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A Look At the Tools Used To Make Metal Gear Solid 4
Soft Image is running a detailed story about the making of Metal Gear Solid 4. They explain the game's development cycle, from the art direction to the animation of characters to the building of models and textures.
"In terms of bones used for constructing the bodies of characters, about 21 joint bones were used that contained animation data and were activated through these data. But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation. ... They also used a tool to automatically generate the rig for controlling eyeball movement and the muscles around the eyes. Because the area around the eyes is also controlled using both shapes and bones, when the eyeball locator is moved, the muscles move smoothly just like they do for the mouth. Further, even if the shape is edited to redefine the eye edges, it does not spoil the blinking or brow furrow expressions at all."
"Games: A Look At the Tools Used To Make Metal Gear Solid 4"
Ah! Coming to a Blender's feature list...
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
P0rn games?
How about Quincy, ME - from your TV to your XBox?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Never played the games, never been near a console game.
I had a friend once explain that the "metal gear solid" is a reference to one of the characters, someone called "Solid Snake" and the fighting robot suit called "metal gear". Apparently theres also someone named "Liquid Snake".
What I've always wondered is... are these names some kind of wierd Japanese toilet humor?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I for one am interested in the piece on how they made the game and can't wait until the price on PS3s falls into the range I am comfortable with so I can purchase and play what is probably the best series of games bar none.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
... actually making the gameplay any fun at all. Who cares about perfect eyeball movement in a game that will bore you to death?
I don't know... that is what made XEyes such a great game!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Just wait until the recently announced XEyes MMORPG is released. This, my friend, will put Linux on the gaming map.
After the steaming pile of shit that DMC4 and GTA4 turned out to be due to being downgraded to support the gimped 360 with its wimpy graphics hardware and smaller than last gen 7gigabyte DVD drive it scary to think what would have happend to Kojima's masterpiece if he was forced to downgrade MGS4 in the same way.
It is amazing to see what game developers can accomplish when they aren't faced with the nightmare of writing games for the 360.
Thank you ...
Quit making games that look cool but suck! This is a damn plague these days.
OMG! Can we touch you???
We all want to be as cool as you!
If I had mod points, I'd mod you redundant. This is said on almost every slashdot article involving game technologies. Yes, we all know that gameplay is more important than graphics, can you please find something new and interesting to say? Or do you need the guaranteed "insightful" karma?
Just because gameplay (just a stupid term btw, since every one has their own definition of it) is more important doesn't mean that developers shouldn't spend resources on trying to get past the uncanny valley, since it is a real problem for games that are trying to achieve a realistic look.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
I thought it was a biography of Hideo Kojima.
I thought MGS4 was actually a lot of fun. It was different from the first three (and I loved the first three, mind you), but it stayed the same in a lot of important ways. The people complaining about cutscenes obviously haven't played...oh...any of the Metal Gear Solid series or something, because they're always long as hell (and done with the kind of panache that makes the length OK, for me at least).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Softimage [sic] is a company that makes 3D modeling and animation software. As such, their part of the story isn't related to gameplay at all, which is why only art and related programming was mentioned.
What they needed was a movie camera.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
... easily done that on MS paint
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
Huh? What game was that you played? Did you have any specific complaints about the gameplay features or are you happy to just say "IT SUXORZ!" and leave it at that? I had the chance to play this about a week ago and found it possibly the coolest gaming experience I've ever seen. Granted, I've not played hundreds of other PS2/PS3 games so my console experience is a bit limited. I also played this on a 61" HDTV with a nice big surround system with a large subwoofer, so the immersion was superb. I found the movement, camera control and weapon/item usage models very well done. I also found the switches between the scripted parts and the gameplay parts about as seamless as they get. The HUD clarity and ease of use was very good. I did not run into any spots where I got "glitched" and stuck on terrain objects or any areas where I had to reload a savegame due to bugs. /shrug...I liked it a lot.
Recipe for +5 Insightful:
1. Find a topic discussing the technology of a recent game.
2. Ignore the fact that you are a geek, and deride said technology.
3. Justify said derision by arguing that this new technology does not make the game "more fun."
4. Ignore the fact that fun is (oftentimes) more reliant on the creativity and imagination of the game designers than the work done by rendering engine programmers and artists.
5. Hand in your geek card, because for some reason you don't think attempting to approach Pixar-quality animation using commodity hardware is totally awesome.
(Note, I do not have a PS3 and have never played any of the Metal Gear series of games. However, this is an interesting article about the nuts and bolts of game development. Treat it as such, not as a soapbox for your opinions on how fun or not fun particular games are.)
