It's puzzling why the studio couldn't do this. The problem itself is easy to spot by a performance engineer, and avoided in the first place by an experienced developer. Did all the leads leave after implementing the prototype? Did management fire the whole team after the release? Were sales good enough that nobody really cared?
The issue was the original studio didn’t stipulate good enough performance targets or were already over-committed to this contractor for the timeframe.
Getting 3D working optimally so that it uses the hardware maximally is actually hard. There are lots of places where you can use the wrong call and something ends up being shunted to the CPU instead of the GPU and all your performance is gone.
As a dev you probably have a really fucking fancy machine on your desktop which hides all the sins you are coding into the game.
Studios sometimes just want bodies and hire way too many inexperienced devs who haven't been through all the gotchas.
Also, you need a good profiler, you need to know how to understand your profiler and you need to profile often on a game to make sure you don't get to the end and find some horrible bug that requires you to go back and ask the artists to change all their assets.
from my experience, toy-makers don't use military-spec parts
Maybe i'm wrong about these particular ideas, but to me it seems that there is something wrong in the industry, where slow software is routinely shipped (e.g. Electron apps and lots of Wirth's Law in practice) and where the exact same extends to games, for example, how Cyberpunk 2077 was at release.
What can we do to solve this, as developers? Can developers even fix this and possibly provide the necessary pushback or something else? Should someone else fix this, maybe at a different level of the org chart?
In contrast, here's a positive example: Visual Studio Code. It's built on Electron, yet somehow feels far more snappy than the likes of Brackets or Atom. It doesn't feel an order of magnitude or two slower than the likes of Sublime or Notepad++ at this point! What is Microsoft doing differently in this regard? Prioritizing performance? Throwing resources at the problem, in the forms of specialized optimization teams and commitments to this? How much does that cost them?
I'm 20, so not that old, and I do load up and old game just to be a bit nostalgic sometimes, will I be able to do that when I'm 40 or 50? It's easy to think that the answer is yes because you can get emulators for games from the past, but games now have so many moving parts (and DRM unfortunately).
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine
I don't see it having been discussed here before, so be sure to check out the followup or contemporaneous reddit discussion:
https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/ffhimn/a_fix_for_...
https://twitter.com/SheriefFYI/status/1468650249426128899?s=...
It's funny because I like the idea of a niche group of programmers all working to increase the fps of Arkham and getting competitive with each other.
Stuff is hard. Most people are overworked and underpaid. Ease off. If you ever, ever root for somebody to lose their job, you're not on our side.
