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The Making of Dungeon Siege

Posted by Zonk on from the next-on-inside-the-dungeon dept.

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun Keiron Gillen has a writeup he did back before the original Dungeon Siege released. Something of a post-mortem, he and designer Chris Taylor discuss what makes the mostly traditional hack n' slasher unique. "Technologically speaking, the most distinctive element of Dungeon Siege was how it streamed its levels. Throughout the huge world, there wasn't a single loading pause. 'When you're in a fantasy game...' Chris reaches for a metaphor to explain why this is so important, 'Well, imagine if it's a movie, and if you have to change the film every ten minutes, you wouldn't be able to immerse yourself into the Fantasy. By eliminating loading screens we were able to keep people in the game, and much more immersed in this world. You become one with the game. You could melt into the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse.'"

29 comments

  1. Melting by mdenham · · Score: 0, Redundant

    You could melt into the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse. But won't that create a hell of a mess?
    1. Re:Melting by Supradog · · Score: 0

      Note to self: clean keyboard before playing Dungeon Siege.

      --
      "A bug? nonono, it's a feature"
  2. Loading screens by geekboy642 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually I've never wanted to melt into my keyboard and mouse. That seems like it may cause more harm than it helps.

    Sarcasm aside, it seems like games are only going the other direction, with the notable exceptions of this game and EVE-Online. I could certainly appreciate more games thinking ahead. One big reason (in my opinion) that they don't is that modern games try to squeeze every erg of power out to drive ever more and more detailed graphics. If the glitz-obsessed gamers and companies could step back from the bleeding edge a notch or two, this "level streaming" thing would be a lot more common-place.

    --
    Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
    1. Re:Loading screens by IndieKid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      World of Warcraft is a pretty good example of how loading screens can be (mostly) avoided. The game world is huge and you can travel from zone to zone seamlessly.

      Actually there are loading screens between the three 'continents' (Outland isn't really a continent), and between the main zones and instances, but even then the loading is pretty quick. I guess Blizzard thought the lack of loading screens (and hence a more immersive world) was more important than bleeding edge graphics.

    2. Re:Loading screens by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

      Blizzard first did that with Diablo II. The original Diablo had loading screens, but I recall during the Diablo II beta period that Blizzard crowed about how they'd figured out a way to do away with them entirely. They mostly did. You could move through massive areas quite fluidly.

      --
      The cake is a pie
    3. Re:Loading screens by Emetophobe · · Score: 1
      One thing I always liked about the GTA series was the relative lack of loading screens. In GTA 3 I believe you only ever saw loading screens when switching between the 3 main islands. Vice City was similar, only there was 2 main islands and 1 loading screen between them. I don't remember seeing any loading screens in San Andreas. I always found the world more immersive in GTA for that reason (aside from minior issues like cars and pedestrians disappearing when they went out of view and you turned around and they were gone). Hopefully GTA IV continues the trend of a seamless world with streaming content. GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas all used the RenderWare engine, while I think GTA IV they had to build their own engine since RenderWare got sold off to EA.

      And on that topic... one thing that always pissed me off was the fact that RenderWare got sold to EA and killed. EA refused to license RenderWare to any other developers and it basically ended up getting killed off by EA internally. It's yet another reason why I hate EA...

      See the Wikipedia article on RenderWare:

      RenderWare is no longer available for purchase, although EA are honouring old contracts, meaning that other developer's games after the Criterion acquisition may still use the technology. What was RW4 has dissolved among the rest of EA internal tech.
  3. No loading screens, just long waits... by Splurch · · Score: 3, Informative

    Loading screen or not, it still had long wait periods where you would travel down a descending elevator or something. They just masked the load screens, didn't really remove them.

    1. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by I'll+Provide+The+War · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is the same technique that Metroid Prime has used. Large areas are connected by small hallways to allow the next area to begin loading. Sometimes you reach the next door before the area behind it is loaded and it refuses to open for several seconds. The same thing still occurs on the 3rd installation for the Wii released last week. It actually seems like a bug if you do not know why the doors fail to always open immediately.

