Ah, didn't know that..
had lots of fun with golf story yesterday.. never thought i would be an archealogist in a golf game..
meanhile, in the (predictable) comments on the article (
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017- ... ndo-switch ) on why switch didn't let you invite friends in fifa 18, i thought this theory was kind of interesting..
Sunjammer wrote:
Theorycrafting time!
Nintendo does what Nintendoes, so I wouldn't be surprised for a second if this is just plainly a fuckup from their end, but here's how I feel about this current situation:
The Switch is not running on the best hardware in the world, so every cycle counts. This is why the thing doesn't run on Android or some other OS, Nintendo needed its OS to be as skinny as humanly possible to make sure games can assume complete control of the hardware. On past Nintendo systems with a "home button", the button essentially made a processor transaction between the game and the OS, and I presume this is the case with the Switch as well. Note how even the shop channel starts chugging with background downloads, and how background downloads are ALWAYS paused during gameplay. People make great looking things on the Switch but don't forget the SOC it's actually running on. Again, every cycle counts.
Compare this to competing systems where they dedicate significant resources to the OS even during gameplay. This enables a ton of nonsense fluff, but it also enables stuff like multiplayer lobby interactions during gameplay. On the Switch, when you hit that home button, you are suspending the game full stop. This is why multiplayer games don't allow you to "home out" during matches because it'd effectively disconnect you.
Temp conclusion: There is extremely little concurrency between the OS and games, if any, and this is by design to ensure Switch games have as much processor as absolutely possible.
For an intensely performance-conscious machine like the Switch, giving developers 99% of the processor time with the tradeoff that they'll have to include multiplayer lobby stuff themselves is sensible, not backwards. If I'm playing Mario Odyssey with zero online functionality, why should I be giving up performance for online shit I will not use?
What Nintendo should do if they haven't already is give developers libraries for integrating this stuff into the games themselves. This would give the impression of a system-wide solution even though there isn't one, and it'll let developers opt in to the scenarios where they want it rather than give up cycles for it by default. Personally I prefer when games themselves do this with integrated design that fits the game, rather than having to bounce via system UI for it.