Digital Amusement Game Development
  
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You've obviously noticed the drop in updates at the pond. I've been putting my focus towards the digitalamusement.com forums, which includes the gaming forum. I've got some things to talk about on the pond with the Wii, which I now own. The state of video gaming isn't looking to have a positive future, which I'll also explain. Interesting trends going on.
Funny, PS3 =~ NeoGeo. Been playing some NeoGeo games on MAME recently. Now that was a fun console. Can't say the PS3 won't be fun, predicting it will. Won't buy one, but I'll play the hell out of it if I got the chance. I had a rather involved conversation with someone about the PS3. They came to me and asked, what's the difference between that and the XBox360? That turned into quite the technical babble. Yes, I'm overly impressed with the Sony Cell architecture built by IBM. It's a supercomputer being sold for peanuts. I even considered last night using a distributed computing method to all PS3's willing to participate, to chew on the enormous amount of data the upcoming Large Hadron Collider will spew forth (est. over 5 petabyes/year). Also been thinking about Microsoft's dedicated gaming PC, the XBox360. It's attractive to develop for, being a common Microsoft environment that most are familiar with. Also for XBox Live, because (from what I've read in my EGM's), MS appears to be professionally catering to the homebrew garage games - providing support and direction. I can appreciate that. That Wii. It's almost intimidating. A whole new way of playing games, unfamiliar and feeling you're risking your composure by not being a static fixture on the couch. I'm up for the challenge. :V
My funny story - Gamestop had Wii preorders the other day. My local gamestop is like a minute away, and is supposed to be number 1 in it's region. This meant that showing up at 9am when they opened to maybe get a reserve was almost impossible. Malestrom aside, I wasn't hoping. When I did arrive 10 minutes late cause my clocks were set wrong, there's a line of ~20 people. The line started at midnight. Considering I got about an hour of sleep and I'm there already, what else is there to do but... stand in line! So for 15 minutes I zombied around picking up chatter of counter monkeys and linegoers. At this point, my only mission is recon. Little snippets here and there revealed gamestop may have another Wii preorder session pending Nintendo's ambitions. There was other things that registered as information but unfortunately that's locked in my subconcious network of influence. I was friggin tired what do you expect! :) Yeah at this point I'm totally looking forward to the Wii. Also, I just learned that id software ported doom (original) to the xbox live arcade. Now that's what I'm talking about! Maaaaybe a port to the Wii? Or perhaps q3 on the Wii? The nunchuck controller setup is right on. And it'd make for a great show. Dahler vs. Fatal1ty head to head in q3, perhaps somewhat back to back facing 8 foot screens adding some occasional comical game-fu to their rapid and precise controller movements? This is where professional gaming stands a chance to be watchable as a sport. (Nintendo) *ding* I'm not sure if I'm outside the curve, or if cellphone gaming really is just a fad pushed by lots of marketing. Microsoft's zune isn't going far, i.e. Ngage2, now with more meat and less cheese. Nintendo also has suprisingly dominated with the DS, which I thought was a kick-it-out-the-door gimmick. I'm considering a DS lite, still can't justify the funds. Where's my GBA SP? As for the gamedev site, I'm taking it kinda slow for the moment. There's no game development going on this side for right now. R/L has quite a few projects I'm trying to get knocked out which leaves about enough time to get a game of pikmin2 in at night. Almost got that game finally beat. Occasionally ut2k4 as well of course. I really like the ability for a level designer to create and add their own vehicle to the map. For instance - on a large urban map with lots of tanks available, there was a little tank kinda like a giant armored jeep. It was really fast and had a vulcan cannon, drove like a stunt vehicle. I launched myself over the side of a recessed water ravine, where 2 goliath tanks were exchanging fire from a distance. I land on my side and slide through two shells tearing by, hit the wall with another wall sticking out far enough to cover me. I drive sideways to stick my turrent around the covering wall and blast away. This all happened in roughly 2 seconds. It was like a James Bond tank. Yeah!
Urban Terror in it's current state no longer holds my interest. Gameplay-wise, I'm done with the ever plaguing issues such as: emptying an entire magazine of an automatic weapon at near point-blank and missing completely. Hits that make no sense, like sr8 shots fired completely off-target and hitting (while players call themselves skilled). The ridiculous spreading hit cone that occurs when holding the trigger to similate recoil jitter. The fact I -rely- on luck to land a shot. That I've had to resort to using the HK69, and becoming extremely proficient at it, as a last resort to ensure I hit what I shot. Lastly, the 27 days of Urban Terror that have faded into yet another lull of development despair. I'm simply tired of waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen while great things happen around the whole industry. Until Urban Terror 4.0 decides to grace my hard drive, I resort to two measures: the much more involved, intense, and FUN gameplay of Unreal Tournament 2004 (onslaught), and preparation of potential funmaps for urt 4.0. There's also the emulator scene which I've recently been immersed into, but that's cheap fun for now. I envision full games that I have the capabilities of creating. It's certainly a matter of pulling the trigger on a great deal of dedication and time. For the moment I have other r/l priorities. That doesn't stop the imagination, conceiving, and recording of said visions.
