This is exactly what I'm talking about.
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The Witness using 5GB RAM so far
- Thread starter shinobi602
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Vincent Alexander
Member
But here's the key: nowhere does Blow say he isn't optimizing his game. He merely says he has to spend less time on optimizing. Nothing more, nothing less.
Bingo.
I mean, I understand if he finds it necessary to cut corners, and with all the resources available to him, I can see how he could justify that to himself in order to get his game to market, but it is hardly something to take pride in.
Ultimately though, I think this is all pretty harmless. He is probably happy just not having to deal with some of the BS limitations from last gen.
alexandros
Banned
Using the memory that is available to you is not "unoptimized". Windows 7 starts caching your most frequently used programs into system RAM right after boot so that they launch as fast as possible, filling available RAM in the process. RAM is there for a reason, and that is to fill up with data.
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.
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.
How is he cutting corners?
Net_Wrecker
Member
It's not that Xenoblade and SMG can run on that little amount of RAM, it's that they HAD to. Devs were FORCED to make games run on the WiiPS360 the way they were. In the early years of the next gen consoles, it's fine if not every game is pushing the limits of what's capable and cramming loads of complex optimization/area streaming techniques if they don't have to. It'll be a load off of a ton of devs who can just "drop" the games into RAM and let them run. This doesn't mean that every game is going to be a buggy piece of crap.
AAA games such as mass effect and dragon age already ran like poop, so more ram will probably help those. There will still be devs making good use of the hardwares.
Why optimize if he doesn't need to?
He says right now it's over 5GB. Sure, they could probably get this running as well as it does with much less memory, but it'll run anyway, the end result is the same, incredible graphics is not their focus (looks good, still) and they can focus on the gameplay instead.
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.
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
What's with the unoptimized comments? If you have all that ram, why wouldn't you load all your textures and stuff in it? Cuts out loading between levels.
I thought he was loading all the assets into the RAM instead of streaming it?
And I'm not saying extra RAM left over would be beneficial, but it sounds like he doesn't want to optimize the game and lack of optimization leads me to believe that the game will perform like shit.
P1, I know that.
P2, I'm more worried about this being used an a crutch in the future to make up for half-assed games. It sounds like PR bullshit.
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.
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.
I'd rather see the effort going into making the game good, rather than meeting some unspoken 'optimization' requirement that everybody seems to be getting up in arms over.
Sure, he could struggle and struggle to make the game run in 1GB of RAM, but seriously, why bother? That extra RAM is just sitting there, and contorting your code to fit in a fraction of the RAM is a terrible waste of time.
You can call it unoptimized; I call it liberating. Less effort on 'optimization' that doesn't actually contribute to playability, more effort on the things that actually matter.
Because it's also a PC game. If it were just for consoles, I see no reason not to use all 5 GB at all times. EDIT: Also, yeah, that initial load would take longer.
That's assuming it's coming out for Xbox One at some point down the line, which I don't think has been spoken to definitively.
-COOLIO-
The Everyman
how is maximizing your use of available resources a bad thing? is he using up ram that the next game could use?
Auto_aim1
MeisaMcCaffrey
5GB is way too much. I hope devs don't take all these additional resources for granted. It's one of the reasons why the previous consoles were so hard to develop for so that devs got to know the hardware well.
Of course, I don't know anything about the game and it may justify the RAM usage, but just seems excessive. Lack of streaming is a great thing though.
Of course, I don't know anything about the game and it may justify the RAM usage, but just seems excessive. Lack of streaming is a great thing though.
Gokurakumaru
Banned
Because it's not cheap, and the consumers wear the costs in higher console prices while the manufacturers wear the costs in lower (or negative) margins.
Dreamwriter
Member
It means the game must load 5GB from the disc before you can start playing any of it, that'll lead to some hefty load times even from hard drive (5GB may not sound like much to load from disc, but remember this isn't going to be just one single file in one location, but lots and lots of little files from all over the file system).
You don't get it. Why even bring Wii U into the equation? I can tell you that a PS3/360 game being ported into Wii U will cost a developer's time of about 2-3 months for them to make it work, and that isn't even performing as well as the other systems.
It is much less about code and more about graphical freedom. Throw in 5mb textures on a ton of objects and you might have needed a team of engineers to create a depth of field coding to optimize performance for a month. Now they can just put that time into make the game better.
More RAM means seamless transitions/no loading, more textures, more objects, more particles.
Nothing to do with being lazy.
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.
Games are starting to require 4 at minimum now so it kinda is.
MemoryHumanity
Member
I don't think anybody's berating the guy for making use of the resources. Like I said, it makes sense for him and other indies to do that. It saves development time and lots of hassle.
It's the way he's taking to Twitter and shouting "MY GAME USES 5GB RAM ALREADY" like we're supposed to believe that The Witness is close to maxing out the PS4's power and that 8GB is almost a bare minimum.
It's the way he's taking to Twitter and shouting "MY GAME USES 5GB RAM ALREADY" like we're supposed to believe that The Witness is close to maxing out the PS4's power and that 8GB is almost a bare minimum.
Salacious Crumb
Junior Member
Oh, So Blow forced Sony to put 8GB of ram in the PS4 so he didn't have to 'optimize' his code? Very interesting theory.
Name them.
-COOLIO-
The Everyman
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 be 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.
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?
Pristine_Condition
Member
Actually, "unoptimized" would be not using as much of the available RAM as you have available. If he had a system using way less than what was available, but having to go to the HDD install or optical disc to fetch more data when there was still plenty available RAM, that would be poor optimization. The less you have to access the spinning drives, the better.
graywolf323
Member
bluecapsule
Member
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?
PeakPointMatrix
Member
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 ^^
-COOLIO-
The Everyman
so you would rather load in 1gb 10 times or 5gbs once? im pretty sure the point of loading in so much data at once is so that you dont have to page out anything. i guess another way of putting it is, would you rather ten 1 minute loading screens or one 5 minute loading screen?
MemoryHumanity
Member
No, that would be called 'being stupid'.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
Oh good, that gives me hope. I'm not planning on getting a PS4 at launch but I want this game.
I'd bet that a significant portion of us have written plenty of code in our lives.
These people are really digging.
Hey guys, guess when the right time to even start *thinking* about optimizing code is:
Answer:
when you encounter a performance bottleneck
A lot of optimizations become routine in one context and simply not necessary in another. We're used to seeing the biggest bottleneck as memory size in today's consoles, but in the next ones, it could just as well be some other attribute. The point is, any optimization is premature until you either experience resistance or are reasonably certain you will.
Going about it any other way, and prematurely optimizing code just for the sake of making it tinier isn't just a waste of time: it can drastically decrease the flexibility if the codebase when a *real* performance issue does arise. Naively written code is always simpler and more readable than optimized code, because optimizations are by their nature not obvious. By optimizing your code, you're in effect trading some degree of ability to easily change the codebase in exchange for some mitigation of a particular performance bottleneck.
If you haven't hit the bottleneck yet, it's not optimizing. It's just making a mess and wasting time.
Arkam
Member
SomeOneInaHat
Member
-COOLIO-
The Everyman
wouldn't he be taking it for granted if he used less instead of more?
bluecapsule
Member
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!"
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