Wise insight needed to small game dev team's workstation

[193491_1454181239]

Hi folks. We are a small indie game dev team of 4 in Korea and seeking your tips about our new office system.

 

Since we are about to have a very positive investment deal coming up in December we are considering options to upgrade our office something new. There is only one question and it may add up to more than just one, but it starts with...

 

Q) Can we seek efficiency in only one beast of workstation to power all our team's workflow? Is it possible? Or is it a dream?

 

So to inform what's up with this madness the wonder started off with Linus successfully demonstrating 1 pc 7 gamers build in past(it was gorgeous) running Crysis 3 on all of the VM at the same time with the numbers we know. Our estimated budget allows for both our plans for upcoming office system upgrade that is: 1. To have each individual developer own workstation and network going as so many other studios do already. 2. Or fire up a beast of a machine like HP Z 840 run 4-6 VMs and have it be the central computing machine. Either way we would still have a server running 247 for mostly backup databank, but can this be possible or is it a plan that's actually practical when it works?

 

So our current project is a side scroller thats mostly 2D except for characters and VFX, so the quadro won't just be wasted since there'll be ton of rendering. We have 2 artists, 1 designer and 1 programmer and there will be 2 more added by next year(one more artist and one more codder since I as the team leader am taking lead of everything on production to business due to low manpower though the scope of the project need them to take some of my burdens). Softwares we use majorly are Maya, 3DSMax, Zbrush, and Adobe Suite in on graphics side. Unity, Construct, and Visual Studio on designer and coding side.

 

Of course if you think this is just too advantageous and not practical we'd go the normal way of building a development workstations per person route, but our team still think it'd totally be awesome if this would actually work. I do agree if this one pc would ever fail or face a downtime for whatever reason the whole team would halt, but would it still be that too great of a deal if our storage server backs up the data well and the team be fed with much less powerful but still capable of production laptops while the downtime of the main computer?

 

Oh, the actual model we are considering is HP Z840 if I forgot to mention. I understand what we face is much different than running several Crysis3 at once, but I thought the model mentioned has truck load of computing power to handle our needs. Like, we wouldn't even need a separate render farm if it works. I do wonder if using this central computing method-ish setup for the team we would not need to set up a much traditional local networks between OS like separate workstations since it's basically one computer physically? If it does work the upcomming fund from our investor could enlarge our project's scope much more in quality even it being at least the graphics side.

 

So, whaddaya think? Am I too bold? Weird? Or is this system running 4 to 6 separate OS and each of them running production workload at the same time just not powerful enough?

[ARikozuM]

I think it'd be better to have a specific system tailored to each individual's job while having one machine capable of testing the game.

[Enderman]

Last time I was in a game studio they were using some sort of active-sync software that allowed people commonly edit files one at a time without conflicting edits.

Everyone had their own PC, but files were stored on a general file server.

I think trying to run everything including VMs on a single machine will be overly complicated and be really expensive.

IMO having a file server and then distributed computers that access the server is much better.

Then you can customize each computer's specs based on what the person needs, eg. the artist would have more GPUs, and that sort of stuff.

[193491_1454181239]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

I think it'd be better to have a specific system tailored to each individual's job while having one machine capable of testing the game.

Yes, that is a very proven workflow and I do not doubt its efficiency, but would our wonder be much less viable than it?

[ARikozuM]

Just now, 193491_1454181239 said:

Yes, that is a very proven workflow and I do not doubt its efficiency, but would our wonder be much less viable than it?

Like @Enderman said. It could be very expensive as you need one GPU for each designer and CPU's for the coders, though cores can be shared and stacked.

[193491_1454181239]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Last time I was in a game studio they were using some sort of active-sync software that allowed people commonly edit files one at a time without conflicting edits.

Everyone had their own PC, but files were stored on a general file server.

I think trying to run everything including VMs on a single machine will be overly complicated and be really expensive.

IMO having a file server and then distributed computers that access the server is much better.

Then you can customize each computer's specs based on what the person needs, eg. the artist would have more GPUs, and that sort of stuff.

Thanks for the input! I acknowledge what you're saying and i don't have any problem with it. I rather think it's much safer since it's the proven way to go. But if this works and works fine I was even thinking doing this for team by team and building networks from them. 

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, 193491_1454181239 said:

Thanks for the input! I acknowledge what you're saying and i don't have any problem with it. I rather think it's much safer since it's the proven way to go. But if this works and works fine I was even thinking doing this for team by team and building networks from them. 

It took linus many hours and tons of headaches to get the 7 gamers (also the 10 gamers one) on one machine working properly, and there were a lot of issues with booting and stuff since the unraid software is still in beta, so it's definitely not recommended for a work environment where people need to get stuff done efficiently.

