Yeah and these developers are probably putting in more than 40+ hours per week anyway and are way more experienced than you and I.
Working alone is not fun anyway for a complex project like a real game. If you work alone for small games that's certainly doable but fun is not based on graphical quality, but by studying fun itself. I had more fun playing old games than I do on today's bf3's. You can always study and get a job in the industry if you really care about graphics and whatnot.
How long would it take to make a decent full fps? (One person team..)
People are calculating a lot of ridiculous numbers here.
It would not take any intermediate programmer alive 350 years to complete Battlefield 3 alone, assuming that person is young enough that the learning process is not over*.
There are many articles written about how productivity/progress does not just increase with each person, and in fact can be lower than one person once you get to around 40 or something people on the same project.
Usually articles talk about how people have to wait for others to complete their work to continue. I would call this the starting point on the topic.
People check in things at my office that break my builds. Sometimes can’t compile. I have done the same to them because my macros were not set the same way as theirs, since they are working on PlayStation Vita and I am on PlayStation 3 (for example). Sorry, didn’t know my changes affected your build.
Aside from build errors there are tons of run-time changes people make that cause others to go wacky thinking they themselves have broken something.
I lost 3 hours of research into a Z-buffer quest just because of a commit from another team member. I was going bonkers wondering why the changes I made had no change to the end result, yet having no change to the end result was not possible. You can’t universally, over the entire engine, swap CCW with CW and see the exact same result on the screen, knowing and confirming that culling is enabled.
Oh, well, I guess you can, if your team member checked in a buffer overflow on the code that handles render state changes.
There is a point when the number of people working on a project becomes exactly equal to having only one person working on the project, assuming all people involved are of the same skill level.
If they are all the same, it is something like 30 to 40 people when it becomes the same as having only 1.
If the levels are varied, the numbers are always fewer than that. More like 15 or 20, because you can always pick the best programmer among them to represent the 1.
If you take that to the extreme and put John Carmack working with only 1 other person, but that person is hardly experienced, then just 2 people are already less productive than 1.
It obviously cannot be solved just by taking the time and dividing by the number of people.
Not only do we not know their skill levels, we do not know how many separate teams were working on it. The above examples I gave only apply to each team.
If a single person has to do both programming and art, then the amount of work is X.
If 1 can do art and 1 can do programming, then, regardless of skill level, the productivity is always increased.
Only inside teams do people stumble over each other a lot. Between teams, there is still some stumbling but since you have eliminated most of the major stumbles, such as those I mentioned, the impact is quite low.
Not to mention that art teams are always relatively more productive than programming teams because artists never modify another person’s art. An artist commit to SVN will not “break” someone else’s art except in the most rare of cases.
There is really no way for anyone to answer this for you, except for the basic fact that if you have to ask you are not able to actually take on the task yet anyway, so there is no real point in giving you an answer.
* And this is assuming the person even has the capabilities at all. Some people simply cannot draw, and that will never change no matter how hard they try. Some people simply have no musical talent. Practice can only be used to reach your full potential. But if you have no potential, practice is not going to help.
So only a person who has the ability (realized or not) to code, model, compose, perform, and design at the level required would qualify as a candidate in the first place.
L. Spiro
It would not take any intermediate programmer alive 350 years to complete Battlefield 3 alone, assuming that person is young enough that the learning process is not over*.
There are many articles written about how productivity/progress does not just increase with each person, and in fact can be lower than one person once you get to around 40 or something people on the same project.
Usually articles talk about how people have to wait for others to complete their work to continue. I would call this the starting point on the topic.
People check in things at my office that break my builds. Sometimes can’t compile. I have done the same to them because my macros were not set the same way as theirs, since they are working on PlayStation Vita and I am on PlayStation 3 (for example). Sorry, didn’t know my changes affected your build.
Aside from build errors there are tons of run-time changes people make that cause others to go wacky thinking they themselves have broken something.
