Why are indie games unoptimized as shit? even low res retro 8-bit games have insane requirements for what they are

Why are indie games unoptimized as shit? even low res retro 8-bit games have insane requirements for what they are

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store.steampowered.com/app/95700/
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Play Dustforce

Shader abuse.

Any examples? It would be because the devs aren't the best coders or something btw

What indie games you massive faggot? If you are talking about something, at least try to be more specific.
>hyrr all indie games are unoptimized shit dyrr
McFuckinKillYourself ;^)

>can't speak german

because they can't code for shit, and people have some weird misconception of low-res pixel graphics being somehow "less taxing", and all that affect the performance.

Super Meat Boy

because they're made by indie developers, scrubs trying to make it big without knowing the extra small stuff necessary for optimization

Who cares about optimization when the game runs?

neither could yuko miyamura, to be fair

>find cool historical "game" about how America teamed with UK to save Iran from a communist dictator
>it's an adventure kind of deal you can finish in less than one hour
>requires 2GB of RAM
>runs like shit
store.steampowered.com/app/95700/

I can play my shitty AA games without closing my 400+ tabs behemoth of a browser session. But I usually can't with shitty indie games.

Optimization is an art. Also not one that's easy to master because a lot of the stuff that leads to slowdown isn't the most obvious of things to clean up for amateur developers.

Everything has to use high level OpenGL and interpreted languages for maximum system requirements, even when all you're showing is blown up low res 2d images.

Probably just boils down to experience and man power.

Is this the new buzzword for people who don't know shit about software development? Did you ever use and care about this term until a year ago? I bet you "care" about your 60 FPS too, faggot.

>store.steampowered.com/app/95700/
Haven't heard about this. Thanks, I'll check it out later.

Because everyone these days is resorting to generic engines such as Unity3D. It's quick to prototype your game with and at that point they say "Fuck it" and just release it like that. The majority of devs using Unity3D probably don't even know about LOD's or occlusion culling.

Hell, if you take a look at Space Engineers which was quite successful and updated a lot, they didn't know jackshit about LOD either or streaming and neither did they employ occlusion culling. They would put down a massive size planet with it's original mesh and they would load the entire game into the RAM because they simply don't know else. They think that Unity3D provides them with the generic algorithmn that would optimize the game on it's own to it's best ability.

There's also the other factor that those engines are bloated and unoptimized by default, because they have to cater to everything and using .reflect that much also has it's performance toll to make the engine work. Where as with the regular DXD sdk, you have a lot of control to optmize and significantly reduce wasted cycles.

It's comparable to using Delphi/Borland to compile your code, compared to a basic C compiler. They add a lot of bloated libraries and references that simply are not needed. That's a difference between 19 kb and 1-2 MB.

As a dev who knows how to code and has been learning the ropes of Unity, you got any good articles on Unity-specific optimization? I'd really like to make sure I stay relatively well-optimized right from the outset.

nu-male developers can't write games without their 10 layers of abstraction

this
most unexpected amount of enjoyment i got from an indie game in years. still play it today. fucking 10/10 game.

This is true. I'm working on low res and I didn't think I had to bother with optimization. Decided to check fraps. Ended up at 40fps, freaked out, spent a week optimizing.

I think the worst offender has to be Plague Inc. for PC. I picked it up when it was on sale because I wanted to try out those custom scenarios, but the game runs like absolute dogshit. Seriously, the underlying mathematics are nothing more than exponential functions, the game never displays more than a few thousand polygons at any given time, yet I had severe performance issues.

Yes, I was playing it on my shitty notebook, but this is a game that shouldn't even need a dedicated graphics processor. You should be able to run this on hardware from the year 2000. Is the PC version simply the Android version, running in an emulator?

As much as I love Awesomenauts, there's no way in hell a 2D game should have low framerates at max settings on any year-old PC, even if it is a laptop, as long as it has a graphics card. And mine does. On almost-max it runs fine but overheats my computer over an hour or two. Only other game I've run on this thing that does that is Smite.

I mean fuck, I'd be tempted to say it's just my laptop if it weren't for the fact that Skullgirls runs perfectly fine, has sprites that are 16 times the resolution, and 4 times the number of animation frames per character.

At least you realized it yourself.

One reason why people have such hostile attitude towards anything made in Unity these days is the fact that so many people who've used its older versions just slapped together something, and never checked under the hood. Hell, there's even tons of free and cheap assets you can download from the store, that do tons of the necessary job FOR you.

like said, the visual quality has very little to do at the end of the day. If the game's taxing your CPU and RAM, it doesn't even matter that you have a 1000€ GPU jammed into your system.

Unity's very well documented, and the huge, active community has probably all the leftover answers you ever may need.

The Unity Asset Store also has plenty of more or less automated optimization tools you can utilize, stuff from basic culling and LOD tools, automated 2D impostor drawing tech, automated texture and model atlas creation tools, and some code optimization stuff even I don't fully understand.

All this is damn huge help to people like me, who are more into design and art-side of the development, but suck at programming itself.

Is that supposed to be an Asuka cosplay?

