240 - Why I Make Games!

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by matt »

Well, presently, I have a pile of papers that I haven't gotten around to shred, boxes of receipts that I haven't filed, computer pieces scattered all over the floor, and an assortment of boxes and packaging materials that I haven't put away. As you can see in the videos, I have a lot of games, and I find that pretty inspiring. I also have a bunch of toys on shelves - and a few on my desk, but that is mostly overflowing with CDs, papers, controllers, etc.

There is a window in my office, but unfortunately, I just get a view of the neighboring building. haha
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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evilkinggumby
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by evilkinggumby »

Yeah I saw the Newegg box in the newer video's. Figured you were doing some upgrades. :) O love newegg and they generallly pack stuff really well but OMG getting rid of all that crap afterwards is such a pain..lol.. I need an industrial corregated cardboard shredder..

sounds like a typical workspace. Not really inspiring, if anything due to those piles of things needing to be addressed, it seems like it could be a source for anxiety and distraction/de-motivation. It isn't quite spring, but maybe it is time for a lil spring cleaning in there, at least kill 10 minutes piling crud in a corner out of the way. :)

Also if you DID upgrade hardware recently, you should keep the old hardware and have it as possible raffles or reward tiers for the next game if it was using during the production of NeN :) Maybe not digital storage but anything else that is still working. It would be fun to have a video card or a memory chip that was used to create a game. :) hehehe
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matt
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

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I had 16 GB of RAM but I kept running out - possibly because I don't use much in the way of virtual memory since I have an SSD - and it's filled. I am now up to 24 GB and I have a new 500 GB SSD to replace my 240 GB. Hopefully that will last me a while. I want to upgrade my CPU, but Intel hasn't really come up with anything amazing lately. I have a quad core Sandy Bridge (I think 2600K) overclocked to 4.2 GHz, so I have quite a bit of horsepower. I was hoping Intel would make an affordable 8 core chip, but that doesn't seem to be on their roadmap for a while. :-/ It seems like they are largely focusing on mobile markets...

I had to remove 2x4GB DDR2 to make room for more RAM, but I was thinking of trickling it down to some other computers I have (TV PC, Linux dev box, etc). I have a ton of computers...
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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evilkinggumby
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

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wait so you ganked out ddr2 and slapped in 16gb ddr2 or did the board allow for ddr2 and ddr3? I'd say if you are running ddr2 at this point, no matter the capacity and cpu, you'll feel it when doing anything memory intensive. damn. I don't have a single pc in my house with ddr2 anymore (sadly I have a number of chips for ddr2 around collecting dust). and we have 5 desktops currently running (I won't count laptops).

if your guess was right, the Intel 2600k is a solid cpu and built for ddr3, so if you really are using ddr2, it is likely forcing the cpu to wait for the memory and so bottlenecking the system at times. ouch. As well that cpu is quad core but will run up to 8 threads. I've read a number of articles on multi core vs multi-thread and they both have their uses, it really depends on what kind of software you are running and if it's built for multi core or if it can utilise multi-threading too. So I can understand why you haven't swapped the cpu lately, it's still fairly powerful (especially if you have it overclocked to slightly over 4ghz)

Always nice to repurpose the spare parts. Are there enough you could build a limited edition custom NeN tower mostly comprised of hardware that helped build NeN and maybe have one of your artists design a custom painjob for the tower based on the game?

That would be hella kool actually.. hehehe... and could fetch a nice price for the next Kickstarter.
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matt
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

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D'oh. I am dumb. I am running DDR3 PC3 10666. I'm not sure why I thought it was DDR3. I'm glad I bought the right thing. hahah

The only pieces I'd part with are my Linux box, which is super low spec. The problem with things like that is that the artists live in Michigan, and I'm in California, so it'd require a lot of shipping back and forth and hoping that the computer didn't get damaged. :( Something to think about though.
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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RightClickSaveAs
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by RightClickSaveAs »

Good lord Matt, what are you doing to max out 16 GB! :) I got 16 GB not long ago just to splurge, and it's ridiculously more than I need, I have to really make an effort to break 4 GB used physical memory, even though I also turned off the page file. Then again I don't do any game developing...

