Slashdot Mirror
A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come
Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting:
"Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
This guy goes all the way back to Doom. It's almost as if he was, you know, in his mid-twenties!
I admit I am a carmack fanboi but damn that's how good doom was. It didn't need a story. It didn't need a manual even. Heck it didn't even need a mouse. There's also the important open source aspect of the game that gamers can create their own WADs which later turned into an integral part and the games themselves in Quake TF, and for the real CS:S and TF2. All because of doom.
Doom isn't a game, it's an attitude.
A lesser extent Duke Nukem? That game was writing gold. I shed a tear as the main protagonist (Duke) said it was time to "Kick ass and chew bubblegum.... But I'm all out of gum". It felt like it was a commentary on the human condition; "It is time to do 2 things, but I can only resonably do one of them right now"
Without Duke Nukems thick layer of metaphors and social commentary, Kojima would never have been inspired to make Metal Gear Solid.
Doom's gameplay is very fun, and there are only few modern games that are similar to it. The original Serious Sam games were similar. Games with good stories are good, but games like Doom are too. Does every game need to have a story? A movie or a fiction book without story, that is bad. But for a game it shouldn't be a negative criticism if it doesn't have one. Depending on the style and purpose of the game, just being fun is enough. Many modern games feel too heavy and slow paced to match the fun of fragging monsters seen in Doom.
And ID software is credited for the first fully dynamic Black-On-Black rendering, overlayed with dynamic even blacker shadows, and then compensating with a shotgun that was so inaccurate that actually seeing things didn't matter anyway.
For the last 5 years the evolution in mainstream PC gaming has been all around fancy new graphics.
The only new original gaming style that poped-up was MMORPGs (not really new, but it did became mass-market in the meanwhile).
[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]
The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but one thing that barely changed in 20 years is AI. I have played many many RTS and FPS games during the last 20 years and while they're getting nicer graphics and effects, the AI is still the same. As a matter of fact, recent FPS games have dumber AIs than half-life's marines. Nowadays I only play online games because of this.
He says : "Doom (story in it) was absolutely rubbish"
Story in most games is incidental and most game stories are bad, a game with great gameplay can save a bad story, but a game with a good story can't save a bad game.
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
People care about how fun a game is ultimately, although I agree there are graphics whore games, but gameplay still is the core of any game. Good graphics cannot ultimately save the crappyness of a game. For instance Assasin's creed looked great but got boring and monotonous insanely fast.
> You start in a room, no idea what's going on [...] You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all
looks like my own life
born in room
no idea what's going on
need to read holy book (manual) to get a grip on it all
ans life seems laking sense if I don't follow the book
at least a game is WYSIWYG
which is not the case with life
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game. You grabbed your minigun, charged into a room you'd never seen before and blasted away. You even had a chance of surviving. There are no story lessons from Doom because there weren't supposed to me.
It's exactly the lack of immediate mindless action that's put me off gaming for a long time after. I want gaming, not cinematic experiences. If you prefer cinema that's fine and there's room for both, but for me all the plot-driven stuff is a turn-off. I still want to grab a minigun and charge into a room blasting widly in a totally unrealistic fashion as strange creatures fall in front of me. Shortly before being overwhelmed by ridiculous odds, of course.
When I do play acrade games, I tend to head MAMEwards. Plot-driven stuff just doesn't do it for me at all - if it does for you then that's fine and I'm certainly not criticising it, I'm just saying there's more than one type of gamer and Doom appealed to me in a way that almost none of the other FPS stuff has. That's precisely because it has little story or plot.
Cheers,
Ian
> Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw
> was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and
> (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D.
The article appears to only think of games from ca. 1993 on, but I will expand this and include 8 bit home computers in my comments:
Old home computer games invariably had no or a paper thin plot that was described in a manual. Different from Doom? Not at all. Perhaps all early PC games had long introductions or manuals, but not most home computer games. So even if early PC games had good plots, leaving those home computer games out of the comparison is nonsensical as they all influenced each other.
You didn't need to read the manual/instructions in most cases either even for games that had a solid plot. You just dive into it and figure out what's going on later... I did that in 1985 and it still works now. Mostly. For more complex games, e.g. Elite in 1984, reading the manual was both interesting and made the playing more fun. For most games it was moot.