I rather feel artificially full after eating Chinese food with MSG than be left mentally empty after playing MGS. Who sits around watching every muscle in the players. Does that make a game more realistic? Spend more time on making a fully animated environment. I want to see flies bugging me once in a while. How about a bird that can be blown to bits (feathers showering down) because it's sitting on a fence and I can do it without PETA coming after me? Put in the occassional bee stinging one of the fellow players on the butt for entertainment value. That will make it more real that an eye twitch.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I know Microsoft isn't in the same league as Sony in designing console hardware. The first Xbox was just a bunch of very expensive to manufacture desktop PC parts thrown into a big ugly black box and the second Xbox is universally regarded as the worst console in the history of gaming.
However, the utterly braindead EDRAM design that is only large enough for 480p framebuffers is just inexplicable. It's a giant fuck you to game developers who are faced with having their game be filled with jaggies due to 720p buffers having no space left over in the 10megs of EDRAM for AA buffers or waste time, effort, and performance writing a tile based renderer just for the damn 360 just to get something that should be just a switch. Idiots.
Hopefully the rumors are true that Microsoft is throwing in the towel in the console market and returning to focus completely on the PC gaming market.
Am on the only on ROFLing at the Altair Snake?
I've never played, so none of those names mean anything to me. However, I plan to play in the future....but things'll still be a surprise for me! So, you fail. Bad troll.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
"I dont see"
They're called Fanboy Goggles. They were invented by Dreamcast fans way back in 1999/2000.
2000:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the Dreamcast could handle it"
2008:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the 360 could handle it"
"They dont bother compressing, I suspect most of that data filling up the Blu Ray is just raw uncompressed data, it's just being lazy."
You're a pathetic idiot.
It's almost three years into the 360's disastrous life and the 'graphical showpiece' for the 360 isn't some amazing first party title, it's a game running on the fucking outdated Unreal Engine 3.
What's even more pathetic about the absurdly underpowered 360 graphics hardware is even running the Doom 3 era UE3 engine Epic still had to limit the number of objects/enemies onscreen to usually just a few and confine the player to tiny corridors and rooms and even outside the background draw distance is absurdly tiny with everything beyond the immediate foreground blurred out with a vaseline type filter.
Hell, the 360's botched graphics hardware couldn't even handle the unified lighting model Doom 3 had three to four years ago.
Epic Fail.
I would add that fun is subjective and not something universal we can all agree on.
Mada mada dane.
Softimage is actually one word. Just a note from a random CG artist.
...so it should be obvious it was made by tools :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHo80w3tXGI
Both realistic look and great gameplay
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
the boss battle between laughing octopus and solid snake is the coolist/ most emotionally tramatic boss battle since SHODAN v.s. the hacker.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
to require three different accounts to play online.
In all seriousness, what the fuck?
I have my playstation account. Cool, but that isn't good enough. I sign into my playstation account and now I have to sign into a konami account? Uh, ok. That's great, I guess they wanted something that the playstation account couldn't provide.
Ok, all set, wait a third account? A gamer account? Uh, ok.
Yeah, I played MGS4 online one time and decided not to bother again. Three login screens was too much for a mediocre game. Oh, and you can only have one character, but for the low low price of $10 you can customize a second!
A fascinating article, but it focuses too much on graphics and ignores the true point of the game series.
What software was used to write and manage revisions of the voice script? How was voice recorded, processed and stored?
=)
The creator later acknowledged that he got the "Snake" name and look of the character from Snake Plissken (in the movie Escape From New York).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation.
We are doing something similar in MK vs DC Universe. Our Superheroes, Villians, and Kombatants have muscles that flex and move based on the position of other joints. This is done in Maya through "Set Driven Keys" and implemented in the game through a custom-runtime. It cuts down on the animation data required for an extremely large skeleton and it looks much more natural (biceps flex when arm bends). It's a win in both the memory footprint and visuals.
The cost comes with processing time and developer time for the implementation. The Maya rule set is in rotation angles and linear offsets. There is a conversion cost for going back and forth between the angular coordinate systems of quaternion (stored), matrix (render), and Euler (muscle system) spaces. There are weird Euler Angle rules for dealing with issues like singularities and major axis inversion make it a bit of a pain to implement if you store your data as (compressed) quaternions.
But the NES Metal Gear was still more challenging and fun.
Wow... what a wonderful way to market Softimage! I'll put it in an article on /.! No one will ever catch that!