Duke4.net Forums: My god, George was an even bigger dickhead than I thought! - Duke4.net Forums

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My god, George was an even bigger dickhead than I thought!

User is offline   Jimmy 

  • Let's go Brandon!

#61

View PostAltered Reality, on 24 August 2017 - 04:31 PM, said:

Ergo, the engine is not to blame. Incompetence is.

Look at this amazing argument of semantics.
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User is offline   BestViking 

#62

If they went with one of the earliest iterations, the game would have been much better for the time, because all the idiotic practises of today was not mainstream yet, like long cutscenes, QTY, "muh emotional story", and all the other garbage that influences modern game development. You'd have a game that would run well, focus on the action and gameplay and therefore be more in harmony with the theme/setting. The longer they waited, and for each engine migration, new standards were set that they were compelled to adhere to, and the further the game drifted from its roots because of this.

Once multiplatform became "mandatory", it was more or less the final nail in the coffin. It just could not have been any good after that unless the devs developed for PC first and then shaved off of that version for the consoles. But we can't have any inequality, right? We can't imply that those on a platform with hardware that is locked for 7 or so years should have a worse experience than those who shell out the bucks for a dynamic platform. Even if you pay more, you should have the same shitty experience, because the game is developed around the lowest common denominator.

It was really the first time the game was restarted that doomed it, because this was just the time when everything started to go downhill. Prior to that, consoles were in an ecosystem of their own. The platforms had different things to offer, and you were really compelled to own both consoles and a PC because they had different strengths. They offered different things. Once that changed, pretty much everything went downhill.
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User is offline   Psyrgery 

#63

A friend of mine recently got a degree in videogame development, and he confirms what has been said here already.

Basically what is not meant to be seen should not be developed or built, because it's a waste of resources. The fact that there are chunks of maps missing it's because the camera will not ever show them to the player.

That's how you make maps in games, it's been this way since forever (no pun intended)
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#64

View PostPsyrgery, on 04 September 2017 - 09:02 AM, said:

A friend of mine recently got a degree in videogame development...

Posted Image

What your friend said is fine despite them spending money unnecessarily. That said it's a bit like explaining that in order to walk you have to alternate the positions of your feet. However if you aren't sure precisely where you're going, you're likely to leave footprints (level geometry) in places you wouldn't have if you knew your destination ahead of time.

This post has been edited by SeeJaneWun: 10 September 2017 - 05:40 PM

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User is offline   Maisth 

#65

I Recently played through DNF for the Third time now and manage to complete it finally.

And i gotta say the amount of detail that went onto the Skybox in Las Vegas its unthinkable, im the kind of person to be easily impressed with graphics but this was an exception, the amount of work that went into recreating this whole area is incredible atleast for me, in the Area where you are about to enter Duke Burger you get an amazing view of the whole city, i was blown away because you could pretty much see everything.

Needless to say it was a wasted potential, i almost expected to see a Bike Escape from Las Vegas to the Dam at some point, oh well you can always dream i guess.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#66

I remember someone here talking about how it's likely that much of the area in the skybox was actually originally playable area. That's speculation without any solid proof however.
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#67

The fact is, it wasn't a skybox. It was part (most) of the game area, walled off and with disabled collisions.
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#68

They probably couldn't get performance good enough. I still don't sense any foul play.
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#69

View PostMusicallyInspired, on 04 January 2018 - 01:03 PM, said:

They probably couldn't get performance good enough. I still don't sense any foul play.

Yes, that's precisely the reason. "Cutting is shipping". As in, "Oh, so this area slows down the game on an Xbox 360. Fine, we're walling it off and make it nonsolid. That'll speed things up."
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#70

That's common practice. Even when they're not "cutting to ship". The game was in development for 12 years, man. Let it go.
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#71

View PostMusicallyInspired, on 05 January 2018 - 05:27 PM, said:

That's common practice. Even when they're not "cutting to ship".

Is it also common practice to make a fully detailed area with the intention to make it explorable, then wall it off when consoles cannot sustain a playable frame rate?

View PostMusicallyInspired, on 05 January 2018 - 05:27 PM, said:

The game was in development for 12 years, man. Let it go.

