Would you as a developer consider a little release flexibility ? Thread

For the purpose of this post, I'll address modders and Indie devs specifically. I myself am neither, but I'd love to see a way to help more people enjoy your work as well as seeing you all getting more recognition, respect and maybe a little love for your efforts.

I was having a casual conversation the other day with a friend regarding the diverse range of cheap " low " to " mid-range " PC systems available on the market. Due to general economic circumstances, a fairly high number of gaming enthusiasts simply don't have the cash to pony up for a rig with decent muscle or to upgrade their current one. Problem is that although so many of them would no doubt love to play more current titles and mod releases, the min. system requirements for these games and mods ( using more currently released engines such as Unreal e.g. ), are just too high for these machines. We all see it so often - the comments of players wishing they had the specs and the complaints of mods " lagging " because the effects are too demanding even with the devs efforts to optimize the game / mod.

I pose this question here in the interest of presenting it more from the simple business ideal of maximizing the exposure of your work and of having as many people as possible play it, then letting word of mouth do the rest. For you Indie and mod developers working your asses off on your projects, this is a win -win formula. But if your work is only compatible with say, 50 - 60 % of the communities rigs, your missing out on a lot of potential for additional exposure and recognition.

I believe that you could potentially reach an additional 15 - 20 % of the community with a " flexible release " option, for rigs with lower graphics capabilities. I'm not suggesting any deviation from your normal methods of development or sacrificing the graphics quality in any way ( graphics is everything these days ). What I would propose to ask you all is your opinion as to the feasibility of; in addition to your regular release with it's own optimizations, releasing a purely " optional " maximally optimization graphics patch download for the large number of less powerful machines of our members.

The idea is simply to consider the greater volume of players ( many of whom might not know a lot about in-game settings optimizing, much less tweaking their system for greater performance ) your projects might reach against the work involved in preparing and offering a pre-cofigured ( engine ) patch for minimum game settings. Is it possible...absolutely. Again, I would simply like to get some opinions and ideas on this thought if some of you would be so kind.

Amendment : Naturally, not everyone can possibly be expected to support such a proposal without some practical data on how much actual benefit might be gained from the extra efforts of what I'm suggesting. I have a reasonable method of gathering some if one was willing - nearly everyone releases a demo at a certain point of development. It would be much less work to introducing and implement as an option with a featured demo release and an excellent way of gathering some valuable feedback on how well it would be received. If just a few managers would be willing to explore this avenue, I believe it would be a great way to involve the community in the idea as a whole.

Edited by: jjawinte

I'd normally be a little iffy on something like this, but you make a good point.

Ever since my development team switched to a graphically more powerful engine, my poor little laptop can no longer keep up like it used to.
I'll ask my team on what they think, but I could easily create a build with a lot of the cushy stuff stripped out (Possibly quite a bit more than just a few options tweaking).

I'd probably also put a watermark or maybe a tiny symbol during the game so if a screen-shot or video is taken, you can see what version your playing.

I can add this to the Indie Dev's news if you have not done so already.

Edited by: JustDaveIsFine

I don't follow...

Players can adjust these settings themselves via .ini files (or ideally through in-game front ends) .. Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other. Many games have optimization guides for maximizing performance - I think releasing one such guide with your game's client would be enough, PC gamers are savvy enough to do the rest.

Edited by: AJ_Quick

I've seen this done years before (IE before 3d GPU's became the norm). It was pretty neat: a non-3D GPU machine could play, or a 3d GPU machine could, both comparable performance.

This is done in "modern" games with the "high quality" patches/mods people put together, but it's not normally done by the dev's (happened for one of the HL1 expansions, didn't it?).

I belive it was Descent:Freespace which had the quality install option. That dictated the level of detail of the models & textures on install. A lower end machine could install the lower-quality assets & run good while a nice machine could install the high quality assets & look really nice.

What's most likely the killer today is all the GFX options modern engines use: IE motion blur, bump mapping, parallax mapping, etc. Those you can't remove w/o losing lots of detail to the game (IE Doom 3 w/o bump mapping looks horrible as the diffuse maps have NO details in them).

BTW, a "gaming enthusiast" *ALWAYS* has the $$$ to throw down for that $1k GPU. Hence the term "enthusiast". If they don't have that kind of $$ they're not an enthusiast any more they're just some smuck that plays games (like the other 99% of games out there! ). One of those people that people come to this forum to complain about (and other forums) for the complete lack of super-cool graphics, uber-surround sound, hyper-physics, etc. that companies pandering to the lowest common denominator is ruining their experience, that's an enthusiast.

