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Mass Effect's Aftermath
1up is republishing a short interview with BioWare's Casey Hudson, the Project Director for their sci-fi epic Mass Effect. The piece originally ran in EGM, and covers a few nagging details left behind by the project, things like "What happened to the ability to interrupt people?", or "What's up with the UI?". "Hudson: Well, the item comparison is probably a lot better than KOTOR's because we now show you a graph that compares [the stats] of one weapon to another. As you can imagine, the inventory-management system for a role-playing game is probably one of the biggest and most complicated systems. It's actually one of the drawbacks to giving people so much to do and so many things. We didn't get much negative feedback during development with the inventory screen, although [if stuff doesn't work right], that's definitely something we want to fix in the future." That's a really deft way of handling that question, but I have to say: despite my deep and abiding love for the game, the user interface is an affront to Tufte.
I think you're greatly oversimplifying. The complexity isn't in storing the bits of data, it's in designing a system that's intuitive for players. Not to mention that I'd bet that the actual data structures are much more complex than you described above.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Had to play it through twice for it. 2x by the consort on Citadel then once each by Ashley and Liara. Doing the blue chick made me feel cool like Captain Kirk.
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I just hope they make more sex scenes, and make them more detailed, vivid, and kinky. I'll show a video of the scenes to Kevin McCollough and Jack Thompson, and tell them that I let my 5 yr old son play the game.
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Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the engine evolves for the next game. Any improvement is going to seem really significant if most of the engine is the same.
I'm not talking about inventory systems in general. I'm talking about the Mass Effect inventory system. ALL items of any type have 3 stats, there is a hard limit of 150 items (of any type). There is no weight or size. There are no bags, you can just have 0-150 items in your inventory. That's it.
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I've played mass effect, I've coded games, and I can promise you that such a structure would be at least three times as large.
.. and thats just to display the damn thing. Internally, there'd be a lot more simply because items would be a specialized form of a larger abstraction of game assets. Not many games these days are written out of pure C and no abstraction of game asset data structures.
.. what the hell does any of this have to do with an inventory screen? The complaints were about usability. It doesn't matter how complicated/simple the data is, the issue is that the UI to equip/unequip and manage your items was too simplistic given that as a player, you're switching your inventory items in and out relatively often.
Description, cost, icon, colour (since items with the same skin are colour shaded differently)
However
I think they missed out big time on not allowing you to build preset load outs you could switch between, and the button mapping for the control of the inventory screen was unintuitive at best. That has nothing to do with coding; thats an interface design (or possibly just a feature scope) issue.
BTW, you'd be shot on sight for using a character buffer to represent any form of id outside of a debug name for debug builds around here. Why use ("character.weapon.mod1"), a 20 byte string in presumably a 32 byte string buffer for an id?!? It's easy to hand wave, but the devil is in the details, and the same goes for interface design.
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I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.
Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.
A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.
Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.
My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.
Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The problem is not that it is confusing, the problem is that after about 10 hours in you start getting the "Inventory Almost Full" message. Then you spend 30 minutes cleaning out the inventory because there is no sort-by-item-level when you are at a vendor. Plus the scrolling speed is extremely slow. Consoles games stink for inventory management, but this game was the worst of the worst. Just give me a mouse and some bags.
You can't see the forest for the trees. Yes, you are being extremely arrogant.
You're talking strictly about engineering. They were talking about exposed design, user interaction, and user interface. How the data is stored in memory and manipulated is completely irrelevant to the point at hand. From an engineering perspective, the amount of work required for that part IS trivial. From an interface implementation perspective, its not that difficult, just time consuming. But when it comes down to actual screen real-estate planning, interaction with the user who is using aj oypad, it becomes a much more difficult system to plan and design. Keep in mind it is a console game which must be able to function at less than 640x480 - and on top of that there is a dedicated safe region around the edges, so take off 5% of your screen space on each edge! Additionally, a joypad is a very different control paradigm than a mouse - you can't just click around the screen. Don't judge how long it would take to create the screen they used. They're talking about how long it took them to come up with the screen they did, which includes prototyping other ideas which they felt did not work as well.
You seem to like to use background to backup your claim, so here is mine. I am currently and have been an engineer in the games industry for almost a decade, having worked on big budget titles for every platform of the current and previous generation systems, as well as PC (with the exception of the Wii). Along the way, I've worked directly UI engineers on implementation of UI screens and back end interfaces on both PC and console games.
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The hard part isn't coding it. As you say, that's pretty trivial, especially for one as simple as Mass Effect. The hard part is designing it - complex enough to have impact on tactics/strategy, simple enough to be usable on a console, usability testing it to ensure it doesn't confuse people, etc.
Generally, I thought the Mass Effect inventory system is pretty good, but it's really let down by the apparent rush job they made of the items themselves. There aren't any items you can get that aren't weapons, basically, so the accumulation of money feels pointless. All you can do with the items once you have 12 of them is sell them, to get money, that you can use to buy ..... worse weapons? I also seemed to be acquiring weapons with no obvious method by the time I was done on Virmire. I'd kill some bad guys and get a ton of upgrades or weapons, but didn't feel like interrupting the action to compare them. So I just mostly ignored that aspect of the game until I was back on the Normandy.
Balancing a game is usually way harder than coding it, and coding it is already difficult enough :)
(insert obligatory "mass effect is awesome" message here)