I lost 3 hours of research into a Z-buffer quest just because of a commit from another team member. I was going bonkers wondering why the changes I made had no change to the end result, yet having no change to the end result was not possible. You can’t universally, over the entire engine, swap CCW with CW and see the exact same result on the screen, knowing and confirming that culling is enabled.
Oh, well, I guess you can, if your team member checked in a buffer overflow on the code that handles render state changes.
There is a point when the number of people working on a project becomes exactly equal to having only one person working on the project, assuming all people involved are of the same skill level.
If they are all the same, it is something like 30 to 40 people when it becomes the same as having only 1.
If the levels are varied, the numbers are always fewer than that. More like 15 or 20, because you can always pick the best programmer among them to represent the 1.
If you take that to the extreme and put John Carmack working with only 1 other person, but that person is hardly experienced, then just 2 people are already less productive than 1.
It obviously cannot be solved just by taking the time and dividing by the number of people.
Not only do we not know their skill levels, we do not know how many separate teams were working on it. The above examples I gave only apply to each team.
If a single person has to do both programming and art, then the amount of work is X.
If 1 can do art and 1 can do programming, then, regardless of skill level, the productivity is always increased.
Only inside teams do people stumble over each other a lot. Between teams, there is still some stumbling but since you have eliminated most of the major stumbles, such as those I mentioned, the impact is quite low.
Not to mention that art teams are always relatively more productive than programming teams because artists never modify another person’s art. An artist commit to SVN will not “break” someone else’s art except in the most rare of cases.
There is really no way for anyone to answer this for you, except for the basic fact that if you have to ask you are not able to actually take on the task yet anyway, so there is no real point in giving you an answer.
* And this is assuming the person even has the capabilities at all. Some people simply cannot draw, and that will never change no matter how hard they try. Some people simply have no musical talent. Practice can only be used to reach your full potential. But if you have no potential, practice is not going to help.
So only a person who has the ability (realized or not) to code, model, compose, perform, and design at the level required would qualify as a candidate in the first place.
L. Spiro
A suitably dedicated person could probably go from little or no programming knowledge to a decent replication of BF3 rendering tech in maybe 5 years, if they really studied it. Particularly if you're not breaking any new ground. Art is a whole thing though, there's a freaking ton of it, and for it all to be polished is a herculean effort -- The largest portion of staff for any AAA game today is in art. There's probably as many or more marketing and business people involved in a AAA game as there are programmers.
Most of the reason that game studios throw so many bodies at a game is not necessarily because it takes that many people, but that it takes that many people do the job on the time-frame that the publisher wants. From a business perspective, time equals risk because you don't know what people are going to want, what competitors are going to do, or what platforms will be prominent in, say, 5 years. 18-24 months into the future is much more predictable.
Why the obsession of going it alone? Having a small, dedicated team can be a big boon for morale and keep progress flowing in some form. If you try to do it all, you'll be the single point of failure, and are likely to find yourself overwhelmed with all the work ahead of you.
Most of the reason that game studios throw so many bodies at a game is not necessarily because it takes that many people, but that it takes that many people do the job on the time-frame that the publisher wants. From a business perspective, time equals risk because you don't know what people are going to want, what competitors are going to do, or what platforms will be prominent in, say, 5 years. 18-24 months into the future is much more predictable.
Why the obsession of going it alone? Having a small, dedicated team can be a big boon for morale and keep progress flowing in some form. If you try to do it all, you'll be the single point of failure, and are likely to find yourself overwhelmed with all the work ahead of you.
I think the question here is the definition of decent. I mean isn't Minecraft a decent FPS? =)
My believe is that programming alone is not the real problem. Here is a book that explains how to program one (i have not read it). The real problem of creating a game like bf3 is the assets: the motion caption, the voice actors, the lip syncing software, the 3ds models, etc. Those are the thing that make creating it literally impossible.
My believe is that programming alone is not the real problem. Here is a book that explains how to program one (i have not read it). The real problem of creating a game like bf3 is the assets: the motion caption, the voice actors, the lip syncing software, the 3ds models, etc. Those are the thing that make creating it literally impossible.
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
