How I increased Hapax performance by 800%

Started by Legend, Jan 12, 2025, 06:39 AM

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Legend

I ran it on a faster computer  :P


Seriously though I was shocked. I still need to optimize the game for lower end hardware but wow this is nice. 4k and 120 fps vs ~1080p and ~30 fps.

Why doesn't every dev do this? Are they stupid?

kitler53

Quote from: Legend on Jan 12, 2025, 06:39 AMI ran it on a faster computer  :P


Seriously though I was shocked. I still need to optimize the game for lower end hardware but wow this is nice. 4k and 120 fps vs ~1080p and ~30 fps.

Why doesn't every dev do this? Are they stupid?
you are a single developer.   games these days are make by 400+ people.   it's hard to let hundreds of people contribute to a code base and get all of them to care let alone be on the same page about best code practices.   the "care" part is made 1000% worse if any of your contributors are contractors.  

so like i'm not in games but,..  contractors are paid to accomplish a task and generally include performance metrics that only prioritize speed of development since it's senior managers not development managers control the purse strings.  so contractors are motivated to show fast progress on features and have no motivation adhere to good code practices or refactor code that is poorly optimized.  


i saw that article from Jason Schreier blaming high dev cost on poor management not graphics responding to that other article blaming graphics.  i kind of feel like both articles took too hard of a stance on finding a single scape goat to blame things on.   ..both things are probably contributors and also there are probably a few more contributors as well.   but yeah,.. poor management has cost my team tons of time.



as an example:

one of my higher ups demand we make our software "hybrid" because apparently that's really important to him.   instead of trying to build features customers wanted he demanded we build a feature that will allow us to add that moniker to our release.  he settled on some pretty dumb idea and demanded we work on it which of course we did because he has the power to fire all of us.   after 6 months of work on it he came back as said, "well i talked to legal today and it turns out this feature won't allow us to call the software hybrid so let's do something else"...

         

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Legend

I thought I made the joke obvious enough   ???



But since you did talk about real issues, yeah management is a big problem. Same with compartmentalization, where every person optimizes their own part of the product without knowing how that impacts things overall.

A big game specific issue is that the graphics guys and the artist guys are getting more and more removed from each other. Unreal Engine 5's main selling point is that artists can just do the most inefficient things possible and yet the game still runs. A team could make a better looking scene that runs a heck of a lot faster if everyone was aware of everything, but that's impossible with a large dev team.