Let's talk next gen gaming. Console wars. Nintendo used a P-Wing, and bumped a star block. It's crazy. Ok enough of the fun metaphores, here's the real deal of the big 3: Microsoft really had no choice but to push for an "early lead", even if it meant serving their dough still somewhat raw. They're trying so hard to push visuals as the heart of gaming. There will be a couple games that will wow and woo people, MS will cling hard to those - regardless of the gameplay. Visuals equal sales... for now. I restate: graphics are absolete. Microsoft however does have the xbox live service. In a clever move, they successfully ported a staple of online pc gaming over to their pc console machine. Although I sound sarcastic, I believe this to be their strongpoint and commend them for playing on this strength. Communication and collaboration brings replay value. Many of you probably weren't around for this, but it's something similar to going to the arcade - games and sociallizing. Score a point for MS. Problem is, when Sony and Nintendo get their turn, Microsoft's weaknesses will become apparent. Although they can go another round or two of loud marketing fluffing whatever they can to mislead gamers, those tolerances will diminish, leaving the xbox floating in the water, breeding and dying amoungst themselves. Sega! Sony. A marvellous effort to really push next gen technology. They're right on track to pull a NeoGeo. A marvel of a system when it came out. Way to expensive for the average gamer to own, way to expensive to develop for. It looked GREAT. Even had games that were fun! (I miss magician lord). But the cost killed it. Sony's ploy is that you're buying a cheap blu-ray player. Does the average gamer need blu-ray? Ask yourself this: what's wrong with your current library of dvds? Ok, now why do you need to spend a few thousand dollars more (bare minimum) on a high-end hdtv display capable of 1080p(rogressive) scanning? PS3 can do it! Yeah, that's great, I'll find that sucker friend and him and me and 20 other gamers will party at his house on his dime a couple nights a week. Meanwhile, we'll go back to either xbox360 or ps2 when we go home. Or watch a dvd movie. Nah, I'd rather play my wheeeee! :D Leaving Nintendo. What happened? The Nintendo64 was a step in the wrong direction. Cartridges eleminated loading time, and in that era, inserting a cd was something executives apparently thought was too much for the average gamer. But cartridges were both expensive and limited on capacity. Enter the gamecube. Subtile. Quiet. Capable. But with the ps2's strong sales, and xbox's marketing storm, third party developers chose to go with the money - sales statistics were against Nintendo, the console becomes very lonely. There were some great games for it (eternal darkness), mostly 1st party though, including the only first person shooter on a console I've ever liked: metroid prime. Their handhelds kept them alive, specifically the pokemon franchise. Without it, Nintendo was the next Sega. They released details of their next system - the revolution. Hardware, no marketing gimmicks, straight forward about twice as powerful as the cube. While Sony is advertising a supercomputer, Nintendo states a formal, realistic machine. The only thing left to reveal was the controller (and the official name... nevermind). No one but Nintendo would dare to tell the book-educated marketing monkeys to stick their traditional mainstream designs up their collective ports. And we now have not one, but dual fully 3d spacially aware nunchuck controllers - with an analog stick. FPS gamers, rejoice. And so did the third party developers. It's new, it's exciting, it's capable. Developers are flocking to it, moving projects from the xbox360 and ps3 to the wii. But wait! The system doesn't boast high definition! Nor is it more powerful than ascii white! Why, why would developers commit such blasphemous munity? Oh yeah, games are most fun when there's quality GAMEPLAY! The FUN part of the interactivity! There's still so many people in executive positions in the game industry who think they're movie producers. Well, YOU'RE NOT. If you want to create an interactive movie, call it that. If it's a game you're after, throw away your demographics and use your imagination! That's where great games are born, not on a pie-chart!
Speaking of engines... Urban Terror 4.0? The released material is looking good. The addition of powersliding is a welcome addition increase the already fast speed of the game.
