Software Certification Companies??

[SVT4ME]

I have to assume there are companies out there that certify an application as to what the minimum system requirements are, just like you see on PC game boxes. I have some people that have developed a web-based game and are in dire need of finding out just where their hardware requirements lie. To take it one step further, they are hoping whoever provides this service may be able to find unoptimized code, as they feel that it may be sluggish more because of this than outright hardware needs. Can anyone suggest a company or at least tell me what you would consider this? I tried googling "software certification", but got way too much fluff regarding paper certifications.

Thanks gang.

 

[SVT4ME]

Bumpagae. Anyone? LOL Maybe I need to start one of these companies if they're that rare

 

[Demon10000]

I've worked closely with a few companies beta testing a few different games. During this time, system requirements would often come up. From discussions with developers, I often got the impression that they would set their own requirements.

Thats just and observation on my experiences, but it's all I've got!

 

[BillLeeLee]

Software companies typically set their own requirements and recommendations for software they create. Usually this might involve running performance tests and developing a baseline for a set of acceptable performance metrics like data throughput, number of simultaneous users, memory usage, whatever is considered essential for the software experience. Or they could just pull it out of air.

Usually you will actually want to see if your software has what you'd consider unacceptable performance, and whether or not to throw hardware at it or if it really requires optimization (perhaps by profiling it with a tool or running your own performance tests on the system). If you can throw hardware at it, it might be more economical than spending x man hours optimizing and testing the optimizations, though this usually only works if you're not selling this directly to customers whom you can't assume will just throw money at making the software run, which means you will probably have to pinpoint whatever is considered a bottleneck or is leading to unsatisfactory performance in your application.

If you need 3rd party assistance for this for things like performance testing or code optimization, expect to pony up very large sums of money as you're basically looking at hiring consulting and external services firms.

If it's a web game, I assume it's an MMO. In which case, have the developers tried playing the game themselves? Have they tried public alpha/beta tests to see what kind of issues users might experience playing it?

 

[SVT4ME]

The game is a first-person driver game where you go head to head with other online cars. The entire game checks in at about 30 megs. They are getting complaints of chop and bad framerates on decently spec'd machines. The company is leery of the developers they hired and would like another company to look at the code and see what can be optimized.