Your game needs some serious work. Maybe if your developers had 4 GB RAM on their computers the constraint would benefit them.

I know you don't mean this to sound hubristic, and I hope you consider the same of me as I'm not trying to be insulting.

But I work in the same company as Gambiting, on the same game I think. And yes, loading a map that is the size of San Andreas in GTA5 (with more props) is expensive on memory.

You can't "load a region" in the editor, not because there is a design constraint but because you need to generate navigation meshes, collision systems, render objects etc before you "stream" them in, not to mention that "streaming" is a hack that is build for consoles and weak PCs and has to be optimised for to work reliably, you'd spend more time chasing bugs in your streaming than actual bugs you were working with.

So, you load the whole map, you generate your navigation mesh and run your collision detection, and then you can do mapwide things like "find breaks in the world" and other stuff.

In this case, yes, 64G is helpful, because a developers time, especially a tools programmers time who deals in very low level C++/ASM optimisations for AAA games' time is worth more than a studio full of 64G ram modules.

I am curious if you do this mapwide thing very often to debug game bugs. Cuz we all know the usual game renderer does a lot of culling optimizations like z buffer, occlusion. Maybe another approach is not doing this in realtime but rather generate frame by frame to do post-render analysis?

The main map of the game is almost 30GB on its own and is a result of work of hundreds of people - suggesting that limiting ourselves to 4GB on work machines would be "beneficial" is silly.

But hey, we're always hiring!

Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?

by the way the integrated graphics are real shit in this laptop, better go get a MSI or something. This PC's are clearly not for high end work, it's just Macbook Pro kind of "pro".

PD: I think if you're running the whole map on the RAM you're doing something wrong.

Which AAA game company do you work for?

Learn-Not-To-Waste-Resources Studios.

I think people are missing a point here. The game itself runs perfectly fine on a 7 year old CPU and 8GB of ram(it might run on 4GB but I haven't tested this personally). - I'd say the actual game client is optimized extremely well.

Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?

If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?

Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.

>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?

At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.

Well, we did that too. But yes, the standard is to slim down everything to fit on a 32G hex core workstation laptop.

Because they can travel with people and desktop computers.. kinda.. can't.

> You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.

Why not fly just an encrypted SSD with the game and buy desktop at the location?

I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).

With counter-terrorism, I would hope companies then have a contingency plan for governments imminently banning laptops on international flights.

With global inventories, it shouldn't be that hard for major vendors like Dell or Apple to offer an identical configuration to drop a hard drive into.

I am not sure if you are trying to be funny or if you are an arrogant prick.

Considering how long you've been here, it's really disappointing that you could bring yourself to write something like this on HN.

What he wrote was extremely arrogant. Unless he tried to be funny. I am tired of people who tell you that you are doing it all wrong after a quick look.

I work on a pretty complex system myself and every few months somebody comes in,takes a quick look and tells us we just need to use framework X and all will be easy. Guess what, we are not totally stupid and have looked at it already. And it wouldn't solve the actual problem which is that it's just a very complex thing we are doing.

First understand what people are doing before telling them they are wrong.

What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own? The best engineers are always the most resourceful and focused.

> What's so taboo about creating things under the constraints of machines that everyday people own?

Because it's impractical, unnecessary and wasteful. There are a number of processes that by their nature require global knowledge. These are not the sorts of processes that need to be done in the client (many of them in fact are done up front precisely so that a client will not need to do them), but they are the sorts of processes that a developer will need to do if they are to be able to make a change and see its effect. Also, there are good reasons to generate assets at a higher resolution than needed in the final artifact.

Just like if you're rendering a 3d animated film you might need a more powerful machine than those who are only watching it, or if you're training a neural net, you need a more powerful system than if you're merely running it.

It's entirely unnecessary?

TEST things under the constraints of machines that people own. Multiple people have given multiple reasons why there are better ways to do things. I read another recently talking about being able to capture all the game state for debugging, too.

Maybe their stuff is extremely complex and is already optimized? Before you make such a suggestion you should be very sure that you understand the situation.

Responding to a question with a question only makes more questions

Regardless of parent's aim, that's actually a very good advice for any developer.

It reminds me of the story "The programming antihero" from an old Gamasutra article[1]

"He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed."

[1]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132500/dirty_coding_tr...

But even if Microsoft put 64GB of RAM in the surface pro, it still wouldn't be the right machine for the job you're describing.

And if you had an eGPU?

Then you're stuck at your desk anyway, so you might as well use a desktop machine and take advantage of the additional performance and cost savings.

Being able to use the same device travelling and at your desk is really useful. Even if it were a case of only opening the actual editor at your desk and just working on emails/design docs/what-have-you while travelling, it makes for a much nicer workflow than switching devices.

I think that's kind of expected though. The game you're likely working on isn't meant to really run on a Surface either.

Well then this isn't the laptop for you. Me neither, but I'm sure e.g. web devs would be fine. Can't make a machine for everyone. Look at the form factor, obviously it's not trying to be a behemoth gaming laptop.

What's wrong with remote desktop for mobile work? Online work only, but most dev environments require internet anyway.

Doesn’t work for a game developer, or a game asset artist.

For videogames, both latency, bandwidth, and software support ain’t quite there yet.

if you need to work on assets that won't work well with 16GB of RAM then the Surface Pro is probably not the right choice.. It competes with an iPad Pro etc which don't even offer a full desktop. The surface runs a full Windows with Photoshop and Unity Game Engine if you want, and with the i7 and 16GB would run that pretty well.

What ever happened to using servers for a lot of this?

We do. But if you take an alpha build of the game to E3 or an external presentation you need to run everything locally, and usually beefy alienwares or custom-built laptops are used for this.