This doesn't fly with a one man team and not with a 1000. It's just badly done, there's no sugarcoating. Those meshes should never end up in the game files.
>This doesn't fly with a one man team and not with a 1000
sounds like someone never worked on a 1000 dev team. random quirks either go unnoticed or are de-prioritized all the time. Most are minor, more and more moderate to major ones are getting through. That's definitely a publisher issue.
random quirks do. this is not random quirks. it's a systematic and expected issue of underoptimisation caused by releasing a product before it was even slated to be ready. one bad mesh is not the issue, it's never the issue. we're talking of thousands of terrible meshes and a near-total lack of basic optimisations applied at the last stage of development to most games. the manpower was not enough to release within the deadline, likely due to running into a lot of technical difficulties working with unity. instead of going into valve time, they released it anyway, which means that you skipped the entire polish and optimisation part not only for the game itself but for half the engine as well. poor performance was not only expected, i'm certain that every member of the team saw it as the only possible outcome.
I'd call 4 examples of "this needed LODs" random quirks in the grand scheme of things. It's not like every single mesh is 100k vertices. Grossly underoptimized, yes. But the devs pre-empting their announcement with "we're not satisfied" tells me they were too busy slaying dragons to worry about the annoying barking Chihuahua in the room.
It was expected, yes. It does not mean they weren't trying to fix it in the 11th hour. I woildnt be surprised if some core tech was unfinished or inadequate that lead to this.
>instead of going into valve time, they released it anyway, which means that you skipped the entire polish and optimisation part not only for the game itself but for half the engine as well.
Yup, welcome to game development when you have deadlines and no benevolent (or at least, apathetic) dictator paying your bills. It's unfortunate that we can trace this back to the 80's with ET, but this is simply the business realities. Game code isn't mission critical (and until recently, does not care about maintainability), and also isn't what sells the product.
So it never gets the time to be cultivated like other indistries. And people still buy anyway. It's a two way street of apathy and every publisher hopes it can slip under the cracks and not become the next Superman 64. Most manage to slip.
There's not much you can do about it with the current publishing structure, where most funders don't work in nor care about games. And the ones that do still see their money draining whenever the talk of delays come up. That won't be solved except with time as more industry trailblazers retire and shift to management (remember, Todd Howard is only in his 50's. Gabe and Kojima are 60. So many pioneers are still well under retirement age). Or for more truly indie teams to arise and learn how to scale up projects while staying lean. The latter is what I hope to do.
It's pretty clear that with the performance that the game has it's a lot more than four models with bad LODs. They would probably have identified that issue within days. There's likely a more fundamental issue, not only with the technology but also with LODs for most detail models. These are only examples since you can't list every model out of hundreds being rendered.
I really think that the performance and scale indie developers can squeeze out puts AAA developers to shame nowadays, and I really hope that that'll continue to happen. All it takes is time, organisation, and a lot of time.
Sure, more than 4, less than however many assets there are in the game. I mostly want to emphasize that a systematic issue implies that this was an acceptable development pipeline, which I doubt any engineer on the team would say.
>I really think that the performance and scale indie developers can squeeze out puts AAA developers to shame nowadays, and I really hope that that'll continue to happen. All it takes is time, organisation, and a lot of time.
Yup, I agree. Indies don't tend to have money, so the budget comes from. Elsewhere. We can already utilize some amazing tools to cut down the time of scaling up environments. Not as much with actor assets. But I don't think it's too far off (more just locked off in acedemics white papers).
I'm solodeveloping a game, and there's no fucking way a 100,000 vert mesh is getting in the game without a LOD. My game is running on the Quest 2 at 72 fps stable
sure, it's easy to catch major hiccups when one person has 100% knowledge base. Not so much when 30 devs each have different responsibilities and the optimizer guy is drowining in other fires.