Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Bad coding- I am sick of it, and you should be too!
holdenhamlet
Member EpicPosts: 3,772
I wanted to try Vanguard but after getting it downloaded and installed and experiencing typical laggy problems I experience with many amauteur mmorpgs, I simply can't bring myself to play. This is probably why the game failed. It's the reason AOC failed and Warhammer failed. People talk about how great the RvR was in DAOC and may wonder why the game wasn't more popular- the answer is simple- it was coded badly and performed badly. The only people that enjoyed it were people willing to put up with a game that stutters.
You can talk around the issue all you want, but if the game isn't coded properly to work, it's going to fail and there's no recourse.
I have a baseline of bad coding and it's that I will accept the lags and stutters found in LOTRO, but only because it has great graphics and story, and the stutters found in Darkfall, but only because it's gameplay is not found anywhere else.
Some games are just coded badly plain and simple. You can easily see the difference when matching up something like Bad Company 2 and Just Cause 2. BC2 is awful for fps standards, and Just Cause 2 is amazing. Every game Square Enix makes plays perfectly. Same with Blizzard, and from a single-player standpoint- Bioware. Those three companies are really the only three that if I buy a game from them I know that it will work as well as my computer can make it work, and if there is lag and stutters, it is not because of the coding but because my machine is out of date. People may wonder why these three companies are so profitable and fail to see the obvious correlation here.
MMORPGs are a million dollar business, and the main reason they fail is bad coding. There is simply no excuse for not hiring good coding talent considering the payoff is immense, and the code is the backbone of your game.
Hopefully up and coming mmorpg devs will realize this even though it's not discussed often because some are willing to put up with poor performance (even me, as I said, was willing to for 2 games), because it's just sad that potentially fun games are ruined from the start because of bad coding.
Do you really want to know why WoW is so popular? Because it works. It doesn't stutter or lag for no good reason like so many games do. That's really the biggest reason it's so popular. Nobody wants to play a game that saps the immersion factor every few minutes by stuttering. The sooner game devs realize this, the better for the entire mmorpg gaming community.
edit: and to those of you that might (correctly) note that WoW had bad performance when it was released, well you're right- BUT, they solved the problems and now the bar is set. For a game to compete now it has to work from the start. That's what beta testing is for, and speaking of that, Devs need to take beta testing seriously and stop using it as a way to make a quick buck, because they are only shooting themselves in the foot when you consider that mmorpgs are a long term cash cow. Selling Beta and releasing an unfinished product may be profitable, but it's nothing compared to what you can make if you would release a finished product that works. The best example of this is STO. When one thinks about how much money STO could've made in the next 5 years if it had just been coded properly (not half-assed using the same engine they used for a superhero game, which didn't even work well for that game either lol...) and complete, one's mind boggles.
Releasing a finished product is win-win for both dev and player, and yet nobody seems to be doing it. I'll bet my bottom dollar that ffxvi and the Star Wars MMORPG will work great right from the start, after an extensive beta period for each, because both Square Enix and Bioware know that the real money is made on quality and reputation, not gimmicks. It's too bad there aren't more Dev studios that can put 2 and 2 together and get with the program and hire real talent, because honestly, the mmorpg community has exactly 2 games to choose from if they want to play an mmorpg that works like it is supposed to, and those are WoW and ffxi, two games that came out many years ago.
Comments
Yeah i think a lot of people are sick of it. I went back to playing rts's because i am sick of getting ripped off by shoddy developers who are just in it for the cash grab.
Their is nothing wrong with making a buck off your customers but ripping them off is getting to be a bit much. lack of content, short development cycles, MT rip offs and snotty developers is a prescription for disaster for this industry and we are seeing how disastrous lately with more and more fans of the genre rebelling and calling the developers on the carpet.
I am totally for this, it makes me feel like a snob when so many people are willing to accept stutter, unresponsive UI, animation bugs that also effect casting, etc the standards are so low and largely it is not improving fast enough in the last decade.
