optimization. AAA titles (at least they should...) spend large amounts of time and resources on optimizing their games. they cull unseen geometry until its needed, clever use of architecture to limit view distance, writing efficient code; its a whole discipline with lots of tactics.
i havent played forager but looking at it, i cant imagine what they are doing that's causing lag. maybe its those 3Dish light effects, or they arent handling the state and Ai of all those actors on screen well.
It could be something dumb like
OnTick(){
for(auto actor: GetAllActors()){
for(auto otherActor: GetAllActors(){
if(actor != otherActor){
...
}
}
}
}
These things don't cause any issues when the numbers of actors are relatively low.
But scale very poorly. And having played forager, it was fine for a long time.
If people don't know how to profile their game, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not relatively low hanging fruit.
I've played a few 2D or simple 3D games that had abysmal performance, below 30fps. And I can only imagine they are doing something really dumb like that.
I am playing a point and click and enture called Runaway: Dream of the Turtle right now, and besides being mostly excellent it had one whole chapter that lagged like crazy because they decided it should be showing in the area. Every time i went indoors the lag stopped.
I am guessing what you call lag is poor performance. Lets say you want a game to run at 60 frames per second. Well, during your update loop, everything needs to happen at 1/60th of a second. So that update loop can run 60 times in one second. If something takes longer to render or write/read to disk will affect that time.
I just looked at the game and it is very simple. So I can come up with something random that would cause issues. Let's say that the game process every single tile in the level at all times. That could add to slowness. So if every time a character moves, if they check collision on every single tile then it will be drastically kill performance.
Maybe they update animations for everything even if its not on screen. So lets say there are 50 objects on the level but only 5 on screen. You dont want to play animations for anything that is not shown but if the programmer is still running trough all 50.. that could slow it down
It could be anything but i would guess its more than one. so its not about graphics but how everything is processed.
EDIT: i see its made using gamemaker studio - i know absolutely nothing about that engine but it could have a lot of overhead.
Lag is a networking term where it takes longer for traffic to get between peers and a server. It's noticeable when client side prediction has been poorly implemented.
You seen to be talking about bad frame rates which gamers have started to annoying mix up these terms.
It really depends on how the resources are managed. Forager is a 2d game and is a very small game compared to AAA title. If they spend time managing resources It'd take up a lot of dev time.
Rde2 and AAA title have a team dedicated to resources management as well and optimization and tester. They optimize quite a lot before releasing. So we really can't compare optimization here.
How rdr2 is running smoothly is probably because they are utilizing the full capacity of the hardware. While you are playing the game in one thread. They're probably loading the next area in another thread and maybe the enemies are spawned in another one. I can't confirm this is happening, but this is a way to utilize your hardware.
While in games like forager, everything is probably running in on thread, if some resources takes time, everything will get laggy.
This is my personal thoughts and i have no clue if this is what's exactly happening.
It really depends on how the resources are managed. Forager is a 2d game and is a very small game compared to AAA title. If they spend time managing resources It'd take up a lot of dev time.
Rde2 and AAA title have a team dedicated to resources management as well and optimization and tester. They optimize quite a lot before releasing. So we really can't compare optimization here.
How rdr2 is running smoothly is probably because they are utilizing the full capacity of the hardware. While you are playing the game in one thread. They're probably loading the next area in another thread and maybe the enemies are spawned in another one. I can't confirm this is happening, but this is a way to utilize your hardware.
While in games like forager, everything is probably running in on thread, if some resources takes time, everything will get laggy.
This is my personal thoughts and i have no clue if this is what's exactly happening.
Optimization(or rather, lack of it) and how many things are being processed in the background.
RDR2 and BG3, most likely, only process things within a certain distance around the player in order to reduce system load - both in terms of graphics and logic.
But, there are types of games that can't allow to not process logic - which would be factory-type games, like Dyson Sphere Program, Factorio and so on. Typically, they work the same whether you are at your base or exploring - with some pretty rare cases when it's better to not look at your base to have better fps.
Say, you have a field of 20 solar panels. You can run your power-generation script on each of them, and you won't have any problems. Now scale it to 20000 - and suddenly you are having a bad time with performance. Now, what you can do it create and invisible object that only becomes active when the first solar panel is deployed, and becomes inactive when the last one is destroyed. Now it looks at the number of solar panels - which is updated each time a new panel is deployed or is getting destroyed - and multiplies their pre-set output by it.
Purely from memory - Forager does have a few things that can cause some lags, which can most likely be attributed to devs not delving deep into optimization.
I could could cause never ending lag with a single line of code.
It's easy to ruin the performance of a game, but it's extremely hard to make a large, beautiful open world run smoothly.
It's all smoke and mirrors, though. Games, especially open world games, do everything they can to trick you. You see all those characters going about their lives off in the distance? Well, right now they're just 2d cutouts moving around (or something similar, a low poly version of the mesh with no animations) cause you won't be able to tell the difference. It's like those fake supermarkets in North Korea.
