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[Juice]

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."

I endorse your graduation to full-sized member.

 

[alexandros]

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.

Because CODING TO THE METAL

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

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

It should seriously be in the thread's OP.

"Everytime you have a certain knowledge of a certain subject and you see how much ignorance there is out there, When you see people who have no knowledge of neither, outside of their perspective opinion, I often have to hold my tongue and remind myself how little their opinion is worth, just become it's not coming from a position of someone with knowledge"

Embarrasing how on the mark he and Patcher were, lol.

 

[Desty]

If it means never seeing a loading screen in the game then it's fine.

It's just weird considering the backflips devs had to do last gen to squeeze every byte of memory out of their systems.

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

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.

Which he probably will. He's using the PS4 version of the Witness as a control point for optimizations. Lower resolutions and aliasing are huge benefactors when it comes to down porting.

 

[Demon Ice]

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

He probably should stay away from technical talks.

Yeah fuck this game developer for talking about developing games, you probably know way more than him bro.

 

[K.Jack]

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?

To be fair Mr. Blow was just casually posting on Twitter, not making a huge deal about anything. Look in the mirror to see who's making a big deal about 5GB, because it's not him, it's US.

 

[alexandros]

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

There is one already!

 

[ZoddGutts]

Isn't it an open world game? Would explain why it eats up lot of ram.

 

[inm8num2]

If it means never seeing a loading screen in the game then it's fine.

It's just weird considering the backflips devs had to do last gen to squeeze every byte of memory out of their systems.

And if they don't have to worry as much about that now, why are people beefing?

 

[Alchemy]

So instead of sub 30 fps due to cramming in too much in the way of effects for the frame buffer, it will be sub 30 fps due to bloat.

Next-gen.

How the fuck is it bloated if it isn't even using all the systems available memory? If the system has the memory available you would be a complete idiot to try to "optimize" around it. Who the hell would work on streaming technology if you can shove the entire game into RAM and not have to worry about things?

 

[Pristine_Condition]

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.

This is an amazingly dumb post.

 

[-COOLIO-]

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

i just realized i made a mistake in that post. being gddr wouldnt help loading times since that's bound by the disk. loading in 8gbs all at once would be rough but he'll probably have several 'first-time' loading screens when switching between areas that won't appear again when switching areas in the future. or something like that.

ill actually edit this in my other post. ah, nvm it still makes sense in another way.

 

[Aaron]

Because CODING TO THE METAL

When people used that phrase, I always imagined them etching assembly into the computer case. So stupid, though I guess CODING TO THE MAGNETIC MEDIA doesn't have the same ring.

 

[KingFire]

Because CODING TO THE METAL

I don't know why this is so funny.

 

[FlynnCL]

So...essentially, everything will be loaded into the RAM instead of being streamed? You'll essentially be having no load times, right?

People are thinking too narrowly when they say this is unoptimized. If he was to "optimize" the game and end up using significantly smaller amounts of RAM, you'd most likely be seeing load times everywhere.

this thread is great. I love the idea that pre-loading the entirety of the game's assets into the fastest storage medium the device has is somehow going to make the game perform worse than if those assets were streamed in during play from optical or HDD. thanks for the giggles guys.

Haha, exactly.

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

And if they don't have to worry as much about that now, why are people beefing?

People gonna beef

 

[kaching]

If he's just loading the whole game into RAM (or as much as possible), that might have been helpful to have explained in the first place to put it in proper context.

 

[Mr_Appleby]

this thread is great. I love the idea that pre-loading the entirety of the game's assets into the fastest storage medium the device has is somehow going to make the game perform worse than if those assets were streamed in during play from optical or HDD. thanks for the giggles guys.

I was worried that having so much RAM would result in devs just writing lazy, bloated, unoptimised code, rather than actually making good use of the extra power.

I said much the same thing once about 20 years ago, when computers started having more than a megabyte of ram as standard. It was a stupid thing for me to say then, and it remains so.

 

[bhlaab]

The game's basically Myst so just use hypercard.

 

[RobotMafia]

What is this game supposed to be again? I really have no clue.

