Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dragdeler]

Unity is the epitome of too ambitious projects with piss poor optimisation.

[Egan_BW]

Unity isn't horrible, it's just free so all the devs who don't know how to model, code, game design, write, or optimize use it.

Well, a lot of the badly optimized unity games use the professional version, but I'm pretty sure that there's lots of horribly optimized games using unreal too.

[Iduno]

I've also read professional devs (decades of experience) say that it's very difficult to do a lot of the optimizing, and moving to a better engine has real benefits.

[nenjin]

Got Actraiser: Renaissance as a Christmas gift. It's a remake of the original SNES game, which I loved as a kid.

So very not sure how to feel about what they've done here.

They haven't take anything away from the original, it's only additive. But what they've added....hrm.

First off, the game's cardinal sin is that the action-portion of the remake isn't good. The sprites are awful for the most part, particularly the Master, the guy you play. It has this ugly blurry quality, like they ported over the sprites from the SNES into a comparable 3d graphical style of just a few years later. It's bad. It also doesn't handle very gracefully. It feels like a first pass. Serviceable but unrefined. The sound effects are also pretty inadequate. And somehow, the hardest hitting track from the original, the Bloodpool level music, doesn't hit as hard as the original. How did they fuck that up?

When compared to the changes in the town management portion of the game, it almost feels like the two parts of the game were worked on by separate studios. In the town management portion, there's anime characters for everyone now, and a lot more dialog. It's almost all empty dialog around what happens in the original game but if you like people kissing your ass as a deity, there's a whole bunch of that. They've also added heroes in each map, which are a whole chain of "quests" and character development. Heroes matter because they've also added sieges, which take place on the same town map. You can build fortresses and arrow towers and barricades and order your heroes around to fight back the horde that trickle in and walk down your city streets. You can use the same miracles you do for the town management portion offensively during sieges as well. At first I liked it but they have you do it 4 to 5 times per chapter, and sometimes randomly. They're not hard except when you stop paying attention and then they can be lost in the blink of an eye. You can summon heroes from previous chapters to fight in your current chapter's sieges too, which is about the only interesting part of the whole thing once you've played it a couple times.

So all in all while the game is longer and feels richer in terms of the story and the world, it's still fairly repetitive. And the thing you look forward to, to break up the monotony of the town management, isn't very enjoyable. The additions feel low effort. The heroes are one note with meaningless levels and stats that don't really have any context. Who cares what someone's attack or defense value is except in relation to another hero, it's not like you know what the stats of the monsters during sieges are or can really do anything with it or about it. The heroes manage themselves as far as fighting, you just tell them where to go. The hero and quest and dialog structure really gets repetitive. By Chapter 3 of 6 you're already familiar with the flow of things and it's really just the town building and upgrading that makes up the lengthiest part of game play. Which, obnoxiously, the game wants you to vaporize your own settlement buildings as your city levels up, to force your people to rebuild structures as higher level versions, because they won't upgrade it themselves. I spent like 25 extra minutes on a level because I didn't realize I needed to nuke my Level 3 Farms so they could be replaced with Level 3 Rice Farms. Maybe it was like this in the original, I can't remember. But it would have been nice to to have to systematically nuke every building your town twice over. At least in the remake you can cast miracles at higher levels with a wider AoE, so you don't have to go house by house.

The city looks nice and it is gratifying to watch it grow still, especially from the World Map screen where you can see them all filled out in pretty good detail. But Actraiser is from an older era where you don't make any real decisions. In the remake you get to choose where to build forts and arrow towers, but it's pretty thin.

If you really liked Actraiser it might be worth a look. But I found myself more bemused or disappointed by it than enthralled. I gave it a solid night's play but I don't know if I'll be back to it any time soon.

[Aoi]

Which, obnoxiously, the game wants you to vaporize your own settlement buildings as your city levels up, to force your people to rebuild structures as higher level versions, because they won't upgrade it themselves. I spent like 25 extra minutes on a level because I didn't realize I needed to nuke my Level 3 Farms so they could be replaced with Level 3 Rice Farms. Maybe it was like this in the original, I can't remember. But it would have been nice to to have to systematically nuke every building your town twice over. At least in the remake you can cast miracles at higher levels with a wider AoE, so you don't have to go house by house.