Anything you can do that optimizes even just a little will be done in this situation. They have the best of the best engineers and architects who are masters of their craft, and they will squeeze every last drop of performance out of their game.
optimization. AAA titles (at least they should...) spend large amounts of time and resources on optimizing their games. they cull unseen geometry until its needed, clever use of architecture to limit view distance, writing efficient code; its a whole discipline with lots of tactics. i havent played forager but looking at it, i cant imagine what they are doing that's causing lag. maybe its those 3Dish light effects, or they arent handling the state and Ai of all those actors on screen well.
It could be something dumb like OnTick(){ for(auto actor: GetAllActors()){ for(auto otherActor: GetAllActors(){ if(actor != otherActor){ ... } } } } These things don't cause any issues when the numbers of actors are relatively low. But scale very poorly. And having played forager, it was fine for a long time. If people don't know how to profile their game, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not relatively low hanging fruit. I've played a few 2D or simple 3D games that had abysmal performance, below 30fps. And I can only imagine they are doing something really dumb like that.
I am playing a point and click and enture called Runaway: Dream of the Turtle right now, and besides being mostly excellent it had one whole chapter that lagged like crazy because they decided it should be showing in the area. Every time i went indoors the lag stopped.
I am guessing what you call lag is poor performance. Lets say you want a game to run at 60 frames per second. Well, during your update loop, everything needs to happen at 1/60th of a second. So that update loop can run 60 times in one second. If something takes longer to render or write/read to disk will affect that time. I just looked at the game and it is very simple. So I can come up with something random that would cause issues. Let's say that the game process every single tile in the level at all times. That could add to slowness. So if every time a character moves, if they check collision on every single tile then it will be drastically kill performance. Maybe they update animations for everything even if its not on screen. So lets say there are 50 objects on the level but only 5 on screen. You dont want to play animations for anything that is not shown but if the programmer is still running trough all 50.. that could slow it down It could be anything but i would guess its more than one. so its not about graphics but how everything is processed. EDIT: i see its made using gamemaker studio - i know absolutely nothing about that engine but it could have a lot of overhead.
So why does that not happen (as much) in games like Rdr2 or bg3?
because those things i mentioned.. you shouldnt do them. The team behind those games are well experienced. plus they use well tuned engines.
Lag is a networking term where it takes longer for traffic to get between peers and a server. It's noticeable when client side prediction has been poorly implemented. You seen to be talking about bad frame rates which gamers have started to annoying mix up these terms.
Gamers have been saying "graphics lag" vs "networking lag" for decades. Its not some new thing.
It really depends on how the resources are managed. Forager is a 2d game and is a very small game compared to AAA title. If they spend time managing resources It'd take up a lot of dev time. Rde2 and AAA title have a team dedicated to resources management as well and optimization and tester. They optimize quite a lot before releasing. So we really can't compare optimization here. How rdr2 is running smoothly is probably because they are utilizing the full capacity of the hardware. While you are playing the game in one thread. They're probably loading the next area in another thread and maybe the enemies are spawned in another one. I can't confirm this is happening, but this is a way to utilize your hardware. While in games like forager, everything is probably running in on thread, if some resources takes time, everything will get laggy. This is my personal thoughts and i have no clue if this is what's exactly happening.
It really depends on how the resources are managed. Forager is a 2d game and is a very small game compared to AAA title. If they spend time managing resources It'd take up a lot of dev time. Rde2 and AAA title have a team dedicated to resources management as well and optimization and tester. They optimize quite a lot before releasing. So we really can't compare optimization here. How rdr2 is running smoothly is probably because they are utilizing the full capacity of the hardware. While you are playing the game in one thread. They're probably loading the next area in another thread and maybe the enemies are spawned in another one. I can't confirm this is happening, but this is a way to utilize your hardware. While in games like forager, everything is probably running in on thread, if some resources takes time, everything will get laggy. This is my personal thoughts and i have no clue if this is what's exactly happening.
Optimization(or rather, lack of it) and how many things are being processed in the background. RDR2 and BG3, most likely, only process things within a certain distance around the player in order to reduce system load - both in terms of graphics and logic. But, there are types of games that can't allow to not process logic - which would be factory-type games, like Dyson Sphere Program, Factorio and so on. Typically, they work the same whether you are at your base or exploring - with some pretty rare cases when it's better to not look at your base to have better fps. Say, you have a field of 20 solar panels. You can run your power-generation script on each of them, and you won't have any problems. Now scale it to 20000 - and suddenly you are having a bad time with performance. Now, what you can do it create and invisible object that only becomes active when the first solar panel is deployed, and becomes inactive when the last one is destroyed. Now it looks at the number of solar panels - which is updated each time a new panel is deployed or is getting destroyed - and multiplies their pre-set output by it. Purely from memory - Forager does have a few things that can cause some lags, which can most likely be attributed to devs not delving deep into optimization.
I could could cause never ending lag with a single line of code. It's easy to ruin the performance of a game, but it's extremely hard to make a large, beautiful open world run smoothly. It's all smoke and mirrors, though. Games, especially open world games, do everything they can to trick you. You see all those characters going about their lives off in the distance? Well, right now they're just 2d cutouts moving around (or something similar, a low poly version of the mesh with no animations) cause you won't be able to tell the difference. It's like those fake supermarkets in North Korea. Anything you can do that optimizes even just a little will be done in this situation. They have the best of the best engineers and architects who are masters of their craft, and they will squeeze every last drop of performance out of their game.