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[Cerity]

The ram is there to be used. If the guy can load the entire game into ram, prevent reaming of the br drive/hdd while maintaining a stable frame rate then he's doing it right.

It's nothing to do with optimisation if he uses the avaliable assets.

 

[xJavonta]

the tweets started with him lamenting the lack of ram in the xbox, he only mentioned the witnesses usage in response to someone. and saying 'our game uses 5gbs of ram' is the worst kind of PR you could spin since its something that would excite maybe 0.00001% of the population. but somehow the tweet ends up on neogaf through no effort on blows part but it's his fault anyway that he 'fucking annoys' you.

just happy that someone is making use of the resources. the guy has been making this game for i think 3-4 years now and he made a game as thoughtful as braid. he's not lazy by any stretch.

Not once did I say that Blow was lazy. And it's not just this, it's a culmination of everything over time. He's been sounding like a GAF member after the Xbox reveal lately, and it's embarrassing. Next thing you know he's going to be tweeting gifs about how shitty the Xbox one is.

If Bethesda came out and said "Our game runs like shit on the PS3 because we're using all the P3's available resources", people would be a little pissed off that they didn't bother to try to get the best performance out of it.



How is this game even going to scale down to an iPad when it's using 5Gb of fucking ram, that seems like it'd be one hell of a job to 'optimize' it.

 

[kuroshiki]

Totally not optimized at all. That game doesn't even look like it needs 512 MB ram.

 

[INTERNET]

Since how can there ever be enough RAM?

If you easily increase the amount and size of textures, lightmaps, and audio,
then it's a trivial observation not having enough RAM. So what's the news
Mr. Blow is talking about?

It's just too easy to consume RAM that way.

If he would speak about math and physics requiring more RAM for their games,
things would look different. But just using textures, lightmaps, and sounds
arguing for not having enough memory tells me something about the programmer.

Sorry to single you out, but you were just the most recent of a ludicrous batch of posts. Blow is as low level as an indie guy gets, and kind of has been for a decade or so. Here's a sample bibliography; saying that he doesn't have a grasp on these issues is just weird, and shows a serious misunderstanding of his position.

 

[Gemüsepizza]

Why do people call this "unoptimized"? If everything performs fine, why should he optimize anything? You only optimize things when software is not performing like you want.

 

[JoeyJungle]

Didn't blow used to have a column in a gamedev magazine about graphics programming? I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about.

Edit:

FUCK YOU INTERNET, beat me by a minute.

 

[onQ123]

Funny thing is his game look like it could be done on the PS3.

 

[JWong]

Yeah. But we know this since the beginning of the computer age. What's the news
Mr. Blow talks about? One can say similar if we would have 1TB of RAM. So what
exactly is the point he is talking about -- what we didn't knew already since
the dawn of the computer age?

Who's we?

Certainly not all of gaf.

 

[Zombie James]

He's right, though. Texture streaming can be pretty efficient when you're dealing with tight memory requirements, but when you've already got all the memory you need why bother wasting time on techniques that give you no benefit?

 

[Vincent Alexander]

He literally wrote that The Witness was using 5 GB out of 8 GB available, and people are saying it must be unoptimized? Do you people think Sony put that ram in there so that developers won't use it? "Here's all this ram, but don't you dare use it or else some forum poster will think you're a lazy coder!"

It's hard not to jump to that conclusion, especially with Blow. Have you ever played Braid? Just about the worst frame rate I've seen in a game, full of jitters and jumps.

 

[Cave Johnson]

We need a special thread dedicated for us uninformed ignorant gamers because these responses make us look embarrassing.

Let me try to decipher what JB say: Basically he's designing a game with whatever resources (time/money) to keep adding content without any worries about RAM space against optimizing "specific" areas where the game feels more than what it is because of all the smoke-n-mirror's in the background. Smoke-n-mirror tech that could've been utilized making a much more enhanced game experience. Amirite or Amirong?

It's hard not to jump to that conclusion, especially with Blow. Have you ever played Braid? Just about the worst frame rate I've seen in a game, full of jitters and jumps.