FTA:
> Duke Nukem 3D is a notable turning point from a stylistic point of view,
> introducing the idea of a vocal player character with a pre-defined personality in an FPS
> - but it's one which has also been outdated since then.
Outdated? No way. Duke 3d is still fun to play, just as Doom is. And both are still a lot of fun in a network. You don't need bleeding edge graphics to enjoy the fun of multiplayer gaming nor to enjoy Duke's commentary...
Conspicuous from its absence from the article is multiplayer. So let me throw something out:
Even for as far as PC gaming has come, it still hasn't moved into one niche that consoles currently dominate. This niche is when you have friends over, and they're suddenly in the mood to play a video game. So you want a game that 1. is easy to learn and 2. doesn't need more PCs than you have available (because having to go back home to dismantle their PCs would kill the moment). Console "party" games fill this niche, such as Mario Party series and its imitators. With the rise of HDTVs that allow easy PC connections to the VGA or HDMI input, why hasn't someone outdone Mario Party on PC?
And, of course, PC gaming is dying...
The reason is quite simple : consoles games sell a lot more copies. Game publishers have no choice but to make a game for console with maybe a PC port. Especially for AAA titles that need huge teams of artists and programmers to develop the graphics and game engine.
Why do console games sell more copies? One big reason is reduced piracy due to vastly better DRM with a console. The OTHER reason is much bigger : consoles are vastly cheaper to purchase than a gaming PC. Just $300, and any game works immediately without hassle. The majority of the gamers in the world don't have the patience or knowledge to screw around with the many, many incompatibilities and bugs associated with PC hardware and software.
This wasn't always the case, PC gaming was huge in the 1990s. However, consoles have 'caught up' to the point that while any given generation of consoles quickly falls behind PCs, the graphics can render to an HDTV which at least approaches the quality of a good PC monitor. Also, current consoles fully support online gaming about as well as PCs ever did.
The only edge PCs still have is the keyboard and mouse as a controller.
Yes, PC graphics cards are better than current consoles, but that only applies to a small fraction of the available PCs.
Of course, console's new reign of domination is only going to last until cloud gaming takes off, which should be over the next few years.
... all the way up to $60+ for a farkin' game.. and that doesn't include pay-to-play games or the expansion-pack model (e.g. the sims) that can cost upwards of $200 or more by the time you've satisfied your kid (until the next version comes out).
and you will realise it's actually gone backwards.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
What about California Games? Leisure Suit Larry? Wasteland?
Yes, there were graphical games in the 80s. They were CGA, EGA,
and even VGA, but they existed.
On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what's going on and you are surrounded by demons.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible.
Huh, right story driven.
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
PONG didn't have a story line either, and what's good enough for PONG is good enough for me!
Duke = Citizen Kane
What's Daikatana then, Gigli?
Chess's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any board game off a shelf, from Cluedo to Monopoly, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Chess. Things like the wobble of the pieces on the flimsy base board and the cheap plastic moulding in the box that doesn't quite hold the pieces right -- these were things that Chess invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Chess was absolutely rubbish. You start at your end of the board, no idea what's going on and you are surrounded by pawns. You have to read the manual and maybe the Wikipedia page to get a grip on it all -- something modern board games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Chequers and (to a lesser extent) Backgammon. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many kinds of pieces capable of making as many totally arbitrary different kinds of moves as possible.
and even later the Wing Commander series I am actually disappointed with many of today's games. Haven't found a space game that makes me feel like the explorer that Starflight did and Wing Commander was simply amazing in both story and game play.
What do we have now? Dozens of games with either space marines or commandos? Yawn.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sadly, iD hasn't seemed to have progressed one iota.
They conceptualized an entire genre of gaming, yet they can't seem to get out of the basic 'you walk down the hallway and *poof* the lights go out and a monster jumps at you' box.
Sure, every game is technologically magnificent but you'd think for their millions and millions of dollars, they could afford someone who could breathe a little life into the games.
Where's Rage, by the way? It could just be selective memory, but it seems like it's been a loooong time since D3, and I don't even see Rage on the hypemeter.
-Styopa
OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.
When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We still have linear storylines damnit (and NO, those stupid choices you get in games are gimmicks and add nothing to the story). We need real AI now that can interact with the player.
"You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing."
