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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."
...every day before work is have a forklift race, where u can win different prizes depending on what position you come in, then we spend the rest of the day moving aroun 15 wooden crates about the harbour.
oxymoron of the day - Xbox gamer
...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.
Well, this detail probably isn't even in error. I've yet to recieve an engine (think V-8, automotive) that didn't come in a WOODEN enclosure that looked an awful lot like a crate. Sure, thigs like brake pads, calipers, and other smaller and lighter items come in cardboard boxes, but for the BIG HEAVY stuff, crates still rule the shipping world.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
If the crates are made of metal, then how am I going to break into them with the crowbar?
As for crates made of cardboard, they just aren't as satisfying to break...sorry.
Now...crates made of glass or ceramic...now that's something I could get behind...
^_^
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It makes me wonder why shoot and kill in one location at all? Think of de_dust, which makes more sense... hunting down terrorists in a small village. Although de_dust has practically no houses or even shops or vehicles, and too many crates.
Look around you. There are apartments (great setting for a game, have never seen a complete apartment map, or a good one, there are villages, mountains, and certain places like airports, hospitals, downtown, offices, railway yard etc. The 747 map in CS was original too, but they overused airplanes in other maps.
I wouldnt mind seeing an underground parking lot map. Think of the parking lot scene in terminator2... I always thought that was a great setting for a game lots of glass to break and places to duck.
I was gonna say a school is good too, but I suppose its not.
And if youre gonna make a warehouse, add computer desks, trucks, weighing and wrapping machinery, forklifts and lifttrucks, piles of crates arranged properly to maximize space...
A library would be great if pieces of paper will fly if you shoot the books...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
*looks up from smashing crates into people with the gravity gun*
:-D
Nooooo......
And hey, which is cooler, the warehouse scene where they're boxing the ark from Indiana Jones, or a bunch of pallets? How would you like it if the "very special award" arrived in a cardboard box full of peanuts rather than a wooden crate labeled "frage-eel"?
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
That's why HL2 is the most realistic game ever. It has crates, oh yes. But it also has pallets. AND cardboard boxes!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
from the article:
"..[developers have] still got that outmoded notion that the player is your adversary. He isn't. He's your audience, the person you're trying to entertain and provide enjoyment to."
Amen! I hope the next time a designer considers putting a jumping puzzle or a maze into a game, he stops and thinks of that.
The same article points out that you can't move crates without a forklift and a pallet for the crate to sit on. If there are crates in a place, there had better be pallets under them and at least one forklift as well.
Because you know, it's not like crates have been around longer than forklifts.
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.