51 réponses à ce sujet

[Gotholhorakh]

simfamSP wrote...

spinachdiaper wrote...

if the industry dies it will be from the birth of the apple iConsole

Don't you even joke about that

Haven't they already flirted with this idea already? I'm sure I remember something about it surfacing years ago, although presumably it came to nothing.

Modifié par Gotholhorakh, 13 décembre 2013 - 11:29 .

[Ziegrif]

They say a picture is better than a thousand words.



I am inclined to agree.

Modifié par Ziegrif, 13 décembre 2013 - 11:49 .

[Maverick827]

eroeru wrote...

The very specific announcement of the game going on (pre-order) sale, is what I meant. Or it landing on shelves.

Either way, Maverick, you were ignoring my point with snapping at a detail.

No I wasn't.  Your post was about companies withholding content that was finsiehd at such a time that it could have been included on the disc, and I'm telling you that timeline doesn't really happen.

[eroeru]

Such is logically evident in many cases. For one, when the content actually *is* on the disc.

[FireAndBlood]

Four million units sold of X1s and PS4s would beg to differ.

[Maverick827]

eroeru wrote...

Such is logically evident in many cases. For one, when the content actually *is* on the disc.

That doesn't tell the whole story, either.

Let's say a game is given a $30 million buget.  That budget covers content that the investors expect will cost $60 per consumer.

A year before the game is released, an idea outside of the original scope is drafted.  A new companion, a new quest, whatever it might be.  An extra $5 million is eventually greenlit for this portion, with the investors now expecting that this content will cost $10 per consumer as DLC

Even if the new content is finished on time to be included on the disc, you're not being "cheated" out of anything.

Unless some executive swoops in last minute and says "take those parts out of the game, we decided that we can get away with selling them separately for a huge profit," then "day one DLC" isn't in her any a bad thing/rip off/etc.  As I said before, however, it's essentially impossible for a consumer to know this, so claiming these things happen only make you look like a crazy person.

[Fast Jimmy]

^

How is it any different if an executive comes in at the last minute, or if its planned a year in advance?

[Liamv2]

Hell I have picked up 8 games for 50 pounds. Finally trying out prototype and a few other games.

[Maverick827]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

^

How is it any different if an executive comes in at the last minute, or if its planned a year in advance?

How is it any different if DLC comes out on the first day, or if it comes out two months later?  How is DLC different from an expansion?  How is an expansion different from a sequel?

The contract between developers and consumers is content for money.  How exactly that content is broken up is irrelevant.  All that matters is whether or not the amount of content offered is worth the money asked, and this is determined on a per-consumer basis.

Morally speaking, most people would find the last minute partitioning of a section of content from the "main" game into DLC to be greedy and wrong.  I'd agree.  But there's just no way to know.  If you're buying games, then you've already agreed to the above contract.  It seems arbitrary, then, to draw lines and say "I deserve that content for free even though I don't know what went into it."

I will say that developers should just go ahead and stop trying to save some bandwidth by putting half-finished DLC on main-game discs.

[Fast Jimmy]

^

It's not just trying to save bandwidth... the content was made right alongside the main game. Pulling it out via a simple file extraction could do major damage to the functionality of the game. All testing done prior to that point could be considered suspect, simply because there isn't a clear way to know what assets, flags, settings, etc. could possibly be affected by grabbing everything that you think is DLC related and removing it from the final disc version.

Which gives more credence to the idea that more of the content is being made before the game goes Gold than many developers who engage in the D1DLC idea would like to concede.

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 16 décembre 2013 - 08:23 .

[dreamgazer]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

You know what I love about the next gen? How cheap it's making the current gen now.

It's delicious, ain't it? 

[spirosz]

Apparently ever form of medium has been dying. Photography - Gaming - Silent Films - Miley Cirus Twerking.

[Maverick827]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

It's not just trying to save bandwidth... the content was made right alongside the main game. Pulling it out via a simple file extraction could do major damage to the functionality of the game. All testing done prior to that point could be considered suspect, simply because there isn't a clear way to know what assets, flags, settings, etc. could possibly be affected by grabbing everything that you think is DLC related and removing it from the final disc version.

