Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2014]

[Billy Idol]

Unless salaries in gaming have escalated suddenly, you're way off base here. I couldn't afford quit my current job coding and move into entertainment. Managers with a lot of responsibility? Perhaps. Maybe some really talented people could get that too, but most? Nope.

I tried to factor in the overhead associated to each work place...but if this is a save estimate and gives us an upper bound...

 

[DrJay24]

Unless salaries in gaming have escalated suddenly, you're way off base here. I couldn't afford quit my current job coding and move into entertainment. Managers with a lot of responsibility? Perhaps. Maybe some really talented people in top tier studios could get that too, but most? Nope.

Employees cost a lot more than their salaries.

 

[upnorthsox]

Employees cost a lot more than their salaries.

Not that much, and most now are subs so no/little extra costs.

 

[Boxercide]

There is no way their employees are costing $150k. I'd believe half that including bennies.

 

[AlNom]

But Digital foundry does provide frame-time graph along with the fps graph, it's located on the top left of the fps graph.

Yup, and if you had followed the conversation at the time, discussing FPS while discussing latency was simply inconvenient.

And in the latest X360 face-off they did confirm it's basically a input lag reference:

Yup.

 

[Gerry]

Not that much, and most now are subs so no/little extra costs.

I think you're underestimating the extra costs massively. Check out this post from ERP about this very subject.

 

[London Geezer]

Marketing/advertising costs for Titanfall is what would be very interesting to see.

 

[Wynix]

I think you're underestimating the extra costs massively. Check out this post from ERP about this very subject.

That's crazy expensive; And here i was thinking it's cheaper to develop games in Canada.
Time to start setting up more eastern European studios.

 

[JPT]

That's crazy expensive; And here i was thinking it's cheaper to develop games in Canada.
Time to start setting up more eastern European studios.

ERP's CA is Canada? I thought it was California... 401k is also something used in Canada?

 

[zed]

thought I posted this

Time to start setting up more eastern European studios.

But if you follow that line of thinking why stop at eastern european, you might as well go the whole hog and move over to somewhere in asia thats much cheaper than eastern europe

 

[TheWretched]

They already do that by outsourcing a lot of art work to asia... just look at the credits of most Ubisoft games today (most significantly Assassin's Creed).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

you might as well go the whole hog and move over to somewhere in asia thats much cheaper than eastern europe

Many studios are already outsourcing work to Asian countries, mostly China, India and Thailand.

However, not every Asian artist can adopt to Western taste and preferences; those that can do so are usually also charging quite a lot more, easily the same as Eastern Europe and sometimes even more. At this point the remote location and language barrier starts to become more and more important, so it's a better solution to outsource to the Western countries or even to local artists.

There's also some business trickery going on here and there in some of the EE and Asian studios, where you get to see the portfolio of the A team and if there's a test to do it's their work as well - but then you get the actual production assets from the B team, which means a lot of extra effort on your end, more feedback loops, later deliveries, extra charges and so on.
This is why a lot of large publishers prefer to establish their own studios in these countries instead, this way they can avoid these issues.

 

[orangpelupa]

Gameloft seems doing fine making their game in Indonesia.

Btw the titanfall interview is interesting for me because bluepoint boss seems understand the work of staff under him.

People that know things and have good social skill is needed and hard to acquire.

*based on my experience hiring people

 

[Lalaland]

People that know things and have good social skill is needed and hard to acquire.

*based on my experience hiring people

This is the combination that makes for a good team, either on it's own is insufficient to deliver a project of any substantial level of complexity.

Pretty impressed by Bluepoints work here, apart from the things that less RAM made inevitable it's a really nice job and has seemingly delivered TF. I quite like their dual media streaming solution but I'd love to hear more about it as IIRC GTAV had similar tech on X360 also. Oddly both showed texture streaming issues in DF analysis, is there a low ceiling on storage b/w from the X360 hdd? Is it behind a USB chip or some such, as the PS3 release of GTAV that also relied on dual media streaming seemed to suffer less from this.

 

[orangpelupa]

The xbox 360 hdd itself is a normal laptop hdd but slow when copying files. Especially lots of small files. Maybe the encryption?

I tried it on PC by connecting it directly to SATA on motherboard.

 

[(((interference)))]

Bluepoint seem to have done a better job technically with the port than Respawn did with their own game...

I mean the fact that Titanfall on XB1/PC has no kind of streaming system at all is a bit crazy and the uncompressed audio install on PC is mindboggling and smacks of incompetence

Spec requirements are also very stringent in some respects. The 3GB of GDDR5 required on your GPU for the insane texture setting lives up to its name, bearing in mind that the actual quality of the assets are nowhere near the likes of Battlefield or Crysis 3. Respawn talks about texture streaming potentially resulting in pop-in, but we suspect that this is probably more to do with the tech required not being a part of the Source engine. The uncompressed audio situation is similarly bizarre. The 48GB install is actually bigger than that - it's just a few megabytes short of a full 50GB, and we can't quite get our heads around the notion of 35GB of uncompressed audio sitting on the hard drive.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-titanfall-next-gen-face-off

 

[Rangers]

Lens of Truth has my beloved averages for Titanfall...and a tear percentage which I think is nice for simplifying things as well (instead of just subjectivity regards tearing, we can quantify things a little more objectively here imo, although obviously no method is perfect). Obviously they locked the 360 to 30 which was kind of dumb for the comparison...

http://www.lensoftruth.com/head2hea...comparison-and-analysis-xbox-one-vs-xbox-360/

Video the clips are from is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB54Q_vOqLo

Posted this here instead of TF thread, even though it'ds not strictly DF discussion, seemed more natural here *shrug*

 

[taisui]

Bluepoint seem to have done a better job technically with the port than Respawn did with their own game...

I mean the fact that Titanfall on XB1/PC has no kind of streaming system at all is a bit crazy and the uncompressed audio install on PC is mindboggling and smacks of incompetence


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-titanfall-next-gen-face-off

the reason behind uncompressed PC audio is to save CPU cycles on decoding, according to the developer.

 

[hesido]

the reason behind uncompressed PC audio is to save CPU cycles on decoding, according to the developer.

Not that I think audio is unimportant, but if audio is making up the majority of your assets, that's something to think about. Also, some have suggested that this unnecessarily includes every language. It just seems lousy planning to me.

Also, the audio being uncompressed could have been optional (it could even have been done during installation via a basic benchmark that could suggest you to uncompress sounds to get better performance, with the default using compressed sound.

 

[taisui]

Not that I think audio is unimportant, but if audio is making up the majority of your assets, that's something to think about. Also, some have suggested that this unnecessarily includes every language. It just seems lousy planning to me.

Also, the audio being uncompressed could have been optional (it could even have been done during installation via a basic benchmark that could suggest you to uncompress sounds to get better performance, with the default using compressed sound.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-11-why-the-pc-version-of-titanfall-is-a-48gb-install

it's always about the min spec that the studio is trying to meet.