I actually didn't hate Gone Home. Would never have bought it for 20$, but pirated it and had a good time. Got it in some bundle afterwards and I tried to play it for a second time recently (new monitor with good blacks, Steam Controller), but it runs like complete ass.

A Unity title not still in early development has no business running this poorly, those devs should be ashamed of themselves abandoning it like that for posterity.

Because they expect you not to run it on a potato.

How games used to be done

Gameboy :
>Assembler code

How it's done today.

Unity with DirectX 11 package together with some custom pacakge all using

>Deferred Shading
>Per-pixel lighting
>Realtime shadows
>Soft Particles
>Lighting Fidelity per pixel

You only have to have a GPU that supports
>Shader Model 3.0+ & MRT

Basically most Indy games are done max 5 people.

In the olden days shit used to be done by 5 people too.

So whats the difference you ask? How did Super Mario3 get made by 10 people and hurr durr indy game with 10 people is shit.

Well back then these 10 people were highly trained individuals with STEM degrees that used math and brains to make shit up like shadows, transformations, scrolling screens, compression, sprite animation and movment and so on...

Today these 10 indy guys are 5 Artsy University guys that had an idea, 2 guys that drooped out of computer science bachelors because it was to hard and 3 "community managers".

So what happen is they use lego design.

Let's use Unity and then tack shit on and it just werks on our 1500$ tech bench PC so who cares about the rest.

AKA they're lasy untalanted hacks compared to the developers of old that literally had to invent shit to make things work.

SEE all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

A perfect example is this game here.

It was so bad and they had so little ideas what to do they actually went on the forums to ask for programing tips form the community.

The game designers where such hacks that for 5 months they way they updated the game was to have the whole thing uploaded to steam and everyone would just REDOWNLOAD 1.5 GB of content.

Yes these guys were SO fucking profesional they couldn't set up a versioning software for their damn game like git or veracity or ANYTHING.

Unity doesn't perform occlusion culling by default?

Though when I think about it, it's understandable for a general-purpose engine to leave things like that up to implementation.

it's a mix of indies not being the best programmers in the business and you having unrealistic expectations of what a game's requirements should be

>dat pic
God fucking dammit.

Not understanding things like this is a major reason why I don't want to get into indie things alone. I'm a professional designer but at work I rely on some genuinely amazing people to handle the code work. Getting on that level, or even to an acceptable one, feels beyond my abilities.

Reading the articles is really nice, feels like there end goal throughout the production was to make a fun game.
And they succeeded, I have played Crash games many times.

Because everyone just uses an engine with tons of overhead and on top of all of that they don't even optimize the code they do produce. All due to this mentality that computers are so fast nowadays they'd destroy a simple indie game so why care to optimize? This just piles up over time.

We just don't have the limits anymore that'd produce the next John Carmack.

You misspelled "3A games"
Just

>per pixel lighting
but why
Unless you really have graphics that justify the usage of raytracing, such as numerous curved shiny objects, you might as well just do per-vertex.

I suppose the problem is that indie games follow in the wake of major titles rather than exploring ahead, so they don't need to invent anything as not only is it already invented, but there's several platforms to choose from which already implement it.

>tfw your indie game idea would actually require invention of many algorithms mixing physics and geometry such as an efficient algorithm for preserving mesh volume as the mesh undergoes deformation

Because they're useless cunts who can't code for shit. Writing optimised code is a lost art, and the likes of Carmack just aren't seen anymore - and even Carmack has been lost to the VR meme machine.

But even a Compsci dropout should know complexity theory, and surely anyone with a passion for games should have enough graphics experience to know what will and won't run well!

It takes time and effort to code cleanly.

People these days have computers which a decade ago were scifi concepts in terms of computation. The reality is that hacks can write shit unoptimised code and get away with it because we've all fucking super computers running 8-bit indie shit.

Because optimization takes actual engineers with actual technical expertise. Try hiring those when you are on a budget.

>It's comparable to using Delphi/Borland to compile your code, compared to a basic C compiler. They add a lot of bloated libraries and references that simply are not needed.

What fucked compiler do you have that includes unneeded libraries?

>The reality is that hacks can write shit unoptimised code and get away with it because we've all fucking super computers running 8-bit indie shit.

Get away with it? Of course they can, and why wouldn't they? Why hone and perfect your craft? That's not gonna get it shared on twitter and shilled on reddit or Sup Forums.

Don't complain about people not doing something for which there is no incentive. If people cared about performance on indie games there would be performance on indie games.

You're talking about people that can't visually tell 15fps from 100fps. No joke.

I'm working on an indie game and I spend a lot of time optimizing it, but I'm only doing it for myself, I know no one will ever recognize it for being well written, I don't even think about it.

So everybody hates Unity for being unoptimized, but is there any good 3D engine that doesn't have massive overhead and is actually affordable to use legally?

Surely you people don't actually expect indie devs to write their own raycasting engines in C++, right?

Default Unity is unoptimized, which is fine for what Unity should be used for out of the box: prototyping.
As stated, there are loads of free/cheap and easily available optimization tools for it, along with tons of documentation.
Unity is fine, when used with some care and thought.