Which gives more credence to the idea that more of the content is being made before the game goes Gold than many developers who engage in the D1DLC idea would like to concede.

"Pulling" the content out wouldn't be that difficult these days.  Every game is made with DLC/plugins/modules in mind.  You would have your test cases with the main game and then you would have your test cases with the module/DLC, just like you would with Day 1+n DLC.

Again, unsubstantiated claims of fraudulent DLC comes off as more "Loose Change"  than it does "Snowden."

[Cyonan]

Maverick827 wrote...
"Pulling" the content out wouldn't be that difficult these days. Every game is made with DLC/plugins/modules in mind. You would have your test cases with the main game and then you would have your test cases with the module/DLC, just like you would with Day 1+n DLC.

Again, unsubstantiated claims of fraudulent DLC comes off as more "Loose Change" than it does "Snowden."

If I had a dollar every time somebody told me that something is easy to do in programming when it wasn't, I bet I could buy my own yacht by now.

Never assume something involving programming is easy. The computer cares not for how you have set up your code.

Either way, while I'm not about to go around screaming that all day 1 DLC was cut out at the last minute I'm also not about to actually have any faith in companies to tell me the truth about it either.

[Maverick827]

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me something is hard in programming when it wasn't...

My absolute favorite is when someone says "code some new armor" or something like that. As if art assets are created in binary in a text editor.

I say it's easy because it has to be. Content management systems were designed specifically to make it essy. If it isn't, then your game/software is doomed. If a game has DLC at all, then it has environments and test cases set up such that the main game is tested and verified separately from the DLC, regardless of when the DLC was created (be it along side the main game or afterward),

[Fast Jimmy]

Maverick827 wrote...

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me something is hard in programming when it wasn't...

My absolute favorite is when someone says "code some new armor" or something like that. As if art assets are created in binary in a text editor.

I say it's easy because it has to be. Content management systems were designed specifically to make it essy. If it isn't, then your game/software is doomed. If a game has DLC at all, then it has environments and test cases set up such that the main game is tested and verified separately from the DLC, regardless of when the DLC was created (be it along side the main game or afterward),

Easy is an incredibly relative term.

It may be easy to create an economy system in a game, for instance. Put a limit on the actual amount of gold floating around, put some very basic formulas in place to regulate distribution and flow and BOOM! You've got a simple economy... a Flash game could be designed to replicate that.

The problem comes in with game balance and progression, not to mention making sure you are sending the player up shirt creek without a paddle. If you make it a requirment for the player to earn 50 gold before progressing to the final portion of your Act, but the realistic economy makes that insanely easy or difficult to do, then the very act itself may become broken and a source for your game to be extremely unenjoyable. 

You mention art assets, as an example, like programmers can't code an armor. And you're absolutely right... but it's the programmers job to understand that if the armor dimensions aren't right, it will cause clipping issues and either give that feedback to the art department or come up with a software solution. Or that creating an armor set with every single possible variation of pixel color makes rendering animations extremely resource heavy, such that it would be near impossible to wear a rainbow glass armor set and actually have that character be in a scene. Programming assumes the responsibility of making sure all the other work and assets created by the other departments CAN WORK within the game. That's a hard task in-and-of itself.

And, lastly, you have prioritization. Sure, writing a few hundred lines of code, especially when you have a skeleton frame work for how it is intended to be created within the structure of the game, is easy. But writing few million lines of codes is impossible. So every request can't be accomodated and it is often up to the programming team to determine work load and set realistic expectations about what a request will cost, in terms of man hours, and what it would do to other artifacts, systems and priorities to get it done. 

Not to mention a coder may not be the best or quickest programmer, but they may be much better at architecting solutions, while another person may not ever be able to take a business need/requirement and turn it into reality, but they can code monkey with the gods. There are different roles and talents that encompass eveyrone in the "programming" department. Such that no job is "easy" but no job is entirely the same, either.

Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 17 décembre 2013 - 12:42 .

[Fast Jimmy]

Besides... have you ever poked around the content in a game before? Ever tinkered with a game with mod tools? There's TONS of stuff in there that's literally, junk data. Unifnished concepts, unused assets, content never meant for the final game.

It's not easy to flag all this content, nor is it easy to just remove it.

