The Great PS4 Missing AF Mystery *spawn
- Thread starter Shortbread
- Start date
Rikimaru
Veteran
DmC. No performance impact.
I've had friends work on what would be considered to be poor games, under exceedingly adverse conditions, who busted their balls to ship games against the odds.
I wouldn't assume that this studio weren't trying.
We're not all over the place, you are very consistent. You have been claiming for a year or so that the AF is off or turned down to make up for a hardware or software deficiencies. There is some data, all contrary to your belief. But like all religious debates, beliefs don't change with data.
It's definitely a case by case basis which is what I've been wanting to get at. Globalisateur did some good researching into identifying UE (pre UE4) as being a culprit. Option (3) the middleware is the culprit but they have no method in which to modify the engine to get it to work or do not know how to. But not every game with AF issues is UE3 based.
That's because I've shipped a game with Sony before. There's a large difference from our viewpoints even if my experience is limited.
There is a lot of process in place. I'm not a AAA developer, but as weak as I am as a developer I know what AF is, and if I can turn it on for 1 system I'd be able to turn it on for another. And if I can't then I'd reach out to Sony as I've done in the past with other questions about their SDK.
If it's a bug/problem that is verified and reproducible there should have been a patch to the SDK months ago, they release new builds more often than you think. If there is a verified mistake with the way people are approaching the API then the SCEA forums would have informed you of it. There are bulletins everywhere on the Sony dev site to help you make your game. If these are real problems then they would not have been swept under the rug.
You cert more than once, you cert for demos, you cert a lot. If this is a trivial issue of a bug/fix then Sony should have flagged it as something to watch for during the cert process.
Yet of all the patches for games that seemingly have resolved AF issues, have any stated why it was not there in the first place? Or they did just tell you that it's now included?
I didn't mean it like that. I mean the technical goals weren't set high, for whatever reasons. They weren't going all out to make the hardware do incredible things, but set a game target and used that for both machines. They weren't tuning the game for best performance on both machines. The people involved may well have busted their balls, but I'm not passing commentary on the studio and aren't knocking them at all as people. I'm focussing purely on the game as released as a piece of evidence in the ongoing AF mystery (which IMO has become all the more interesting thanks to TH5!).
Spawned off to stop overpowering DF thread. I couldn't find the existing discussion. Didn't it have its own thread?
We closed it because in April Sony placed additional bulletins on SCEA forums on how to remind developers how to use AF.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
You do. But it's an assumption that AF is consciously being disabled by devs. If anything (based on games having AF patched in and Sony's tech note on the issue) it looks like dev oversight of AF being enabled.
But we don't know for sure.
It's my assumption that it's being "set" to a value. It's like making a model and applying a texture, you know right away when you didn't apply it right. It looks stretched.
The only thing that comes to mind that could be an issue is if there is an "auto" setting in the engine for AF that lets the driver handle it. In which Xbox would have no issue and neither would PC. But if auto defaulted to off for PS4 I could see that as being problematic with the engine/middleware and not the SDK.
IMO if there is a technical issue I am greatly leaning toward the issue sitting with engine and not the SDK.
There could be an engine aspect. UE3 is pretty old and I'm not even sure if it's fully supported on PS4 any more. So there could be a bug there that devs have to rewrite, say. Then the high occurrence of the AF issue would be down to widespread use of said engine.
D
Deleted member 86764
Guest
TH has one or two bugs, can we all agree on that? Presumably there were one or two more bugs over the past few months before release. I don't imagine the AF filtering bug(?) was exactly top of their lists of priorities.
It definitely is true that AF filtering can have a negative impact on performance. Without a doubt. Maybe some games really have deactivated it to increase bandwidth elsewhere. At the same time there are games that definitely are not bandwidth starved and have no AF on PS4. Isn't that weird? Almost suggests there's a wider problem, no?
It definitely is true that AF filtering can have a negative impact on performance. Without a doubt. Maybe some games really have deactivated it to increase bandwidth elsewhere. At the same time there are games that definitely are not bandwidth starved and have no AF on PS4. Isn't that weird? Almost suggests there's a wider problem, no?
Yes. Definitely. With TH, any game that is facing crunch time tends to just scramble to get the game completed and in working order.
There should always be a performance drop with AF, whether it's enough to affect the frame rate to drop below the 'locked' number is something else.
Yes I agree here. I hope this sentence is not glossed over, thinking I've got some agenda to prove PS4 isn't as powerful as everyone makes it out to be. Sure it looks that way, but that certainly is not the point I'm trying to make.
Any and all developers will agree that we spend almost all our of development time in 'debug' mode. Every time we need to check our code we run it in debug. If we were level editors writing scripts of levels and checking for parts of the level where I could clip to death, I'd run it in debug. I'd be the same person who is also making the level and applying the textures and walking around the level, they are running the game in debug.
It is a very labour intensive process - so if I'm building a level and applying textures to it, I expect the game to look a certain way. I see it in debug mode for xbox and PC. I test it for PS4. I should know right away if there are differences between the platforms because I'm specifically looking to test certain things. I should see an AF problem if my job is to turn on and off AF for specific textures. If everything looks the same to me then its clear from a debug perspective everything is working.
After debug is perfect on the SDK units and on PC we move to release and we test it again. If all of a sudden AF isn't working on PS4 then we can conclude it was the engine, because it was working in debug mode. If it were the SDK I don't think it ever should have worked in debug then either. And if it didn't work in debug that should have been identified and address way early in development.
Do you know what I'm trying to get at here? Game development is a huge process with a ton of opportunities to perform quality checks. If developers couldn't resolve AF and identify it there are a lot more challenging problems in game programming that would never come to fruition. I believe in process. There are many employees working on this product over 8 hours a day for 2+ years!!!
8 months ago this was made a public outcry, 6 months ago Sony double down on documentation. Sony has had time to address any SDK issues that might exist. That's not counting the number of months developers had to bring it up with them before release. Hell this being an SDK issue it should have been identified as far back as when Killzone was in development. And today we still have games some games with no AF. Counting one on an engine that previously had AF (AC:U) and with its latest product no AF (R6:Siege)
Unreal Engine suspect? Sure. Lets look more into that and the good work Globalisateur has done much earlier.
forumaccount
Newcomer
