Morbus
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Fixed that for you.K.C. Cool said:
Why Fallout: New Vegas crashes
- Thread starter Brother None
- Start date
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Alpha Protocol, KotOR2, New Vegas all are good RPGs.
I only saw some real bugs in New Vegas , and that's not even their engine , they made it based on Bethesdas . So its from Fallout 3 originally , that thing didn't have such desktop crashes to be much concerned about but the sheer number of glitches prevailed everywhere in game .
Kotor 2 never crashed to desktop for me , Alpha Protocol also , NwN 2 also as far as i can remember .
Sure , it looks "incomplete" if you buy it immediately when it comes out unpatched or having to play it without the DLC content at start is almost the same nowadays . Waiting a bit didn't kill anybody . The problem is choosing the right stuff so that the product delivers what its supposed to .
And critics ... some are disgusting vile scum if you ask me . At least one of them will always be a subjective hater not even trying the game out to the end and saying untruthful gibberish and there you go . Bugs are at least easier to cover .
Kotor 2 never crashed to desktop for me , Alpha Protocol also , NwN 2 also as far as i can remember .
Sure , it looks "incomplete" if you buy it immediately when it comes out unpatched or having to play it without the DLC content at start is almost the same nowadays . Waiting a bit didn't kill anybody . The problem is choosing the right stuff so that the product delivers what its supposed to .
And critics ... some are disgusting vile scum if you ask me . At least one of them will always be a subjective hater not even trying the game out to the end and saying untruthful gibberish and there you go . Bugs are at least easier to cover .
UniversalWolf
eaten by a grue.
I never buy games until a couple years after release. Not only are they dirt cheap, there are tons of mods, most of the bugs are fixed, there's a ton of technical info available on-line, and hardware has progressed enough that they run at maximum settings without any worries about lag. You just have to be patient.Atomkilla said:
sampson70
Still Mildly Glowing
I wonder if they blame the engine for the dreadful loading time...being that FO3 didn't share that feature . 
Because Vegas IS buged like hell. Thats sadly fact.Batcha said:
Because Bethesda spends more time on marketing then developing quality RPGs. You dont criticise a game with super hype and some huge marketing champaign usualy. Only when there is a sequel then you can criticise the predecessor Fallout 3 > Oblivion, or Syrim > Oblivion. etc.Batcha said:
C2B said:sampson70 said:I wonder if they blame the engine for the dreadful loading time...being that FO3 didn't share that feature .
? It pretty much loads instantly. And FO3 also had long load times on consoles.
It did, but they didn't become 10 times longer when you play the game for an hour.
cogar66 said:C2B said:sampson70 said:I wonder if they blame the engine for the dreadful loading time...being that FO3 didn't share that feature .
? It pretty much loads instantly. And FO3 also had long load times on consoles.
It did, but they didn't become 10 times longer when you play the game for an hour.
In my experience, load times becoming longer as you play more has been a "feature" of New Vegas, Fallout 3, Oblivion and Morrowind.
sampson70
Still Mildly Glowing
I've played both games on the 360,and when I played FNV later in the game it did take sometimes up to a minute or two.sarfa said:cogar66 said:C2B said:sampson70 said:I wonder if they blame the engine for the dreadful loading time...being that FO3 didn't share that feature .
? It pretty much loads instantly. And FO3 also had long load times on consoles.
It did, but they didn't become 10 times longer when you play the game for an hour.
In my experience, load times becoming longer as you play more has been a "feature" of New Vegas, Fallout 3, Oblivion and Morrowind.
sarfa said:
It is pretty common for videogames for load times to extend later into the game. I think Oblivion had a specific bug on it they fixed at some point but I'm not sure.
BobNotHerbert
First time out of the vault
I think the main thing that everyone is missing here is that since the game is so freaking huge, all of the bugs, elongated load times, and the experience in general will change drastically based on who's playing it.