AJ_Quick wrote: Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other.

He's talking about a $300 Wally-world box computer vs a $5000 alienware. What works on the $5k machine won't necessarily work on the $300 one. Models in the hundreds of poly's on the $300 machine would be better for it vs 3000 poly's, for example.

Edited by: TheHappyFriar

AJ_Quick wrote: I don't follow...

Players can adjust these settings themselves via .ini files (or ideally through in-game front ends) .. Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other. Many games have optimization guides for maximizing performance - I think releasing one such guide with your game's client would be enough, PC gamers are savvy enough to do the rest.

You'd change that opinion once you tried to play a game and it "doesn't run" or "runs utterly crap" on your machine. Then "good" and "crappy" PCs does get a meaning. That's one of the reasons I make my (a bit different) game engine

TheHappyFriar wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other.

He's talking about a $300 Wally-world box computer vs a $5000 alienware. What works on the $5k machine won't necessarily work on the $300 one. Models in the hundreds of poly's on the $300 machine would be better for it vs 3000 poly's, for example.

yes, and that's what LOD ( levels of detail) were created for. In an engine like unreal you can change how aggressive the LOD swapping is if you are on a low end PC with the result that a 15000 polygon character might render at < 3000 polygons. The same goes for textures - it's called mipmapping. A 2048 texture can be reduced to 128 by the engine itself. There's absolutely no need to manually repackage and distribute lower quality assets separately.

Edited by: AJ_Quick

I think a good example of this working well is with the eve client with a highly graphical client is a optional download to the standard client which for the most part should run on anything with a dedicated graphical processor.

AJ_Quick wrote:

TheHappyFriar wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other.

He's talking about a $300 Wally-world box computer vs a $5000 alienware. What works on the $5k machine won't necessarily work on the $300 one. Models in the hundreds of poly's on the $300 machine would be better for it vs 3000 poly's, for example.

yes, and that's what LOD ( levels of detail) were created for. In an engine like unreal you can change how aggressive the LOD swapping is if you are on a low end PC with the result that a 15000 polygon character might render at < 3000 polygons. The same goes for textures - it's called mipmapping. A 2048 texture can be reduced to 128 by the engine itself. There's absolutely no need to manually repackage and distribute lower quality assets separately.

You don't get it. You'll know what I mean when your PC can not run shader model XYZ or DirectX XYZ or OpenGL XYZ or extension XYZ. Quite some extra work there so many don't do it meaning you can't play many game on lower specs. And concerning UT3 and scaling... LOL. You should see how UT3 behaved on an older PC I had around at the time I tried it: total... utter... failure. A slide show had been nothing in comparison to this.

Your right about the LOD and the mipmapping, they help. But these days, they lessen the load on your system, but not enough to gain more then 1fps or so
afaik, the bottlenecks aren't textures or polygons (when taken into consideration, when you go loose, everything can become a bottleneck)
but shaders are the thing these days. Those take up most of the rendering time as far as i'm aware

besides, for me personally, i can stand jagged edges, so AA goes off first thing. Usually gives me the biggest fps boost.
but like i said, i can stand the jagged edges, most people can't i guess since AA is the holy grail for making things look better (or so it seems)

What astonishes me every time is that people consider AA the holy grail. I play all games without AA since they often look worse with AA (all blurry). Lots of performance lost and looks worse. Why bother?

Thank you all gentleman. It's good to see that the idea isn't at all unreasonable. It's simply be a matter of the most convenient or more preferred method of execution to the individual. I've been doing some experimenting on an older PC I keep on hand, running an AMD Sempron 2.2gh processor and a NVIDIA 6K series card with the OS stripped down to " bare bones ". Yeah, not much under that hood. There's still only so much you can do.

The point is that you and I may have the knowledge for this and manipulating ini. files or even something as basic as configuring NVIDIA's control panel settings for max performance, but there's too many people who just don't and who still ask what to do with a zip file. These individuals would truly benefit a great deal from this bit of extra effort.

@ Ninjadave - Thanks and no I haven't placed this to the Indie Dev's news. I would appreciate if you would.
@ AJ_Quick - Good point. Inclusion of a step by step " how to " guide would be helpful to someone who at least knew their way around a bit.
@ TheHappyFriar - Quality install option - A very good idea. Haven't seen that in a long time.

I don't follow you since the majority of mods and indie games I see run fine on low-medium spec machines

Edited by: StormAndy

The "DirectX 10" ones though for sure won't since many still run WinXP.

