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The Making of Black & White
Chris writes "GameSpot has posted a feature story that details the entire development process for Peter Molyneux's new PC game Black & White. There are a lot of quotes from Molyneux as he takes you through the whole three years they spent making the game. A lot of interesting stuff about the philosophical underpinnings of how the game judges you good or evil."
What, did you look at the big disclaimer "3D ACCELERATOR REQUIRED", laugh and say: "Oh those silly jokers are jerking my chain. There's no way my 'bad-ass' ISA S3/Trio with 200kb of EDO RAM won't run circles around this pansy game!" ???
Doesn't suck? What, the fact that the world physically morphs as you move around? That doesn't suck? Sheesh. Given advancements in terrain algos, (tribes 2 et al), as well as the hardware reqs of the game already, this should have been -trivial- to fix. And yet it wasn't. The gesture system is great in practice, but the more villagers you have, the slower the game runs, the fewer fps you have, the slower it is to manipulate the mouse in a specific pattern. Personally, I would've liked icons. What would have been the difference? They show me the pictures on the bottom of the screen, why shouldn't I be able to just click on them? It's not like there's really -that- many spells. The bugs in the game/gameplay are also astounding. Check out the faq written on it. "Even if you finish the game, your creature stays cursed.". Brilliant. No, really. Combine things like that with the forced tutorial every time I restart make it a rather silly game to play. To sum up: Playing and finishing in story mode screws your creature permanently. Playing in 'skirmish' mode means converting the game into an RTS, for which it was clearly not designed. Good stuff. That said, some of the story elements aren't bad, and the creatures are pretty nifty. But why oh why does 'number of poos' need to be a statistic, and does it need to incorporate fart jokes? ...
Nietzsche is dead. - God
It sounds like a really cool game, but original? It is really just a remake of Populous, isn't it? Granted, the time has come for a remake. Ater the success of Populous there were lots of clones (like Megalomania), but nothing similar has been made for five or six years.
Three years and a month, thank you very much. And I think you meant John Romero's zombie army of programmers and artists. But bless you for not mentioning Anachronox.
Considering the individual has their keyboard resting on the far side of a 12x18 Wacom tablet, an illustration book left open near what appears to be Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy and other art books to the left of the monitor, a small stack of artwork on the other side, and is sitting in an area with other similarly equipped desks and concept art tacked to the walls, I must in fact conclude that... it's a very powerful gesture programming system indeed.
In fairness, many programmers' desks look as messy but are liable to include somewhat sensitive materials, so you wouldn't see them photographed as much. And of course, programmers' mess is pseudorandom, not by design.
I had my creature eat a water miracle by mistake once. I wanted to reward him for picking it up, but that caused him to devour it. I was apprehensive about what might happen next, but it was uneventful -- all that really happened was that I lost that miracle. It would be a nice touch if there were an appropriate comedy moment after the creature eats a Miracle.
What do you mean, how are they going to modify it? It's got 3 controls; a right-click, a left-click- and the directional control. OK, put two of the triggers to simulate the wheelmouse functionality, but that's about it, all done. What about the analog stick make it so you can't draw spirals and hearts?
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Motion Blur movies 24 FPS huh?
What crack are you smoking? It's a biological fact that, at 30 FPS, your brain blurs the motion enough that you don't see the frames any more. This isn't some trick or arbitrary number made up by the MPAA to cheat you out of your deserved 60 FPS movies with THX and such. If you or anyone you know claim to see frames at 30 FPS, you need to go submit yourself someplace to be studied.
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You XOR one with the other.
Remembering that (x|y)|x=y for any number, the solution is a[x]=a[y]|a[x];a[y]=a[x]|a[y];a[x]=a[y]|a[x]. Try it, it works.
Funny, I have a Kensington Turbo Mouse trackball, one of those big Arcade Centipede trackballs. And the heal miracle is the easiest one for me to do :)
I have trouble with the shields...