Take a step back and realize the size New Vegas. Look at what's going on under the hood: reputation system, faction armor, DT and DAM, SPECIAL in regards to combat and dialogue, hardcore, overlapping quest-lines and a large diversity of options there, etc. This list could go on forever. There are going to be problems.
This isn't Fallout 3 where everything was very cut and dry. It's easy to not mess up something like Liberty Prime. But guess what? Bethesda couldn't even get something like that right. I still have major problems getting him to MOVE! Republic of Dave will always be Republic of Dave. The supermutants and the Enclave will always shoot to kill. There's very little diversity to your playthrough in the Capital Wasteland besides whether or not I'm going to kill everything.
Be grateful that New Vegas works as well as it does because if Bethesda tries to do something of this scope for FO4, we may as well bend over and prepare for a long, painful ride.
Bethesda built a great dungeon crawler. Obsidian gave it some purpose...IMO of course.
Take a step back and realize the size New Vegas. Look at what's going on under the hood: reputation system, faction armor, DT and DAM, SPECIAL in regards to combat and dialogue, hardcore, overlapping quest-lines and a large diversity of options there, etc. This list could go on forever. There are going to be problems.
This isn't Fallout 3 where everything was very cut and dry. It's easy to not mess up something like Liberty Prime. But guess what? Bethesda couldn't even get something like that right. I still have major problems getting him to MOVE! Republic of Dave will always be Republic of Dave. The supermutants and the Enclave will always shoot to kill. There's very little diversity to your playthrough in the Capital Wasteland besides whether or not I'm going to kill everything.
Be grateful that New Vegas works as well as it does because if Bethesda tries to do something of this scope for FO4, we may as well bend over and prepare for a long, painful ride.
Bethesda built a great dungeon crawler. Obsidian gave it some purpose...IMO of course.
Now I understand why BN is so angry all the time ...
Own experience does not equal stability or buggyness(?) of a game. I personaly cant say that I had any bug with either Oblivion or Fallout 3. No bugs which I would call serious. But that doesnt say anything because both games are bugged like hell. What both games Oblivion and F3 do is that they feel bugged for me. Its the strange look, stiff animations, weird glitches, bad textures etc. that all gives it a rather clumsy feeling. But thats just me.
Own experience does not equal stability or buggyness(?) of a game. I personaly cant say that I had any bug with either Oblivion or Fallout 3. No bugs which I would call serious. But that doesnt say anything because both games are bugged like hell. What both games Oblivion and F3 do is that they feel bugged for me. Its the strange look, stiff animations, weird glitches, bad textures etc. that all gives it a rather clumsy feeling. But thats just me.
Some bugs are very entertaining...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExUyMuSvMKo&feature=related[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExUyMuSvMKo&feature=related[/youtube]
Brother None said:
For open world games it also makes intuitive sense- as the player does more in the world, the save game bloats and it takes longer to load all the info. I was just pointing out that it's not a new thing in New Vegas- which seemed to be what sampson70 implied.
it crashes becausxe its a piece of shit
archont
It Wandered In From the Wastes
The reasons why games are buggy:
Developers an't using the AGILE approach. Not that it's a neccesity, however that how it often turns out to be in the end. A particular gameplay system get coded, finished, documented and in all respects completed until someone comes in and says "Nah, that's not what we wanted really. Go make X change Y and reverse the order, let's get rid of this or that thing, put something else, or more things in it's place.
A system designed specifically to be quick and easy to modify means a lot of up-front work, liberal use of the correct design patterns, more documentation - in essence, more work.
Systems that are expected to be optimized are even worse, as a clever developer will see opportunistic tricks and code in a way that's neither aesthatic, easily comprehensible nor easy to modify. Sometimes a complete rewrite is easier than trying to untangle the highly efficient but impenetrable algorithm.
