 60+FPs experience. And I won't buy a full-price 30FPS game, but, if it goes on sale for super-cheap like the last game did. I'll consider it.

 

[Gylukios]

Reminds me of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, where like Sotanaht (post 4) noted above with Dark Souls 2, much of the game's logic was tied to the framerate. In ME3, the most Massive Effect of this was the enemy targeting and firing. The console version's 30 fps delivered enemies that were a lot slower to do everything, whereas the 60 fps PC version's foes were a lot deadlier. People noticed this and took it steps further, playing with the fps limiter in the game files in order to achieve very bizarre experiences.

On 10 fps, you could run all around the map and take no damage from anything, as enemies were "thinking" too slow to complete checks for line of sight, aim, and fire before you were long gone.

On 90 or 120 fps (don't remember how high they got it), players would be cut down mercilessly and almost instantly by enemies that could "think" a lot faster, resulting in hilariously fast team wipes.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

Ok... between this and the unGODLY system requirements (seriously. The Xbone does NOT have the power of a 7870 so why is that the minimum requirement?), I think Capcom is trying to sabotage the PC port to make it do poorly to make some sort of point about how it's not worth it to make PC ports.

Tin foil hats, anyone? Though I think it's more plausible than most conspiracy theories.

EDIT: Also, game programming 101, NEVER TIE YOUR GAME LOGIC TO FRAMERATE! Framerate is unstable and variable no matter where the game is, tying any game logic or physics to the framerate is one of the stupidest things you can do as a game developer. Anyone who does it needs to be fired and go back to school on this.

 

[azurine]

And I am reminded of this:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/8545-Shaming-PC-Ports-Because-Why-Not

Would it really be so hard to delay the release just a little bit, work with the code, and do some bug fixing?

 

[Yozozo]

Reminds me of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, where like Sotanaht (post 4) noted above with Dark Souls 2, much of the game's logic was tied to the framerate. In ME3, the most Massive Effect of this was the enemy targeting and firing. The console version's 30 fps delivered enemies that were a lot slower to do everything, whereas the 60 fps PC version's foes were a lot deadlier. People noticed this and took it steps further, playing with the fps limiter in the game files in order to achieve very bizarre experiences.

On 10 fps, you could run all around the map and take no damage from anything, as enemies were "thinking" too slow to complete checks for line of sight, aim, and fire before you were long gone.

On 90 or 120 fps (don't remember how high they got it), players would be cut down mercilessly and almost instantly by enemies that could "think" a lot faster, resulting in hilariously fast team wipes.

This explains SO MUCH of my problems with ME3's MP. How did I never find this out...

But yea... you'd think tying ANYTHING to Framerate or system clock speed... just a terrible awful idea. I don't claim to be an expert programmer, but hell, I learned this before I finished high school.

 

[Something Amyss]

Translation : We are incompetent as fuck at PC porting... and we don't give a fuck, suck our dick, we're motherfucking Capcom.

And you'll buy it anyway, so we have absolutely no reason to change or care.

 

[Cerebrawl]

So they naturally don't want the PC version to be better than the console version. Which of course is a classically shortsighted decision from CAPCOM.

Hence they're deliberately hamstringing it. In fact given that the only real diff between PC's and consoles is more the power behind them and PC's have that hands down, it's very likely that they have in fact booby-trapped the game to produce problems when run at a speed greater than 30fps.

Hanlon's Razor comes to mind. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.

More likely they're just stupid enough to tie stuff to framerate like the idiots that they are. Just like several other console developers do, as noted this has caused problems with games like Dark Souls 2, Mass Effect 3, and Need For Speed: Pursuit. It's not new, but if I had a guess, it's probably one of the least hardware demanding solutions, used because of anemic console specs, for games that are intended to be console exclusive.

My guess is they had an exclusivity deal with microsoft that had some sales stipulation "if it doesn't make X sales by Y date, exclusivity is off and we can port it elsewhere to make our money back", they just never thought it would come to that, but it did because the xbone didn't sell enough.

 

[thetoddo]

Maybe I'm just old and don't have the newfangled eyes this generation has, but given persistence of vision (which is how we actually create the concept of motion in the brain) isn't 60 FPS more than the human eye can detect?