Trainspotter fact: It has a cathedral and is therefore a city. I kid you not.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
First of all, Peter Molynoux (I bet he's furious by now that no one can spell his last name right. ;-) created them both. I recon you still can copy an old concept though. But although part of the idea is the same, "You are a God." a lot of new stuff has entered the game which makes it interesting.
;-)
First of all you have this creature. Think of it as a Tamagotchi which can interact with it's enviroment and actually learn. (Not only grow fat and die, it can grow fat, it can't really die though.)
Second you have the people, in B&W you can interact with the people in a way which wasn't possible in any of the Populous games. You can pick them up and put them down to give them some "divine inspiration" or you can hurl them across the land. (Be careful though, your creature has a nasty habit of picking up on what you do and tend to imitate.
And the graphics, yummm, they really did manage to create one of the best looking 3D engines to date. On the topic of FPS btw, my P3-550, 256Mb and Matroc G400Max shugs along at 25 FPS at high detail. I don't know if people with 1GHz computers are having problems with drivers or what, but I don't have any probems.)
And then there's a lot of small things. Like how your creature can learn to dance, it's really a game you should try!
Is B&W actually OUT
Yes. Got my preordered copy in the mail yesterday, and I'm in Norway.
I expect that most of the larger brick-and-mortar game shops have received their shipments.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
41-year old? I thought he was in his late fifties. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I gotta concur...
I got the game last night. I've played for a total of three hours. It took down my system - my normally as stable as you can hope Windows will be - eleven times in those three hours. So far, I've learned that going in the rooms in the temple is the surest way I've ever seen to crash my PC... I think I've spent longer trying to skip the intro than play the game.
Sigh. It is gorgeous, though.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
It was written in pascal too. (Use "unp" to unencrypt the .exe)
Here's a link with a bit of history: http://www.starbreeze.com/triton.htm
Unfortunately you'll have to run it under DOS with OUT any 386 memory managers.
The creature will eat the Beachball, Rocks, and if you manage to get to the forth world you may notice that the Skeleton Village is populated with living dead.
My creature cleaned house. I hope I didn't need them skeletons for anything. YES! HE ATE THEM ALL DISPITE PUKING EACH ONE UP IMMEDIATELY AFTER EATING IT!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Anyone else get the impression that the game is seriously forest-bound? It seems like all I do is get people self-sufficient food-wise (which takes a RIDICULOUS amount of wood in itself) and then keep throwing down wood or magical forest.
Maybe there's some super 31337 trick I'm missing, but that seriously detracts from the game...
"All I do is eat and poop!" -- Bean
Occasionally, I've seen some second-run theaters or art houses that have cheap projectors with single-bladed shutters (producing a refresh rate of 24Hz), and in those cases, the flicker is very, very annoying.
Also note that it seems to have become trendy in the last couple of years to photograph action scenes with a very high-speed shutter (such as in Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan). The frames are still spaced out at every 24th of a second, but for each of those frames, the shutter is only open for a very short time (maybe 1/500 sec.?). That reduces motion blur so that you can see objects a little more clearly, but it also makes all the frames seem somewhat disconnected from each other. Just look at those clumps of dirt that fly during the explosions in Private Ryan. You can see them neatly suspended in mid-air (as opposed to just a streak across the frame), but that lack of motion blur also makes it harder to follow them from frame to frame.
Free Hans!
I'd like to see the entire GUI component of an OS support this.
Walk around with a PalmOS device for a few days. You'll be yearning for keyboard shortcuts (which B&W thankfully has provided).
I have ended a couple hours of B&W, and found that I've forgotten how to use a scrollbar. :)
[
The manual indicates (under miracles: wood and miracles: grain) that repeatedly clicking the mouse button when casting these miracles will increase their production. If you position your hand over the little 'hut' part of the village store and rapidly click the action button, you'll wind up with about 30,000 units of wood per spell (rough estimate). That's enough that I've rarely seen my people cutting down trees, and in fact have only need for a single wood-cutter in a far off town I took over.