Played it on the PS3 and did not notice that. Maybe your console/PC has issues...

 

[-COOLIO-]

Dude this is fucking reaching and you know it. He has no need to optimize the memory usage since there is still leftover RAM even after loading the whole game. How in the world do you ascertain it will perform poorly because of this?

Read this post below buddy. Just LOL at all the expert armchair devs in this thread, haha.


And bam:
All of you getting in a hissy fit, inform yourselves ^^

beautiful.

 

[yogloo]

Isn't it amazing that a game developer can post on twitter about ram usage and have hordes of people who have never written a single line of code bash him on forums and telling him he must be doing something wrong?

Dumbass-gaf working full time here sir!
I can't believe how many people missed his point.

 

[akachan ningen]

What's the point of optimizing if he doesn't need to? Just so he can brag about how much RAM he has left over?

 

[shinobi602]

Killzone uses realtime lighting and streaming (loading from disc/HD as needed) for textures and audio assets. As well as a lot of instancing (reusing the same model multiple times) of assets.

The Witness loads almost everything at once and utilizes baked high resolution lightmaps for the lighting. The audio for the game alone is ~800MB. Blow is actually doing some neat stuff with audio for example there are over 1,100 sound samples for footsteps, with 4-6 individual samples for each foot on each ground material in the game, which means that you won't have the repeating sound loop when walking like most games have and it will sound much more natural. The advantage of not streaming everything is that you can avoid pop-in (there will still be some as I doubt the GPU would be able to render everything at once but you likely won't be able to notice it) and have greater draw distances. Streaming also introduces quite a bit of processing overhead and also extra development time insuring that the world is broken up into small pieces and that assets are loaded in time to be used. Streaming systems quickly become complicated and can lead to a lot of bugs and uneven performance.

You just made me a lot more hyped for the game somehow. Good job.

 

[redmetal86]

why the hell would I still try to get them to fit in a Mini Cooper sized amount of space inside the van? I could just pile them in, drive my van, and be so much more comfortable.

That's no fun at all. If you pack them all into the van Mini Cooper style, then you can add more people on top of each other. You know what that means? Instant clown car!

 

[Danneee]

"Wants to use over 5GB.."

?

Anyway, how is this game so ram extensive?

The game looks like a current gen game IMO.

This.
Though I'm impressed they somehow got the game to eat all that ram, must be severely unoptimised.

 

[xJavonta]

Dude this is fucking reaching and you know it. He has no need to optimize the memory usage since there is still leftover RAM even after loading the whole game. How in the world do you ascertain it will perform poorly because of this?

Read this post below buddy. Just LOL at all the expert armchair devs in this thread, haha.


And bam:
All of you getting in a hissy fit, inform yourselves ^^

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance? That is what we've essentially been taught to think all this time.

But whatever. I'll leave you "real GAF devs" to continue talking about how not making your game more efficient on resources is a good thing if possible.

 

[Juice]

Not once did I say that Blow was lazy. And it's not just this, it's a culmination of everything over time. He's been sounding like a GAF member after the Xbox reveal lately, and it's embarrassing. Next thing you know he's going to be tweeting gifs about how shitty the Xbox one is.

If Bethesda came out and said "Our game runs like shit on the PS3 because we're using all the P3's available resources", people would be a little pissed off that they didn't bother to try to get the best performance out of it.



How is this game even going to scale down to an iPad when it's using 5Gb of fucking ram, that seems like it'd be one hell of a job to 'optimize' it.

If Bethesda had said that, they'd just have been honest.

I like how "acting like a GAF member" is somehow a scandal. Either you hold GAF members in low regard, or you expect developers to behave in some way that's unlike us. Wanting the Xbone is a completely rational reaction to gamers, much less developers who've been personally burnt dealing with Microsoft directly, often on business that could make or break their business.

He's a human and he doesn't like the Xbox and he's making arguments in support of that case and that's all perfectly fine.

 

[GavinGT]

This.
Though I'm impressed they somehow got the game to eat all that ram, must be severely unoptimised.

