New platform, new features, new ways of working “We’ve made it all work, and we have a good thing going now,” Ahmad said. Performance is really high and loading times are a lot shorter. It’s a very refreshing platform to work with overall. Performance is really high and loading times are a lot shorter.”Īnd limitations are hardly something exclusive for Stadia – they are just different from what you’d have on normal, local machines. “It’s a very refreshing platform to work with overall. “At the same time as you have those limitations, the machines Stadia uses are very powerful,” Ahmad points out. Luckily, The Division 2’s servers already run partially in Google’s cloud, which made it easier to solve the technical issues that came with the game’s development. That was one of the first big hurdles that the developers working on Stadia had to – and did – overcome. There’s also the fact that there were now two separate networks that needed to be connected – Google’s and Ubisoft’s. “You need to think about iterations in another way since they take longer to deploy, but become much faster to access for everyone.” Essentially every new piece of tech means we have to learn to do things in new ways.” “This isn’t uncommon when it comes to new platforms.
“You can’t do what you’re used to doing,” Ahmad added. “You need to think about iterations in another way since they take longer to deploy, but become much faster to access for everyone,” says Julien.
It means learning new ways of doing things, offset by the ease of for example transferring a build to QA departments instantly through the click of a link.”Ĭertain limitations need to be considered as a result. “It’s not like you can just add more hard drives, like you can do locally. “It affects everyone, including the people in Data Management and QC departments,” Ahmad explains. “There’s nothing physical, nothing tangible – everything is in the cloud, after all.” The machine isn’t sitting there next to you, on your local network.
That means maintenance work needs to be approached differently. Instead of downloading a build, you simply click a link to see the latest updates and changes from the team. There’s nothing physical, nothing tangible – everything is in the cloud, after all. You don’t deploy the game on your own PC. One example is that there are no development kits, as you would usually have for consoles. There are several major differences between developing for Stadia and developing for traditional consoles and PC. “With all their expertise, they were able to show us at Massive how Stadia works,” says Ahmad. While RedLynx might not have worked with Snowdrop before, they had experience with Stadia, as they had previously released Trials Rising on the platform. It was the beginning of a close collaboration between the two studios. We didn’t have to sit down and discuss every little detail – instead they always found things themselves and when they asked us anything, they always asked the right questions.” They have a lot of seniority at the studio. “The team in Helsinki got up to speed very fast,” noted Ahmad Mouhsen, Lead Online Programmer at Massive Entertainment. “Our main focus were aspects like UI, controller inputs, the friends list and platform-specific features like Stream Connect.”