Is this game broken?

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Drakier wrote:

PoE engine was built IN-HOUSE... not using any licensed engines or technologies. While I agree that it is poorly optimized, they did well considering their credentials at the time, etc. They basically took a bunch of computer science graduates and decided to make a game (and a pretty successful/popular one at that).

And while I DEFINITELY recognize that PoE's programming section consists of then-fresh-graduates, that's really not good to consider it a fair excuse; that'd be like insisting people were rude for not taking a 5-year-old's crayon drawings as seriously as professional art on the grounds of "when you consider it was made by a preschooler, it's really good!"

Long story short, there's no reason to "rest on one's laurels." My main argument is that at this point, GGG should be focusing aggressively on re-working and shedding their old code in favor of something new, that befits the multi-million-dollar franchise (with a couple hundred thousand players) PoE has become. Similarly, most of the graduates are approaching their 10th-year anniversaries. I'd just like to see GGG put something out that really demonstrates how far they've come.

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Drakier wrote:

Torchlight (to which you keep referring) used the OGRE engine, which is an open source engine... developed on by MANY people who know engines and know what they're doing.

To get the degree of what was seen with Torchlight/Torchlight 2 (or really anything good) requires working a LOT on OGRE. And, of course, it only handles 3D rendering, and nothing to do with memory management or loading.

To be honest, I have less issue with the graphics engine than I do with much of the rest of the game; I feel that once they finish implementing ribbons ("streamers" is the term I think they mentioned of their own) that overall graphical performance of the game will fix its only major remaining issue: the lethal amount of framerate drop when the screen fills with a thousand spell effects going off at once. (such as any Cyclone CoC or Mjölner in action)

The main complaints about PoE, I feel, are coming in as a result of how badly it handles when it comes to handling its memory (where it hogs probably around 2-3 times as much RAM as it should) as well as overall issues with loading. (such as, for instance, loading lag-spikes even for users with SSDs, who should not even be able to PERCEIVE loading pauses) And in those categories, the Torchlight games had no real issue... And didn't rely on third-party middleware. (as, again, OGRE just handles 3D rendering)

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Drakier wrote:

I imagine that GGG learned a lot about creating an engine when they made PoE and if they had to do it all over again, they'd likely change a lot of things. I'm not making excuses for them, but I'm trying to get people who aren't technically apt to understand the reasons it is like it is... because I feel that is VERY important.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. I'm positive that Chris and his guys have a HUGE list of things they even outright WISH they'd done differently.

I'm probably one of very few who've been keenly aware of the situation they've been in: from the looks of it, when they started PoE, most of them had effectively zero real-world experience; most of them seemed to go straight from U of Auckland right to GGG, and even Chris's bio suggests that, largely, he went from college, to having a "normal" programming job, then simply decided he could do something more awesome than simply a security engineer.

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Drakier wrote:

Find another "indie" game that developed their own engine as complex as PoE and did a better job. I'll give you kudos.

First one that came to mind was Real Virtuality. It's the engine used in the ARMA games, (and DayZ) developed fully in-house by an independent studio.

If GGG qualifies as an "indie" studio, then I'm pretty sure Bohemia Interactive does as well: they are fully independent (not owned or partnered with any major company) and their staff size is, even NOW, not much bigger than GGG: around 160 vs. 57. Mind you, the company's older than GGG by a decade, and GGG has hinted at likely expanding as far as 110 within the following years.

As for the engine itself, it's not just "merely functional," RV has, in fact, bested the level of visual fidelity offered by a number of engines such as Source and Unreal, and probably only rivaled by CryEngine. In other words, it's not just AAA-class, but outright bleeding-edge, developed by a decidedly independent studio.

If you wanted other examples, there's plenty further into the past; technically, Epic Games used to be an independent maker, at the very least through the development of Unreal Engine 3.0. (in 2004) The earliest reasonable mark of them ceasing to be "indie" would be their partnership with Microsoft for Gears of War.

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Drakier wrote:

As a software engineer, I'm sure you have encountered situations that you didn't know how to solve yourself, and it was hard to find resources to help you. Graphics engines are a very specific field that not a lot of people are familiar with. I've attempted to build engines before and it is a lot harder than I first realized. I never finished it.

My hard drive (well, mostly older/prior HDDs) are filled with those sort of things. However, in a business environment, discarding and simply not much of an option when you're speaking of a live product; that's the point when you seek to bring in outside knowledge.

Mostly, I've been of the opinion that by this point, with the amount of success they've had so far, GGG should focus some efforts on recruiting more veteran programmers to help them rework the bulk of the game's code into something with a high degree of polish.

Reading through the posts here is really annoying, typical cases of "bachelor's wives and maiden's children are well trained". Why the hell are you trying to convince people how badly PoE is performing in your opinion and situation (with your crappy turd of a computer)?? Please tell me, is it out of frustration?

To people crying about how broken they think this game is: You want a lollypop? It's a bloody free game, GGG doesn't owe you anything...

Discussion doesn't matter, we all agree that PoE could be performing better. If you want to believe that this is game breaking you're free to stop playing.

In my experience it's running fine on my high end machine and so for me it's not broken.

GGG is doing a lot to improve the performance, what else do you want really?

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Startkabels wrote:

Reading through the posts here is really annoying, typical cases of "bachelor's wives and maiden's children are well trained". Why the hell are you trying to convince people how badly PoE is performing in your opinion and situation (with your crappy turd of a computer)?? Please tell me, is it out of frustration?

You apparently disliked reading conclusions that didn't match your own narrative so much that you missed that real-world comparisons have been provided in spades. Sorry (actually, not sorry) that you were offended that your opinion was presented with some inconvenient evidence against it.

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Startkabels wrote:

To people crying about how broken they think this game is: You want a lollypop? It's a bloody free game, GGG doesn't owe you anything...

You're confusing a "free-to-play" game with a charity. GGG hopes to make money off of this, and so far, they have; enough to have over 50 paid employees. Clearly far from "Free."

GGG Puts this game out in hopes of convincing people to pay money for it: they're doing this as a business, not a charity. Criticism here is CONSTRUCTIVE, as suggestions on how, in fact, they could improve their PRODUCT to better attract payment.

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Startkabels wrote:

In my experience it's running fine on my high end machine and so for me it's not broken.

Really, that largely just sums it up for you. That comes across as a case of "screw you, got mine."

And there is no high-end machine that really runs this game PERFECTLY. Framerates still drop below 60 when a CoC or Mjölner build gets in the groove, and even with a RAID SSD array (those exist!) PoE's load times are still slower than HDD-only loads in many other games.

If you're fine with it, then good! The conversation has no relevance to you, and hence you have nothing to add; simply not reading and posting could actually save you time.

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Startkabels wrote:

GGG is doing a lot to improve the performance, what else do you want really?

Simply put, make this "a lot" actually a meaningful amount compared to the effort they're putting at virtually any other front.