 

[faceless007]

Jonathan Blow just shot himself in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about video game programming (I'm an expert), but optimization and wasteful streaming are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Bethesda where you can become successful by being utterly incompetent at managing memory. If you use more than 5GB of RAM, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.

What this means is the video game public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase The Witness for any system, nor will they purchase any of Blow's future games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Blow has alienated an entire market with this move.

Blow, publicly apologize and redesign your whole game to use less RAM or you can kiss your business goodbye.

 

[Net_Wrecker]

If this thread is any indication, you could give half of the posters in here a game to make on the PS4, and they'd spend at least another year in dev time trying to cram the entire thing into 2BG of RAM and brag about how they saved 5 gigs like the master coders they are.

Bravo backseat devs, you guys sure would save that RAM for bigger and better nothings. As my grandpa always said, "It's better to save things for no reason than to use them for what they should be used for."

 

[Alchemy]

If he's just loading the whole game into RAM (or as much as possible), that might have been helpful to have explained in the first place to put it in proper context.

Well, what is wrong with assuming the game has very high resolution textures? Blows point about texture memory footprint isn't bullshit. You're not only dealing with diffuse textures for all the objects in the scene, but bump maps and render targets. I'm not going to claim to know the render set up for The Witness, but it really isn't hard or undesirable to make use of 5GB of store space.

 

[Demon Ice]

So from what I've seen of the angry posters (XBone fans) ITT, you guys want consoles to have tons of RAM but also want most of it to go unused?

Lol k

ThisIsNeoGAF.gif.

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

Jonathan Blow just shot himself in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about video game programming (I'm an expert), but optimization and wasteful streaming are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Bethesda where you can become successful by being utterly incompetent at managing memory. If you use more than 5GB of RAM, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.

What this means is the video game public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase The Witness for either system, nor will they purchase any of Blow's future games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Blow has alienated an entire market with this move.

Blow, publicly apologize and redesign your whole game to use less RAM or you can kiss your business goodbye.

.

 

[Jest Chillin]

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.

"Unoptimized code" only equals poor performance when it's pushing the resources to the limit. So really, the only reason people should complain about this is in reference to playing the game on PC where they either only have 4gb RAM or they have 8gb RAM and do a lot of multi-tasking aka run a bunch of stuff at once while you game. But he's talking within the context of a Console. So unless you're Streaming video and have 20 tabs open in a browser while you're playing The Witness on your PS4.. there really shouldn't be a problem.

The previous poster's car example really does explain it quite simply. Fitting 8 people in a car is problem if the car is a Mini Cooper. Not if it's an Econoline Van.

 

[Sutton Dagger]

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.

You must be one of those 'real GAF devs', otherwise known as 'lazy'.

P.s thanks for a great post, some people in this thread are incredibly embarrassing.

 

[i-Lo]

This is an amazingly dumb post.

It may be but it does make me wonder about how flexible and scalable that engine is.

 

[Paches]

Jonathan Blow just shot himself in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about video game programming (I'm an expert), but optimization and wasteful streaming are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Bethesda where you can become successful by being utterly incompetent at managing memory. If you use more than 5GB of RAM, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.

What this means is the video game public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase The Witness for any system, nor will they purchase any of Blow's future games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Blow has alienated an entire market with this move.

Blow, publicly apologize and redesign your whole game to use less RAM or you can kiss your business goodbye.

Never gets old.

 

[Tan]

Jonathan Blow just shot himself in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about video game programming (I'm an expert), but optimization and wasteful streaming are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in Bethesda where you can become successful by being utterly incompetent at managing memory. If you use more than 5GB of RAM, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.

What this means is the video game public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase The Witness for any system, nor will they purchase any of Blow's future games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Blow has alienated an entire market with this move.

Blow, publicly apologize and redesign your whole game to use less RAM or you can kiss your business goodbye.

Surprisingly well done.

 

[alexandros]

I don't know why this is so funny.

Assuming you're really asking and it's not sarcasm, the terms "optimization" and "coding to the metal" have taken on almost magical properties that can get you between 2x and 6x the performance that a specific piece of hardware would normally be able to produce. So many people in this thread are reading that an indie game uses most of the PS4's available RAM and assume that the developer has not optimized the code, he hasn't been coding to the metal, therefore he's lazy and the game will run poorly. It's yet another example of the average gamer not fundamentally understanding technology yet feeling the need to state his opinion on it anyway.