Hope that helps.
Playing God in a popolus environment. Throwing around helpless villagers. Planting trees through the roof of a house. Teching your creature to use a bathroom.
Smuffe.
Yeah right. Going above 31 fps is really important. Not!
The whole point of the game is that they manage something nearly impossible- how many polygons do you think it takes to draw a whole continent anyway? Hint: more than any graphics card can do.
Therefore the game scales back the number of polygons to hit a particular framerate. The designers obviously chose 31 fps because if you go much faster than that the players can't really see it anyway. (Don't bother explaining how YOU can feel the difference- you can't.)
Apart from that you make some very good points. It's a bit overhyped. Basically at the end of the day its similar to Magic Carpet 2 with shades of Dungeon Keeper.
Still, its fun. I've played games that are a LOT worse.
But, I agree in the final analysis its leaping for 10/10 but only making 8/10.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So cinema is getting more computer like? (Refresh rate on monitors is typically 70hz or more, obviously.)
I also read some discussion about the moving shutters used for filming movies. Apparently you can see the shutter sometimes- it's going to have an effect on the blurring- different effects depending on which direction the object is moving in. There's even been some discussion about emulating this for computer graphics use (probably mainly for film use).
Come to think of it, that's why they used 1/500 sec, so that it makes it easier to image process it after filming. It's not a trendy thing per se, it just reflects the tech they used.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"There was a topic on here a whie a go about how technology makeith not a game.
Ok, so there's some bugs. Big deal, they're not terribly nasty ones, and if finishing the game in single player mode reduces your critter to slag, well then... just save before you do that.
On the whole this game RULES. It is highly addictive, very interactive, and always good for a laugh. Autosave is a bit of a bitch but you can turn that off.
Black and White, especialy if it goes open source, has the opportunity to be a foundation for strategy games in much the same way that quake and unreal have been foundations for first person shooters. Once the engine exists, there are many programmers who can turn this into hundreds of facinating games. Furthermore, it dosn't look like Lionhead has plans of abandoning htis game.... more stuff is coming, hell... there's even a room for that stuff in the temple!
Bottom line: BUY THIS GAME it is the first thing since Civilization to make it to the 5:00 am zome for me.... that's saying alot.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Basically my first impressions,
1) The kiddie voices used throughout the game really drive you mad
2) My Geforce on 700 Mhz has trouble with some scenes but I am on highest detail setting
3) Teaching creatures would be more fun if there was more useful things for them to do, currently I can only teach my tiger to throw my villagers into walls and stuff, which makes up for any other short commings in the game, cause it's as funny as anything.
It's turtles all the way down.
It's out. I bought it over a week ago, March 29th, at the Fry's Electronics on Hamilton Road in San Jose.
It's a great game! My only complaint is the speed of play, it can take hours to get a scenario done by the time you feed your people, take over other towns, build up those towns, etc... My favorite thing, though, is petting my monkey. 8-)
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Read the README, there's some additions, probably because the developers and testers did not want to spend all day failing to draw heart and wood gestures. Recognizing gestures isn't that hard in code, but the bigger you make your gestures, the easier it is to get recognized (just like PalmOS graffiti).
Typing R is the same as the Repeat gesture. This is the number one time saver. Just as graffiti is fine for jotting a quick note, I don't want to be scrawling all day.
Typing M is the same as the Miracle spiral gesture. You still have to draw the specific gesture to choose it, but repeats with R simplify multiple casts.
Typing C zooms to your Creature. The camera will follow him until you adjust the view yourself.
Ctrl+Shift zooms in very close to your hand. Zoom way out and then use this repeatedly to bring distant cows or mushrooms to your altar. Since this is so fast, you can steal trees from your enemy's forests with practice.
Don't waste a bookmark on your temple: Space,Space goes to your temple, and Space,Space again returns to your previous view.
