Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'
-
Lol hunt takes six months dev time to make the ui twice as worse
wrote on 24 May 2025, 23:48 last edited bycloser to 2 years. its crazy how incompetent crytek is.
-
If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they're clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you're estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that's because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 00:05 last edited bymenu system
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he's spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.
-
Diablo4 has memory leak issues. As a software engineer myself, I just don't see any excuse for a game this long in production to have memory leak problems.
There is no doubt that a lot of games are getting rushed without being properly tested.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 00:10 last edited byTbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
-
This post did not contain any content.wrote on 25 May 2025, 00:38 last edited by
But other media said that coding is as simple as asking couple of question on chat.
-
Tbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 01:06 last edited by mriswith@lemmy.worldIn large scale online games you have issues ranging from obscure things causing memory leaks based on drivers, hardware combinations, etc. and all the way to basic things getting overlooked. One of my favorite examples being GTA5 online.
They forgot to update a function from early testing, and it was in the game for about a decade before someone else debugged the launch process. And then realized that it was going through the entire comparison file for each item it checked on the local list. So "changing a few lines" ended up reducing initial load times by up to 70% depending on the cpu and storage media.
EDIT: I've been drinking and probably misreemebred parts, so here is the post about how he found the issue
-
That's nothing new.
Gamers who don't know any programming, or maybe made a little utility for themselves. Looovee to bring out the old "just change one line of code", "just add this model", etc. to alter something in a game.
They literally do not understand how complex systems become, specially in online multiplayer games. Riot had issues with their spaghetti code, and people were crawling over eachother to explain how "easy" it would be to just change an ability. Without realizing that it could impact and potentially break half a dozen other abilities.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 01:18 last edited by jimmycakes@lemmy.worldWell why didn't you start 6 months ago. It's not my problem. I paid full price. If you wanna be left the fuck alone sell games for $15 and take your time no one will bother you. When you start asking $80 a game the price sets expectations. Devs lack of planning is not my problem as a consumer.
-
I think for something like this, you'd rent cloud servers as you'd expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it's actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 09:17 last edited byInteresting!
What kind of system would allow for that? Would queueing help?
-
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
- The codebase is fucked
- All resources are going to new features
- Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
- Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 11:41 last edited byIn the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There's always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.
We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.
-
But other media said that coding is as simple as asking couple of question on chat.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 12:58 last edited byCopilot, add destructible terrain to my game please
-
Interesting!
What kind of system would allow for that? Would queueing help?
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:22 last edited byUnfortunately, I'm not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.
-
Well why didn't you start 6 months ago. It's not my problem. I paid full price. If you wanna be left the fuck alone sell games for $15 and take your time no one will bother you. When you start asking $80 a game the price sets expectations. Devs lack of planning is not my problem as a consumer.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:31 last edited byDo you yell at waiters by any chance?
-
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
- The codebase is fucked
- All resources are going to new features
- Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
- Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:35 last edited byThe correlation between code quality and game quality is almost negative. When you're doing groundbreaking stuff or going for your own artistic vision it's tough to code well, even more so when you hit a jackpot and have to expand quickly (e.g. League spaghetti, Palworld)
-
menu system
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he's spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:37 last edited byCorrect. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it's simple, but it rarely ever is. It's hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that's what you sign up for in this line of work.
-
Well why didn't you start 6 months ago. It's not my problem. I paid full price. If you wanna be left the fuck alone sell games for $15 and take your time no one will bother you. When you start asking $80 a game the price sets expectations. Devs lack of planning is not my problem as a consumer.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:40 last edited by digitalnuisance@infosec.pubGamer who doesn't understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don't get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.
-
Unfortunately, I'm not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 13:56 last edited byFair! I'm in web so wouldn't know either. What kind of software do you work in? I've been thinking about jumping careers lately after realising that I quite like architecting a more complex system, and sort of hate working with front end web dev
-
My favorite one is "Just add multiplayer".
Sure. I'll just go right ahead and toggle it in the engine. Why didn't I think of that?
wrote on 25 May 2025, 14:23 last edited bylemme just bang out a complete rewrite of the game functionality over lunch
-
If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they're clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you're estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that's because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 14:43 last edited byDescribing design problems and attributing them to "bad code" is part of the problem tbh. The issue in your example started long before any code was written.
-
Gamer who doesn't understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don't get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.
wrote on 25 May 2025, 15:33 last edited by jimmycakes@lemmy.worldFound the lazy dev
-
Copilot, add destructible terrain to my game please
wrote on 25 May 2025, 15:47 last edited byI dont think anyone will claim that destructible terrain is an easy addition.
-
Found the lazy dev
wrote on 25 May 2025, 15:50 last edited by digitalnuisance@infosec.pubYeah, you're probably right, the video game you personally made is probably better and we're just lazy. BTW I demand 20 hours of brand-new content to be released next week, and it better be cutting-edge, uniquely interesting and creative, bug-free and $4.99, or else you're a lazy dev, too.
It's genuinely funny watching these people learn absolutely nothing when slapped in the face with hard facts.