Does high performance count as a feature?

Marketing says no

Published on May 9, 2007 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

So that game you've been waiting for finally comes out. You've read the previews of it. You've watched video demos of it. You've lived through the delays and the you now have the box in your hands.

You install it and start to play it and then you make the discovery -- your computer isn't fast enough to run it. You thought you had a good computer but no, no it turns out that you have to lower the display settings way down to play the game.

Why is this the case? The answer is this: Marketing. There is little value in making a game run well on your computer because game developers aren't punished for not having optimized their code as long as the game will run on your machine with lower settings.

And if you complain about that, you will be told that your one-year old video card is "ancient" and told to "get a new video card".

Which is a shame because most games could run much faster than they do if there was a good reason to optimize for it. When Sins of a Solar Empire comes out, people will no doubt marvel at its great graphics. But will anyone (or any review) make notice that it has state of the art graphics and can run on older machines? People in the beta have certainly noticed how fast the game runs despite having better graphics than a number of shipping games with cutting edge graphics. I.e. it runs faster with better graphics than many shipping high end games.

Are turn-based strategy gamers different? We'll be able to gauge by the 1.6 release. Around 200 engineering hours have gone into just performance tuning for 1.6. The mini map has been rewritten in Direct3D and we've back ported some of our new game engine features from our upcoming fantasy strategy game (which has crazy advanced graphics technology but that's another story).

The net result is 1.6 should be a major jump in performance over 1.5X. That isn't to say there aren't a bunch of other cool feautres in 1.6. There certainly are. But performance is where the bulk of the work has gone. New features (real meaty ones anyway) will have to wait until 1.7 it appears.

Comments (Page 1)

Evil Roy

on May 09, 2007

the performance increase in 1.6b2 is exceptional. i can even play it on my PM 1Ghz, 512 Ram, Intel Extreme 2 laptop on battery, when it scales down to 600Mhz. Dammit, it looks better too!

respek.

evil

TLHeart

on May 09, 2007

Performance is a big issue...

I have bought many games, to leave them setting on the shelf, because they are unplayable on my Old computer. I also will not buy another game from that company again. So they made one sale to me, but I will not be a repeat customer.

There loss, not mine.

Frogboy

on May 10, 2007

1.6b2 will seem like a pig compared to 1.6b4 which is still in development.

DarkStar7

on May 10, 2007

I can remember in the old days when games like Raptor: Call of the Shadows. I was totally blown away at that the entire game fits on a single floppy and runs well with my 386Dx computer. In those days...all the games run well and stable when you met the MINIMUM requirements.

Nowdays, so much complications, sound cards, graphic cards, and then recently some idiot wants you to buy an FX-card to work with your graphics card. Minimun requirements are more like recommended now. For a few games, the minimun requirements means you can load the game to the start menu!

Currently, away from home...I can run DarkAvator(1.5x) on a Pentium M 1.73Ghz with lousy integrated graphics card. Can't wait for final 1.6 release!

Stardock is awesome...Hopefully you guys won't be force to a buy out by some giant company.

geminisama

on May 10, 2007

OMG. Now that Ive read this...I gotta try to play on my desktop! Has 1.6b2 been released via stardock yet?!

Viperswhip

on May 10, 2007

I think it performance is an issue, but unfortunately we often run into a situation as customers where we have bought the game before discovering that it is so slow that it might as well be buggy.

I can't alt tab later on in a game in a large galaxy on DA without a bit of lag time coming back in, which means I don't really bother with anything bigger because I alt tab a lot. So, I will love the patch. I haven't felt hindered because I mostly enjoy medium map sizes anyway, but it will be nice to get a huge game going that can last for a long time.

Game reviews only mention performance if it's quite bad, or doesn't run particularly well even on the often better than average review computers.

I haven't bothered buying Oblivion because I have a 6800 and am not yet on a dual core processor. I am not sure what happened to the gaming industry, but is it out-pacing technology now? There was a period around 2003-2006 where a decent 3 year old computer could fare pretty well, now there is no hope of playing the big flashy new games. It's a great consolation that they are often crappy games though heh

I do appreciate the graphics in DA and given the huge numbers of things going on in a galaxy I have already been impressed but I really only knew that it was a great TBS space strategy game when I bought it and performance played no role in the decision.

I certainly would not have bought DA if DL had played poorly on my machine, and I do love your company for caring about a product so much after release, you may be one of the rare few that do.

Raknor

on May 10, 2007

High performance is not a feature, it something inherit to any good product. But the lack of high performance is a critical bug.