The videos of TOR make me concerned because the animations look un-fluid, which is a common sign of bad responsiveness issues. Maybe building their game on middleware will not turn out to be the best idea if they can't iron out the responsiveness to WoW's standard.
Sounds like someone might need a few hardware upgrades with all the whining about stuttering. Optimization is key, but so is the hardware to support the game.
Comparing games with requirements like Vanguard and complaining about the performance and then comparing WOW's performance isn't even in the same ballpark. WOW runs the way it does because of the graphical requirements, hardly anything to do with the coding of the game. The requirements are just lower to make it accessible to all systems, and you can look at the game and see the sacrifice they made.
Upgrade hardware and see the difference. I experience no stuttering and excellent FPS in most of the games you listed.
I agree, most if not all recently released games were coded fairly badly and had many issues with technical problems. I would play a bad game if it was nicely coded but i wont play the best game in the world if it was badly coded, as in im crashing like every 20 mins.
Want to see some Super Poor coding? Go check out Atlantica Online. Its the king of poor coding LOL.
Good post, I agree
A lot of the high system requirments are due to bad coding. Those coding are spoiled with high systems and forget to optimize their codes to the bone. You get lazy programming requiring more % of power that need be,
For example Crysis, nice graphics, sub par gameplay but it ran bad. No way they optimized their codes. Same machine runs today games that are prettier and more complex without a hitch.
After I got my Associates in Electronics, I continued my education working for a Bachelor in Computer Science over the yrs while employed as a tech.
I know from first hand experience although you may feel something is iron-clad, you give it to someone else and they can find ways to break it. This just from straight-forward programs that were required as assignments in class.
When you add the many iterations of machines/vid cards/etc....there is a lot of room for bugs that were not thought of to appear. Granted these are supposed to be "proffesionals", and they should be above making a plethora of mistakes. It happens none-the-less.
When it comes to my gaming.....if a product has very few flaws, and those flaws are worked out rather quickly when they come to light I am less critical of a Dev team than those that either have tons to begin with, or let problems go. That isnt to say a half-arse product with no bugs would make me happy. I want quality with minimal bugs.
Some of the stuff Devs/companies try to pass off though, for a money grab, should land them in a cell with guy named "Bubba" IMO. Cause when you buy their products, you feel violated....and turn about is fair play :P
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I have played Vanguard since beta and yes it was bad at release but now it's nothing like it was.Thier are still minor problems when entering cities like Khal but it's very minor. I two box in Vanguard of one PC, yeah that's right i have two vanguard clients running of my one pc with everything maxed except VC( CLOUDS).
I have also played LOTRO with everything maxed in DX10 and never had any lag or stutter. I can say the same for AOC which i play now along side Vanguard and have had no lag or stutters.
You really think that WOW is a good example knowing how inferior their graphic engine is ,it was built for low end PC. Many gamer just haven't got the right set up but rather than fix it they blame the devs or the game.
Check out this recent VID of Vanguard which was made on a five year old system, with a AMD Athlon X2 4800, 2GB RAM, and NVIDIA 7900GTX 512MB Video Card with Rendering Quality on High, Textures on Medium-High, and Shadows on High.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JFrW_dQRPM
Perhaps it's you who needs to sort their set up out,their are many people who play Vanguard with very few non game breaking problems.
Furious Fighters
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/13trindx.htm
While I agree most modern MMO's have released in poor shape, most fix themselves up over time and become quite playable.
Good coding isn't the only reason that WOW succeeds and others fail, so many factors go into WOW's success and they've been discussed in many threads so no reason to do so here.
I find the coding in EVE to be of acceptable quality for the most part, and don't think its as huge an issue as stated in the OP.
Could it be better? Sure, but we're talking video games here, not Photoshop or air traffic control software so its just not going to undergo the same quality efforts as other software might.
That said, games should not released early has is too often the case, though some like Aion, LotRO and a few others were just fine.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
IMO devs are on the short end of the stick here, you want to program to include as many people as possible thus you have to make a game compatable with a metric shit ton of hardware combinations and that leaves a lot of room for error. You could narrow the hardware you program for but you alienate some of your player base.