Fifteen. Development started in 1996 with the creation of voxel objects, intended for use with a version of the Build engine. I'm sure George would LOOOOVE to be able to rewrite history books and make it look like he didn't fuck up for so many years. Fortunetely for us, once something is online and there are people interested to its history, it can never be removed.
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#72

Yeah, and I'm sure all those assets were transferred over totally unmolested to the various new engines...

Either way, cutting out the various parts of the map for performance's sake would be the console's fault if any. If it was a PC only game maybe it wouldn't matter. But it wasn't. I still don't see this as being all George's fault. Don't get me wrong, he obviously mismanaged the whole process for those 15 years. Obviously. But making the decision to stop progressing and get something done was the best thing he did. His whole problem involved adding too much and having too many ideas.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 06 January 2018 - 01:32 PM

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User is offline   TerminX 

  • el fundador

  #73

View PostAltered Reality, on 06 January 2018 - 10:12 AM, said:

Is it also common practice to make a fully detailed area with the intention to make it explorable, then wall it off when consoles cannot sustain a playable frame rate?

More common than you think, even with games that are only on PC.
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User is offline   KareBear 

#74

View PostAltered Reality, on 06 January 2018 - 10:12 AM, said:

Is it also common practice to make a fully detailed area with the intention to make it explorable, then wall it off when consoles cannot sustain a playable frame rate?


Fifteen. Development started in 1996 with the creation of voxel objects, intended for use with a version of the Build engine. I'm sure George would LOOOOVE to be able to rewrite history books and make it look like he didn't fuck up for so many years. Fortunetely for us, once something is online and there are people interested to its history, it can never be removed.


I don't doubt preliminary work on DNF began in 1996 those Duke 3D voxels were intended for the plutonium pack.

http://www.shacknews...t=postdate_desc
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User is offline   Jimmy 

  • Let's go Brandon!

#75

Actually there was supposed to be a free V1.7 patch that added a few more things to the game, but development of DNF eclipsed that.
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#76

View PostAltered Reality, on 06 January 2018 - 10:12 AM, said:

Is it also common practice to make a fully detailed area with the intention to make it explorable, then wall it off when consoles cannot sustain a playable frame rate?


Yes.
Very common in fact. And not limited to console or multiplatform titles. PC exclusives tend to have just as much, if not more stuff cut from them before release.
It's just the nature of the beast.

Go and look at the Doom Bible, or the original Quake design doc. The amount of content that was cut was insane.
What you are showing here in DNF.... is common place. It's just a part of video game design. George's problem wasn't that he cut content from the game... it's that he waited far too long before doing so.
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#77

View PostDamien_Azreal, on 21 February 2018 - 04:58 PM, said:

Go and look at the Doom Bible, or the original Quake design doc. The amount of content that was cut was insane.

I read the Doom Bible way back in 1998. I was under the impression that the cutting happened before development even began, so there's never been a build actually showing the Tei Tenga planet, the various characters (who ended up in ROTT) or the demonic artifacts.
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#78

Yes, the majority of that stuff was cut before Doom started development, but there was plenty of content cut during development as well.

It's common place in the industry. And, getting upset because DNF has buildings only modeled and rendered from the front, of details being low poly/texture at a distance... is pointless. As you'd have to get upset at every game ever made.
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User is offline   justLMAO 

#79

I found this thread pretty interesting. I love behind the scenes shit and Duke Nukem: Forever is kind of fascinating to me because of its unique development history and all the stuff that was cut from the game.

However, don't most games have "cardboard cutout" background elements? There's no need to render the full building when you won't see it anyway.

This post has been edited by justLMAO: 08 September 2018 - 06:31 AM

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#80

View PostjustLMAO, on 08 September 2018 - 06:29 AM, said:

I found this thread pretty interesting. I love behind the scenes shit and Duke Nukem: Forever is kind of fascinating to me because of its unique development history and all the stuff that was cut from the game.

However, don't most games have "cardboard cutout" background elements? There's no need to render the full building when you won't see it anyway.

You are absolutely correct. When working with large scale environments, the farther an object is away from the viewer, the lower quality the asset can be. However when we can completely replace rasterization with raytracing, this technique will become deprecated.