Dragonlord wrote: What astonishes me every time is that people consider AA the holy grail. I play all games without AA since they often look worse with AA (all blurry). Lots of performance lost and looks worse. Why bother?

Your absolutely right. It's the always the first to go with me !

Dragonlord wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:

TheHappyFriar wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other.

He's talking about a $300 Wally-world box computer vs a $5000 alienware. What works on the $5k machine won't necessarily work on the $300 one. Models in the hundreds of poly's on the $300 machine would be better for it vs 3000 poly's, for example.

yes, and that's what LOD ( levels of detail) were created for. In an engine like unreal you can change how aggressive the LOD swapping is if you are on a low end PC with the result that a 15000 polygon character might render at < 3000 polygons. The same goes for textures - it's called mipmapping. A 2048 texture can be reduced to 128 by the engine itself. There's absolutely no need to manually repackage and distribute lower quality assets separately.

You don't get it. You'll know what I mean when your PC can not run shader model XYZ or DirectX XYZ or OpenGL XYZ or extension XYZ. Quite some extra work there so many don't do it meaning you can't play many game on lower specs. And concerning UT3 and scaling... LOL. You should see how UT3 behaved on an older PC I had around at the time I tried it: total... utter... failure. A slide show had been nothing in comparison to this.

Unreal engine scales pretty damned well. I guess your PC has less computing power than an Ipad because Epic recently released a very slick UE3 demo running on one. Youtube.com

There have been alot of bells and whistles added to it recently ( UDK) but all of them can be disabled if required. As for shader complexity? Well that's something thats down to the artist to keep under control. Unreal makes use of fallback materials which are rendered on older ( ie. SM2) cards, so that's something. Ultimately, if you want to play a game / mod with even semi modern graphical capabilities on a machine that was outdated ten years ago, you're just going to be disappointed . If the developers have optimized their assets to the best of their ability, and provided users with configuration guide they have more than done their job. Releasing a second version of the game with missing or stripped down assets would be A) a ton of work . B) pointless , given that the only people it would benefit would be those who can't cope with the engine period, much less your content.

Edited by: AJ_Quick

@AJ_Qiuck - Your points are all valid and true. It would be foolish not to acknowlege that there are, at the core, two levels of PC gamers as well as the gear they use. If you don't have a capable system for a particular game, you either upgrade or you don't run the game. Fact: it's just that simple.

Then you've got the others have the mid-level gear but not quite enough muscle to play it as it was intended ( with all the bells and whistles and who also lack the knowlege to optimize themselves. This is one reason for my initial thoughts on this idea and the group of players I'm actually centering on here.

It's not my intention to soap-box my suggestion as an " across the board " pitch that all devs should be or have to be involved in, but only for those willing to explore the idea.

Edited by: jjawinte

AJ_Quick wrote:

Dragonlord wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:

TheHappyFriar wrote:

AJ_Quick wrote:Since there is not really such a thing as "good" PC and "crappy" PC, it seems a little odd to try and shoehorn people into one camp or the other.

He's talking about a $300 Wally-world box computer vs a $5000 alienware. What works on the $5k machine won't necessarily work on the $300 one. Models in the hundreds of poly's on the $300 machine would be better for it vs 3000 poly's, for example.

yes, and that's what LOD ( levels of detail) were created for. In an engine like unreal you can change how aggressive the LOD swapping is if you are on a low end PC with the result that a 15000 polygon character might render at < 3000 polygons. The same goes for textures - it's called mipmapping. A 2048 texture can be reduced to 128 by the engine itself. There's absolutely no need to manually repackage and distribute lower quality assets separately.

You don't get it. You'll know what I mean when your PC can not run shader model XYZ or DirectX XYZ or OpenGL XYZ or extension XYZ. Quite some extra work there so many don't do it meaning you can't play many game on lower specs. And concerning UT3 and scaling... LOL. You should see how UT3 behaved on an older PC I had around at the time I tried it: total... utter... failure. A slide show had been nothing in comparison to this.

Unreal engine scales pretty damned well. I guess your PC has less computing power than an Ipad because Epic recently released a very slick UE3 demo running on one. Youtube.com

There have been alot of bells and whistles added to it recently ( UDK) but all of them can be disabled if required. As for shader complexity? Well that's something thats down to the artist to keep under control. Unreal makes use of fallback materials which are rendered on older ( ie. SM2) cards, so that's something. Ultimately, if you want to play a game / mod with even semi modern graphical capabilities on a machine that was outdated ten years ago, you're just going to be disappointed . If the developers have optimized their assets to the best of their ability, and provided users with configuration guide they have more than done their job. Releasing a second version of the game with missing or stripped down assets would be A) a ton of work . B) pointless , given that the only people it would benefit would be those who can't cope with the engine period, much less your content.