[Guest]

I vote against the VM machine, for a reason no one has mentioned yet... You will be using 4 clients. You are going to hire 2 more persons next year, so 6 "heavy users" on 1 HEAVY machine. That might work... But what if you double your employers... What if 12 people would use the computer as clients through VM's... What if it gets up to 24...

 

Having a fileserver as mentioned would be the way to go. It should be easy to add more computers to the network, so you don't need a whole new HEAVY machine...

[193491_1454181239]

5 minutes ago, Dutch-stoner said:

I vote against the VM machine, for a reason no one has mentioned yet... You will be using 4 clients. You are going to hire 2 more persons next year, so 6 "heavy users" on 1 HEAVY machine. That might work... But what if you double your employers... What if 12 people would use the computer as clients through VM's... What if it gets up to 24...

 

Having a fileserver as mentioned would be the way to go. It should be easy to add more computers to the network, so you don't need a whole new HEAVY machine...

Good point! That scenario case of doubling our team size was indeed not included in this formula! But we are not seeing possibility of that kind of team size growth just yet. We are at the threshold of turing an indie game to barely not indie production. But if that becomes true and need grows if this would have worked we thought it could also possible to small teams of 4-6 sharing the system by each team would too work! But like @Enderman mentioned the unraid software being still unreliable comes to my mind the priority concern!

[193491_1454181239]

22 minutes ago, Enderman said:

It took linus many hours and tons of headaches to get the 7 gamers (also the 10 gamers one) on one machine working properly, and there were a lot of issues with booting and stuff since the unraid software is still in beta, so it's definitely not recommended for a work environment where people need to get stuff done efficiently.

I see! I didnt realize the unraid software still being in beta therefore is still a liability! That does make things more clear how this system could not be even in workflow performance. Thanks! I am still researching how to build the active sync server the traditional way, though. I've used it but certainly never built one myself before so..! XP

[193491_1454181239]

41 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Like @Enderman said. It could be very expensive as you need one GPU for each designer and CPU's for the coders, though cores can be shared and stacked.

Point acknowledged! However, we are and are about to be able to afford a single workstation each worth of around $3k so if the team size grows to max of 6 it's actually not that crazy to do this expanse-wise

[Guest]

I like indie games. What kind/genre game is it, and what platform?

[193491_1454181239]

Just now, Dutch-stoner said:

I like indie games. What kind/genre game is it, and what platform?

It's a side scroller / platformer / rpg. Our game is too focusing on speedy gameplay via platforming but rather bit slower to explore and interact more with magic! Since somewhen a game cannot be justified with a single genre XDXD we live in a different days now, eh?

[Guest]

Some games just should focus on a specific genre. And then I am thinking about the very old games like Imperium Galatica 1 and 2. (haven't seen that many like it) Or I-war 2. But that's just my opinion.

 

Do you have a screenshot/website link, so we can look at it? Beta testers?

[193491_1454181239]

21 minutes ago, Dutch-stoner said:

Some games just should focus on a specific genre. And then I am thinking about the very old games like Imperium Galatica 1 and 2. (haven't seen that many like it) Or I-war 2. But that's just my opinion.

 

Do you have a screenshot/website link, so we can look at it? Beta testers?

True that! But we tend to push a bit more than one solitary genre! And i believe thats what happened to most of games nowadays having multiple genres in one

 

Our project started January this year and we are done prototype phase and found our investor a while ago and crunching for presentation demo build atm! It may sound odd case development scenario but we are fortunate we had all that time to come up with current prototype build since we had all that time to spend on preproduction which don't really happen that often! Hope to share some good news soon but it definitely wont be this year XP

[Sauron]

As other said, buying a custom machine to suit everyone's different needs is probably more efficient - if you aren't actually running any graphics on a given computer you can avoid buying a dedicated graphics card, and so on.

 

Secondly, running everyone's work off of a single machine means that if for whatever reason it has a problem, ALL your team will be unable to work until it's fixed (not to mention it may be more complicated to fix and more prone to having problems than "normal" setups). Having a backup mitigates the losses, but multiplying your potential downtime by 4 is something you most likely don't want.

[iTzPrime]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

As other said, buying a custom machine to suit everyone's different needs is probably more efficient - if you aren't actually running any graphics on a given computer you can avoid buying a dedicated graphics card, and so on.

 

Secondly, running everyone's work off of a single machine means that if for whatever reason it has a problem, ALL your team will be unable to work until it's fixed (not to mention it may be more complicated to fix and more prone to having problems than "normal" setups). Having a backup mitigates the losses, but multiplying your potential downtime by 4 is something you most likely don't want.

That is completly true, you basiclly higher the risk x4 for something to go wrong. Workpc will go down after a while, because of the heavy use, and you dont want that to happen to all your employers at once