It's months away from release, so I don't think it's fair to criticize it for being unoptimized. That part usually happens at the very end of development.

 

[-COOLIO-]

"Our game runs like shit on the PS3 because we're using all the P3's available resources".

you got that from his opinion that the xbox should have added another couple gigs of cheap ram?

 

[MemoryHumanity]

Guys. Why are we getting pissy at the use of the word 'unoptimised'? If the game's just been loaded into RAM, then it's not been optimised. Not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance? That is what we've essentially been taught to think all this time.

But whatever. I'll leave you "real GAF devs" to continue talking about how not making your game more efficient on resources is a good thing if possible.

Who is this "we" you speak of? And careful with those quotations. Might hurt some feelings.

 

[inm8num2]

Hell this excites me. Now I have a reason to get more RAM.

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

We need a special thread dedicated for us uninformed ignorant gamers because these responses make us look embarrassing.

Let me try to decipher what JB say: Basically he's designing a game with whatever resources (time/money) to keep adding content without any worries about RAM space against optimizing "specific" areas where the game feels more than what it is because of all the smoke-n-mirror's in the background. Smoke-n-mirror tech that could've been utilized making a much more enhanced game experience. Amirite or Amirong?



Played it on the PS3 and did not notice that. Maybe your console/PC has issues...

You are correct. Streaming technologies are used in situations where a system can only load X amount of geometry to produce Y framerate. John seems to be delighted that there isn't any screen smearing bullshit getting in the way of his video game, on the PS4 at least.

 

[PTG]

Right now I'm planning a game for the iPad/PC. Most of my work is designing the game, but a good portion of it right now is how I can load the game into the iPad's 512mb of memory. I have to figure out how to load the game while the player scrolls across a map, how to load and unload assets in the background, and potentially limit the amount of images the player can see at any given time.

If it was just PC, I wouldn't really need to plan this at all. I could go straight into game making and not have to worry about memory juggling because most computers have 1GB to spare for games.

If tomorrow you told me I could design a game for 8GB of memory, I would be able to throw out at least a month's work of planning and testing for memory crashes, loading/unloading assets, and so on. It would be absolutely awesome.

Anyone screaming "bah lazy devs not optimizing their code" just don't get it. I can fit eight people into a Mini Cooper if I absolutely had to, stacking and squeezing them on the floors and seats, but if they could ride in a passenger van instead, why the hell would I still try to get them to fit in a Mini Cooper sized amount of space inside the van? I could just pile them in, drive my van, and be so much more comfortable.

 

[BrainZEROX]

Sounds unoptimized

When it doesn't actually. Ram optimization is required when you're constrained by the amount available, if you get the same performance and your ram budget still fits in the initial allocation then it is absolutely unnecessary to optimize it. For what reason would you spend additional hours of work? why bother? That would sound like a waste.

 

[bidguy]

Blow has been an incredibly annoying and confrontational voice in this console generation. For his sake, I hope The Witness sells well because I enjoyed Braid a lot. I wouldn't hold my breath on it taking off personally.

And how the hell is this game using 5GB of RAM? It's a game that current gen machines could probably run.

yeah i dont buy his bs at all.
i get that hes pissed but he sounds obsessed.

 

[Paches]

Somewhere Pachter is laughing at this thread.

 

[-COOLIO-]

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance? That is what we've essentially been taught to think all this time.

But whatever. I'll leave you "real GAF devs" to continue talking about how not making your game more efficient on resources is a good thing if possible.

oh no you don't, YOU GON LEARN TODAY.

get him programming gaf!

efficient use of ram doesn't mean anything if you're the only program outside of the OS that needs to use it. the only benefit to cutting down the ram usage would be one slightly faster loading time, but then that would be a waste of the remaining high speed gddr ram. using 8gbs of ram on the ps4 is absolutely what you should do if your game can make great use of it, which it sounds like he is.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

yeah i dont buy his bs at all.
i get that hes pissed but he sounds obsessed.

