Would there be value to MacGyver an engine benchmark or "something" for the purpose of stress-testing community hardware and gathering statistics of where issues might arise?

 

This benchmark would not need to have any game play elements, just a ridiculously large dummy map, with hundreds of simultaneous character movements / spell effects and multi-directional sound.

 

I believe this might allow the development team to get an idea, up front, of where "funky" hardware issues will arise. Additionally if the statistics show that the vast majority of the community already have capable hardware, then maybe this will provide some comfort pre-alpha.

 

 

I'm pretty sure pre-alpha wouldn't have had much optimilisation added to it's systems, so the results wouldn't exactly reflect the final game proper.

I'm pretty sure pre-alpha wouldn't have had much optimilisation added to it's systems, so the results wouldn't exactly reflect the final game proper.

 

Oh absolutely! However on the other hand - Unity engine is also well established, so there might be in-built optimisations. And if there are, this would assist govern resource spend during alpha/beta.

In either case, however would be a good test for hardware-specific quirks of users' systems - for example if someone is planning to run the game using integrated Intel renderer, then what would that mean in terms of number of concurrently rendered spell effects?

 

As a further example why jumping on this early (whether pre-alpha or pre-beta) might be worthwhile - back in the day, when Starcraft 2 shipped, Blizzard did not include driver support for 7.1 Razer Megalodon USB surround sound (was patched following week). Not saying that Unity is known for this problem, but data and statistics only help, not hinder.

In Blizzard's case - they're a massive studio with oodles of resources, and yet they had a launch issue, ironically for gamers with higher-end hardware.