Do you run Virtual Machines or anything?
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evilkinggumby
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by evilkinggumby »

I'm not surprised he has the 16, between the OS and running multiple windows, if you are working on compiling or rendering or encoding videos and such you could eat up a lot of memory fairly quick. 16 may be slight overkill, but it is so nice for that room to breath.

glad it is ddr3 lol. if you had bought ddr2 it wouldn't fit in the slot and you'd be stuck with chips you couldn't use (though newegg is usually good about rma'ing stuff if you repack and return it promptly for good reason ) .

if you were to get a case custom done it is also possible to either send just the case (no internal components) so it's large but fairly lightweight, or JUST send them the sidepanel to paint on and then have that be the only real custom work on it (which I've seen a number of case modders and custom companies do too). it would still require shipping it back and forth but it'd be fairly cheap.

oh and glow in the dark paint.. lol. by day you see a great image of roaming the corridors of the mansion, then at night when you turn the lights out you see glowing monsters stalking him.. hehehe
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matt
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

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Now I have 24 GB. I think Dan has an insane amount... I do try to keep the page file tiny because I have an SSD, but I really shouldn't be using up that much ram. Part of it is I keep my computer running and things like Flash player leak huge amounts of memory. We have a bunch of open source projects, so Visual studio can use 2 GB, Photoshop can get around 2GB if I open lots of high rez assets, Firefox can take a gig, Vegas can take a lot if I'm processing developer diaries, but in the end, it doesn't really seem like it should be 16 GB. I suspect something is leaking (perhaps at the driver level?) or there is some problem when I keep my computer running for a while, but it seemed like buying more RAM seemed like easier than figuring out what is really going wrong wrong.

I had to upgrade my SSD, and the Samsung drive has some RAPID boost thing if you have extra RAM, so maybe with 24 GB, I'll be able to use that.
-Matt Gilgenbach
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RightClickSaveAs
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by RightClickSaveAs »

Ah, of course you're working your computer out a lot more than I ever do mine for sure! The biggest memory hog I have is Lightroom, and I don't run it all that often.

Do you run Windows 7 or 8? 8 is supposed to have even better memory management.

I have a Samsung SSD as well, and I tried out RAPID for a while but could see absolutely no difference, so I switched it off. The only noticeable change for me was it made the Samsung utility's benchmark numbers ridiculously high to the point of being meaningless for real world performance. SSDs are already so fast that if there was a few milliseconds of difference in launching some programs, I couldn't tell. From my limited understanding, RAPID is basically supposed to be a RAMdrive that uses it's own systems to determine what programs and data are accessed most, and cache those for faster access. Sort of like Windows Superfetch I guess, but Samsung claims (of course) that it's way better :)

You should give it a try though, with all the I/O intensive stuff you do, and see if you notice a difference. It's pretty painless to implement, just need to restart once after turning it on. It definitely doesn't hurt, I think it only hogged up 1-2 GB at most on my 16 GB system.
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matt
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Re: 240 - Why I Make Games!

Post by matt »

On my main machine, I'm still on 7. I have 8 on my laptop. I have everything all set up, so I'm thinking of just waiting to upgrade until 10 and do a clean install.

The rapid stuff does sound a lot like Windows Super Fetch. I'm not sure how they can make it any better than Windows but who knows. Depending on how many files you have in your project (we have a crap ton), compilation can be I/O bound, so anything I can do to improve IO performance would probably be a win. On Retro/Grade and other AAA game projects we did a trick where we would include a bunch of CPP files into one file, which simplifies the number of file reads (you don't have to keep grabbing the header files and all that), but hopefully with SSDs these days that isn't a huge deal.

However, our compilations still can take forever if you do a clean build since we have so much open source stuff. Dan keeps threatening to include Boost (from source) to spite me. hahah
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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