
Is Your Game Crap? This Fan Will Fix It for You - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/deadly-premonition-pc-durante/
======
gagege
There is a long tradition of mods, fixes and enhancements in PC gaming. The PC
version often ends up being much better than the console version. The privacy
and DRM issues with current consoles are bad, but this article demonstrates
_my_ favorite reason to just buy a decent video card for your existing PC,
rather than buy a console.

~~~
Groxx
My favorite reason is that games from 10 years ago still run, and as a last
resort I can fire up a VM, on a modern computer. My N64 cartridges, meanwhile,
stopped working in new machines as soon as the Gamecube came out. And if the
console ever dies, they get harder and harder to find.

~~~
endemic
Wat? One of the things I like about consoles is that they are plug 'n play. No
fiddling with trying to get emulation settings just right.

~~~
CodeMage
Yes, consoles are plug and play, but they're not backwards compatible. There
are several PS2 games I love, that will never be remade for PS3 or PS4.

Meanwhile, I can still play "Crusader: No Remorse" or "The Longest Journey" on
my PC.

~~~
Groxx
Or even Zork.

~~~
xerophtye
or even Legend of Zelda! or Bomeberman!!

------
beloch
I am routinely amazed at the improvements the modding community makes even for
games that are designed to be unfriendly to mods.

Take Mass Effect 3 for example. The game ships with Origin, which is EA's
wannabe Steam online-store/community/DRM. The me3 executable is validated when
origin starts up in an attempt to ensure that there's no way to play a
modified version of the executable. Modders found a way around this that
basically involves playing musical chairs with executable files, and proceeded
to mod the heck out of the game from there. The game is not terribly friendly
to mods so there's nothing like what you'll see for a game where a toolset has
been released, but basic things like texture upgrades (and changes), unlocking
and repurposing game assets, modifying weapons, unlocking the in-game console,
etc.. (I'm a particular fan of enabling the flycam so you can fly around
levels and see how they're built, dynamically loaded, and how they achieve
optical effects).

Other games are more mod-friendly. Bethesda's games are one of the standard
bearers, and stepping back into one of their games after a year or two can be
a completely different experience with the right mods! There are mods that
completely rework combat mechanics, add entirely new spell systems, total
interface overhauls, you name it! If there's something you don't like about a
Bethesda game, odds are you can completely replace it! This raises the replay
value of their games tremendously, and all they have to do is release a devkit
and be a little bit friendly!

Every once in a while, a botched and buggy game with tremendous potential will
be buffed and polished by an obsessed modding community, revealing a classic
that the developers were never given time to realize. Games like Troika's
Vampire: Bloodlines or Obsidian Entertainment's KOTOR2 are still evolving
online. I've been holding off replaying KOTOR2 for years because I know it
just keeps getting closer to the game it was meant to be every year.

I'm rambling, but I really respect and love the PC modding community. It truly
is something special, and I wish more game companies (EA, I'm looking at you!)
would give it the respect (and cooperation) it deserves!

~~~
PetitPrince
> Every once in a while, a botched and buggy game with tremendous potential
> will be buffed and polished by an obsessed modding community, revealing a
> classic that the developers were never given time to realize. Games like
> Troika's Vampire: Bloodlines or Obsidian Entertainment's KOTOR2 are still
> evolving online. I've been holding off replaying KOTOR2 for years because I
> know it just keeps getting closer to the game it was meant to be every year.

A game that is worth mentioning here is Falcon 4. More than 10 years after its
initial release people have (and are still ?) modding it. More info at
[https://sites.google.com/site/falcon4history/](https://sites.google.com/site/falcon4history/)

~~~
platz
I was addicted to falcon 4 only a few years ago. Its a wonderful sim that even
ran great on my laptop. Learning all the radar modes really increases the
feeling of realism.

Also there's a strange online community. The everyone is middle aged and some
real pilots too.

------
seivan
I am glad it's about a computer scientist (hacker) that performed an action
that wasn't subjective and not some 'game designer ux product idea ui designer
visual artist ux' snake oil who wants their game idea implemented.

Fixing broken game ideas is easy.

~~~
benihana
Because obviously someone's title declares what he is capable of or likes
doing. Because someone with a title that isn't 'hacker' instantly discredits
his ability to hack. Obviously. Because people who didn't study CS can't be
hackers, obviously. Because someone who does UI or UX can't hack backend
things, obviously.

~~~
benzor
Yes, and because we all know that no computer scientist has ever done anything
unethical, obviously.

~~~
soganess
I understand where you are coming from, or at least I think I do. You feel
that has comments relegate UX designers to some time type of "second seat" in
the software development food chain. And, perhaps as a designer yourself, that
to be rather insulting.