I did it! Finally got the alpha02 release out. There were quite a few snags... actually I think the worst of them turned around to be for the best. Here's a timeline of what all transpired... somewhat dramatic actually: Sunday afternoon - loaded the map in gtk and began assessing if I wanted to update anything before packaging the map. Started with a tweak here, tweak there, add lighting here and there, patch that hole, add textures, fill in whole buildings, add details all over... it was sunday night before I was satisfied the map was in a releasable state. Started the final compile. -vis took way too long and I had to abandon the release for sunday. Compile finished some 10 hours later. Then came the task of rounding up the textures to package. At first I was doing a comparison of what textures showed up as grey notex's ingame, gave up soon after stating "it's an alpha!", and copied the whole friggin texture directory. It was a shotgun approach but time was not on my side. Found a few models that needed to be added too. Spent a half-hour on surface sound assignments cause there's that many textures in use. Once I got it all together, I made the pk3 and threw it into the test q3ut3 folder. On startup of UrT, the interface was hosed. My pk3 was breaking UrT and I didn't know why. I've come across this problem before, never figured it out. Now's the time. Painstakingly systematically deleted files from the pk3 and reloaded urt until I found it was the shader file causing the problems. Now I had to narrow down which of the few dozen shaders was at fault. This took well over an hour (maybe two) to troubleshoot. Finally, it was my fault as I inadvertantly used a unix style # for a comment, rather than a C style //. Finally everything is working. Got the map to Frog. He uploads it to Dank's server, runs it... server crashes. ??? What? Frog asks if I tested the map in my regular q3ut3 folder. Dammit, no I didn't. Crashes. I try my second machine. Crashes. WTF. The server output had a t47 named before it started the shutdown sequence. That's gotta be a target entity. Pulled up the map source in wordpad, found it, manually removed the offending entity. But the new problem... I have to recompile to truly fix it. I had noted in a test run there was a major gameplay problem plus a big missing texture, Frog suggested I fix those up right away before recompiling. Good idea, they're quick fixes. Now it's already Monday night. I have to get ready for a flight the next night and only have a few hours to prepare. No time for a long compile. I risk using -vis -fast to at least get vis data, but risking lower fps. No time, I run the compile with -meta -vis -fast -light -patchshadows -filter -samples 4 -bounce 8. Takes about an hour total. Recompile surface data in, and compile the .aas botfile. Package is launched out the door. As Frog is downloading it, I find yet one more problem. Again it crashes. My only hint related to the botfile. Said fuckit and deleted the .aas straight out of the pk3. It works. Instructed Frog to do the same. I told him he'd have the final by 10pm... it was 9:59pm... I still have real packing to do and not much time left! I had to give the tour of the map though, new tricks and whatnot. I felt great to hear the unending compliments and humor. Must have had 10 people spec'ing me at one point, I walked over to the newspaper box, seconds later the TS2 channel is roaring with laughter about my headline. The new tricks were awe-inspiring. New capabilities were gleefully welcomed. It's certainly times like last night when I know making the sacrifice, putting out a map, is more than worth the time put in. This new version, although alpha, has been another leap forward in the superman/supersoldier series. If I hadn't gone through cleanup on Sunday, I don't believe the map would've had nearly the same effect. I'm looking towards the next version as much as anyone else. It's a map that encompasses real three-dimensional gameplay, with multiple areas that could be maps of their own. I'll be out for a couple weeks, so enjoy the new release! :V -wily duck
Basically I turned the alpha from a crappy "it's a map" to something worth playing and checking out. There's no gameplay guarantees. Nothing is broken that will totally distract. Yes there's missing brushes here and there, but I cleared up anything that would drastically detract from the experience. Many areas that will be gameplay areas are not accessable. Oh in the 'shader work' that includes making the arrows move visible, per popular demand. :) It feels great to be level designing again. I wish I could pump out a few funmaps. Not going to happen anytime soon though. Fortunately the new Urban Terror 3.8 release appears to be real and soon. I'll post the next pond update with the supersoldier alpha release news! Yay!
What else... sneak in some god of war here and there, along with ut2004, hl2:episode one, darwinia, ms. pacman, pikmin2, and tabletop risk:2210ad. Quakecon is coming soon, but I just don't feel the excitement really, maybe cause I'm not going, most likely cause I'm really disappointed with the lateness of pulling it together. It's probably a good thing in the longrun to have toned down the event, as I mentioned earlier it might have been getting a bit too big. Shame that Dierth is gonna be there and I'm not... Frog most likely can't make it either. We've always got next year!