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

But is it really incompetence, or just lazyness?

There's not much difference when it comes to running a business.

Translation : We are incompetent as fuck at PC porting... and we don't give a fuck, suck our dick, we're motherfucking Capcom.

And you'll buy it anyway, so we have absolutely no reason to change or care.

That's what pisses me off the most about this. People will throw a fit about the 30 FPS issue, but then they'll make sure that the PC version makes Capcom millions of dollars anyway. It would be nice, for once, to see the PC community band together to stubbornly cross our arms and just sit there until the developers agree to fix the issues they brazenly said that they wouldn't fix.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Maybe I'm just old and don't have the newfangled eyes this generation has, but given persistence of vision (which is how we actually create the concept of motion in the brain) isn't 60 FPS more than the human eye can detect?

It's a bit more complicated than that. I could clumsily try and explain the basics of it, but it'd be better if I just link to the Vsauce video that talks about it.

Vsauce: What is Video? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSaywCF6E8] - Skip to about 2:10 if you just want the discussion about framerate and the human eye.
Vsauce: What is the Resolution of the Human Eye? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I5Q3UXkGd0] - Semi-related video that's also interesting to watch.

 

[Rocket Taco]

I am reminded of the days when buying a faster CPU sped your games up, to the point of being unplayable. As a software worker who has done some game projects, the thought of tying real-time logic to the speed of a non-fixed resource is horrifying. Even on consoles, that's spectacular incompetence.

 

[Something Amyss]

That's what pisses me off the most about this. People will throw a fit about the 30 FPS issue, but then they'll make sure that the PC version makes Capcom millions of dollars anyway. It would be nice, for once, to see the PC community band together to stubbornly cross our arms and just sit there until the developers agree to fix the issues they brazenly said that they wouldn't fix.

Of course, there is an element of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." Because DR3 will either sell well or they'll blame piracy. Even if nobody pirated the game, they'd blame piracy.

Still, it's a little tiresome to hear the outrage over these things and people buying them anyway.

 

[Something Amyss]

Maybe I'm just old and don't have the newfangled eyes this generation has, but given persistence of vision (which is how we actually create the concept of motion in the brain) isn't 60 FPS more than the human eye can detect?

We can only view a few discrete images per second, but that number is actually (if I remember right) in the single digits. However, when we see images at that speed, they look choppy. Higher framerate means it looks smoother to our eyes. There's some matter of debate over where the noticeable cap is, but it's not as low as you would think based on technical numbers with the eye. You can also notice changes that happen at an even faster "framerate," based on tests of picking up an individual dot, for example.

Keep in mind, though, that while there are people who will swear they can tell the difference between 30, 60, 120 and even higher, there are also people who swear they can tell the difference between lossless and high quality lossy audio files, as well as vinyl and digital, who can't actually do it when tested. I'm not sure if any such test has actually been performed for gaming applications, but I'd be interested to know how many people could actually tell the difference (even in clinical conditions).

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

That's what pisses me off the most about this. People will throw a fit about the 30 FPS issue, but then they'll make sure that the PC version makes Capcom millions of dollars anyway. It would be nice, for once, to see the PC community band together to stubbornly cross our arms and just sit there until the developers agree to fix the issues they brazenly said that they wouldn't fix.

Of course, there is an element of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." Because DR3 will either sell well or they'll blame piracy. Even if nobody pirated the game, they'd blame piracy.

Still, it's a little tiresome to hear the outrage over these things and people buying them anyway.

Yeah, this is true. Big businesses (and this isn't exclusive to gaming) have a bad habit of nearly-always learning the wrong lessons from their sales reports, even the good ones. If a product does well, the company (and rivals) will find the simplest and most easily reproduced part of that product and then mass product the hell out of it. Hence why Lego Movie was awesome (because it had a deep and meaningful plot with characters that had actual depth), and now a bunch of toy makers are in a big rush to greenlight their own products as movies because all they saw was "movie about toys did amazingly well". Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have a game (who's name I forgot) that was horribly made, but the developers made a big deal about piracy as the reason for low sales.

*Sigh* You'd think with all that money they could afford a few brain cells... apparently not. -_-