Is it impossible? No, of course not. As the saying goes, nothing in development is impossible with enough time and resources. But can it be done quickly, easily and without any harm (or risk) to the overall project? Obviously not, or else nearly every game shipped wouldn't have large amounts of this junk data... especially when games are working to keep content on one disc to save distribution costs. That's blatantly saying "it would be cheaper and more accomodating to our schedule to release a game as two CDs with oodles of junk data than try and weed out the extraneous content and see if we can get it all on one CD."

[Maverick827]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Easy is an incredibly relative term.

Fine.  How about "basic" or "foundational?"  It's not hard because content management is implicit to every major development project.  It just already...is.

You mention art assets, as an example, like programmers can't code an armor. And you're absolutely right... but it's the programmers job to understand that if the armor dimensions aren't right, it will cause clipping issues and either give that feedback to the art department or come up with a software solution.

It's probably not even down to the actual programmers at this point, either.  Clipping issues wouldn't go past the art team unless things are clipping because of a bug in the engine, which wouldn't really happen if you're using a $10 million engine.  I suppose the art team could be requesting an enhancement to the engine, but that's not at all close to "they should code some more armor."

And, lastly, you have prioritization. Sure, writing a few hundred lines of code, especially when you have a skeleton frame work for how it is intended to be created within the structure of the game, is easy. But writing few million lines of codes is impossible. So every request can't be accomodated and it is often up to the programming team to determine work load and set realistic expectations about what a request will cost, in terms of man hours, and what it would do to other artifacts, systems and priorities to get it done.

You're kind of going off on a tangent.  I have no idea what you're talking about.  There's no code to be written when you're talking about merging/demerging decoupled projects from a build, outside of some sort of build script, which are very simple.

Not to mention a coder may not be the best or quickest programmer, but they may be much better at architecting solutions, while another person may not ever be able to take a business need/requirement and turn it into reality, but they can code monkey with the gods. There are different roles and talents that encompass eveyrone in the "programming" department. Such that no job is "easy" but no job is entirely the same, either.

Yes, you have architects, developers, and business analysts.  I would hope no one would doll out programming work to the business analyst, business work to the architects, and design work to the programmers.  

Well, the programmers could probably handle everyone else's task, we do all of the actual work anyway...

Besides... have you ever poked around the content in a game before? Ever tinkered with a game with mod tools? There's TONS of stuff in there that's literally, junk data. Unifnished concepts, unused assets, content never meant for the final game.

Yes I have, actually.  Professional studios produce huge messes.  But they're moduled messes.  Skyrim's main game scripts are full of horribly written/documented/unused code, and so are its Dawnguard and Dragonborn scripts, but they're still separate, because they were designed to be.

It's not easy to flag all this content, nor is it easy to just remove it.

Is it impossible? No, of course not. As the saying goes, nothing in development is impossible with enough time and resources. But can it be done quickly, easily and without any harm (or risk) to the overall project? Obviously not, or else nearly every game shipped wouldn't have large amounts of this junk data... especially when games are working to keep content on one disc to save distribution costs. That's blatantly saying "it would be cheaper and more accomodating to our schedule to release a game as two CDs with oodles of junk data than try and weed out the extraneous content and see if we can get it all on one CD."

It would be unwise to remove some suspected unused code.  It's not dangerous at all to remove code that the compiler tells you is unused.  The largest offender, old, commented out code, is esspeically safe to remove.

I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make anymore.

Modifié par Maverick827, 17 décembre 2013 - 02:35 .

[Fast Jimmy]

I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make anymore.

You originally said developers should just stop leaving incomplete content on disc if they plan to use it for a DLC. It's not that easy.

Yes, release and development management should be able to properly identify the other modules affected, but SHOULD and DO aren't always the same. I can't even begin to count how many nights I've been up far past midnight with a production release that has now made a totally unrelated (or so many people thought) program completely unusable. After months of testing, there winds up being some small unforeseen correlation that causes the release to be pushed back and hundreds of hours testing could not catch what one code change made apparent in less than ten minutes of using.

Point being, nothing is perfectly modulized, nothing is as safe as tested content. And you can't say you've truly tested something thoroughly until its in as close to its final state as possible.