There are so many things being tracked all the time in the game for puzzles and the power arm. Yet despites literally tracking sunshadows for some puzzle completion for example it runs almost smoothly with (in my 170h) no crashes. On a 6 yo portable console??
Botw was already impressive but I could grasp it with the shaders and also there weren’t that much physics puzzle. Objects were more static, there wasn’t the two other maps, enemy diversity was limited, same for weapons. There was less of everything overall but I thought it was the limit of the console and the possible engineering around it.
Is there any resources on how they managed to pull this off? White papers, behind the scenes, charts, …?
I’m not sure what your experience levels are with code, but breath of the wild source code is decompiled and available online. it was truly eye opening how that game is designed, everything is very modular and parameter based to work within just a few generalized shared systems. I’d guess TOTK took those same systems and expanded the parameter data that can be applied, and added a whole lot more modules using them.
I am happy to read that there are still game devs around that give a fuck about optimizing their code. I am so sick of that whole “hardware is cheap” excuse for wasting resources.
Thinking about it… it’s probably more prevalent in game dev in general than in application software dev. But I digress.
When you’re developing a flagship AAA game for the Switch you can’t use that excuse since you’re stuck with 6 year old mobile hardware.
The console was released almost 7 years ago, the chip used is even older at almost 9 years old
The thing is, that it works.
Optimisation is what brought us Pokemon, an open world RPG with 151 different characters, each with their own stats, special abilities, strengths and weaknesses, on a freaking handheld that before only ran Tetris.
I’m just adding that info because it makes the feat even more impressive, I think.
Game devs are overworked and underpaid af, so all those layers upon layers of abstractions just handed to you by game engines, at the cost of a ton of performance in order to save brainpower and time, look VERY enticing. Sure, you could spend more time and also spend more money in order to keep devs from leaving your company (because if you don’t keep giving your devs lucrative deals, they WILL jump ship as soon as they can get a better deal, that’s every job in tech) so you can maintain modular, decoupled, high-performance low-level code, but why do that when it’s just as profitable, even more profitable actually, not to?
But Nintendo, despite treating their consumers like shit, is EXTREMELY good with workers (especially in the context of Japan which is probably one of the worst countries on this planet for workers). They make good games because their employees aren’t overworked and underpaid as hell. They don’t have high turnover, they keep their employees over decades because they keep enough funding and effort into their current employees, rather than pumping all of that into hiring like most companies do. That’s why they can even exist despite the Switch being kind of garbage, why they can succeed where Sony and Microsoft are failing, because they attract and keep experienced, quality employees, so they can make quality games.
Game development & design can be one of the hardest jobs in the software engineering industry, and it’s the biggest entertainment industry on Earth by far, yet game devs have some of the worst conditions of any software engineers, dare I say the worst… So by buying shit games from shit companies, people are just affirming their shit practices.
This made me think we need an independent 3rd party to certify games that are “ethically sourced” , so to speak, like they do with cacao and palm oil.
I’d be more likely to buy games where the workers are treated well as opposed to ones from developers that are meat grinders.