*Sits and waits for a RTX card that can do 40 gigarays*

This post has been edited by icecoldduke: 08 September 2018 - 06:40 AM

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#81

View PostjustLMAO, on 08 September 2018 - 06:29 AM, said:

However, don't most games have "cardboard cutout" background elements? There's no need to render the full building when you won't see it anyway.

Don't all game engines skip rendering polygons the player won't see? Even vanilla UE1 does that. If that feature was removed during the development of DNF, that only proves that whoever did so was a dickhead.
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#82

View PostAltered Reality, on 13 September 2018 - 09:12 AM, said:

Don't all game engines skip rendering polygons the player won't see? Even vanilla UE1 does that. If that feature was removed during the development of DNF, that only proves that whoever did so was a dickhead.

It looks like Vegas was a huge, monolithic level, that had to be stripped and cut into segments to fit on consoles. That kind of work has to be done by hand, and obviously a lot of stuff got missed, including a bunch of segments that ultimately went unused. I'm sure DNF, as part of the rendering pass, does quite a bit of geometry culling(i.e. skipping hidden polygons), however there seems to be left over bits in the data which ultimately went unused, but that doesn't mean that data is costing anything more then memory.
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User is offline   spessu_sb 

#83

View PostAltered Reality, on 13 September 2018 - 09:12 AM, said:

Don't all game engines skip rendering polygons the player won't see? Even vanilla UE1 does that. If that feature was removed during the development of DNF, that only proves that whoever did so was a dickhead.

PainEngine and idtech4 required the level designer to manually place zones/visportals in order to have this be possible.
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User is offline   DavoX 

  • Honored Donor

#84

View PostAltered Reality, on 13 September 2018 - 09:12 AM, said:

Don't all game engines skip rendering polygons the player won't see? Even vanilla UE1 does that. If that feature was removed during the development of DNF, that only proves that whoever did so was a dickhead.


I really don't understand why you're still pushing this... there's no point in wasting time to create stuff the player won't see, play around with, get inside, etc... that is all. It's not rocket science.
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#85

View PostDavoX, on 14 September 2018 - 08:09 AM, said:

I really don't understand why you're still pushing this... there's no point in wasting time to create stuff the player won't see, play around with, get inside, etc... that is all. It's not rocket science.

Except that the player will, in a different level where the whole of Las Vegas is seen from a slightly different angle and where the area the player cannot reach consists mostly of duplicated data from the previous levels. It makes no sense for a level designer to create a chopped up building from scratch to allegedly avoid wasting time, and then create another building that sort of looks like the first, except that a different section is cut off. It only makes slightly more sense to create the whole building and then chop up different parts for different levels, if we start from the false assumption that UE1 does not automatically cull whatever is not visible.
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User is offline   DavoX 

  • Honored Donor

#86

View PostAltered Reality, on 14 September 2018 - 09:25 AM, said:

Except that the player will, in a different level where the whole of Las Vegas is seen from a slightly different angle and where the area the player cannot reach consists mostly of duplicated data from the previous levels. It makes no sense for a level designer to create a chopped up building from scratch to allegedly avoid wasting time, and then create another building that sort of looks like the first, except that a different section is cut off. It only makes slightly more sense to create the whole building and then chop up different parts for different levels, if we start from the false assumption that UE1 does not automatically cull whatever is not visible.


One thing is to cull level props themselves like chairs, lamps, etc. behind walls. And something else entirely to have a mesh of a building in the distance. It really is just that, another prop model in the distance, might not even be made out of BSP at all. Also its not always the level designer's task to create said mesh replica. Most of the time you just tell one of the 3D modellers to make a small scale replica of a building that appears in previous levels or in the future. Those buildings in the distance where probably added late in dev after designers knew what the levels looked like in a more final form. Again, a game isnt made for the people that are going to hack or mod it, it's made primarly for the people who will play it as it's meant to be. If you noclip out of the level boundaries it's your responsability what you might find or not.
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#87

View PostAltered Reality, on 14 September 2018 - 09:25 AM, said:

Except that the player will, in a different level where the whole of Las Vegas is seen from a slightly different angle and where the area the player cannot reach consists mostly of duplicated data from the previous levels. It makes no sense for a level designer to create a chopped up building from scratch to allegedly avoid wasting time, and then create another building that sort of looks like the first, except that a different section is cut off. It only makes slightly more sense to create the whole building and then chop up different parts for different levels, if we start from the false assumption that UE1 does not automatically cull whatever is not visible.