    2. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by damium · · Score: 1

      Another loading mask I've seen games use is short cut-scenes that happen to be timed to just longer than the next level needs to load.

    3. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by Toridas · · Score: 1

      Loading screen or not, it still had long wait periods where you would travel down a descending elevator or something. They just masked the load screens, didn't really remove them.

      I never noticed this. With elevators the screen just faded to black, the elevator went up or down, then the new level faded in. It happened pretty quickly.

      By eliminating loading screens we were able to keep people in the game, and much more immersed in this world.

      Yeah, too bad the world was incredibly linear and with one narrow corridor you could follow through the whole game.

    4. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by JoelKatz · · Score: 1

      "Yeah, too bad the world was incredibly linear and with one narrow corridor you could follow through the whole game."

      That's always a delicate balance in a game. The flipside of this is having to search the entire world to find the one little switch, door, or object that you missed the first time through with no idea where it could possibly be.

    5. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by Paolone · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The flipside of this is having to search the entire world to find the one little switch, door, or object that you missed the first time through with no idea where it could possibly be. No, what are you describing is a tree you are forced deeply to "go on". What GP and me want is a game that allows you to get there in more than one way. I found Dungeon Siege terribly boring, but then NOX spoiled me happy (not that it's not linear, but i find its gameplay extremely more varied).
    6. Re:No loading screens, just long waits... by SQLGuru · · Score: 1

      Other than a few instances where you needed specifc skills to pass a barrier, you could pretty much load up on distance fighters and healers.....set the healers to auto heal and send in the guns.....very boring.....no sense of freedom. Even the side quests were pretty much "along the way". DSII got a little better where you had to keep going back to some key cities, but even then, mostly linear, forward moving.

      Layne

  4. VM by Detritus · · Score: 1

    I thought that's what virtual memory was for. You build a huge world and page bits of it in and out as needed.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    1. Re:VM by damium · · Score: 1

      For many games building the world all at once from the data is just not possible. Not only would it take too long to build but many times it would fill up available virtual memory and still not be done.

    2. Re:VM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm... virtual memory (memory mapped disk space) is on the hard drive.

    3. Re:VM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, and? That doesn't mean it's unlimited! The in-memory representation of a game world, which has to be in a form suitable for sending straight to the graphics card, is much, much bigger than the on-disk representation, which can be made more compact and can then be compacted further by compressing it. It is not feasible to store an entire modern game in its in-memory format; hard disks just aren't big enough.

  5. still going strong by rucs_hack · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I still play dungeon siege 2, it's one of only two games I have installed, although the broken world expansion, while it add lots of niceness that makes the main game far better, is a bit small, just another chapter really.

    I keep looking to see if dungeon siege 3 is ever coming. I thought this article appearing on slashdot was an indication of such an event, seems not though. Shame.

    1. Re:still going strong by kv9 · · Score: 1

      I keep looking to see if dungeon siege 3 is ever coming. kinda
      --
      Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
  6. Dungeon Siege the movie! by DrXym · · Score: 1

    Directed by Uwe Boll. This cinematic turd has been sitting in the can for a couple of years now but apparently it's being sent out to die in January. The theatrical cut is 120 minutes. Real masochists with have to wait for the 165 minute extended edition on DVD.

  7. I always felt that the leveling system was best. by B5_geek · · Score: 1

    The level loading screen have never been an issue for me (not including all the wasted years trying to play D&D and Ultima on my C64). What I do truly love in DS was the way that it handled leveling.

    I know that it wasn't the first to 'invent' "If you primarily hack your way through battles, then your strength will increase." style of advancement; it felt the most natural.

    Yes the game was too linear, yes the game had a few major bugs that allowed for level advancement at stupid speed. But I liked it.

    --
    "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
  8. Awesome! by rucs_hack · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the link

  9. Re:I always felt that the leveling system was best by blahplusplus · · Score: 1

    "Yes the game was too linear, yes the game had a few major bugs that allowed for level advancement at stupid speed. But I liked it."

    The original DS was alright, the 2nd kinda sucked. I think the real big issue is that it should play more like diablo then baldurs gate. I mean in DS2 they had special moves and everything but it felt unnatural to use them becaue you simply couldn't turn off "auto" attack.