You fail to see that this demo had been "especially tailored for this system"... aka down-scaled a lot. You would not run UT3 out of the box on such a system. You need an extra distribution for this and that's exactly what the topic is about. So no, UT3 does "not" scale well unless you provide a "second set of assets" tailored for a specific system.

Tbh, UE3 on ipad took long to develop (they started out on iphone)
There is a powerpoint presentation about the development floating around on the net. They had to rewrite the renderer for one
in fact, if my memory servers me right, they had to rewrite about 90-95% of the existing code
so i call that (like dragonlord said) tailoring to the target, not downscaling

Sigma wrote: Tbh, UE3 on ipad took long to develop (they started out on iphone)
There is a powerpoint presentation about the development floating around on the net. They had to rewrite the renderer for one
in fact, if my memory servers me right, they had to rewrite about 90-95% of the existing code
so i call that (like dragonlord said) tailoring to the target, not downscaling

Excellent point ! That's where I see quite a bit of misconceptions and confusion generated. It's a simple matter of savvy developer marketing. By adapting their product in more than one way in order to exposure their work to the largest audience possible. Specifically tailored releases for maximum exposure. It's within the foresight of recognizing the necessity for this " forced " flexibility where success and the potential for continued future growth are realized. That's exactly the dynamic that I'm proposing the adoption of here. I'll elaborate:

I've been watching the Indie scene for quite some time now and I believe we're on the cusp of some very positive progress in the industry. Personally, I want to see it grow fast and grow big, and I'd love to see Desura become a driving force by taking the lead with promotions and sales. The key to the success of both I believe, will be in the developers willingness to become " flexible " in order to introduce their games to as broad an audience as possible. An optional " light " Demo, why not ? Why release to only 60 % of the potential market with a full " heavy " version when it's possible to increase that market to 80 - 90 % by offering a " light " version as well ? Unless it's a pet project for fun, it's a no brainer.

The same ideology also applies to modders. Most modders want to progress their skill sets to where they can produce an Indie of their own and make some money at doing what they love. Modders, whether they be mappers, coders, 3D artists or level designers all work their way up into bigger and better projects while earning some respect and making a name for themselves and with some good fortune, start or gain a spot in a solid Indie project. How many Indie devs and/or members of an Indie group modded before they started on an Indie project ? In the best interest of having their work known, played, and appreciated, they should also be endeavoring to reach as many potential players as possible. Whether they're building on Source or UE3, the same release " flexibity " would increase their exposure a great deal.

This kind of "flexibility" though requires extra time including modifying art assets for a different system and especially testing on such systems. Indie and Mod projects tend though to have very little time so they usually can't afford to add this extra work. Besides if you use a DirectX engine you are already limited to what platforms you can venture to. UE3 is a good example for blocking (Linux debacle, recent 3DS comments) but is far from the only example.

Its certainly an excellent idea. Reaching a larger amount of players should appeal to any mod or indie game maker; Its simply getting there thats the problem. Maps, depending on their quality or size, can be quite difficult to run properly, even when tweaked to run for worse computers. The matter only gets worse with custom content, which is something that is appearing more and more in the modding community. In the mod Im working on right now, we have prop models that have reached 7.9K polys, something that is likely to crash even the most powerful computers. Reducing this to a reasonable size is hard enough; lowering the bar to something capable of running on the oldest of PC's without making a bad model is impossible without proper training.

I personally think that while its a good idea, many mods or indie games simply arent ready to practically create a new game in order to get 15-20% more people to play it. Look at source mods. We've already moved on from HL2 and the larger mods are usually now on EP2; we know that it wont hit as large a community, but we'd rather sacrafice that for a more powerful engine capable of making better maps and supporting better models.

