In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:
One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.
DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:
I still have 26 animations in the queue, and with most of them being fairly long, I think I have at least two more weeks before the queue finishes.
So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?
Once again, referencing
mpa71's
BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!
Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!
So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).
From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.
What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...
Based on
some data that
ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).
ename144 again has
summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.
I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.
DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.
So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.
Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.
And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.
TL;DR?
- DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
- DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
- DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
- People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
- People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
- DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.