But I'm going to put this out there and say your are misinterpreting his
comment.

There is a whole lot of "rockstar" talk when it comes to software now;
"amazing" engineers or designers that will change your world(TM). It would
seem that revolutionaries and visionaries are a dime a dozen now. However,
more often then _I_(and I'd argue the parent as well) would like, the whole
thing turns out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors. That type of
behaviour bring the whole community down. Its not that UX designers or agile
engineers or whatever are bad, they are clearly some of the most valuable and
hardest working members of the technical community. Its just that when I see a
piece on the next great mind in software, I get this knee-jerk reaction to
think "hypppppppe."

Which is what I thought when I clicked the link. But this article plays
counterpoint to that world. Here you got a guy, unkept, on his way to being a
computer scientist, probably never meet a VC in his life, who is also a
hacker. And instead of talk, he is putting forward some rather boring,
technically difficult to implement, but useful, stuff. What's more, he is not
trying to be like, "I'm better than this company," instead he's got a real
grasp on the scale, penetration, and limitations of his work. Its just
refreshing.

Perhaps the parent could have worded things better, but I'm not sure he
intended to be insulting.

------
fragsworth
> some people made up long reasons for why such a lock could be in place, I
> was irked. Someone was wrong on the internet, and it fell to me to set them
> straight.

The lock was in place because one reason: Their developers did not know how to
do this in a short amount of time. Their estimate may have been 2-3 months
(because they would need to learn how to do it properly), and management
decided against the effort.

This shows how valuable a well-rounded team of developers can be "as an
asset". If you only have one or two developers for very specific languages or
platforms, their skillset is going to be very limited, and you're going to
miss out on big opportunities.

~~~
Luc
> Their developers did not know how to do this in a short amount of time.
> Their estimate may have been 2-3 months (because they would need to learn
> how to do it properly)

Eh, what? They're not idiots, they know how to change resolution. They just
figured it wasn't possible to do a proper job in the time/budget for something
low on the priority list, so they didn't do it. Game devs like to get paid for
their work, too.

~~~
icebraining
It's not just changing the resolution, it's also fixing all everything that
breaks in a game that was developed targeting a single resolution.

~~~
Luc
Indeed. Which is why it takes some effort.

~~~
Kiro
So basically you're agreeing with fragsworth.

~~~
Luc
Not that it's worth going on about ad infinitum, but no, I don't agree with
"Their developers did not know how to do this [...]" and "they would need to
learn how to do it properly".

In fact I assume the opposite - their developers knew EXACTLY how to do this
in a short amount of time (i.e. massive overtime), and they would NOT need to
learn how to do it properly, AT ALL, because they know what they're doing.

~~~
fragsworth
If they knew exactly what they were doing then it seems very unlikely that
they would decide against doing it, because Peter Thoman's method only took
about 2 weeks of his own time. The method the developers were considering may
have been an internal one that required some kind of refactoring, and they
were either unaware of any other way to do it, or they were aware but didn't
know how long it would take because they've never done it before.

Not every game developer has an extensive understanding of how to manipulate
DirectX, considering that you can put together a pretty decent game by just
using a game engine and ignoring the underlying graphics altogether. I can see
them failing to hire someone who has experience with the lower-level stuff on
PC, when the game wasn't for PC to begin with...

~~~
pavel_lishin
But Peter's method, as he himself said, isn't good enough for software that
would be released by a company for people to use:

> _Thoman says the difference between his fixes and official patches are
> primarily an issue of quality assurance. “When I write and program
> something, I make sure I didn’t make any obvious errors, and then I just
> release it,” Thoman told WIRED. “If it works for 90 percent of people, I
> already consider that a success.”_

> _From there, Thoman starts working for that other 10 percent, but he says
> that there’s probably one percent of people that he will never be able to
> help. If he were in charge of a commercial product rather than a fan-made
> patch, he’d have a responsibility to make sure whatever he released worked
> for everyone and didn’t break anything._