One thing a lot of gamers dont realize is that an above board sound card helps a lot spending around $100 on a nice sound card will aleviate a lot of issues i know for me i bought a nice fatality sound card and gained about 15-20FPS in crysis. Offloading sound processing from your processor to a dedicated sound processing card helps. I admit there are some games that are just poorly coded and there isint anything you can do to improve their playability even with the most monsterous machine possible.
Games like Aion that released with very few bugs (altho they seem to be able to break it with every patch and update they do) should be the standard even tho i dislike Aion in general for lack of anything fun to do (but thats my opinion). Devs these days have to walk a fine line between taking too much time and losing investors and taking too little time and losing customers, MMO's arent getting cheaper to produce specially when developers create whole new game engines to power their creative dreams. IMO its a tight rope balancing act to create a game with enough content and smooth enough gameplay to be engaging from the start within the time constraints set by investors and the corporate penny pinchers.
To a certain extent I agree, although game programing is pretty damn hard and they get paid peanuts. No excuse I know but if you don't like the games with bad coding, don't pay/play them.
Also, are you sure it's coding issues and not your PC? Nothing worse than people complaining about things like this when they're trying to run it on their 5 year old budget PC loaded with adware from downloading porn.. :P
AW
Sure, except there were all kinds of dropped frames, etc in that video so that's not really a good indication. Plus the fact, whoever made it has no directorial sense. Brown dragon flying into brown mountain? Not good visually.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I've never had a problem in any of the games you listed.
The Official God FAQ
op!the thing is dev often face hard choice they want the lastest shinniest graphic but they have to work on a pentium 3
so you end up with half full/ half empty game!oh they know they need stuff like remote differential compression
or microsoft donnybrook,large adress aware etc but since most dont have the know how for it!they just go the established way
with the result we see .or other try to add newer tech on dx9 tech when it was made specificly for dx11 etc
with the bad result we see very often
check the game that play smooth what they all have in comon !they dont use dx11 techno on dx9 game
vice versa.some complain why didnt they upgrade!because it meant leaving the vast majority of customer behind
so they stick to dx9 era techno the whole way ,often we end up with better looking graphic whit less lag then the newer half full half empty attempt!
soon we ll see game fully using dx11 era techno be it w7 etc but for now its often better to stick to older dx9 era stuff they just play better and without a hickup!
I agree with you. Warhammer is badly coded the same with early AOC. Current AOC however is extremely impressive.
But warhammer failed more to gameplay then bad coding. Warhammer is and always had been a shtshow of bad gameplay design. AOC can pull itself out, because at its base it has more traditional and decent gameplay. Warhammer just sucks at its core and will always unless they remake the entire game.
But MMOs are hard to code to begin with. Even a good coder is gonna have tons of flaws when he puts together an MMO.
Just a side note. If you are complaining about current vanguard its more then likely your PC then the game.
The game might not be the most optimized, but it is extremely playable if you are running it on what they say it should run on.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
SHENANIGANS!
I played Gunship on my frikkin' C-64! That was some amazing programming.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
if its like in the 80!school are 2 gen behind the industry
this means they use dx9 when the corp are using dx11(an exemple)
so yes the school will say we have the latest dx9.but its still 2 gen behind the industry!so industry often have to pay employe
to get to the latest knowledge !since its very hard to garanty an employe will stay after having learned the newest shinniest .company often dont bother they get employe from the best school they can and make do what the employe they have!
its not really bad coding its just that boss put handbrake in some crucial part of game design,and often later the boss say ok maybe i should not have put the hand brake at that moment but as we all know its already too late .and its very hard to fix an issue after!
its like welding a pipe while water is running!(grin)
If you are using an nVidia gpu then the stuttering you are experienceing could quite possibly be due to the drivers that you are using. All of nVidias drivers since 186.18 cause most of the newer games I play to "stutter". This includes Fallout 3 and Fallen Earth. Rolling back to 186.18 completely solved the problem. Try that and see if your stuttering improves.
