what makes people believe that some games are poorly coded?

[ElFenix]

beyond obvious examples like BF2 where lots of people are having very obvious problems, it seems like games that score low FPS on very good hardware are considered poorly coded. is this because games such as HL2 and farcry manage to have as good looking visuals while maintaining relatively high frame rates?

(i'm refering to FEAR and oblivion, here)

 

[Acanthus]

A lot of people dont realize how taxing things like realtime shadows and true dynamic lighting are on a system.

Fear has very complex parralax mapping on a lot of surfaces in the game as well.

 

[xtknight]

Yeah, performance isn't always linear with image quality.

 

[imported_Woody]

I consider certain aspects of some games to be poorly coded. A good example is the absolutely pitiful built in user interface In EA's Battlefield2 for finding online games. Considering this is a game that can only be played to it's full potential online the unstable, unresponsive, buggy, and crash prone mulit-player interface is piss poor. There have been slight improvements in stability and functionality through updates since the release but it's no where close to the level of other games. It's my personal feeling that this is a deliberate attempt to force users to use the included "gamespy" software and avoid the user interface to allow EA to sell advertising space in the game without being too obvious about it.

Other games in the past have clearly had coding issues that affect various aspects of gameplay including network play. Given the complexity of the games and the competitive nature of the industry I suspect that sloppy and rushed programming is inevitable. The true measure of a company that makes and publishes games is their dedication to follow up released games with updates to improve gameplay and fix coding problems long after the game has been released.

 

[xtknight]

The only games I'd say that have damn near perfect engine coding are Half Life 2 and Doom 3/Quake 4. But what do you expect? Valve has always been great with engines, and John Carmack has too. It is very hard to code game engines. I don't think I'd have the patience to make even a single 3D box on the screen. I did a multi-colored, moveable, CAD-like grid in OpenGL once but it wasn't 'easy'. Then factor in they have to innovate, do stuff nobody else has done before, so that adds a lot of time to development because there's no documentation on things that have yet to be invented.

I'd say shaders are among the easiest to code. The output/time ratio is high (quick gratification).

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: xtknight
The only games I'd say that have damn near perfect engine coding are Half Life 2 and Doom 3/Quake 4. But what do you expect? Valve has always been great with engines, and John Carmack has too. It is very hard to code game engines. I don't think I'd have the patience to make even a single 3D box on the screen. I did a multi-colored, moveable, CAD-like grid in OpenGL once but it wasn't 'easy'. Then factor in they have to innovate, do stuff nobody else has done before, so that adds a lot of time to development because there's no documentation on things that have yet to be invented.

I'd say shaders are among the easiest to code. The output/time ratio is high (quick gratification).

Unreal Engine...?

(And the Valve engines have been based off Quake, so credit goes more to Carmack than Valve I think - and who can forget the stuttering sound issues that plagued HL2?)

 

[xtknight]

Yup, Unreal is very good too. I'd put it:

1. HL2 (Source)
2. Quake 4 (Doom 3)
3. UT2004 (Unreal 2)

It's simply amazing what they did with HL2: Lost Coast.

 

[Regs]

Software makes the game. The hardware allows the programmers and design teams to make the game they always wanted. However if the game moves like sludge on the most top of the line computers with little-to-no scalability, then yes, the games coding is inefficient. We also have the software in-between the game and the hardware - the operating system. Which could make it easy or harder on the programmers to engineer a gaming engine. Which is also one of the more noticeable reasons why a game would run better on a XBOX 360 than it would on today's main stream PC.

 

[Keysplayr]

When their hardware can't run it properly, suddenly the game develops crappy coding syndrome.