~~~
MichaelGG
What's wrong with having having a checkbox to "Enable experimental renderer"
and let people tweak the settings there? Certainly that's better than
restricting your entire customer base because some of them don't have the
right setup.

~~~
pavel_lishin
From a product management perspective: it adds complexity, and it adds other
things for people to complain about your product.

People might complain that your car's top speed is 60mph, and that the
acceleration is crap, and that is bad for your car and company's reputation.

It would be much worse if there was a switch a driver could flip that would
double the speed and acceleration, but would soimetimes eject the windshield,
exhaust pipe, and door handles.

------
w4rh4wk5
He is one of my lecturers at university and god damn awesome at what he does.
_cheers_

------
vacri
I remember his fix from the Dark Souls PC release. The creators, From
Software, basically announced "we have no experience in PC, this will be a
direct port, and the quality is an unknown". They were quite up-front about
it.

This bloke had a prediction about what was needed to fix the issue, and said
he did a few hours prep work. Dark Souls was released, he confirmed that his
prediction was correct, and it was only half an hour (from memory) between DS
being released and Durante posting the first version of his fix. He continued
to roll updates for a few weeks afterwards.

One bizarre thing was that all the art in the game was already hi-res. Nothing
suffered for turning on the hi-res ability. It seems odd to me that art for
console-locked resolutions would be made in hi-res and then displayed in low-
res, rather than being designed for the target resolution in the first place.

------
cclogg
I like what this guy is doing :)

I've personally stopped buying any game that is a port just because of past
experiences lol. Also it's probably us PC gamers who have certain standards
that are more demanding than consoles. An example is the feel of an FPS (half
life and the like set that bar)... or just as in the article, the graphics
settings.

I've actually been a bit sad lately, because I think the industry has changed
so much in the last 10 years. The '95 to '05 run of PC games was awesome
[1]... small to mid-sized companies churning out great stuff (especially in
some of my favorite genres, like strategy). Then around 2004, I got engulfed
in HL2 (+ mods) and WoW, and emerged a few years later to find quite a
different PC games market. To me, it was basically now only Blizzard/Valve,
with everyone else gone... or making the 'cool' games for console (I guess
console gfx finally caught up). Good to see indie/kickstarter stuff lately
though!

I miss the days when I would go into a random games store and find gems in the
PC games aisle (and I'm not even that old). Last time I tried that it was
basically all ports of console games and then the 25 WoW expansions lol.

[1] Some of my favorites from that time: Age of Empires/Mythology, NOLF, Blizz
games, Unreal Tournament, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Valve games,
Battlefield, Dungeon Siege, Far Cry, Call of Duty 1, The Sims, Baldur's Gate,
Quake... can't remember any more haha.

------
rlx0x
There are mods that fix some broken things, like all those mods that add
widescreen support to older games, and it was skyUI that fixed the broken HUD
of the shitty skyrim console-port.

Anyhow it is frustrating to see what the PC as a gaming platform has become,
you have unoptimized, un-customizable, just awful console ports. Where the
industry constantly rambles about the pirates, but at the same time are
unwilling to invest in more quality assurance, that you need because of the
wide variety of hardware configurations, instead they _just complain_ about
the variety of pc hardware configurations (even carmack did it!), do nothing,
ship broken buggy console ports that, on top of that, also include their
borderline-rootkit DRM crap. Gee I wonder why people pirate their games?

Not that I particulary miss anything the big companies produce, stuff like
<60fps/health-regenerating/gamepad-autoaim-controls/ etc.

So yes there mods that add higher resolutions to crappy console ports, whoop-
dee-fucking-doo!

------
arnoldwh
“My primary motivation,” Thoman said, “is because I don’t like playing games
at low resolution.”

I thought that quote was great. The modding community always amazes me for
their frequent dedication without any kind of financial reward or recognition.

------
Havoc
He might not feel like doing this full time, but surely there is a market for
this. i.e. A team that doesn't nothing but PC ports. I'd imagine similar
issues would crop up every time so specialization might be possible.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
Companies hiring other companies to do ports is commonplace in the industry.
Such companies aren't usually _limited_ to doing only PC ports (sometimes it
will be a company that also releases its own original games as well).

------
kosei
Very cool. Tough, as often times it's a question of cost-benefit analysis and
it's definitely possible the developer didn't feel it was a high priority
enough issue (against other bugs, against shipping by a certain date, against
other projects), so it's awesome that someone from the community could choose
to fix the issue in their stead. Obviously not ideal, but very cool
nevertheless.

------
Houshalter
I don't play games much and when I do it's on a really shitty 14" standard def
TV, so is 720p really that bad? I usually watch videos at that and it looks
just fine.

~~~
ics
Compared to 14" standard resolution no, it will not look any worse. You would
definitely notice on a larger, higher resolution screen the minute you had
something to compare it to though.

------
kshay
I thought this would be about a fan (mechanical air-blowing device)... like,
so effective that you could wildly overclock your machine or something.
Disappointed.

------
MWil
I bet even he would be unable to get GTAIV to run smoothly on a computer built
today

~~~
ZoFreX
Not only does GTA IV run perfectly smoothly, but there are community patches
to make it look jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Very similar story there to this one,
actually.

~~~
rlx0x
bs. in case anyone wondered, GTA4 is the prime example of a shitty console
port.

~~~
wetmore
Definitely when it first came out, but didn't it get patched? I remember a
friend of mine getting it when it first came out and it ran terribly. He tried
it a year or so later and it was improved.