I don't talk about my personal life on the pond. I'm not going to start now. What I will tell you is that due to real life predispositions, I have deemed doing game development work outside of a full-time job at this time has become too challenging to sustain the minimum amount of creative focus and concentration to release supersoldier on time, at the end of July. I am now officially moving the release date to the oft-ridiculed - "when it's done". The clan members I've spoken to on the phone have been very, very supportive of my situation. They understand the priorities I've made and decisions behind postponing the release. Thanks guys, your support is always gold, and I couldn't have made it this far without the support of the community. This doesn't mean I've given up, or that I'm done. I will have to figure out how to manage my time with my evolving situations in order to continue community game development. This may (note: will) take some time. I'm truly sorry to disappoint. As stated below, my future in game development hinges on releasing this map. Re-iteration: I will continue working on supersoldier, it will be ready eventually.
I'm considering using Omega (previous machine) to do the gtk dev work since gtk behaves much better on it. I'm so fed up with gtkradiant. Quake Wars: Enemy Territory better come with it's own editor or I'm done fighting with this broke-ass tool. It would be in my favor to learn 3ds, or even maya. SOMETHING that isn't GTfucKingRadiant. If I get time here I'll go over to map-center and see if they have any answers. There's no way I can complete this map on time if I can't use the tool. Word on the urban terror forums is 3.8 slowly lumbers toward completion. No word on changes, things to look for, design for, etc. Whatever. I wonder if strafejumping is patented. I like fast games. Hopefully Sonic on the Wii will satisfy my speed obsession. I eagerly await nintendo's new system.
I just have not had the time to tweak the new machine. I'm doing what I can to put the most amount of focus into this map.
I got a huge amount of work done last night on the Krat Distro building, the west building. It's been gutted and ready for texturing and detailing. This was a pain to complete due to the odd shape of the building. Also because it's at a 45 degree angle, that increases the work required to create uniform brushes and correct alignments. I've worked the superman formula into this building and I can't wait to test it out. Goal is to have a beta available mid July.
I'm chock fulla ideas to get implemented in the map. Many of them are shader ideas. I'm also considering designing the map to allow a future graphical enhancement version. Basically this consists of making most textures into shaders. I'd also like to do low and high quality versions of the map, high being high-density lightmaps and textures, extra shader action. The basic build I'm doing is medium to high. Damn I wish I had a team to do the art portion of the map. Pushing through the snags... quakecon still unannounced... this duck is getting a little worried.
And now for my journalist point of view. This is all speculative. Quakecon is an uncertainty at this point. No announcements made, save for yesterday's "it's not cancelled". I may or may not be able to go due to the lateness in announcing the date. Sad but true, maybe quakecon has gotten a bit too big. It takes a mammoth undertaking to put the event together, and id software is a small company. My observations align the perceived management infrastructure of the volunteers as being somewhat corporate, secretive to the processes of something that was publicly community run. Obviously when an event such as quakecon becomes as large as it is, it requires both a great deal of organization and strong funding, thus becomes somewhat of an advertiser run event. An executive (id software) has to negotiate with the advertisers' demands, then translate that into demands for the high ranking staff. The staff in turn dedicates part of their life to the commmitment of fulfilling their duties, with no expectation of a return (i.e. compensated time). This is both good and bad for all of us. The quality of the entertainment value is substantial and excellent, however the event's complexity begins alienating people in and around the event. Individuals in the management chain could be stressed or burnt out through the years of dedication. The torch doesn't seem to get passed very often to others, favoring experience over new, ambitious, unproven individuals. The increasing complexity demands qualified, proven individuals, pushing away the roots in which they came from. Some of the staff could be questioning their continued dedication as the demands of their work are extremely high and increasing, while the advertisers are putting the bulk of the rewards into the hands of the attendees. It's fun and games for a while, however when factoring in psychology, eventually something's going to give. Moral degrades. Life claims higher priorities, stressing individuals ability to dedicate the necessary time and/or quality of work, or finally questioning if this is good for onesself? (a myraid of subcategories belong here) The inability to secure a venue for the event has brought forth certain realities of what quakecon has become: an elaborate gaming festival, run by extremely dedicated teams of volunteering individuals, whom struggle to deal with the vastness of the entire event with the resources available. Quakecon relies on the advertisers to supply them the network components, the swag, power, screens, tournament quality pc's, venue capital, and so much more. It's a big event, they give it to us attendees for free or less. Those that have dedicated themselves to being staff are in the business of giving, but how much can they give before there's just not enough to give? A request is made for a large amount of peon volunteers to do mundain tasks. Tech support, security, setup, clean-up, etc. Don't mistake "peon" as being derogitory. Quakecon