    That and Dungeon Sieges cheap attempt at ripping off Diablo's awesome item generation system without the depth and hardwork that was put it Diablo's came off feeling cheap. Most items in DS are throw-away, yet in diablo I'm always finding stuff that could possibly be useful for other characters or in certain situations.

  10. Boring by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 1

    I would just like to say that Dungeon Seige is the most boring game I've ever purchased.

    It also had a very strange plotline, wherein you kill a giant killer dragon and you think the game is over (oh thank God it's finally over!) only to find out you need to keep going another few hours. The ACTUAL boss of the game is "just some guy" in a dungeon, I beat him without even realizing I was beating the game, then it ended. Weird.

    On second thought, Doom 3 does that also: you kill the big monster in hell (oh thank God it's finally over!) then you get into an elevator and it's back in the mars base for another few hours of tedium. Ugh.

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    Comment of the year
  11. For More Technical Details... by simon_clarkstone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege (a fascinating read).

    To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.

    --

    C:\>spell -b slashdot_submission.txt
    Bad command or file name.
  12. film changing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well, if you had to change the film every 10 minutes you actually wouldn't notice it because they use multiple projectors and have the next reel ready to go when the little cigarette burn appears. So that's just a bad analogy.

    Its more like when you have to pause to come up with a bad analogy.

  13. That shouldn't be a problem. by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

    On the PS3, maybe. Blu-Ray is actually slower, relative to the capacity of the disk, than DVD. Thus, a Blu-Ray game anywhere near full is going to spend a lot more time loading than a DVD game near-full.

    But elsewhere... Take a look, next time, at what your computer's actually doing when it loads a level. In particular, watch your hard drive light. (If you have one; Mac enthusiasts need not apply.) Best-case scenario: The light is on steady, or nearly, which means the game is loading as fast as the disk can stream (or at least somewhere close, within a factor of 10) -- that, or you need to buy more RAM because your computer is paging like mad.

    But this never happens. Not even five years ago.

    What's my point? Well, if it's not using the hard drive much, and if loading a level takes any less time than traversing it does (and it damned well better), you at least know your hard drive is fast enough to stream the level.

    It might take CPU usage, true. But I really don't think it ends up being that bad. Just look at some of the games which use dynamic loading -- things like the Prince of Persia series on the PS2 -- some of them really do push the limits of the graphical capabilities of that system.

    No, what really keeps this from happening is lazy developers, and/or low budget for development. If the engine you wrote/leased doesn't support dynamic loading easily, you probably won't have time to implement it yourself.

    Just a quick observation: I've noticed that the games with the worst loading times also tend to have the worst tech all around, and sometimes end up just being the worst games. Example: Enter the Matrix. Bad enough to make us wait a minute or two for the area to load. Bad enough to make us do that after sitting through the cinematic, during which it isn't always loading. Un-fucking-forgiveable to make us re-load the entire area when a player dies. Even Doom 3 doesn't do this -- loading a new map can take a minute; loading a savegame on this map takes five seconds, at worst.

    Compare that to Jak & Daxter -- launch title, but still had some very cool effects, showing off what the PS2 could do. Or Prince of Persia -- beautifully detailed environments, to the point of obsession -- each additional sword the Prince gets has a name, written on the blade in Arabic, if you look closely enough.

    Or the Halo series. Halo was the game that MADE the Xbox, and while it does appear to "load", it also manages to go a whole episode without loading -- which is way more than can fit in the Xbox's RAM. Halo 2 pretty much doesn't have loading screens. Halo 3 probably won't either, despite being a flagship next-gen Xbox 360 game.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  14. (Enter asinine subject you think is witty here.) by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2, Funny

    The Making of Dungeon Siege

    Interviewer: So, how did you guys go about making Dungeon Siege?

    Dungeon Siege Developer: Copied Diablo and slapped it in a true 3D engine.

    Interviewer: Thanks! Next up on our show, how Morgan Webb, tall and dark, can be so hot face-on, but have such a damned scary profile.

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