Mass Effect PC: DRM'ed Alien Sex

[Asher]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

Maybe it's because they didn't develop the game for the PC in the first place...

Doesn't matter. The complexity of the diverse PC ecosystem with insanely complex codebase in games today is very, very expensive to develop for and test. It leads to very, very buggy games as well.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher


Doesn't matter. The complexity of the diverse PC ecosystem with insanely complex codebase in games today is very, very expensive to develop for and test. It leads to very, very buggy games as well.

They seem to have specific problems with specific video cards. I mean if it were the problem of p video cards times q cpus times x amounts and flavors of RAM that would be one thing (and would be quite a common problem)

But ME is having general problems with specific gpus. Now granted, there are a lot of cards (as a video card shopper I wouldnt deny that) Am I incorrect.

But theres only qpu makers, AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Seems to me that AMD and NVidia should be able to deal with this, and have considerable incentive to.


Maybe its time for another "is PC gaming doomed?" thread?

[Asher]

But theres only qpu makers, AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Seems to me that AMD and NVidia should be able to deal with this, and have considerable incentive to.

Uh. Quite obviously, I would think, this isn't as simple as you make it out to be. If it was there wouldn't be a ton of specific issues to specific video cards. Look at Nvidia's driver release notes and you'll be scratching your head, 'cause it'll have issues like "8800 GT in X game causing crashing". No other cards in the family are affected...

[Kuciwalker]

They seem to have specific problems with specific video cards. I mean if it were the problem of p video cards times q cpus times x amounts and flavors of RAM that would be one thing (and would be quite a common problem)

But ME is having general problems with specific gpus. Now granted, there are a lot of cards (as a video card shopper I wouldnt deny that) Am I incorrect.

The second paragraph is a direct result of the first.

[LDiCesare]

The only things of concern are OS * video cards.
Usually the OS doesn't cause much problem and isn't hard to test.
So there's the variety of graphics cards left.
Thus we would have:
Too many graphics cards = less games because it's harder to make them.
But without games, there'd be less market for video cards (you'd only have 3d artists for movies/tv and CAD). The marketshare would drop so much that there wouldn't be that many video cards left. Which means you could design games again because you could test them.

The PC games market should reach an equilibrium somehow, and not just die. Because if it died, the reasons for its death would disappear.

[Kuciwalker]

Usually the OS doesn't cause much problem and isn't hard to test.

Additionally, you forget that different OSs will have different driver bugs.

[Asher]

Vista's graphics drivers are completely different from XP's.

Then there's the issue of SLI in drivers...

[LDiCesare]

Different OSes are not the problem. Different drivers are, which is still the point of graphics cards, and the drivers bugs aren't the OS bugs. You usually support 2 OS at most for a PC game. You must support dozens of video cards, which are a pain to acquire and test. OSes are a breeze in comparison. I"ve got a test machine where you switch OS by just putting a CD inside, and then you run your program and check it. I can test all OS that way in an hour. For graphics cards, I can't even start testing them all.

[Asher]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
Different OSes are not the problem. Different drivers are, which is still the point of graphics cards, and the drivers bugs aren't the OS bugs. You usually support 2 OS at most for a PC game. You must support dozens of video cards, which are a pain to acquire and test. OSes are a breeze in comparison. I"ve got a test machine where you switch OS by just putting a CD inside, and then you run your program and check it. I can test all OS that way in an hour. For graphics cards, I can't even start testing them all.

I don't know how to tell you are wrong aside from telling you are wrong.

Vista and XP drivers are 100% different. So the OS is a problem, because it means completely different drivers with different design paradigms.

So you've got your divergence at the start of the tree: XP and Vista. Then you've got further divergence below for every different type of video card.

You must support four different driver families (more if you include S3 and Intel) over two different OSes with many dozens of different video cards themselves.

This is a nightmare to do.

[snoopy369]

I think LDC is saying that, if you were to test something on as many cases as possible, different OSs is not as big of a problem as different graphics cards, because you can more easily change OS than graphics card by a huge factor.

Unfortunately it's probably not tested in the manner LDC indicates for the far majority of games, because you have to actually play the game a significant amount to be able to truly test it. That said, you'd think the company would at least open up the game on a lot of different cards... but having each card is an expense in itself, unless you're big enough to get freebies, and having each machine, and ... sigh.

That said, I think I could design a very efficient testing environment were I in a position to do so, that would test the far majority of situations. There are always situations that will have problems (due to S3 and such), but you can eliminate the far majority (98%+) with a rigorous testing plan. I'm rather surprised that wasn't done in this case...

[Asher]

Problem is it takes time to test the software. With new builds every day, you can't always test the latest. And you can't exactly set up unit tests or other automated testing very well for these complex games.

[Harovan]

Bah. I was considering to buy this game, but this thread convinced me not to.

[LDiCesare]

As far as I know, you stop making daily builds when you go in the latest phases of shipping a product. Testers work on a version that remains teh same for a longer period, like one week. Not all companies may behave that way, but some do.
There, switching OS is easy as you need one disk for the 2 OSes you want to support.
Switching graphics card is impossible because you own maybe 10 among the dozens of cards you'd like to support, so their diversity is way way way more annoying than the OS. The fact that the OS multiplies by 2 the number of tests to perform does not matter much. You need twice as much time but you'd need ten times as many cards as you've got.

Anyway, I agree that supporting a vast number of hardware combinations is a nightmare. But this nightmare comes form the fact that there are many cards, not many OS (I've worked on a product built and tested on 5 OS and it wasn't a problem to test all of them).
But the amount of cards comes from the demand, as many are made for games solely. If the games market shrank, the number of cards would shrink too, and making games would be easier...

[snoopy369]

Usually there is a period where 'additions' are locked down (ie, only bugfixes), in the projects i've been involved with that is about 2 weeks, and then three to six weeks while the game is being mastered ('going gold') you start working on the first patch.

The problem is usually bugs later in the game - they are hard to find because you have to set up certain circumstances usually. The "If you take this quest and then go over to this city and kill this guy, suddenly the game hangs" bugs.

Crash on startup is something they should have been able to catch, IMO... they should have the cards and the machines to test most of the cards out there. A few older - or super new - cards I wouldn't object to, but the breadth of cards this is failing on means that a) their coding was probably poor (relying on things that weren't effective across cards) and b) they didn't test this on a lot of major cards, even to the point of just starting up the game.

[Asher]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
Anyway, I agree that supporting a vast number of hardware combinations is a nightmare. But this nightmare comes form the fact that there are many cards, not many OS (I've worked on a product built and tested on 5 OS and it wasn't a problem to test all of them).

NO.

It comes from BOTH.

An 8800 GT and an 8600 GS are far more similar under the same OS than an 8800 GT is in Vista and XP.

I am not sure you comprehend the enormity of the difference in the Vista and XP drivers. Or how important the drivers are to the performance and bugginess of games. They are massively complex pieces of software.

Theoretically, it doesn't matter what card you're writing against since Nvidia and ATI have unified drivers. But the problem is actually in how the DRIVERS handle their directives, and the drivers handle them slightly differently depending on the hardware used (the graphics card) and massively differently depending on the OS used.

The video card driver design is fundamentally different in Vista over XP. It's a massive source of development issues, because it's still "new" as well.

So yes, the # of cards matters, but to downplay the complexity of developing complex modern, 3D games for both Vista and XP is folly.