If you wanted to max out your population, you had to use lightning bolts to raze your low-density housing. I believe the farms would auto-magically grow... wheat? once you pick it up from whichever region and drop it off in the new area; you didn't have to burn those down.

Even more fun is that on fairly rare cases, they'd build alternate structures, instead of the high density housing, so you had to blow it up again until they figured it out.

[Kagus]

but I'm pretty sure that there's lots of horribly optimized games using unreal too.

Oh god yes, plenty of junk cash grabs out there based in UE4, with godawful framerates thanks to them just building one gigantic room and then filling it with all the random 3D assets and always-on particle effects and AIs they could find.


When it comes to more professional handlings, I'd say that in my personal experience I've seen more Unity games that chug with optimization/cleanup problems than UE4 games that do the same, but this likely also has something to do with the popularity of Unity over UE4.

[Stench Guzman]

Overload

It's pretty good.

I think Descent 1 and 2 are still better.

[Frumple]

For what it's worth nenj, if you haven't seen it already you might want to scope out Smelter. Parts of the art style are kinda' contentious (i.e. it's aping kill la kill in places, so, uh), but from what I've seen of vids it's basically "What if Actraiser, but the platforming and whatnot was actually pretty decent". Less clunky SNES and more modern Megaman X-line 2D platforming, with the overworld being pretty solid Actraiser.

[MCreeper]

I'm not going to seriously play this nonsense, but i like this kind of modder.  He put his mod in released mods section, wrote an about 20 browser pages long (excluding unspoilered screens) essay on mod, mod lore and Neptunia lore or somewhat, in google translate from japanese, but forgot to put in download link. It exists, but it is not there nevermind, they are at beginning of posts after first. First thing of note - every leader has unique penalties for declaring war or denouncing her, up to inability to use settlers and workers. No bullying indeed. Second thing of note - it appears that every base game unit has been renamed and remodelled, which is pretty outstanding as far as late Civ mods go. And third is... xD

"There are two known episode are:
Episoide 1: Supergalactica Neptunia Galaxy of Peace and Chaos. God of The Gamalatica.
Episoide 2: Supergalactica Neptunia Galaxy of Peace and Chaos: Rinne Somnium.
Episoide 3: Supergalactica Neptunia Galaxy of Peace and Chaos: Memory of Kagami."

"This is kind like KonoSuba mixed with Star Wars element were afterlife, the goddesses, fantasy planet, laser guns, magic sword and spaceship were include in this story. Remember, this is the story about the bullying even there are fantasy setting, funny stuff or lead the space army or laser sword to fight against the evil space alt-right force that want to destroy her and her galaxy because this is the story about the bullying"

I might just read this load of hogwash sometime. 

[Rolan7]

This stupid kid has a place on the crew.  I'll even take him on missions, despite him being a piece of drek.
Check the number four - good kid.

Outer Worlds - that kid.

[Robsoie]

For once, lots of praises for the coders of the Tomb Raider goty game and its engine, as despite the superb visuals, very detailled models and very good animations and lots of special effects alll around, the game is running amazingly smoothly and load absurdly fast.
Now that's optimisation.

[nenjin]

Friend got us all Phasmophobia as gifts so we've been playing a bit of that. It can actually be a bit creepy. Not so creepy with friends to talk to, but enough to raise my hackles playing alone. And the whole walkie talky thing is pretty cute and real adds to the atmosphere to hear your friends with effect laid over their voice.

There are times I really like the game, despite hide and seek horror not really being my thing. And then there are times it can be irritatingly vague.

Like we moved up to the higher difficulty, feeling like we have a good sense of the game now. But most of our games in intermediate is us trying everything to find the identifying traits of the ghost and coming up blank. Are we even in the right room? Your "setup time" is really your "find the fuckin' ghost's hang out spot" time and start deploying all your tools before it goes ape and starts choking people. When you can't even locate the right room before first hunt starts....chances are you'll struggle to find the other clues with an angry ghost constantly attacking.

It's a bit of a party game, which don't tend to hold my interest for long, but I have to give credit, it is pretty interesting even without being in VR. And we had some genuinely fun moments. I just wish it was a little less vague.....but I guess that's where their design had to lead them. "Only shows when passing through the DOT Projector AND is being filmed on a video camera." "Only shows itself on video when people aren't around." That's kinda of annoyingly specific to have to figure out by the process of elimination, and the possibility for a false flag too.

