Hacker News Reader

Comment by art0rz | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of focusing on graphical fidelity I think we should be focusing on lower development time, gameplay features/diversity, stability/portability and implementation.

> I have yet to see a proper open world game (Think GTA but you can enter every room in every building) with good draw distances that don't suffer from horrible pop in.

I don't think these are compatible. The majority of man-hours are spent creating graphics, not programming features.

View on HN

> The majority of man-hours are spent creating graphics, not programming features.

Technically, yes but it's not as heavily swayed as you might think. On the four AAA projects I've worked on, it's been roughly 60-40 art to programming/technical design (think level scripters). There is definitely a sizeable amount of the man hours spent by engineers writing C++

Programmers writing C++ to support graphics also goes in the art bucket though. If there is a performance bottleneck on art, or if you need to load/unload art resources since they take tons of memory, or if they are tweaking shaders, then that is still work done to make the art.

> Programmers writing C++ to support graphics also goes in the art bucket though.

Hard disagree here.

You have to do it to support modern game graphics. It is something they could skip if they didn't do modern game graphics. It is a cost of modern game graphics. Doesn't matter if you disagree, this is a fact.

So if you divide it up, how much work is done to support the art and graphics of the game, and how much is done to support the gameplay, you get a much greater ratio art to game than 60/40.

By that reductionist logic anyone who writes features for UI, or cosmetic only physics (ragdolls) is supporting modern game graphics?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com