SoW:BoB 64-bit/Multicore optimised?

[mazex]

Originally Posted by dduff442

This is all just nonsense. The reasons games don't employ computing power effectively are:

A) The development cycle of nearly all PC games is tied to that of console games. Consoles focus almost totally on graphical bells and whistles to the exclusion of all else.

B) Game devs don't profit (or rather feel they will) from a focus on long-term, evolving codebases. Graphics engines etc are stable technology. Individual game engines on the other hand are throwaway crap for the most part, with few going through more than 2 or three iterations. If Blah I is a classic, Blah II will be derivative, and Blah III is sure to add loads of half-assed junk options as the devs know the wheezing wreck of a codebase is already beyond rescue. Most codebases are dead already if the original design team is disolved. This hasn't been the 1C:Maddox way in the past and I hope it doesn't go down this route now.

C) The development cycle of most games has little to do with engineering. It nearly always starts with the concept art, followed by rounds of meetings by the suits as the company considers distribution, market segment issues, the company's portfolio of other titles etc. The result is never something anyone might love: it's something random disinterested businessmen think is okay, the lowest common denominator creatively speaking.

D) The actual coders are only involved at a low level and only get their say after (C). 'Game engines', where they exist at all, cover graphics and (at best) some scattered elements of the modeled environment. The wheel is reinvented for each new release as far as gameplay is concerned. Why do you think gameplay in FPS games has barely moved forward since Thief in 1998?

Multi threading on multiple cores needn't even be that efficient on all processors with modern PCs to still make a big difference to gameplay. Not all processing need be done on a frame-by-frame basis. For example, top-level AI heuristics could provide direction to lower-level manoeuvre AI which could in turn guide AI behaviour on each frame. Synchronisation of the first two strands isn't critical and memory bandwith issues etc. would not be significant.

Developer commitment to high-quality engineering and a sustainable codebase can be very profitable as the Oracle example cited elsewhere proves. The reason it features so little in the gaming industry is that it no more guarantees profitable games than do good lighting and camerawork in the movies, so it takes a back seat to the often stupid ideas of the business 'creatives'. This attitude is short-sighted, however.

A stable, tightly-knit dev team committed to incrementally improving a sustainable product could blow away the competition in many areas of gaming. Flight sims are evidence of this. Image processing and compression tech are other good examples. Look at the humble jpeg, basically the technology that made the internet possible. JPEG (and MPEG, MP3, MP4 and other derivatives) will be 18 this year. That sort of thing is real technology, not the throwaway stuff pumped out by the games industry.

Regards,
dduff

Well, calling other peoples opinions nonsense is just troll behavior and I won't swallow that bait...

[dduff442]

Well I'm sorry I upset you but your remark about guessing I'm not a programmer got me going. I think enough reasons other than technical grounds were given for the near total lack of either memory- or processor-intensive games was given in any rate. Other fields in computing use these features routinely.

[Feathered_IV]

SoW better have 250+ aircraft in the air at any given time.
If it pretends to be anything more than the piddling skirmishes of Il-2, it had better take advantage of 64bit and multi core systems.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by dduff442

Well I'm sorry I upset you but your remark about guessing I'm not a programmer got me going. I think enough reasons other than technical grounds were given for the near total lack of either memory- or processor-intensive games was given in any rate. Other fields in computing use these features routinely.

Fair enough, being insinuated as a non-programmer is serious stuff

Still - after spending 15+ years of writing multi threaded c++ code, and at the same time writing some games I sometimes get tired when people that are not programmers "buy" the Intel/MS propaganda that you must have 64-bit OS with at least 4 cores for your entertainment PC - and then demand that the game developers must start using their hardware. We all know that Intel would love to increase the CPU speed instead of doing a more complex chip with many cores - but they have reached a technology barrier with the current production process - so they went for the multi core strategy instead.

I first suspected you might be a guy that had ditched his old overclocked E6700 to a new i7 and had realized it was not faster in games - but obviously you do work with software development in some way? You arguments are interesting and I agree with most of them...

In my opinion, the problem is that normal games /that does not have that many AI objects) manage to end up being GPU limited instead of CPU limited, even on the Core 2 family of CPU:s... Is that because the AI is to simplified then? Maybe, but fact is that as very few games are CPU limited - why do the extra work of trying to do an efficient multi threaded engine?

Sure, as the market is now going to a 4+ cores per socket in every new computer, and the raw processing power of each core is not increasing that much - the multi threaded approach is the way to go for the future. But if your engine is not CPU limited today - why do the extra work if you have a tight budget (like most non blizzard projects)? Sure, some obvious candidates like threads for strategic AI and preloading textures to memory etc are candidates today to reduce "stuttering" in the game - but the main render loop is still responsible for a very large portion of the CPU cycles used...

What is your proposal for the multi threaded strategy for games?

Regards /Mazex

[julian265]

So true dduff. That sort of engineering management is certainly commonplace, in much more than just the gaming industry.

[Les]

Originally Posted by dduff442

...If Blah I is a classic, Blah II will be derivative, and Blah III is sure to add loads of half-assed junk options as the devs know the wheezing wreck of a codebase is already beyond rescue...This hasn't been the 1C:Maddox way in the past...

Sorry, not having a go at you, but I find that funny, as I think 'IL-2 Sturmovik', 'IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles', 'Pacific Fighters' and 'IL-2: 1946' fit your description quite well. We're just lucky there was more to it all than that.

