Michael1957: 1st - Sony is backing this for getting something for their PS4. They hyped it for PS4. Well, PS4 is a well described environment - no changes for other PS4 necessary. So, in fact it is easy to be optimized.
This makes sense, of course. But likely the process was: developed for PC, using sse trickery for search algorithms and world generation. Port-work on this to PS4 is non-existent, the amd build they have supports SSE in general, just without some specialization instruction sets that.. no one will use anyway. On top of that, the problems you run into with reduced thread response because of shared cache (on the bobcat and jaguar amd chipset, the last one is on the ps4) likely weren't an issue to getting it to run.
Then there are the curious extra functions and the shaders with the weird aliasing. This is just a qualified guess (since I can't confirm it), but likely this was added to the ps4 version later - this is just extend libraries for OpenGL running on the gpu functions, and Sony use them a lot. These functions are then likely ported back to the PC version, in the sense that the libraries are just built for a general platform target. Which works generally well enough, but is the kind of thing that will affect graphics cards with limited compute performance, or limited amounts of separate shader-units.
Not to get too deep into this, but functions like this that would run normally on an apu type processor may end up causing unpredictable run-time, as well as cause a well-known nvidia problem where the thread scheduler on even the newest and very solid cards can croak completely on compute tasks. This comes from the fact that they have fewer separate smx-units/shader-units, and therefore need to context switch between each operation. When these have to execute quickly, like every frame, then each frame depends on a very slow context switch at best, and you get thread starvation at worst. Lots of new games have this problem on these platforms, but generally things are picked up and "fixed" so they reach a 30fps target eventually on all cards, etc. Or Nvidia works with the developer and creates some other fix.
Middleware of various sorts tend to be involved, because separate threads feeding the gpu at the same time is "less efficient" than wrapping it through a rescue-library. And the more compute-based games we're going to see, the more problems like this will turn up - also on the top-end rigs. The mystery of why Pascal can absolutely dunk anything on single-thread, but will croak against AMD cards on compute is not actually a mystery, in other words.
But it's not a case of HG developing the game for 30fps on ps4 in 1280x720, and then porting it across.
2nd - PCs are not coming with a single definition. There might be million of different versions of PCs out there and as such an optimization for all of them is difficult - maybe even impossible. That means there was trouble to be expected.
Also makes sense. But not really true either. There are things that are called "standards" that various cards and cpus can fulfill. Basically all PCs have the same minimum bus-speed, generally they have more performance than you need, you can predict functionality without ever testing one practically, and things of that sort. And nowadays the consoles from MS and Sony really are completely normal PCs.
On top of that, the "every PC is it's own platform" thing typically used to refer to the fact that all windows-installs acted differently and behaved in strange and curious ways depending on what peripheral cards and equipment you had plugged in. No developer ever developed a game for x86 through directx or OpenGL, and then had the core engine croak because of different bus-speeds or ram-timing, etc. So while the ps4s of course are identical, and their middleware can be tested to work with the platform, and so on - the actual benefit they were looking for is that they can run "PC code" without any porting work - that is, outside making their OS/sdk run in concert with the application.
Which on an abstract level actually is the same type of porting that had to be done earlier. Since it's one part compile job - even if you make small adjustments here, it's not going to take forever. And resources and tweaking has to be done anyway. And then there's the peripherals, the overlay, and ensuring response times, etc. Which is what takes most time. So from a technical point of view, porting a PC game to a PC-Ps4 is actually pretty complicated - in the same way as it was - since you need to run Sony's OS/sdk along with it.
3rd - Porting from PS4 to PC was not done well. If I consider the OpenGL problem and some other features, I might be forced to say that some problems / solutions were falsely and in a very bad way obviously neglected. Easy problems that should have come up to the mind for anybody busy in the profession. (I remind you, that there are surely more difficult problems, but for this point here I'll think of easy to be found cracks in public used software parts. - Possible glitches that nobody checked before release.)
You mean, during the 2 month delay :D Like people suggested up there, Sony cares about getting the game to run in 1280x720 with anti-aliasing to smooth out the compressed shaders. They don't care that the PC version could run at much higher resolutions and framerates. This is, again, just guesswork. But from what we saw of the early demos, and from what I heard about test-runs on pretty abysmal hardware, they have added effects and shaders later on that .. may not have been very wise. Specially given the advertised minimum specs. Which, according to the ones I spoke to, wasn't actually a guess.
The problem HG runs into now, very likely, is that the ps4 and the PC build are very tightly knit together. Whether that's the gameplay tweaks (like the autopilot that prevents you from coming to within 100m of a crash, for example), or the visual tweaks (the weird shader package and the full-screen filters that hate higher resolutions).
4th - In order to play the game now, you have to spend 60 bucks. I consider that to be a considerable high amount. I payed that for other games but I received a lot more of support for that. That indie shop cannot give that support. If you have to pay some big money (like this) you should be able to expect it running or to receive support ASAP. If you don't get it, there is sufficient reason for ranting.
Also sounds logical. But it sort of doesn't seem like you've ever bought a game from Activision or EA before. :p
Summing it up: Problems had to be expected with release (as always - even big companies get problems at release more often than not). But a game being unplayable or nearly unplayable earns it's full amount of rant.
Also sounds.. :p No, you have /some/ people who react in this way. They always do. The ones who are the most active on the intertron, the people who write articles and need to find a fully encompassing narrative that explains the release failures, etc. They always, no matter what title it is, blame any problems that turn up on "expectations were too high, the hype was too great, people expect a perfect game".
Most of us don't. Whether we are programmers or have some hobby-experience with developing games, or beta-test in our spare-time, or just buy games once in a while - we know that games have problems. If you're just writing articles, or have delivered a report at work, or even at school - you know exactly what's going on. You never get everything you want out on the deadline, and even if you're happy with something, you always look at a sentence and wonder what in the world you were doing when checking up on it later.
So whether you take the positivist approach and think that the game will eventually be patched to perfection, but won't be perfect at launch (or suggest the game would have been better if it was released in open beta, and developed feature-wise more fully -- which has merit. Starsystem map, waypoints, scripting for missions, etc. gives off the impression of being very limited and incomplete). Or if you have a more relaxed attitude that will make you happy as long as you can fly around and look at the planets, see the transitions between atmospheric and space-flight seamlessly, etc (this is me).
In either case, it's allowed to be annoyed when the game is delayed for two months, seemingly so that Sony's testers could add in an auto-pilot that prevents you from having fun. As well as that we're getting build-issues from the ps4 version surface treatment effects. That's not positive, no matter how you twist or turn it.
And it's kind of a crisis for HG, because they have - like said - marketed (and by all accounts also developed) the game for fairly low system specs.
I don't have a solution to this, of course. And I don't seriously expect HG to develop a separate PC test branch that rolls back any amount of changes made to the game in the last 5 months. But I really wish they did it anyway.
Hell, I wish they had done that 5 months ago. So they could have been spending time now on improving functions in the game, adding more fragmented story-missions and story-paths, implementing faction behaviour interference, and changing waterlevels, deforming terrain, event interference, asteroid belts that actually make sense, starchart functions, and so on and so forth.
But what we're getting instead is likely a feature-locked/cut down version that Sony deemed was tested well enough to reach a launch. And then that's going to be it. With some lipstick added on inside existing functionality later.
And this essay could be "AAA development in a nutshell", basically