There in lies the problem! Like almost anything in this instant world, if you can't understand it in less than 0.3 secs, most people will simply turn off and find something they can get a handle on quicker. Very sad statement on our times.
I have got into retro gaming lately, if you're gonna a play a rehashed idea, might as well play the original arcade and 8-bit versions!
The first FPS that had a good story, and consequently great co-op play, was the Marathon Trilogy--the first of which was released about the same time as Doom II. It also had an amazing level and physics editor, as well as water, flight, tracking missiles, beautiful graphics (so long as you didn't get too close to anything), power-ups, interesting baddies with great sounds and even some good AI, and a real 3d environment--elevators and all--radar, great gore, etc. There really was no other game comparable to it, especially for creative, intelligent types who enjoyed FPS--unlike any other FPS at the time, you could play it tactically. Strangely, the one thing it did lack was the ability to jump. By the time it was ported Windows, there wasn't much interest. And then Microsoft bought Bungie...
I agree this article ignores the vast history of video games, but comparing Leisure Suit Larry and Halo 3 would have been retarded. (Maybe some day they will make a FPS where the purpose is to go around fucking people. A full immersion pornography game with puzzles and chuckles.)
I would have liked to see the author take Doom and Killzone 2 or Halo 3 and trace the relevant developments between them. These are considered to be the premiere FPS titles of their time, and have practically zero plot. With that scope, the author may have been able to put together something worthwhile.
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What an idiotic quote from the article. First of all it is not "inventing" the gun wobbling, sooner or later any sensible developer and/or artist who wants a reality like feel to him game would have done that. Granted, id software were much more visionary than what was normal back in Dooms days.
Also, it is equally stupid to slash id for not providing a story. To me that was what was great about Doom, it just threw you into that world, without explaining it all that much. That is another side of the "reality simulation" bandwagon which id created - they wanted to get away from all the explaining and mimicking and come closer to the real thing. Of course, in retrospekt, we can see that Doom is not much of a "real thing", but when I was 14 and saw it running on a 15" screen of a 486DX machine, it looked as real as Crysis trailer did two years ago. The article author has probably gone soft from all the manuals and storybooks he has read, now he cannot even understand the point of not supplying one.
The PC market is moving to digital downloads, so most sales stats are wrong.
"The stats are based on retail sales. Online game subscriptions and digital distribution are not included. And that online gaming market is increasing rapidly, especially with PC gamers. UPDATE: Starting with 2005, NPD tracks online PC sales."
Like this one.
Good post, mate, but wrong. Please mod parent down :-)
-Woof woof woof!
Didn't you ever see the movie?
Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from these were things that id Software invented
Surely having a wobbling gun is an element of realism, not an id created idea? Knowing the general direction you've been shot from is also pretty realistic, and on-screen feedback is just the logical replacement when actual pain inflicting devices are unavailable...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard
That hasn't been the case since about 2000. By that time, every new PC came with a port for a multitap that takes four controllers.
and a tiny crt
Tiny CRT? It used to be the case that TVs couldn't use a PC's video output because CRT SDTVs ran at 15.7 kHz (480i) and PC monitors ran at twice that (480p or higher). But that changed in 2008 when LCD HDTVs with a VGA input displaced CRT SDTVs in electronics stores. At the start of the 2008 holiday shopping season, HDTV had already entered one-third of U.S. households. Two aspects of the "far to go" that I mentioned involve 1. the major labels of PC gaming noticing the increasing HDTV market share and 2. PC game developers educating the market about HTPC possibilities.
The big drawback to consoles is that console makers like Nintendo and Sony have historically been dead-set against people who develop video games as a hobby or as a part-time business. Either it's your day job from day one, or you're not allowed in. They don't even allow mods developed by members of the gaming community. Microsoft and Apple, on the other hand, provide downloadable SDKs to all owners of an authentic copy of their respective PC operating system (Visual Studio Express for Windows or Xcode for Mac OS X).
I always thought that I could make up the story in Doom while blasting enemies away. I could imagine myself on earth or in deep-space and think up my own plot or motivations. I feel sometimes that all that the new shooters do is rehash predictable ideas. Its really the same thing as comparing books to movies - at least with a book you could picture events and stories while being guided by the author.