Possibly, if modders or indie game makers were to do something of this sort, I would suggest trying a less drastic version; simply cutting some models and features, automatically setting the game options to their lowest capacity, and removing all forms of "beautification" (complex lighting, color correction, etc.)

i think it is because i have mapped the last 6 years with HL2 that i haven't got complains about people not being able to play my mods (Strider Mountain, Coastline to Atmosphere, Final Project, and a4 sp-maps mappack). So you need to have a really 'crappy' pc when you're not able to play HL2 (ep2) maps these days. As far as i know and have noticed are there huge differences between games and mods made with these games. Some games don't even look that great and still ask for a high specs and other games do look great and are using considerably lower specs.
With HL2 (ep2) mapping it was to me not so much a point of the detail added to a map, but mote the sizes of the portals in a map, although the detail does of course matter too. I do remember the old days when i mapped with COD (1 and 2), with the GTKRadiant editor. With that it was so easy to make huge detailed maps with loads of smaller brushes and still keep it very playable with high fps on lower spec pc's. Because there you had the option of using detail and structural brushes. With Hl2 (hammer) mapping its all different, and it took me quit some time before i did understand what needed to be done to make them as playable as possible. I always try to make my sp-maps as large and detailed as possible, and still make it playable on not such powerful computers because when you don't you make that a lot of people indeed can't play you're work, what is then ofcourse a huge shame. I am glad i always could count on my friend Baltic who did all the optimization in the maps, he is a real wizard with that.
I am still not sure what will be my next game that i will map and mod with, but for now it does look that i will go for Crysis2, (release date is delayed to Q1 2011 as you probably know, what gives me the extra time to first learn mapping with Crysis (1), so i immediately can start with C2 when it is released. And i recon that i will get troubles with fps then, C2 is ofcourse a much more demanding game as Hl2 (epe2) ever was and then you have to look even more carefully that what you make will be playable by as many people as possible, read, as many different computers as possible.
I don't think it would be possible for me to make different versions of my sp-mappacks and mods, so they can be played on low and high end pc/s. Maybe it can be done, but that would probably mean that there will have to be made so many differences between the low and high end version of the maps that you almost could speak of totally different maps. For sure would it take quit some time to do so, and it will not be fun to do, at least not for me i assume. Ones you're done with a map you don't want to have to go over it all over again, and to take out stuff and or change it in such a way that it can be played on a lesser pc. So, i do try to make my maps and mods as accessible for as many computers as possible, and try to keep in a bit main stream. But to make 2 really different versions of the same maps is a bit much to me. And, pc's are getting cheaper and cheaper these days. Years ago you had to spent a huge amount of money to have a high end pc, and these days you have for only a few hundreds of dollars /euro's a very powerful pc. So the need to do so is not that much there anymore, as far as i can see it.

leon

Dragonlord wrote: This kind of "flexibility" though requires extra time including modifying art assets for a different system and especially testing on such systems. Indie and Mod projects tend though to have very little time so they usually can't afford to add this extra work. Besides if you use a DirectX engine you are already limited to what platforms you can venture to. UE3 is a good example for blocking (Linux debacle, recent 3DS comments) but is far from the only example.

I wouldn't say it takes that much extra work. If you're making a 5k character, you can rig & texture it. Then you can make a duplicate & reduce the poly's on the duplicate to ~1k (most likely with little structure loss) & just paint the texture from the high res model to the lower poly model (you could even bake in the bump/normal mapping & paint it all one). Nothing that hard about it, all the hard work was done for the 5k model.

But most modders don't test on any system then their own, so testing isn't an issue. It's not really any extra work: in general, for LOD to work you need your low poly models anyway. Now you're just using the low poly ones & no higher LOD ones installed. API doesn't matter as all API's are limited in one way or another & DX9 works on pretty much any Windows PC out there, OGL on pretty much anything period (with the "new" dynamic tessellation that's in DX10/11 & OGL 4 you could make low poly & use that to make things rounder if you wanted). The most limiting thing would be the person creating the game to think differently. Basically, think "if I were making this game 15 years ago, what would I do to make it look great". Spend the extra 20 minutes doing that & not assuming everybody but yourself is a moron when it comes to game content (people got by for decades just using .zip files w/o any installers!) & you open the floodgates to who can play.

As mentioned above, LODs of models are your least problem when dealing with older machines. It gets harder when you have to reduce stuff which is heavily coded into the engine/game that makes older machines puke. Not the first time backwards compatible code is dropped altogether since it gets in the way with high performance code.

Edited by: Dragonlord

Dragonlord wrote: As mentioned above, LODs of models are your least problem when dealing with older machines. It gets harder when you have to reduce stuff which is heavily coded into the engine/game that makes older machines puke. Not the first time backwards compatible code is dropped altogether since it gets in the way with high performance code.

I do know with Torque, I was able to forcefully take out the shaders and tone down a lot of excess processing.
Another big one was manually setting up vegetation to be optimized, which helped a lot in field or forested areas.

I also recall the total amount of changeable options was slim, and it was almost easier to manually change it rather than trying to implement a choppy slider.