Slashdot Mirror
Games With Crates Get No Twinkie
Gamasutra's reoccuring feature "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie" covers the subject of crates and barrels in games, (ala Old Man Murray) courtesy of designer Ernest Adams. From the article: "If there are crates in a place, there had better be pallets under them and at least one forklift as well. In fact, somebody wrote to me (unfortunately I lost his name in an E-mail crash) and pointed out that wooden crates are completely passé now anyway. Modern shipping is done in piles of cardboard boxes all held together with industrial-strength plastic wrap. Wood is heavy and expensive, cardboard is light, cheap, and recyclable. But our FPSes are still displaying 40-year-old shipping technology, even in futuristic science fiction games." He also touches on Rumble implimentation, Easy Mode, Split Screen, and Camera Angles.
Why is is that almost every feature posted on (the admittedly good) Gamasutra makes a slashdot post about 12hrs later? Someone is really milking that site ;)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
Perfect Dark handled crates without pallets very well, I think. It had a nifty device attached to some of the crates that made them hover so that you could easily push them around. Likely some antigravity device or something similar. No need for pallets, forklifts, or anything.
I work in a high tech place that would be a great setting for a game, and there are crates all over the place. There's every sort of crate you could imagine-- big wooden ones, big plastic ones, metal ones, medium sized ones of wood, plastic or metal, little ones of all materials. All sorts of different paint jobs from bare wood to fancy bright paint with all sorts of warnings. We even have an internal website for sharing surplus material and it has a whole category with hundreds of used crates and shipping cases, with pictures of them available on-line. And most crates large enough to fit over the forks of forklift have rails to hold them high enough off the ground so they don't need to be palletized to be forked. Smaller cases get palletized, and sometimes saran wrapped to hold them in place.
I hardly think we're unique, either-- all those crates come from somewhere, and when I see other peoples' facilities, they have lots of crates, too.
If you spend much time in a place where people make actual stuff as opposed to arranging ones and zeros in useful ways, you'll see lots of crates.
What is unrealistic are the signs that they put on them, but hey, they're games.
(Off-topic: If anyone has some hints on how to easily fix these errors, I'd love to hear it.)
:-)
Off-topic solutions!
MAX_MAP_MODELS: I think this one's when you have too many brush entities. The limit for the HL engine is 400, but you'd be best sticking under 200 or so for a multiplayer game. Actually, for a network game, the fewer entities of any kind, the better.
MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES: This one is a bit more fiddly, and is the result of the player clipping being too complex. First, if you're not using a custom build of the Half-Life compilation tools, I'd suggest moving over immediately - there are numerous tweaks and new features which are absolutely invaluable for someone building a larger map, such as turning ornamentation brushes into func_illusionary entities to remove their clipnodes completely (but watch the map models count!). There's also the glorious 'NULL' texture which is ridiculously useful, tricks for hugely increasing the maximum number of planes in the map, and last but not least, my lovely realistic light_environment hack.
The main trick to reducing the clipnodes count, however, is to put 'CLIP' brushes around any complex geometry. If you've got some roughly-cylindrical pipes, put a cuboid around them - likewise, if you've got some unreachable ceiling details such as vents, skylights or whatever, put another 'CLIP' brush around those too.
Turning something like, say, some chairs and tables into a func_wall will make visibility much easier to calculate, assuming you haven't done so already - to reduce the map models count, you can probably tie an entire roomful of furniture to one brush entity. Plus with a relatively modern HLRAD, you can get the furniture to cast shadows again, although it can dramatically increase lighting calculation time while compiling.
Finally, when you've got completely sick of the Half-Life engine, move on to Source. It's utterly awesome - maps can be so utterly, terrifyingly huge...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Eh heh... Brahms did lullabies. The quote went something more like "they were playing Wagner. I couldn't resist."