Lordy, and we start all over again...There isn't anything for you to buy. It's simple logic that having more ram to develop with opens up more time for game development in areas other than optimization.

efficient use of ram doesn't mean anything if you're the only program outside of the OS that needs to use it. the only benefit to cutting down the ram usage would be one slightly faster loading time, but then that would be a waste of high speed gddr ram. using 8gbs of ram on the ps4 is absolutely what you should do if your game can make great use of it, which it sounds like he is.

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance? That is what we've essentially been taught to think all this time.

But whatever. I'll leave you "real GAF devs" to continue talking about how not making your game more efficient on resources is a good thing if possible.

I'm going to redirect you to these two posts again because it is entirely clear your vitriol is woefully misinformed and you have no idea how game development and memory management works. There is no need to optimize since it will perform the same either way on the PS4. He has not even hit the ceiling of RAM yet. Wasting time on shrinking the memory usage to leave a cavern of vacuous RAM just for the sake of "optimizing" is useless.

But you're right, the iPad port will need to be optimized, have no doubt.

 

[BluePigGanon]

Somewhere Pachter is laughing at this thread.

Right? Sigh.

 

[Juice]

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance? That is what we've essentially been taught to think all this time.
.

Yes, that's absolutely reaching and it's an absurd argument.

Most of the code I write works perfectly well for its use without concerning myself about its performance. Therefore, the code I write often doesn't need to be optimized. Why is this? Because I spend enough time to ponder and verify that some other aspect at runtime will be the overall performance bottleneck.

In my case, that is almost always a network request. Since network requests are typically many orders of magnitude slower than computations, it would be completely unreasonable to optimize the code when improving that external factor (the network request) is the only place I'd realize any gains.

 

[bluecapsule]

Somewhere Pachter is laughing at this thread.

This thread is pretty high on the embarrassment meter. Do people not realize that devs cut down on memory usage by using lower resolution textures + lower polygon count assets? Do people not realize that games look better on PCs partly because PC games can use more RAM? People are literally mocking this indie developer for using the resources available on the PS4.

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

oh no you don't, YOU GON LEARN TODAY.

get him programming gaf!

efficient use of ram doesn't mean anything if you're the only program outside of the OS that needs to use it. the only benefit to cutting down the ram usage would be one slightly faster loading time, but then that would be a waste of high speed gddr ram. using 8gbs of ram on the ps4 is absolutely what you should do if your game can make great use of it, which it sounds like he is.

This makes me wonder what the initial boot up time ends up being seeing how this seems to be an open world game.

 

[tirminyl]

Clearly a lot of armchair developers in this thread don't get it.

Exactly. Reading the responses in this thread has been an absolute pleasure.

 

[KingFire]

It seems that some fellow GAFers don't even understand when devs resort to optimization. Let me introduce this little situation to clarify:

• Developer A has a neat concept for a game in mind. Starts working on it.
• Developer A realizes that his concept can't work on current gen hardware using conventional coding methods due to hardware limitations (mostly memory). To achieve his goals and realize the concept, he needs to implement some kind of memory management system to break up/load his game.
• The process is costly and tiresome, but he needs to do it to make the game he wants to make.

Now let's look at the same story but on the PS4

• Developer A has a neat concept for a game in mind. Starts working on it.
• Since developer A is working on a more powerful hardware in this case, the developer realizes that he can achieve his project intended goals without resorting to special memory management techniques.
• Since developer A has more time and resources now, he decides to include new features in his game.

So if some indie devs wanted to dump the whole thing in RAM and call it a day, why is that bad?

 

[Tallshortman]

What crock of bs. It's easy for any app to use 5Gb lol.

He probably should stay away from technical talks.

He's the one who codes his games, are you a computer science professor or something?

 

[Haunted]

Right now I'm planning a game for the iPad/PC. Most of my work is designing the game, but a good portion of it right now is how I can load the game into the iPad's 512mb of memory. I have to figure out how to load the game while the player scrolls across a map, how to load and unload assets in the background, and potentially limit the amount of images the player can see at any given time.

If it was just PC, I wouldn't really need to plan this at all. I could go straight into game making and not have to worry about memory juggling because most computers have 1GB to spare for games.

