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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

    Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

    Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

    The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

    The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

    The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.



  • I can only recommend what I’ve owned, so this is primarily a “here’s what I’ve used before and how I’ve used them”.

    I started with the Fuji XT2 and absolutely loved it. It was compact enough so I was always encouraged to take it around with me wherever I went. Fuji’s out-of-the-box color profiles are awesome too especially if you don’t do any post-processing.

    The physical dials feel great and really make the camera - it felt like it was made by photographers. The Fuji lenses are optically some of the best around, but can be a little pricey. The upside is that Sigma and Tamron make lenses for the X mount now (they weren’t available back then), so you have a lot more options these days! The autofocus was generally pretty slow, but the newer XT3, 4 and 5 have substantially improved on that if you’re concerned about it.

    I eventually switched to a Sony A7III because I needed better quality portraits and headshots with a full frame sensor, and I’ve also come to love Sony’s mirrorless system so far. Sony’s FE prime lenses are really good value for what you get, and are really compact for what they are.

    Sigma and Tamron also make excellent glass for E mount at a much more affordable price than Sony’s GM lenses (some at nearly equivalent quality).

    My current daily driver is a Sony A7CII (but the A7C is also really good if you want something more affordable). The reason I picked this up over the A7III was because I found myself not wanting to carry it around as much. I love street photography and the A7III’s screen didn’t articulate in a way that allowed me to shoot in the incognito way I did with the Fuji XT2.

    So far, I’ve been really surprised at how good the A7CII is, especially for how compact it is. I’ve also started using it for my portraits and headshots and haven’t missed the A7III at all.

    It’s quite an investment for any camera system (cameras and lenses), so make sure you spend time looking at the range of lenses that you want/need, and if possible rent them for a little bit to get a feel for them.

    Fuji will be the more affordable option purely because of the smaller sensor size and the lenses that go along with it, but if you’re interested in full frame quality (especially for better low light shots), then I’d recommend looking at Sony.

    Good luck with your hunt and I hope you find something that fits you perfectly!




  • Because the truth is worth knowing

    This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.

    What is the in the point in the truth in this article’s reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what’s ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to ‘chase the trend’? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn’t believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?

    If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you’ve gleaned.


  • Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it’s bullshit.

    But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

    News like this doesn’t do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim “I can’t believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!”

    All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.

    The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.

    Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.




  • This is absolute bullshit.

    Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.

    ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.

    But let’s just say all $250mil went to Firewalk (of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.

    The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?

    The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that’s still just short of 30mil for 1 year.

    Firewalk didn’t start with 160, so you can’t extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.

    Don’t believe this horseshit.




  • I’ve read a number of comments like yours and have always been curious about this sentiment.

    I feel similarly iffy about the whole process. Despite that, I can’t think of a viable alternative at this point in time that wouldn’t lead to a disastrous result.

    I genuinely want to know: if he does step down and give way to another candidate, who do you have in mind? Is it one person? Is it multiple? Or are we just hoping that if he steps down, a magical better candidate will show up?