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sighinggoldfishHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

> I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take

> I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take. In my experience the sheer number of bugs we've seen from "I tested it in the local only build mode so it's fine" and the impact that has on the project makes it worth _not_ supporting an offline mode. I'm not an exec, but practicing good habits during development (there's a phase where it's not worth it sure, but by the time you're on a live project...) makes actually building a game easier. Both should be available cause yes, you need to test like you said. But if I'm setting up skinning on a character or cloth simulation on a cape, I want my turn around time as fast as possible from DCC to engine. Maybe I just want to validate my PBR materials with a specific level's lighting rig and baked GI/reflection probes. Those specific examples are client side only, so I absolutely want that to work on an offline build. The longer a roundtrip to the engine takes for content (including the time it takes to start the game up), the harder it is to iterate and thus quality also falls. …

Original discussionStop Killing Games259 source comments · at import
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MA
maccardHN

> I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements. I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take. In my experience the sheer number of bugs we've seen from "I tested it in the local only build mode so it's fine" and the impact that has on the project makes it worth _not_ supporting an offline mode. I'm not an exec, but practicing good habits during development (there's a phase where it's not worth it sure, but by the time you're on a live project...) makes actually building a game easier. > As an example, com…

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MA
maccardHN

Providing testbed maps for rapid iteration and is not the same thing at all as allowing you to play offline. > WoW took 4-5 years to develop with "The original World of Warcraft was created by a team of 40 people, which eventually doubled in size as the launch drew close." You’re moving the goalposts here. You asked about cloud tech initially. The topic of “have game budgets and teams gotten out of control” is a totally different one. > so how is this handwavy? These aren’t just game middleware technologies that we’re talking about - things like Java, SQL Server, have non distributable licenses. Systems like LaunchDarkly require active subscriptions and don’t allow for redistribution and are often deeply embedded in applications. > And prior to this recent problem in games, middleware licenses worked just fine too and often shipped with server binaries Some games still do ship with serve…

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JO
johnnyanmacHN

>WoW took 4-5 years to develop with "The original World of Warcraft was created by a team of 40 people, which eventually doubled in size as the launch drew close." Where as as Helldivers 2 has about 100 devs at the end of development taking 8 years according to their CEO. So not seeing the wins there. Even if we were only comparing cloud teams, I don't see the wins from WOW from 20 years ago working on asset pipelines that was simply 1 3d modeler, compared to an HD release in 202X. Bandwidth hasn't really kept up with asset fidelity, and at the same time consumer demands for ping also went up (as in, lower ping haha). >we have tons of precedent of these middleware licenses working just fine when redistributed as binaries to users' devices, so how is this handwavy? Every license is different, and it only takes one important middleware being difficult to stall the whole thing by months. I …

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