Played:EQ,DDO,WoW,EQ2,Eve Online Trial,Fallen Earth,NWN&NWN2
Its not bad coding. Its bad QA and unealistic timelines for the iterative process needed to refine these things.
Don't blame the coders. Its impossible to write bulletproff/efficient code for a complex system in a one-off way.
Blizzard is not a company that has "good coders". In fact some of Blizzard's best coders founded Arenanet long ago. The key difference between Blizzard and many game companies has always been their QA process and focus on QA and never releasing until they are done even to the point of going into more debt, which they had to do to make WoW.
It is as much "cultural" as it is tehcnical. This is not the result of technical imcompetence. It is a larger picture and it is not isolated to gaming.
I am all for not accepting something if its not good enough, like the newest hearts of iron 3, I simply won't put up with it anymore. They used to be different, but now they are like everyone else. And I can understand your reasoning to some degree. But for me a bit stuttering here and there doesn't take away from the immersion or game experience at all. I have a quadcore 2.67mhz with a geforce 275, and guess what? In raids like onyxia or sartharion(oh who can forget dalaran) I can get HORRIBLE fps, I can go from 200 to 20, and let me tell you, I am not the only one. Does it matter? Not at all, its a minor inconvenience, I refuse to believe some stutter once in a while is the main reason. While I do agree they need to give us a better product at launch, WoW is no longer such pc friendly as it once was.
I haven't tried just cause 2, and I'm no big 3d shooter player, but bad company 2 runs very good on my machine, not that it really matters.
I'm all for demanding more from the game developers, we shouldn't accept these half assed finished mmorpgs that have kept popping up, but I disagree strongly with the stuttering part, but thats just my opinion, others could be terrible bothered if they do not have a constant fps of 100.
Also I remember when I played diablo 2 a few years back, when running into a lot of enemies, even with a super computer I got much lagg, I've always had that with diablo 2.
ya all game run into one issue !bandwith issue!some have begun to activelly try to use remote differential compression to their advantage other limit the graphic quality avail to limit these issue
but on the long term of massive multiplayer:its hard to see where the solution truelly lie!yes ms donnybrook will help maybe even remote differential compression (who knows lol)one thing is sure all these are still temporary bandaid because lets face it when dx11 (and i mean specificly tessalation)is online even those i mentionned wont be enough!
is there a long term solution!maybe but i havent seen it yet!
I was waiting for this. I have 2.7 gh dual processor (my weekest link), 8800gt 512 mb, and 3.2g ram (the most I can get on a 32 bit OS). My system can run litterally anything on the market decently at mid to high settings, and yet it can't run Vanguard with litterally everything turned down all the way. And no I don't have a virus or anything. I started using no-script and having had a single virus for over a year, and I used to get them frequently (no-script is something I'd highly recommend for everyone btw).
As for graphical requirements, well what do you think the 10 million people have that are running the game? I bet my bottom dollar that at least half of them are still running on a single core, a sub-8800 video card and like 1 gig of ram. Probably at least a million o fthem play on laptops. If you can't see the profit correlation between making a game playable for 5 million people and not making it playable for them, then I don't know what to say. Making a game scalable is difficult surely, but it's important.
This argument that it's the player's fault is the main stumbling block to people realizing that it's not the player's fault, it's the coders' fault for at least, if nothing else, not making the game scalable. Besides, even on high Vanguard looked pretty bad compared to something like LOTRO, which is scalable. Unfortunately LOTRO has the inevitable hiccup every once in awhile, just like Warhammer did and most games do. The problem isn't my system, the problem is that people are willing to look past those immersion killing hiccups because by this point it seems to be impossible to avoid considering how many games have them. 2 examples show it isn't impossible to aviod in the mmorpg genre- WoW and ffxi, and countless single player games.
If it's a network problem then again it's not my network because some games work and others don't. My feeling without being an expert is that it's not a networking problem, and more a problem of lazy coders.