 

[Man-is-Obsolete]

Wow, some of the comments in this thread. So many arm chair developers. Thanks Chubigans for speaking up and the great analogy you made. Can't wait for the Witness, and all of it's footsteps.

 

[BlazinAm]

It may be but it does make me wonder about how flexible and scalable that engine is.

The engine isn't even what Blow is talking about; I assume that is going to compress the textures for mobile platforms.

 

[INTERNET]

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.

Yeah on rereading I think misinterpreted to whom "the programmer" referred, apologies missile.

 

[kaching]

Well, what is wrong with assuming the game has very high resolution textures? Blows point about texture memory footprint isn't bullshit. You're not only dealing with diffuse textures for all the objects in the scene, but bump maps and render targets. I'm not going to claim to know the render set up for The Witness, but it really isn't hard or undesirable to make use of 5GB of store space.

Based on what we'd seen of the game so far, it didn't really look like the visual style required that kind of complexity, that's all.

 

[i-Lo]

The engine isn't even what Blow is talking about; I assume that is going to compress the textures for mobile platforms.

That'll be one mighty compression. That said the art so far has shown mostly solid colours. I am more keen to know about the lighting and how that would change for iOS devices.

 

[missile]

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.

No worries.

It's about the argument of him. It's a reoccurring one.

He says; "... 8 gigs isn't that much. The Witness is 5GB so far, and it is
an indie game."

Please explain the meaning of this last sentence to me.

- Then how much memory will be enough?
- Almost every game wants to use more RAM.
- What has all of this to do with being an indie game?

 

[Alchemy]

Based on what we'd seen of the game so far, it didn't really look like the visual style required that kind of complexity, that's all.

We've barely seen anything about the game, that sounds like an extreme rush to judgement.

 

[fatgamecat]

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.

Thank you, I was reading the thread waiting for an actual software developer to say something like this.

Comeon guys don't hate. The Witness was announced for iOS too. That means he'll have to "optimize" it if he hasn't yet.

 

[Hoo-doo]

Dat >5GB worth of data:

It's a beautiful game.

Absolutely gorgeous. People saying this looks like a last-gen game are out of their minds.

 

[inm8num2]

Next time I buy a computer I'm going to aim for low specs. That way I'll challenge developers to optimize their software.

How dare anyone use modern technology to free themselves of the limitations of prior hardware!

 

[family_guy]

Lower end, at least. Requiring 4 GBs opens up the game a significant number of users as opposed to 5 GBs, since most people purchase RAM in 2/4 GB denominations.

He hasn't even broken down how the ram is being used. On PC you have your system RAM plus your graphics card RAM. It could be 3 gigs + 2 gigs or some other variation. I don't think anyone can make a direct comparison for how games are developed on PC and PS4 because of unified vs split ram. In any case less ram doesn't make your PC lower end. You could put 16 gb of ram in any pos computer with a weak dual core processor and 4 year old graphics card.

 

[Kintaro]

Blow be trollin' on Twitter. Lol

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

Absolutely gorgeous. People saying this looks like a last-gen game are out of their minds.

QFT

 

[BlazinAm]

That'll be one mighty compression. That said the art so far has shown mostly solid colours. I am more keen to know about the lighting and how that would change for iOS devices.

Lightmaps are used on ios so a lower precision in creating them I guess.

 

[missile]

To be fair Mr. Blow was just casually posting on Twitter, not making a huge deal about anything. Look in the mirror to see who's making a big deal about 5GB, because it's not him, it's US.

My post(s) was more addressed at people over here.

 

[i-Lo]

Absolutely gorgeous. People saying this looks like a last-gen game are out of their minds.

I think it's because it does not explicitly show effects that would skew the game more toward photorealism.

The game has a distinct Nintendo like visual aesthetic with its solid and strong primary colours that both are both complimentary and contrasting.

Lightmaps are used on ios so a lower precision in creating them I guess.

Ah, thanks.

 

[Bluekaveli]

What is The Witness?

 

[SomeOneInaHat]

What is The Witness?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=The+Witness