Damn dude, you should contact the devs. You solved the problem that their engineers couldn’t. Big brain.
Comment on Microsoft’s Xbox Series S Parity Demands Are Now Handing Sony Free Wins
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It isn’t clear why here. I presume performance, in which case drop some polygons, reduce some particles, limit lighting bounces. It’s an RPG - gfx are secondary!
Zoidsberg@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You think split screen is new? You think this hasn’t been done before? You think this is the first generation of consoles to bitch about one of them?
Whinging about the S is a small brain reply to Microsoft who aren’t willing to compromise. And good for them. There is plenty of hardware in an S and devs if they want to sell more need to target it first. No use crying about a design decisions made years ago wrt the hardware envelope. Drop some shit, make it work, run some flamecharts, optimise some more
comic_zalgo_sans@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not just graphics, if anything BG3 is light on graphics horsepower needed, and from a quick scan around is a bit heavy on RAM.
From previous developer comments part of the issue seems to be the world simulation plus split screen. If you split your party the whole current map has to be running/simulated all the time, you can’t freeze/unload different areas as you walk away, and that includes keeping track of objects for physics - ever notice how bethesda games don’t have many physics objects outside? Think along similar lines to a dedicated server that runs without graphics - just all the world, characters and object meshes, or a large world MMO that has to keep track of what players are doing at different ends of a continent.
Adding graphics back into it, when the party splits up they’re probably looking at different things increasing the breadth of content that has to be loaded. They might be able to cut down textures, but it could mean being more brutal with cuts than Larian wants because they don’t want their game to look like shit.
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Looking like shit is fine if it still plays! Look at the success of BattleBit. A timely reminder for EA working on the next Battlefield
BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I bet the lower amount of RAM is a major issue.
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ll bet bandwidth more. Dynamic loading of assets isn’t an old technique - it’s ancient, but the more detailed everything becomes, the harder it is. Some of the textures are incredibly large in modern games dev now too. But shipping lower res versions can be prohibitive also with SSD space at a premium.
But essentially if you want to target the current generation. Build it for the S first!
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Split screen open world games effectively have to be able to run two copies of the game at the same time. This isn’t a traditional split screen coop where two players are always within one “level” together, and thus all the game code can run just once for that “level”. All the physics, ai, memory, textures, all thr subsystems are running just once.
If two people can be on oppsite ends of a world, that’s two totally different sets of physics, ai, memory, textures. Everything has to happen, twice.
Basically, believe the smart person who made the game instead of dreaming up reasons you think they are wrong when they literally made the game and told you the problem.
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wow, I’ve never had such a condescending reply - even on Reddit!
The article is clearly lacking in details like you described. But did you know that we used to have open world RPGs like Balders Gate 2 run on what are now potatoes?
Here’s another hint. World state will be measured in 100s of MB. Twice means there’s still loads of gigs left to play with. The S has loads of CPU too. This will be almost entirely a look problem
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
wow they should hire you, you know what’s going on my man