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Will Wright on the Colbert Report
N'Gai Croal, the talented gent covering the games scene at Newsweek, has a short piece up looking behind the scenes at the Colbert Report the night that Will Wright was in attendance. Mr. Wright passed on some encouraging words about the progress of Spore, and some funny comments about the culture inside EA. From the article: "Wright told us that Spore is slated to come out sometime during the second half of 2007. It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned. The project's subsequent milestones--Pre-Alpha Four, Pre-Alpha Three, etc.--are expected to be achieved monthly until it finally hits Alpha next spring. " Update: 12/06 00:23 GMT by Z : Don't blame me, Comedy Central. I got the YouTube link from KingJoshi.
Mod Parent up as 'Informative', please.
Teaming up with EA was the worst thing that ever happened to Maxis.
SimCity 2000 was so polished and bug-free. SimCity 3 and 4 are... well... painful to run.
My wife is a diehard 'The Sims' addict. She can go on and on about bugs in 'The Sims 2' that make me scratch my head... and I play MMOs and am used to longstanding bugs.
I just got done reinstalling her system so that she would have more room to download player-developed content. Oh, she had a 70gb hard drive I bought for her just for this reason, but 'The Sims 2' pukes if its download folder is not BOTH on the 'C' drive and in the user's 'Documents and Settings' folder. Simply relocating the folder via windows registry changes is not adequate.
I pleaded with her to quit buying the expansions until they had a 'known issues' patch, but they apparently still haven't released one for their 'pets' expansion. She wanted to breed virtual dogs so she's struggling with a veritable cornucopia of game issues, bugs, and incompatibilities.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I bought SimCity 4 from Walmart not long ago. I installed it and it wouldn't run. I went to download the latest patch and put up with the ordeal of having to register an account to do so. The patch didn't help. Emailed EA support but never heard back. Emailed a second time, nada. The next week I recieved an email from EA asking me to rate my tech support experience. I had choice words.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about how the content is generated during the game development process (no matter how it's put together, if it's "pre-made" it's pre-made). Even if that tree and that walk animation were generated with a lot of computer assistance, they are not procedurally generated on-the-fly as the game runs, based on a complex history of each organism's evolution.
Is "groupthink" what you say when anyone disagrees with you here? I gotta try that one.
You, sir, are out of your mind.
Yes, there are a few fractal shapes such as trees that are routinely procedurally generated, but even then not always. As someone who knows I can say yes, 90% of those walk cycles are either done by hand or generated from mo-cap data. Why? Because every game engine uses slightly different bone and rigging set-ups. You can't take a walk cycle or any other animation from one game and use in anything else. Even some games that are built on the same engine are not compatible, depending on how much customization has been done. If you can right a program that can generate realistic biped motion out of any random set of bones and you can write your own checks. Even Spore (the most advanced procedural game ever) does not claim to be able to generate anything of the sort, only that what is generated is consistent with the creature designed.
Yes, every character, every box, every building are made polygon by polygon. ALL OF THEM. There is a reason that AAA next gen games have 20-50 million dollar price tags attached. That is a lot of assets to generate.
I just noticed that Zonk has updated the summary with the link attributed to me. First, I don't know who posted the link on youtube but I'm grateful to them. Second, I went to comedycentral.com first, but it said I had to upgrade flash. However, I have the latest version of flash for linux (that's not beta). Comedy Central used to work with this version of flash, but they must upgraded everything and neglected the linux users. So I went to youtube and someone was gracious enough to post the interview.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
While good technology, top-notch designers and intriguing concepts may not absolutely guarantee a good game, it's not quite a surefire indicator of a flop either.
Many of the stages are 'proven fun', like the pac-man stage, the city-planning stage, the civilication stage, etc., and Will Wright has first-hand experience making excellent games of several of them. I doubt he'll settle for worse than his previous.
I'm open for the possibility that the game might turn up crap regardless, of course, but I wouldn't bet money on it. Would you?
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
Yeah, that is "understood" by people who's entire experience in the game industry is listening to a couple of speeches by Will Wright. To the actual programmers in the game industry it is "understood" to mean any generation of content by an algorithm.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Heh. I'm with you. Now I don't know what it's called internally at the various publishers, "EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" already sounds better than what others call a release. In fact, for some it's where you get after 3 patches... if you're lucky.
Take, say, Jowood for example. If "play from beginning to end" is a condition for "pre-alpha", then all their games aren't even pre-alpha as released. Unless you play them in half hour increments, because that's about how long it takes them to CTD. (OK, ok, so it's not a hard number. If you have 2GB RAM you can actually play some for 2-3 hours until the memory leak kills them. 'Course, the last half of that time they're swapping, so they "run" like a snail on sandpaper.)
Or looking at some of the patch logs, e.g., "family tree dissappeared when the first generation of player chars died out" or "in singleplayer mode the game could freeze between 1432 and 1440" in The Guild 2, as well as the other 30+ _major_ bugs listed in there... I honestly can't imagine that someone at Jowood actually played (or could play) that game from beginning to end. I mean, fuck, 1432 is literally after 8 game turns, and the death of the first generation of characters could be even earlier than that. And let me also say that if that doesn't kill your game by then, the pathfinding has already flown off the hook by that time too. It can't deal well with city growth. Or a few other issues will kill it. Count 'em and weep: 8 turns tops before the game flies off the hook.
Or take such massive fuck-ups as, say, AO at launch. Read the review on Something Awful, if you're curious, and I can vouch that all the issues described there were 100% accurate. Those swirling doors and enemies attacking through walls still bring back bad memories. In fact, SA goes pretty easy on them. There were a ton of other issues that they don't even mention there. You could run on flat ground on the street and then the game would glitch and you'd find yourself falling from stratosphere for no obvious reason. Characters would occasionally fall into the floor and start swimming in the floor. Mission instances (the non-city ones a little later) were often generated in such ways where you couldn't even get through one without falling in some hole in the ground and having no way out. Enemies' melee attacks had the same range as a sniper rifle. "Stealth" missions required you to kill everyone in the building to get the badge. Balance was a _sick_ joke: not only whole classes were useless, but a whole _faction_ in the game didn't even have shops above newbie level. Etc.
Or the German version of Victoria. Oeer. Now that was a new low. It threw a script syntax error when you tried to start the campaign. Not something blamable on the gamer's computer, or drivers, or whatever. Literally, one of the main scripts had a typo. That game couldn't run as released on _any_ computer. Forget playing from beginning to end. You couldn't even _start_ the game. It's that sad, folks. We all occasionally joke about games being shipped when they can display the main menu, but that game was the literal case of it. I can't imagine it being tested more than that, because as shipped it _couldn't_ get past the main menu.
Etc.
So, heh... "can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" is pre-alpha? Heh. Oh what I wouldn't give to only endure "rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" in most games released nowadays.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.