Digital Foundry leaves IGN, now independent [video] | Hacker News Reader

Digital Foundry leaves IGN, now independent [video]

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93 pointszdw40 comments

I hope they are successful. What I appreciate about DF is their ability to explain what techniques the developers chose to use in the rendering process. Game engines are so buzzwordy these days and they're often good about showing in the videos which rendering techniques are turned on or off based on settings.

They produce nice material. Sometimes they're so focused on frame-rates it's annoying though.

I mean that is what normal people care about, too. If the game is a stuttery mess, it is more negatively perceived than if the game is graphically meh imo. _As someone who does care about framerate_, I do what you are getting at, though.

I'm curious what you think of games at low frame rate for artistic intention. I'm making a game and locking it at 30fps not for technical limitations, but because I actually like feel of it compared to the overly smooth high FPS. The game I'm making isn't fast paced so it feels appropriate. I sometimes lock my games to even 14fps.

> I'm making a game and locking it at 30fps not for technical limitations

I would not purchase it if the game has a panning view of any kind. I wish you the best of luck all the same.

I may likely be limiting my audience since many people are used to 60fps and higher now. I'm slightly strange in that I think on a visual level, it just does not match my intent as I actually prefer the lack of visual clarity in art.

I do have a fear that most people won't see the intent and instead just see a badly performing game (I have not got this critique yet in every other game I have with intentional low frames yet, but then again my audience cares less about performance and more about the experience). Here is the game for reference that I am locking to 30fps.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3215280/TORI/

And one that I locked to 14fps

https://infinitetears.itch.io/cityephemera

It’s not about badly performing for me, but reality.

Low frame rates on modern display technology make me physically ill if there is a viewport component.

The “smearing” of the image induces nausea for whatever reason. I do not suffer this from CRT displays, just modern ones and have done since LCD effectively arrived. Though I can tolerate it on teeny tiny screens like handhelds interestingly enough.

This is a point I never considered, thanks for sharing. Accessibility is important. Makes me want exhibit my games using CRTs for the ideal experience. This discussion has me thinking about the divide between VR players that experience motion sickness and the ways games try and don't try to fix this.

It might be unrealistic to exhibit games on CRTs if they aren't going to be played on CRTs - if you've got a lot of headroom with the 30fps target, is it worth trying a subtle CRT emulation shader? Especially with people frequently having 120fps+ monitors, it seems like a subtle fadeoff could be made to work.

P.S. I thought your original question was madness, but now that you've posted your projects I can totally see why you're targeting lower framerates. I really like the mood, have wishlisted TO:RI

Judging from your video, it depends on how long I am supposed to play this. If it is a few hours thing I see no issue but it could be tiring to stare at this for too long. I dig the aesthetic you are trying to create, though.

In the 14fps one, 14fps white noise is probably better than 60 fps white noise.

I recently played South of Midnight, which is one of the best games I've played in years. I'm really surprised it didn't get more attention. I think it has the best sound design of any game I've ever played and beautiful art and story throughout.

It uses a stop motion style for character animations, which is pretty close to low frame rate, I'd estimate around 15fps (at least the way it was implemented there). I have to say it was the one part of the game that I disliked. I could see the purpose, I could see that it fit well with the general art direction. I just found it very uncomfortable and tiring to look at after a while. Fortunately they were smart enough to acknowledge this with a menu setting to disable it.

If you do decide to artistically lock your game to a low frame rate, please do your players a favor and allow them to unlock it.

Go into display settings, and set your monitor's refresh rate to 30Hz and try using your computer - you'll soon think what I think about the issue.

I don't think I've ever played a game where I found it to feel better at a lower framerate. The lower the FPS, the highter the latency of input response and the lower temporal resolution makes it harder to track movement, particularly rotational control of a camera.

Artistic intention I do understand. I played your game and you're specifically evoking a low-fi aesthetic. The noise in particular might look noiser at higher framerates, damaging the era it's trying to evoke.

Though I have to wonder if there might be a way to split the difference, to render out the scene at low FPS and reproject the camera at a higher framerate, similar to how most VR implementations work. That way the aesthetic would be largely unchanged, if the camera isn't moving it would be identical, but you'd get that much nicer input response.

