Ok, I've moaned about the fact the game runs on 512mb devices, when Bethesda know it will crash eventually.


However, this thread us to suggest a fix for this.


When the game runs on a device with 512mb of Ram, it should cap the population at say, 35. It'll obviously need to adjust the room thresholds to suit and it would need to provide a way to remove dwellers from the vault, once it's full.


This would allow you to replace low stat dwellers with better ones, should they turn up or you get one in a lunchbox.


This would enable people to play the game on older devices and thus enable them to spend money on lunchboxes.


Thoughts?

I'm curious as to why people play it when the specs say it's not designed for 512 MB devices.

Delete the game?

Sure let's dumb down everything to the least common denominator.

Let's force game companies to make current games playable on the original Xbox and Playstation.

Let's force software companies to make their programs for 086 processors running Windows 3.0.

Wow, constructive replies!


Firstly, going off the App Store description, it doesn't state not to install on 512mb devices. It simply states optimised for iPhone 5 etc ...


Secondly, I wasn't suggesting dumbing down the game for everyone, only those running 512mb devices. The game can easily detect the amount of memory and then run in restricted mode.


It's going to be more practical than reducing memory consumption so that it runs in 512mb.

Who runs the apps store? Is it Bethesda or Apple? I just own a low rent cell phone, so I have no experience running these things, but in a pinned topic at the top of this forum the memory restriction is mentioned. It's also in the release article on Bethblog.

Bethesda control the text on the App Store, not Apple.


I didn't know about this forum until I started looking into the problems. It's pointless having text on here, you don't download the App from here.

There are tons of people having the same issues on devices that meet the devs own requirements. The fact of the matter is the app was not well tested and bogs down after a certain point. Else we wouldn't have an 8 page thread dedicated to crashing. Even brand new devices are having problems.

This is very true. I don't doubt they will fix the bug for the optimised devices, but they can't fix it for older devices without changing the game as above.

Agreed. Accepted devices may get patches that improve things, but I doubt very much they'll be doing anything to help it run with 512MB.

That is not the point of the OP's thread, What they are asking for is the program to be modified for their device, when it was not made to run on that device.

It also states extremely clearly on the app page in the description, the very first words are, "Requires at least an Iphone 5, Ipad3, or Ipad mini 2."

That's literally the very first thing in the description. They can't make it much more clear than that.

You're going to have to accept your potato can't run it. Because really, 512 mb of RAM constitutes a potato in this day and age.

lol no an iphone 4 aint dume and its far from out of date i belive they could make it work because it does run most the time. but they choose to make it for iphone 5. and makeing xbox one game on xbox want work because its almost 10 years old

The iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM. The 5 has 1GB (twice the 4). It may work for a while on the 4, but as the game progresses, it starts needing more ram to store data. The iPhone simply doesn't have the horsepower. Capice?

Here is the basic problem. Let's take the iPhone 6+ as an example.

There are people that are reporting problems on the iPhone 6+. There are also reports from iPhone 6+ owners who are NOT having problems.

Why is one user, using the same device having a problem and another user with the same device not having a problem. What is the difference?

A difference in the OS might be the cause, except based on reports people running 8.3 are having problems and others running the same OS version are not. So that can't be the cause.

A difference between program versions might be the cause, but people were reporting problems/no problems when there was only ONE program version in the wild. So that can't be the cause.

Hardware/firmware revisions might be a cause. We don't have any hard data on that. So that is possible, BUT. it isn't JUST iPhone 6+ owners that are reporting problems and reporting no problems, this is occurring across ALL supported devices.

There could be a conflict with other software installations on the device. We don't have the data on that.

The users having problems might be trying to perform certain actions (either supported or unsupported) that the people not having problems aren't trying to perform. We don't have data on this.

Until the developers can identify the difference between an installation on one device that is having a problem and another that isn't having a problem, they pretty much have to take a guess as to what will fix it.

Everything that is added to a shelter game will affect memory usage. It isn't just dwellers. Everything occupies memory. What probably occupies the most memory is the graphic resources. Following that would be the dwellers and the rooms.

To limit the game as you are suggesting would require not only putting a limit on the number of dwellers but also on the number of rooms. You would essentially wind up with about one fifth of the game.