For example, some ghosts can be identified because they can make your EMF meter go to 5. But only at specific times. Usually when they make their presence known in some way, with sounds or maybe they actually do materialize. Whatever. Point is, the moment that EMF reading can happen can be at any time, and maybe in different places. Whether you have your EMF out, and turned on, and not using some other tool or a flashlight, all these factors play into whether or not you can identify the ghost. And the EMF reader is just one tool out of like a dozen.

Maybe when you play the game enough to start recognizing tell-tale signs of specific ghosts so you don't have to do as much guesswork. But that's kinda what it feels like at times, doing guess work with not enough information and too many/too specific combos to check. And then you die.

It's a cute game and a cool execution. I just wish it felt a little less....like it was intentionally holding back info from you, so you waste time, so it can kill you.

[Rolan7]

I had some good experiences with Phasmophobia with my brother's crew, but yeah things are super vague.  I often felt like I was supposed to watch some streams first.

I played extremely cautiously, mostly waving the EM reader around and asking the spirit questions with my actual voice.  I even went in alone, into dark rooms, trying "taunt" the spirit into manifesting.  Not churlishly calling it names (usually) but being alone.  In the dark.  Local-talking to it, trying to enunciate its name.

I very rarely died, somehow.  Probably my best experience was attempting a mission that was FAR too large for the three of us, an old school with loooooong hallways.  The EM and flashlight went wild and I was like "Fuck okay, I'll run.  I've never seen an apparition move particularly fast."
Supposedly that was the wrong response.  However, I did survive.

Second best experience:  Being in a small cabin and having the apparition spawn almost on top of me, on a stairwell, and me hurrying under the stairs.  Where one of my friends was looking directly at me, basically staring daggers.  She got me, I think he escaped.  We laughed a lot afterwards!  But honestly they sorta acted like I'd done something wrong - meh. 
Dying... is pretty creepy.

I would never play this game with external VOIP.  Most of its impact comes from the radio dropping, hiding/fleeing, and having to reconnect and share notes in the aftermath of the surge.
"H-hey, I-"
"You're alive!  Did you see it?  Where was it?"
"I... I don't know, I just ran... all these corridors..."
"Try to remember.  We're on our way down.  also you're a dumbass for running, you're supposed to hide"
"Yeah okay whatever just, get down here, please?  I... keep talking, it's dark down here"

[Robsoie]

My first contacts with Tomb Raider were the 2 first games of the serie on a playstation (the first one because i got it free from a magazine cover CD and the 2nd because i liked the 1st one a lot so i had to purchase the 2nd one) .
Despite the clunky tank controls, i had so much fun that i completed both games.

But past the 2nd game i never could get interested anymore in the further releases, probably a bit too much "more of the same" and the environment weren't atmospheric or interesting anymore (the first game was probably my favorite because of that, and the music of it was just fantastic).

So i started playing the 2013 reboot Tomb Raider without knowing what to expect gameplay-wise.
And wow, it really surprised me on how they actually vastly improved the character control, i was fearing a return of the tank control but no, Reboot Lara is incredibly reactive to your moves in a natural way (even playing with mouse/keyboard as i have no controller) and basically can catch everything that's near her when she jump or fall.
It also got rid of the pixel precision of the games of old, oh i still have nightmare of some levels with a really hard serie of jump and the save crystal being far ...
In this Tomb Raider reboot i nearly haven't missed a jump at all on those action sequences in which everything crumble or explode around you and you need to run and jump on many falling platforms (out of a few in which the camera mislead me at first) , i guess they thought of the old folks like me .

What i liked a lot less is that they added QTE, fortunately they have a -very- generous timing, but the problem is that they display an icon and not giving much of a hint to what is the actual key i have to press (considering i have different key binding than the default) , fortunately as the timing isn't too short i can deal with that.
But still that's annoying. 

After that the characterisation change of Reboot Lara with the "must be puzzled/vulnerable/weak/crying/relatable all the time", i think it's not really a great change but i must say the actress voicing (at least in my language) really does an amazing job at the emotions and everything portraying the character evolving a bit through the story. Making the characterisation at least tolerable.