Your assuming each of these different levels were made independently of each other. It makes more sense that they made one single giant map, and carved it up. When you realize late in development "SHIT! our data doesn't fit on consoles", things become more about, "how do we ship this!", vs what's proper. Give these guys a break, lot's of people probably did 24 hour days at the office trying to make DNF ship on consoles.

This post has been edited by icecoldduke: 14 September 2018 - 11:07 AM

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User is offline   justLMAO 

#88

View Posticecoldduke, on 14 September 2018 - 11:04 AM, said:

Your assuming each of these different levels were made independently of each other. It makes more sense that they made one single giant map, and carved it up. When you realize late in development "SHIT! our data doesn't fit on consoles", things become more about, "how do we ship this!", vs what's proper. Give these guys a break, lot's of people probably did 24 hour days at the office trying to make DNF ship on consoles.


IIRC a former employee said he worked for free for almost a year. They massaged his ego by telling him they desperately needed him and only he could do it etc and he fell for it. It's a super interesting story.

And people are "harsh" on the game because it was marketed and sold as a triple-A title. Kind of like a pump and dump scam. The review embargo ensured that gamers were bilked before word got around that the ports were cancer. I got the PC version for a dollar but if I had paid $100 for the Balls of Steel 360 port I would be ready to kick Runny Shitfart out of the nearest window.
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User is offline   necroslut 

#89

View PostjustLMAO, on 15 September 2018 - 03:43 AM, said:

IIRC a former employee said he worked for free for almost a year. They massaged his ego by telling him they desperately needed him and only he could do it etc and he fell for it. It's a super interesting story.

And people are "harsh" on the game because it was marketed and sold as a triple-A title. Kind of like a pump and dump scam. The review embargo ensured that gamers were bilked before word got around that the ports were cancer. I got the PC version for a dollar but if I had paid $100 for the Balls of Steel 360 port I would be ready to kick Runny Shitfart out of the nearest window.

People who buy FPS games for consoles partly have themselves to blame, though. :rolleyes: DNF didn't even have high system req's.
As for the review embargo stuff, it seems 2K sent out the 360 version rather than the superior PC version. That's not a good way to ensure good reviews when your console port sucks.
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#90

View PostjustLMAO, on 15 September 2018 - 03:43 AM, said:

IIRC a former employee said he worked for free for almost a year. They massaged his ego by telling him they desperately needed him and only he could do it etc and he fell for it. It's a super interesting story.

And people are "harsh" on the game because it was marketed and sold as a triple-A title. Kind of like a pump and dump scam. The review embargo ensured that gamers were bilked before word got around that the ports were cancer. I got the PC version for a dollar but if I had paid $100 for the Balls of Steel 360 port I would be ready to kick Runny Shitfart out of the nearest window.

AAA doesn't necessarily mean quality, its more about how much was spent on the project. Studios will often ego stroke talented employees, this isn't anything new. I remember Weider saying at one point, when he left 3dr to go find another job it was difficult for him, because he didn't have a shipped title on his resume within recent history. I suspect quite a few developers over there had similar issues. It just annoys me to hear you guys insult the developers and call them "lazy" and "incompetent" because you go through the assets and see shit that isn't done correctly. I've been on death marches in my carrier and it isn't fun. I understand that consumers will never understand what its like to be in death march when making a game. Your stuck between quitting, and seeing the project through to the end(either getting cancelled or shipping then getting shitty reviews). I suspect all devs that worked on DNF were very passionate about the product, which is why some agreed not to get paid for an entire year. I feel for everyone that worked on DNF. That feeling you have in your stomach when you know, the game could have been SO much better, if a series of completely avoidable events never happened, is a terrible feeling.

This post has been edited by icecoldduke: 15 September 2018 - 08:13 AM

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