why does this apply here: because I can easily imagine artists using this to modify some assets and trying to run the game to see what they look like, but with 16GB of ram they won't even load the editor, much less the actual server+client combo.
But I work in the same company as Gambiting, on the same game I think. And yes, loading a map that is the size of San Andreas in GTA5 (with more props) is expensive on memory.
You can't "load a region" in the editor, not because there is a design constraint but because you need to generate navigation meshes, collision systems, render objects etc before you "stream" them in, not to mention that "streaming" is a hack that is build for consoles and weak PCs and has to be optimised for to work reliably, you'd spend more time chasing bugs in your streaming than actual bugs you were working with.
So, you load the whole map, you generate your navigation mesh and run your collision detection, and then you can do mapwide things like "find breaks in the world" and other stuff.
In this case, yes, 64G is helpful, because a developers time, especially a tools programmers time who deals in very low level C++/ASM optimisations for AAA games' time is worth more than a studio full of 64G ram modules.
But hey, we're always hiring!
by the way the integrated graphics are real shit in this laptop, better go get a MSI or something. This PC's are clearly not for high end work, it's just Macbook Pro kind of "pro".
PD: I think if you're running the whole map on the RAM you're doing something wrong.
Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?
If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?
Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.
>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?
At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.
Because they can travel with people and desktop computers.. kinda.. can't.
Why not fly just an encrypted SSD with the game and buy desktop at the location?
With global inventories, it shouldn't be that hard for major vendors like Dell or Apple to offer an identical configuration to drop a hard drive into.
I work on a pretty complex system myself and every few months somebody comes in,takes a quick look and tells us we just need to use framework X and all will be easy. Guess what, we are not totally stupid and have looked at it already. And it wouldn't solve the actual problem which is that it's just a very complex thing we are doing.
First understand what people are doing before telling them they are wrong.
Because it's impractical, unnecessary and wasteful. There are a number of processes that by their nature require global knowledge. These are not the sorts of processes that need to be done in the client (many of them in fact are done up front precisely so that a client will not need to do them), but they are the sorts of processes that a developer will need to do if they are to be able to make a change and see its effect. Also, there are good reasons to generate assets at a higher resolution than needed in the final artifact.
Just like if you're rendering a 3d animated film you might need a more powerful machine than those who are only watching it, or if you're training a neural net, you need a more powerful system than if you're merely running it.
TEST things under the constraints of machines that people own. Multiple people have given multiple reasons why there are better ways to do things. I read another recently talking about being able to capture all the game state for debugging, too.
"He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed."
[1]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132500/dirty_coding_tr...
For videogames, both latency, bandwidth, and software support ain’t quite there yet.