FPS locking is not the right solution (although it is an easy one). Your animations are the ones that should be animated on twos, or threes, or fours, or whatever feels right for your game. That applies to animations, particles, etc. This leaves you the option to let other things run as fast as needed to feel smooth (for example: I do like the leaves falling slowly, the book opening, etc. Camera panning & moving would feel infinitely better at a 60 FPS.)

Unfortunately, playing a game is very different experience to watching a movie: take the example of Ghost of Tsushima, that despite having a Kurosawa mode, still accepts 60FPS and over.

I'd have to try it. I think some games can be done at lower FPS. If there's any sort of action element, though, imo the higher the fps the better.

14fps seems so low...

If above stuttering mess I care more about how the graphics look rather than frame rate (competitive online fps games excluded).

Agreed. But, I generally play competitive FPS so framerate is king.

>I mean that is what normal people care about, too.

Depends on how you define normal. I think it's much more likely that the number of people who care about it deeply is extremely small - a small sub-group within the group of people who see gaming as their main hobby.

> I think it's much more likely that the number of people who care about it deeply is extremely small

And yet large enough to support the existence of DF whom has a heavy focus on exactly this. So obviously a market exists.

My sense is that frame rate is a buzzy topic for nerds to nerd out over. The same way that nerds use to nerd out over RAM. Talking about it seems like a high effort status signal. But those can be swapped out for other things easily.

You can't feel RAM, you can feel bad framerate.

You’re projecting.

DF cares much more about frame timings, not necessarily framerate. In many of their videos they praise games which achieve a locked, stable, hitch-free, 30fps. In some cases, frame time stability can be almost as important, or even more, than absolute average framerate.

Especially when Unreal has been infamous for shader compilation stutter, where even a on-the-surface 60fps average can feel terrible due to inconsistent frame timing and hitches.

The audience of digital foundary care about frame rate, simple. If they are more interested in other non technical aspects of a game, they wouldn't be watching/reading their reviews in the first place.

It feels like I’ve seen most places that went independent die out but I don’t have any data to back it up.

As a videogamer I hope Digital Foundry survives this, because they give lots of data-based insights about the industry, especially from a tech perspective. And as a follower and fan of their videos, I must add that these guys seem smart enough to figure it out.

DF already has a vibrant Patreon community so they’re not starting from scratch on funding themselves. I’m excited to see what they can do going forward.

I get the sentiment but I have to give it to DF, they have been taking the slow and steady route. That is a path to success in their field.

£500k in revenue in 2023 - not great for youtube money.

Yes, they're surely not getting rich, but it's commendable that except from selling their own merch, they do not go the raycon/nordvpn/brilliant/younameit route. With Adsense alone I'm pretty sure this would not be sustainable, but they have a pretty successful Patreon.

Not quite true, they got in trouble recently for running a Nintendo ad without properly labelling it (until it was pointed out, the video is fixed now): https://youtube.com/watch?v=V10wHzV5zp0

Screenshot of original video: https://www.resetera.com/threads/digital-foundry-posts-an-ad...

It is a bit shameful that games journalists didn't cover this at all - seems almost like an omertà. Even assuming the mislabelling was an honest mistake, running the ad in the first place makes me trust them less. Worse, I used their videos when deciding to buy a Switch 2! I would have been much more skeptical (likely ignored them entirely) if I had known they were taking money from Nintendo.

They labeled it as "sponsored" when it should have said "ad". I mean yeah, it's weird to simply repost a straight ad on the main channel, but at least that's clearer than integrating it into their own content. The description also always made clear that it's content provided by Nintendo.

If you believe that this influences their view of the Switch2, then by all means, get your information elsewhere. From what I've seen, they've actually been more critical of Switch2 than most other outlets, highlighting the issues with the blurry screen and also the rather lackluster line-up from third parties, mainly because Nintendo is intentionally stingy with dev units.

so Independent that I need to sign up to read that post.

Read what post? It's a link to a video...

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