Ricree

on May 10, 2007

Like others have said, the answer is "kind of". Good performance isn't usually praised nearly as much as it should be, but it does have implicit benefits in reviews and word of mouth. For one thing, bad performance will almost always show up in reviews. Look at supreme commander. By all accounts, it is a brilliant game, but it has definitely scored lower than it would have if the performance issues. Personally, I really want to get the game, but I know that my computer simply can't handle it. Because of this, I am going to have to wait until I get a new computer, and by the time that happens it will almost certainly be down to bargain bin prices.

Because of this bad performance penalty, there is another marketing benefit to good optimization. If you put in the time and effort to make the game run smoothly, you can pack in a lot more features without running into those performance problems, and that is certainly something that will show well in marketing, reviews, and word of mouth.

Mjollnir64

on May 10, 2007

I love it when a company obviously considers performance when they release a game. I have never seen a company do it better than Stardock.

But I have a question: Would there be any value in providing compiler-optimized versions of the primary executables for common processors? There must be performance benefits with a game optimized for SSE3 instructions on Prescott P4 (and later) CPUs instead of having to compile to the lowest common demoninator. Or is this simply not cost effective and/or too complex to keep track of for the developer? I have wondered why developers don't do this for years.

Ricree

on May 10, 2007

I've kind of wondered that too Mjollnir. This seems like something that would work especially good with digital distribution, since it's a lot easier to target an individual's computer. If I had to guess at an answer, I'd say that it is probably just a matter of not seeing enough benefits for the added complexity of having to debug a the different builds. Still, I don't really know. Hopefully someone on here who's a developer will see and chime in on it.

kryo

on May 10, 2007

I gotta try to play on my desktop! Has 1.6b2 been released via stardock yet?!

There's a sticky in the beta reports forum. Just grab the files there and unzip them over 1.5x3.

LintMan

on May 10, 2007

The worse the performance is for more people, the more increasing it will be seen as a big feature. Just like with any other feature you might add, some % of people will appreciate it and some will not. I personally haven't had any performance complaints since around the 1.3-1.4 era, but I understand there are those that do. I like that Stardock tries hard to keep low-end system performance in mind.

@Viperswhip: My old system sounds like maybe like yours: I had an Athlon64 3800 (not dual core), with an nvidia 6800. I played through all of Oblivion with mediumish graphics settings and thought it was a blast. (My frame rates were "meh", but I'm used to that from FEAR, Prey, HL2, etc.) It's certainly not as pretty as if you crank the graphics up, throw in some texture packs, etc, but the game is still very playable.

@Ricree/Mjollnir32: I thought that the way a lot of the specialized SSE-type instruction sets worked is that any libraries functions that use them will use them automatically if they are there, and emulate them in software if they are not. I believe that is how the floating point instructions worked on an old 386 computer (with or without the math coprocessor). In any case, though, providing specialized builds for different processors would be a huge effort for both development/QA and for product support after release. Imagine the variety of potential complaints: people running the wrong version for their processor, people complaining that their optimized version doesn't seem any faster, people not sure which version to use, people complaining they ran the wrong version and now their PC is broken (nonsense of course), etc.

LintMan

on May 10, 2007

Doh! Sorry double post.

General Pants

on May 10, 2007

On behalf of those of use with jobs, families, and poverty-level incomes, I sincerely thank you! GC2 is the only game I play anymore, and this will probably keep it that way (once we clear up a little glitch where I actually CAN'T play right now, but CariElf is working on that!).

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on May 10, 2007

1.6b2 will seem like a pig compared to 1.6b4 which is still in development.

What about 1.6b3?

If you put in the time and effort to make the game run smoothly, you can pack in a lot more features without running into those performance problems, and that is certainly something that will show well in marketing, reviews, and word of mouth.

False. Optimizing the code means less dev time for adding those features. The game's budget is the limiting factor not the computer's resources. That's why so many games are released that are buggy, have poor performance, and have a stupid AI (because everyone is just going to play multi-player anyway).
Stability and sold game play are critical. I'm playing on an average 3yr old computer (512MB RAM, single core P4 2.8GHz, Nvidia 5200FX) so I appreciate you optimizing the code. I appreciate improvements to the AI over better graphics. In my first DA game (1.6b2), I'm seeing much better planet development by the AI (better use of bonus tiles) vs. DL. However, in your recent AAR post the AI placed what looked like a galactic wonder on a research bonus tile but also built 3 labs on regular tiles. Drengin's Ulca

I expect it would be hard to port the AI improvements from DA to DL given all the new AI impacting features in DA. However, I expect it would be straight forward to port the graphics optimizations (e.g., mini-map); will there be a 1.6 for DL?

p.s. If I recall correctly, GalCiv II runs on Win98 and WinME; I would have thought any computer old enough to still be running Win98 would not have a graphics card with DirectX 9c support which I thought was required.

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