Ctrl+digit makes a bookmark. Digit zooms to bookmark. Get your angle of view just right to see most of the buildings in the middle of a town, plunk a bookmark in the current center of your screen. Then you can zip to that same vantage point very fast. Again, use this to take things from place to place super-fast, like scaffolds to a neighboring town.
Another time-saver: assemble the scaffolds in the workshop yard, not on the building site. Why fly back and forth several times?
Another sanity saver: your creature will continue to follow a command after unleashing. Bring him home with a quick Space,Space,L,click,L. If he wanders into some other gods' zone, the other god will leash your creature!
[
All programming is done through their unique Gesture Command(tm) system :)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Sigma is a game being developed by Relic, the studio that created Homeworld (Game of the Year by some accounts, etc, etc.) Anyway if you dig B&W, you might also dig Sigma (when it's out, late this year?) It involves crazy creatures, a B-movie plot, genetic wackiness, a pretty impressive rendering engine, etc. I'm sure the dev team of Sigma has watched B&W closely (it's been in development for about as long), though the gameplay and objectives seem to be different enough. Homeworld cameras and gameplay were great, so I have high hopes for Sigma!
1 /page2.asp n dex3.shtml d =92&pageid=5 e ws1.asp
In the words of Relic's CEO, Alex Garden, (who has brushed shoulders with Peter Molyneaux)... "We prefer to think of Sigma as what happens when a geneticist smokes far too much crack."
Some links for more info...
http://forums.relicnews.com
http://pc.ign.com/previews/14840.html
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/gamestock0
http://www.gameweek.com/features/gamestock01/pc/i
http://gamepen.ugo.com/gamepen/Features.asp?itemi
http://www.gamesmania.com/articles/PC/sigma/previ
How does Relic afford to fund a game that has also been something like 3 years in the making? Microsoft dollars. Sierra funded Homeworld. Not sure why MS is backing this one, and say what you want about the evil empire... but they've got money to risk on crazy games like Sigma. And I think that's pretty goddamn cool...
John Romero, and his army of programmers and artists, took four years to create Daikatana!
Does it have frogs? or robotic mosquitos? a sparking fist? all that green scenery?
Hmm...come to think of it, Duke Nukem (taking) Forever has been worked on for pert-near FIVE years now.
Woah, I stayed up all night gripped by the other behind-the-scenes stories that I guess I had just somehow missed. Check them out:
http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg/
The story of Lionhead studios read like one of a man with 18 Charisma holding together a company by sheer force of will and charm, but you should read the incredible story of tragedy, specifically "Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte" and the story of lies and folly, "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana." I also found the story "Total Annihilation: The Story So Far" fascinating because the game really was so unbelievably good, and it seemed like Chris Taylor had come out of nowhere. The "Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard" story is of course this industry's unbounded success story and was also a fairly interesting read because Blizzard has historically been so secretive and unwilling to discuss its insides with the press.
Having done the indie self-funded game development thing, I have never read a story more inspirational than the one on Peter M. and Black & White. It was thrilling and romantic to hear about the bullpen style open office, the absurdly long hours, frankly the outright suffering, the light and flexible approach to design, the excitement of frantically describing your vision and watching it come together, and through thick and thin Peter's unflappable optimisim and gamemanship.
Although I think the year-long 16+ hour days are tragic and wrong, I think this is otherwise how games should be made. I hope in exchange for funding it himself, Peter and his developers enjoy a tasty return on investment.
I picked up black and white the other day and love it. I've only been waiting for like two years since i saw the preview in PC gamer. sure there are some issues. but the prob with land 5 has been taken care of just check a BW fan site. and otehr issuses are being solved all the time. molyneux has said that even more things will be taken care of in coming weeks. as i recall waiting for the latest version of Doom, quake, unreal, etc... is fine. all of these games were great and were all buggy. then they released a patch and we updated and played on. i think we'll just have to accept buggy games when they come out. its just an economic reality. (btw rolling the rubber ball through town is just fun)
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The gesture recognition system works but some of the gestures can be a bit hard to do, especially when you really need to do them quickly.
