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.
...but missing a few interesting ones in most cases, like being able to shoot people through walls. Real live battles would be a lot safer if twelve millimeters of wood stopped missiles and massive electric arcs.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Says who? Prettu much anything bigger than a few feet on a side that weighs between 250lbs and 1 ton comes in wood.
A crate made out of particle board and 1x4s is about as cheap as it gets for strong shipping containers for heavy, expensive items. Order a full rack storage array, or an 5' industrial water filter or a V8 engine sometime and see for yourself.
Man. Everyone is focussing on a strange part of this article.
Ok. Yes. You can argue that crates still *exist.*
At the same time, when you walk around in videogame worlds, you hardly see anything *but* crates.
From Doom, we learn much of Hell is constructed from the still-growing bones of the sinning masses... and from crates.
If you read the Old Man Murray article, they test how long it takes to get to the first crate in various games. Usually, it's under thirty seconds.
These crates never seem to contain anything. They're in environments where you wouldn't necessarily expect crates. There doesn't seem to be any way to move the crates around.... the pallets are a big deal, because a four foot wide crate is useless without a way to lift it.
Game designers act as if crates are the most common item in the entire world. There is nothing you'll see more of than crates. Socks are not more common. Soda cans, chairs, magazines, and cigarettes are not. The only thing that comes anywhere near being as common is slightly withered potted plants.
Once you've read the Old Man Murray article, it's hard to ever look at games the same way again. It *is* an error, and they make it because crates are really easy to render. They make it so a scene is full of objects, but they keep the polycount low.
Now that we have enough polys available, crates are only so common because we're used to seeing crates in games. It's time to fix this. Also it would be nice to have fewer levels set in rusted-out warehouses, which is a cliche that built itself around the easy availability of crates.