About the 64-bit/multicore thing. After watching and waiting for SOW this long, I'd be disappointed if it's performance isn't more responsive to hardware upgrades than the IL-2 series. In fact I just can't imagine how it couldn't be.

The IL-2 series fell into the same unavoidable trap that the Microsoft Flight Sim series fell into (and is still in with FSX). And that is, when the sims were first built the only foreseeable (bankable) development path for CPU's was in terms of sheer single-core speed increases, and the software had to reflect that. But that path came to a shuddering, overheating, physically limited halt and we all went off down the multi-thread/multi-core path instead, leaving the single-core oriented software behind. Only, we didn't leave it behind, did we? It's still here. For the last few YEARS we've had the hardware and practically no software to make use of it. A whole generation of CPU's (dual core) has been superceded (by quad-cores), and now there are six-core chips about to come out and practically no game or sim has been coded to take full advantage of all those extra cores.

Now, I can't say whether it's even possible, practically speaking, for SOW to make use of those cores or not, as I don't know enough about it. But I'm much more sure about the fact that if there are still scenes in 1946 that a Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz can't handle, then SOW is going to be dead in the water judging by what I've seen and heard about it so far.

I honestly don't know how the thing's going to run, let alone expand, if it doesn't follow the hardware. Surely it would be madness to code for the past and not the future.

The fact that they've switched over to DirectX gives me hope that they're willing to make major changes to the way they do things to ensure the future viability of the series. And I'm left thinking, if they can (if anyone can) make it a truly multi-core sim, they will.

Again though, if it turns out to be code-limited like the IL-2 series is, which is to say, if parts of it remain unplayable even six or seven years after its release, I don't think I'll be the only one feeling a bit ripped off. Adding more (and faster) CPU cores and more powerful video-cards, (and therefore more RAM too I guess) must have a beneficial on-screen effect, for the duration of the whole SOW series (if extra features are added along the way, otherwise there must be a reachable point where the sim can be 'maxed out' while still getting a good frame-rate).

Sorry for the rant/over-reaction, but I just realized there is a possibility SOW might not be the combat flight sim I've been waiting for afterall, if it's neutered from the start and left with nowhere to go in terms of being able to take advantage of current and future hardware.

But who knows, maybe none of this multi-core/64-bit stuff is necessary anyway, it just seems illogical though that more in this case wouldn't be better...

Les.

[dduff442]

Originally Posted by Les

Sorry, not having a go at you, but I find that funny, as I think 'IL-2 Sturmovik', 'IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles', 'Pacific Fighters' and 'IL-2: 1946' fit your description quite well. We're just lucky there was more to it all than that.

About the 64-bit/multicore thing. After watching and waiting for SOW this long, I'd be disappointed if it's performance isn't more responsive to hardware upgrades than the IL-2 series. In fact I just can't imagine how it couldn't be.

The IL-2 series fell into the same unavoidable trap that the Microsoft Flight Sim series fell into (and is still in with FSX). And that is, when the sims were first built the only foreseeable (bankable) development path for CPU's was in terms of sheer single-core speed increases, and the software had to reflect that. But that path came to a shuddering, overheating, physically limited halt and we all went off down the multi-thread/multi-core path instead, leaving the single-core oriented software behind. Only, we didn't leave it behind, did we? It's still here. For the last few YEARS we've had the hardware and practically no software to make use of it. A whole generation of CPU's (dual core) has been superceded (by quad-cores), and now there are six-core chips about to come out and practically no game or sim has been coded to take full advantage of all those extra cores.

Now, I can't say whether it's even possible, practically speaking, for SOW to make use of those cores or not, as I don't know enough about it. But I'm much more sure about the fact that if there are still scenes in 1946 that a Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz can't handle, then SOW is going to be dead in the water judging by what I've seen and heard about it so far.

I honestly don't know how the thing's going to run, let alone expand, if it doesn't follow the hardware. Surely it would be madness to code for the past and not the future.

The fact that they've switched over to DirectX gives me hope that they're willing to make major changes to the way they do things to ensure the future viability of the series. And I'm left thinking, if they can (if anyone can) make it a truly multi-core sim, they will.

Again though, if it turns out to be code-limited like the IL-2 series is, which is to say, if parts of it remain unplayable even six or seven years after its release, I don't think I'll be the only one feeling a bit ripped off. Adding more (and faster) CPU cores and more powerful video-cards, (and therefore more RAM too I guess) must have a beneficial on-screen effect, for the duration of the whole SOW series (if extra features are added along the way, otherwise there must be a reachable point where the sim can be 'maxed out' while still getting a good frame-rate).

Sorry for the rant/over-reaction, but I just realized there is a possibility SOW might not be the combat flight sim I've been waiting for afterall, if it's neutered from the start and left with nowhere to go in terms of being able to take advantage of current and future hardware.

But who knows, maybe none of this multi-core/64-bit stuff is necessary anyway, it just seems illogical though that more in this case wouldn't be better...

Les.

While I agree with most of what you say, IMO there are encouraging and discouraging signs from the recent vids and screenshots.

If I had to guess, I'd say what we're seeing is elements of il-2 and SoW spliced together for testing purposes. If that guess is right, it probably means SoW is further off than it might seem from vids of newly modeled a/c in flight. OTOH, it would show that the il2 codebase is still workable whereas most game developers would have had to start from scratch due to poor quality control.

Regards,
dduff