If tomorrow you told me I could design a game for 8GB of memory, I would be able to throw out at least a month's work of planning and testing for memory crashes, loading/unloading assets, and so on. It would be absolutely awesome.

Anyone screaming "bah lazy devs not optimizing their code" just don't get it. I can fit eight people into a Mini Cooper if I absolutely had to, stacking and squeezing them on the floors and seats, but if they could ride in a passenger van instead, why the hell would I still try to get them to fit in a Mini Cooper sized amount of space inside the van? I could just pile them in, drive my van, and be so much more comfortable.

boom

Lots of people that are dense or outright hostile to Blow without an understanding of what's happening in this thread. It's not lazy or unoptimised, it's making use of the ram available to you.

8GB might sound like a lot now, but it'll be another bottleneck midway through the generation. Nevermind consoles with less ram available for games. People that aren't short sighted and can see past 2015 see the sense in Blow's mention of this now.

 

[Sean]

What's the point of optimizing if he doesn't need to? Just so he can brag about how much RAM he has left over?

The Witness was announced for PC and iOS too. Unless Blow thinks the next iPad is gonna have over 5GB of RAM he should probably consider optimizing the game.

 

[-COOLIO-]

if blow ever sees this thread, i hope he takes the whitta quote to mind.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

if blow ever sees this thread, i hope he takes the whitta quote to mind.

lol. I was just about to ask if Blow has a Gaf membership. Or had.

The Witness was announced for PC and iOS too. Unless Blow thinks the next iPad is gonna have over 5GB of RAM he should probably consider optimizing the game.

Again, Blow never said he wasn't going to optimize his game. He merely stated it will be nice that he won't have to spend as much time doing so.

 

[i-Lo]

Sorry to single you out, but you were just the most recent of a ludicrous batch of posts. Blow is as low level as an indie guy gets, and kind of has been for a decade or so. Here's a sample bibliography; saying that he doesn't have a grasp on these issues is just weird, and shows a serious misunderstanding of his position.

You should have read what he wrote again. Sorry to single you out but iirc he is a coder himself. He isn't saying that Blow is lazy or what he is doing is unwarranted rather that it's not really news given the various ways developers are looking to exploit the room with or without using ancillary systems (like streaming and then to what degree).

Personally, it's about the game and it doesn't matter how much of the available resources are being used. They are there for the devs to exploit.

 

[Juice]

I wish people who were wrong would reply to my quotes in which I explain why they're wrong. I wish they would proceed to tell me how absolutely right I am.

:-(

 

[tirminyl]

The Witness was announced for PC and iOS too. Unless Blow thinks the next iPad is gonna have over 5GB of RAM he should probably consider optimizing the game.

Of course he will when he ports to those platforms. That isn't even a question. He is simply commenting that since he is developing on a console that removes that restriction, he can stick to designing his game. Of course when he port to other platforms, those things he took advantage of will have to be redesigned.

 

[bluecapsule]

The Witness was announced for PC and iOS too. Unless Blow thinks the next iPad is gonna have over 5GB of RAM he should probably consider optimizing the game.

And when he ports it to iOS, it'll have lower quality graphics + sound. But I guess he should cripple the PS4 version to match the iOS version, so it'll be "optimized."

 

[AcceptableGhost]

Sounds unoptimized

optimizing for the sake of optimizing is a waste of time / resources

also being able to load everything you need at the launch of a game has big benefits

edit: if he was only making this for the ps4 it would be a total waste I mean. obviously he is going to have to make solutions for low/mid end pc and mobile.

 

[INTERNET]

It's reaching to think unoptimized code = poor performance?

If only there was a super ubiquitous and universally accepted to the point of cliche programming catchphrase that dealt with this exact issue

 

[Vincent Alexander]

I wish people who were wrong would reply to my quotes in which I explain why they're wrong. I wish they would proceed to tell me how absolutely right I am.

:-(

You'll never have the satisfaction. Personally, I make sock puppets with their avatars and go about it that way.