No, rooms don't appear to be too much of an issue, I've got mine running with 30 dwellers and it sometime crashes, occasionally during loading, but I just reload and 90% of the time it loads it in.

To people thinking that it shouldn't run in 512mb, think about what you're saying. A game the size of Fallout3 ran in 512mb on the PS3 and XBox360. So, a piddling (by comparison) little game to control the stats of 200 dwellers can't run in 512mb?

Someone somewhere at Bethesda obviously forgot to use a bit of common sense when designing the app. They either got too carried away with the eyecandy (sure, it does look nice) and then only discovered a problem when it crashed on a 4S during development.

There is absolutely no way that a game like this should be using anywhere near 512mb of Ram. I'm sorry to say, it stinks of inefficient design and poor technical descisions and a technical lead that really should have known better.

As a professional game developer myself, I can't agree more with above opinion. Game of this scale should run perfectly on 512 M device.


512MB is quite a big memory. Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 run on 512 MB DRAM. Number of dwellers or rooms does not matter much, if designed properly. There are tones of good mobile games that are much more complex and graphics intensive than FO:S but run beautifully and flawlessly on 512M iphone.


Then why don't FO:S run well on 512MB device? Poor design and too much eye candy, I think. Especially, resource collection UI and animation. It is real performance hog.


Good design and optimization takes developer time and money. And Bethesda didn't invest enough on this game. It was just red-haired stepchild.

I'd argue (and I expect you'd agree) that had the game been designed from a technical point of view correctly and I'd wager this is something to do with the fact this is Bethesda's first Mobile game, that had the correct desicions been made early on (i.e. during design), then it cost very little to get right (bar a tiny bit of RnD perhaps), rather than finding out its a problem a month or two away from release, when its a hell of a lot more costly to fix.

To those non-developers here - think of it this way. You sit down to design a new house, you have two routes, draw a quick sketch, room there, door here, conservatory here. etc.. But you get building quicker. The other route is to design it in more detail, what the pitch of the roof will be, the exact measurements of the walls, what the construction of the walls will be and survey the land to see what's underneath, it costs more than the first option and takes longer before you have something to show for your efforts.

What we have here is an example of the former, they appear to have made quick and fast design decisions (i.e. Door Here, wall there) without actually thinking of the consequences. i.e. 'We'll have lovely 3D rooms that whilst add little to the gameplay, look nice'. Problem is they didn't appreciate perhaps the technical implications of their choices.

So what happened is that a couple of months before the game was complete (or the house was built), they found that the ground under the half the house wasn't stable and liable to shift. To fix it now is a hell of a lot more expensive than it would have been had they done a bit more planning right at the start and found out about the land and simply moved the location of the house before building started.

Whilst a developer the size of Bethesda really shouldn't get caught with their pants down like this, I go back to what i said above, I wonder if they tried too hard to impress graphically with their game and lacked the mobile development experience to know better.

Even at the load screen (the Vault selection screen) its consumed over 160mb of memory, which to me (a professional developer, albeit not a games dev, although I'm dablling!), that suggests like the memory use is heavily graphics related.

You know, "as a professional developer, retired" I have to say that is the absolute worst anology I have ever seen to software engineering.

I appreciate that things like design first, code later may be new concepts to a retired developer ( I won't even mention object orientation for fear of blowing your mind ) but I'd have thought that the basic anology of development being like construction would have been valid even in your day. I know punch cards were considered advanced, but even those systems needed thought before you started to code.

When you consider that OOP was developed back in the 1960's, I was probably using it before you were conceived. It is sooooo last millennium.

But that isn't what I am talking about. You fail to mention the iterative nature of design and development (even for houses). You make no mention of requirements or scope. The quick sketch you sneer at is REQUIRED before you even draw the first line of your blueprint (or write the first use case). Your method of design will have you creating the fricking Taj Mahal when the client just wanted an outhouse.

I arrived even I to 35 people with iphone 4s, but I crash even before the selection of the vault. at this point it does not work anymore the game, so I deleted and reinstalled the game and it works, so for me the most games (mean days) and there will be more chances of the crash.