Regardless, every subsystem, no matter of how properly coded it may be, will eventually deteriorate into a buggy mess of wobbly code held by duct-tape - with each unexpected and unplanned modification for to the codebase. Unless you're working at ID softare, in which case you don't have to worry about having the time to properly refactor the code after some feature had to be hacked in last-minute.
Then we have the lack of communication. A programmer and a designer speak different languages and think in different terms. Either the programmer is also an active participant in game design, or the other way around is the only way for those people to get a much clearer idea of what's being expected and how they should approach the problem. That, or get an analyst middleman to translate from the designer's "vision" to the programmer's "tech specs".
Designers for example rarely think about all possible states and interaction between elements - while a coder is much more likely to ask for how a system should work in abornal or uncommon situations.
Then we have stupid decisions. Choosing the wrong tools for the job. Or the wrong people for the wrong job - Can your water graphics shader specialist write an AI? Sure he can, but he won't do it as good as an AI specialist.
And then there's the issue of code singularity. Back in the old days there wasn't much code, so all of it was kept the same standard.
However with today's monoliths, it's different. The core engine has to be rock-solid, perfectly optimized and exhausting in it's API and feature documentation. It has to be the pinnacle of coding.
Everything around it however, the stuff that describes the rules of the game, things that are likely to be changed often don't require this sort of strict adherence. Since those elements get contantly remade durning the creation of the game, oftentimes with multiple subsystem rewrites, it's comfortable to know you can quicly hack a working solution - both thanks to a rock-solid API and knowing that the solution just has to work properly and can go away with sloppy coding.
What I've noticed is that the smaller and more informal a game dev team is, the more coherent a game is.
Developers an't using the AGILE approach. Not that it's a neccesity, however that how it often turns out to be in the end. A particular gameplay system get coded, finished, documented and in all respects completed until someone comes in and says "Nah, that's not what we wanted really. Go make X change Y and reverse the order, let's get rid of this or that thing, put something else, or more things in it's place.
A system designed specifically to be quick and easy to modify means a lot of up-front work, liberal use of the correct design patterns, more documentation - in essence, more work.
Systems that are expected to be optimized are even worse, as a clever developer will see opportunistic tricks and code in a way that's neither aesthatic, easily comprehensible nor easy to modify. Sometimes a complete rewrite is easier than trying to untangle the highly efficient but impenetrable algorithm.
Regardless, every subsystem, no matter of how properly coded it may be, will eventually deteriorate into a buggy mess of wobbly code held by duct-tape - with each unexpected and unplanned modification for to the codebase. Unless you're working at ID softare, in which case you don't have to worry about having the time to properly refactor the code after some feature had to be hacked in last-minute.
Then we have the lack of communication. A programmer and a designer speak different languages and think in different terms. Either the programmer is also an active participant in game design, or the other way around is the only way for those people to get a much clearer idea of what's being expected and how they should approach the problem. That, or get an analyst middleman to translate from the designer's "vision" to the programmer's "tech specs".
Designers for example rarely think about all possible states and interaction between elements - while a coder is much more likely to ask for how a system should work in abornal or uncommon situations.
Then we have stupid decisions. Choosing the wrong tools for the job. Or the wrong people for the wrong job - Can your water graphics shader specialist write an AI? Sure he can, but he won't do it as good as an AI specialist.
And then there's the issue of code singularity. Back in the old days there wasn't much code, so all of it was kept the same standard.
However with today's monoliths, it's different. The core engine has to be rock-solid, perfectly optimized and exhausting in it's API and feature documentation. It has to be the pinnacle of coding.
Everything around it however, the stuff that describes the rules of the game, things that are likely to be changed often don't require this sort of strict adherence. Since those elements get contantly remade durning the creation of the game, oftentimes with multiple subsystem rewrites, it's comfortable to know you can quicly hack a working solution - both thanks to a rock-solid API and knowing that the solution just has to work properly and can go away with sloppy coding.
What I've noticed is that the smaller and more informal a game dev team is, the more coherent a game is.