is nothing without this level of volunteers. I've had the honor of being a peon volunteer a number of times, most notably the first year I came. Thanks Nate. Scores of normal joe's get their chance to participate in the administration of the event. A few stand out and are recognized by others higher in the chain, potentially paving the way to become more involved with the organization. This of course requires a great deal of dedication from the new individual. Pros: becoming woven into the grand event of quakecon, cons: see above. I believe quakecon will soon require new means to support it's evolution. Stronger advertiser support is one, and gasp... paid compensation to the upper staff. Also, a small division within id software dedicated to quakecon. Currently the same person that handles PR for their games and products, also coordinates quakecon, and especially during times of PR events such as the E3, juggling all tasks could become quite difficult. We'll soon see what the fate of QuakeCon2006 reveals. :V
I wanted to finish building my new pc this weekend, but it seems the only thing UPS can consistently succeed at is failing. So hopefully tomorrow I'll have I can start putting it together. I did get to fabricate a custom filter for the 3.5 bay hole, where 3 of the 6 drives (for the RAID 5 array) will be housed. Looking at the synthetic benchmarks, I'm looking at 3 to 4 times more performance minimum over my current machine. My goal is 4x all around. Ooooo can't wait! Time's ticking away... will I have superman/supersoldier done on time? I spent some time making fabs to stick in the map, played with lighting and shaders... made a neat little test level to render around on. I'm finding that for some textures, changing the ever-used [$lightmap filter] shader pass to [$lightmap gl_src_color gl_dst_color] wields superior lighting. Much more vivid. I'll make my next post just as soon as my new machine is up. I always check the pond comments so feel free to make shoutouts!
Oh and my apologies for not posting earlier... got distracted during last post and didn't save. Oops. Anyway lots of progress going on. It's looking good. Haven't run into any bad snags. The west building lawn was tough cause gtkradiant kept fighting with me to endcap the curb curves. Also realized that to thicken curves properly you have to do it before bending the Z-axis, else you get odd vertex points off the integer grid. Going to add trees and brush soon. Working on some custom textures will add some nice, necessary details. Designing building interiors on paper. New machine is ready to be ordered. Possibly new laptop as well for remote dev work. That's all the map updates I have for now. Other news. I most likely will not be doing the level designer's conference this year as I wanted to. I have not heard back from id software PR. There may be a good reason for this from id software's side which I will not devuldge. I also speculated that their focus has been strongly on the E3, which has paid off as Enemy Territory:Quake Wars was voted #1 multiplayer game there by gamespy.com. There were quite a few impressive demo's... notably and off the top of my head: spore, crysis, okami, even the new metroid had me a little stoked due to the new Wii controls. Seems the theme of most of the advanced games were physics handling. It's about time, game industry. A couple were also starting to show more focus on quality A.I. handling. Some of the games looked good, but appeared to lack depth of gameplay while adding a couple new features and effects - gears of war is the first I can think of. Do yourself a favor and check out the crysis movies, I believe they're a demonstration of what real next gen fps can and will be.
It's not a perfect process... with a bunch more time I could optimize the program to search out the shaders and do a bunch of recursion to find all the dependent shaders and sort out the correct texture and not mess with the 1st/2nd party shaders... way more work than I want to put into it now. So I had to go manually grab all the related shaders and put them into one .shader file, replace all wack occurances of superman_b3, ut_superman, wily_duck, again you get the picture. THEN, bringing up the map in gtkradiant to find what's missing... textures that were missed (buried in shaders) and shaders that still had to be ported. Once all is completed, another bsp -meta -light fast compile. Oh wait, don't forget to find all the models and sounds and of course the skybox. Are we having fun yet? The payoff: all media is now centralized and accounted for. The years of slopping stuff around is over. I can easily put together a .pk3 file with minimal headaches. And in fact I have - the first supersoldier alpha map has been packaged. It's not for public release unfortunately, but it exists as proof of concept.
I wrote a perl program to save me a bunch of headaches regarding map content that's strewn around multiple directories. It reads a map source file, modifies the contents, spits out a new source file and some helpful copy commands. You can view/download it here. Made it friendly enough so anyone can modify the necessary variables and understand what they're doing. I like perl. Looking ahead, I didn't feel like spending hours trying to find and debug and copy all the textures the map uses when it's time to package the map. Theoretically this will also make the map more portable. I've got q3:excessive in mind. :) Current version is 1.0, I'll give a heads up if I update it. Haven't run the map in gtkradiant yet, but side by side comparision shows me the source integrity is solid. Yeah so a couple words on the screenies below. You can see there's still a lot of work left to do. FPS shown is of no relevence as -vis is not calculated yet. I'm quite happy with the street lights... more happy than anyone should be about some streetlights. That was the third revision of lights! I couldn't resist. Later if I have the time I'll adjust the shaders so the lights change. Geeky! Next page |