The gestures are used in different ways. For example, if you have your creature leashed to your hand you can shake the mouse right and left to remove the leash from your hand.
The miracle gestures are where it can get tricky. The healing miracle, for example, calls for tracing a heart pattern. I've often had to do it two or three times to get it to work. I've never been unable to perform a gesture, but it has often taken several tries for the more complex ones.
Considering what the games has to do to recognize your mouse gestures I'm amazed that it even works at all. Once one has had some practice with the gestures they come pretty intuitively. I still use the keyboard for movement and such, however.
Xemacs has "strokes mode" which is pretty much gestures for emacs. If you've used one of the CAD tools that supports strokes (Mentor Graphics for me) you really start to appreciate what a great improvement to the UI they are.
I'd like to see the entire GUI component of an OS support this.
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The game was, in fact, released too soon. Even though it was postponed back and back and took three years, it's still quite buggy. Framerate never goes above 31 fps (with the reccomended system, plus an extra 128 ram on top). The non-traditional interface is great.. At least until you realize you need to get to a main menu instead of being forced to watch the ten minute intro again after a crash corrupted your most recent save and the program assumed that you wanted to start a new game. It's cool until you uninstall and reinstall to replace corrupted files, taking careful checks to ensure you don't lose your saved game, only to find out that you lost all your creature AI. It's cool until you realize that you only really have the creature for 2 of the 5 lands, since you don't really use him on the first, he gets kidnapped in the second, and there's the 'level 5 creature bug' which utterly destroys him in the last level. It's cool until you realize that the villagers can't do anything except deforest and overpopulate, and you have to spend all your time completely micromanaging them. It's cool until the side quests completely disappear the same time the plot does. It's beautiful eye candy, it's completely engrossing for the first several hours, it leaps across traditional boundaries, but it just, unfortunately, didn't quite make the last hurdle.
B&W looks like one of the most original games to come out of any development house in many years. The FPS, RTS, Roleplaying (sometimes just repackaged adventure games) have all been beat to death. Great houses like Looking Glass have fallen off the map. It's good to see something like this be created, I look forward to it being the best seller of 2001 and significant for many years after.
I also wanted to point out the article, it is one of the best written (and longest!) that I have seen on any website or magazine in a long time. We should thank the author Geoff Keighley for taking the time to really interview the people at Lionhead and understand what it took to bring this game to fruition. The article was so interesting there was no way that I could go without reading it until the end.
Many people here post flames when writers and journalists get computers and technology wrong, we should be thankful when they get tech right.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
On page one, the article says "three years... team of 25 people" My first thought was to run the numbers: break-even is 273,000 units (conservative estimate). No way this gets funded. No way. This game would have been rejected again in the first meeting when there was no "good" answer to the question "what genre is it?"
Page two explains why the game got made: it was self-funded.
Its really a shame that the "big companies" in the game industry can't support efforts like these. Black and White looks like its going to be an amazing game, and it would have been a great thing for a publisher to have participated in its development.
Good to see that better and better games are being developed.
He is right in a way. Movies do not see the flickers, because if you look at a single frame of film it is blurred, like taking a picture with long exposure and people move inside of it. It has transistion from the last frame, the current frame, and the nextframe all merged into one. The blurred goes away when the frames are played in sequence at the correct speed. The effect is moving pictures. If you take a frame of computer game, from a game there is no blur. Every single picture is sharp and crisp. To get a non-jerky motion to show you need to push a video game to at least 60 fps. The extra frames give a more fluid motion, because the eye cannot pick up each frame in its entirety, but sees parts of each frame and combines them into a composite picture of sorts. The effect is that the motion is fluid. Film doesn't need extra frames but computer games do.
I've been tring to work out what the most bizarre thing my creature is willing to eat. So far, I've seen my monkey eat people, whole pine trees, live cattle, it's own dung, and a fence.