Now the story, whoever wrote this must be a complete sadist and because of that some moments in which you're supposed to care about Reboot Lara are turned into you laughing as if it was a parody.
I mean, imagine the situation : you have Lara running and whatever platform she's running on is crumbling and she fall on the lower floor.
In normal way, she falls and probably hurt herself a bit then stand up and resume her runnning.

But that's not what happens most of the time, in that Tomb Raider reboot she's running , the platform crumble and Reboot Lara starts to fall.

Then she manages to hold a bit, a guy come and kick her in the stomach, then she falls on a badly placed wood trunk that probably break her vertebrae, she rebound and impale her leg into a metal spike sticking on the wall, she then continue to fall scraping her face to some nettles vegetation in the wall, and finally she land on her head on the granite ground.

After getting back to her senses she starts to stand but there's another guy that come and beat her with a baseball bat probably breaking her ribs and most of her head, then a wolf jump out of nowhere while savagely biting her leg while she desesperately try to roll away, causing the ground to crumble again and she fall through a bunch of more or rocks, wood and metal that hurt her a lot more while a powder keg explode right near her until she finally land a dozen of meters below nearly broken in half. 
Once getting to her sense, she finally stand up and resume her running. 

I exaggerate a bit (just a bit) , but this kind of situation happens -a lot- to Reboot Lara in the game, so after a while it loses unfortunately the "poor girl she can't take a break" thought and that exaggeration become mostly comical.

But the game is not only visually great and run very well and smooth, it's also a really good game, i'm enjoying it a lot.

[scriver]

I exaggerate a bit (just a bit) , but this kind of situation happens -a lot- to Reboot Lara in the game, so after a while it loses unfortunately the "poor girl she can't take a break" thought and that exaggeration become mostly comical.

They overdid it by far, I agree. I liked the game enough to finish it (which is extremely rare) but in the end it just felt too sadistic. Like as if -- you know how in many games and movies the plot has something really bad happen to the hero just before the final climactic fight so they have to fight after being stabbed it shot or explosioned or with a broken arm or something -- as if that, except Lara had one of those major dramatic injury moments every other scene. "It's supposed to be the story of how she becomes the badass Tomb Raider Lara Croft" my arse, I'm surprised that after that plot she didn't spend the rest of her life in physical rehabilitation (not to mention the ptsd!) xD

Also -- and this is really just a minor narrative vibe thing -- but did anyone else feel like there was this weird dissonance between how much the game wanted to press the whole "first adventure" thing while also having a plot that felt like it was more like a large climax to an epic, several instalment long series or something?

And wow, it really surprised me on how they actually vastly improved the character control, i was fearing a return of the tank control but no, Reboot Lara is incredibly reactive to your moves in a natural way (even playing with mouse/keyboard as i have no controller) and basically can catch everything that's near her when she jump or fall.
It also got rid of the pixel precision of the games of old, oh i still have nightmare of some levels with a really hard serie of jump and the save crystal being far ...
In this Tomb Raider reboot i nearly haven't missed a jump at all on those action sequences in which everything crumble or explode around you and you need to run and jump on many falling platforms (out of a few in which the camera mislead me at first) , i guess they thought of the old folks like me .

I also thought the games flowed very well with movement and targeting and stuff, particularly with making moving from snimstoom type to animation type look less janky than if often does even in modern games.

One of the things I didn't particularly like about it was that I never really felt there was any real choice in where to try and climb, so it always ended up feeling like I was on a track. Ie, if the metaphor is a obstacle course, then more like an athletic course where you have a clear route just with hinders on it rather than an area where you have to figure out how to get to the end yourself using the features at hand. Now, and I admit that the following may just be because I was a dumb kid with no problem solutive skill when I played the Tomb Raider games of old, but that puzzling out the route was some of the stuff I liked about those games. So I missed that.

I also got the second and the third new game because I kinda fell into a "wow I actually finished a game for once, i gotta get the next one" trap and then got bored of the second before the end and never finished it. But I did actually pick up another game, a Star Wars game called the Fallen Order or something, that was basically Star Wars Tomb Raider with Jedi stuff that I liked and did finish. It was so much Tomb Raider that I swear they were reusing some of the animations.