RE: [Algorithms] Scalability costs

[Brian M. <bma...@ra...>]

> Is this true in the PC market? For consoles, you get most sales
> in early days,
> very little afterward. Tom's suggestion that you can still be
> looking good in n
> years time isn't matched by sales in our circumstances.

This varies a lot with product - Goldeneye has sold many millions but
started very slowly - a few hundred thousand. And it's still selling.
Scalability for a console is more useful for load balancing the engine to
keep the frame rate and detail. Or for handling things like play modes that
need twice the number of character on screen.

One challenge I'm working on here is getting the processor time to scale in
line with the graphics - there are solutions for scaling the graphics that
work nicely - processor scaling is proving something more difficult.

Also making the artists more productive is a very big thing - just building
one version with automatic lodding helps a lot, even before you get to the
authoring approaches like Tom F. has detailed.

-Brian.