Were PATHWAYS INTO DARKNESS (Wolf 3D era)(Bungie) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness and MARATHON (Doom era)(Bungie) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game) Both had outstanding plots, better mechanics than Wolf 3d or Doom, and generally explain why Bungie is now a world-class game company whereas Id is merely a world-class game-programming company that makes crappy games. Suck iTTT, Carmack!
Spring is buggy as hell. I reported several bugs on the forums, and I got
* denial
* accusations
* "if you aren't using Ubuntu, you have no right to complain that it doesn't work in your distro"
* "if you don't like the manual, change it yourself, it's a wiki." Except that it is buggy and that the devs are pretenious pricks, I don't know anything that I could add to the wiki.
Spring is not worth anyone's time.
No mention of X-Com in the history of PC gaming? Now that's just silly.
Sometimes all the story you need is "The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"
Then you just walk to the right and kick some ass.
Maybe I'm just controller ethnocentristic. And maybe my opponents are too. But I'll take a mouse and keyboard any day over the Xbox controller
It entirely depends what game you're playing.
Quake needs a mouse and keyboard ... and so on.
Geometry Wars needs twin analogue sticks.
Street Fighter needs an 8 way digital joystick
Samba de Amigo needs a pair of triangulated maracas
Guitar Hero needs a plastic guitar
All of these styles of games can be played with suboptimal controllers (such as Quake on a console controller) - but they each have their ideal controller.
If you can find a copy of the excellent Grid Wars for PC, the recommended control scheme is to plug in an Xbox 360 controller.
Wow. Look at all the responses to your post!
As per usual, people are connecting their sense of self worth to their preferences in arbitrary things. Movies are another big ego-hook.
"What? Something I have chosen to like isn't universally popular? DENY! ATTACK! REJECT!"
The Ego is such a silly burden.
That being said, where I actively have to resist the addictive call of (some) PC games, which I do very well, thank-you, console games seem astonishingly dull; they all appear to be variations on an identical theme; "Move a point of perspective around in a 3D environment with an awkward little control unit and manipulate objects." Every game is essentially the same basic set of challenges dressed up with different wall papers. If you've played one, you've played them all. They were exciting when the concept was new, but honestly, the last time I enjoyed one of those 3D games was when the wall paper was Star Wars and I got to use a light saber. Then the novelty wore off. Story is the only thing which interests me now with such productions. --Half Life, for instance, had a really neat story, but I only know that because I got fed up part way through the game and read a synopsis so that I could quit navigating a bobbing camera around for fifty hours while getting shot at. That's what movies are for; the actors do all that annoying puzzle-solving crap for you. I just wanted to know who that dude with the briefcase was!
The PC games I find attractive are those which have unique and far more dynamic problem solving tactical elements, preferably with lots of short cut keys. Dodging bullets is fun only until you realize that the solution is obvious; shoot at the other guy until he stops shooting back. Problem solved. Works every time. Now just apply that exact same solution thousands and thousands of times. Isn't that fun?
But don't take any of that personally. I enjoyed those games too when they were new.
-FL
Many of the early puzzle games had decent graphics, they were pretty darn nice for their day. Take a look at "Think Cross", simple but elegant. Dave 2 was rudimentary graphics with a simple plot to get through the haunted house, but so what, it was fun.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
The first game I played on a PC was Star Trek. Those old text-based BASIC games were the best!
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On the Amiga. From that day, I had to have one...
Ken's Labyrinth was released almost a year before DOOM. So isn't it really the first?
Ken's Labyrinth released Jan 1 1993
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken%27s_Labyrinth
Doom released Dec 10 1993
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29
Frog
Apparently FPS games are the only real computer games. Because there's no way anyone grew up on RPGs, strategy games, adventure games, sports games, driving games or what have you. Nope. Doom is the mother of all games, and it's derrivatives are representative of the entire gaming industry.
Have u seen some of the 'stories' in fighting games? Dead or Alive 3 has two girls fight over a head of lettuce. Street Fighter Alpha takes place before Street Fighter II, and Street Fighter III takes place after Street Fighter IV. Many of the fans have even stated how they don't care that much about the storylines, as remaining canon just messes up a good thing. Most street fighting games get their storylines in anime, comics, and books, AFTER the release of the game. Imagination > Storylines
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Does this guy use his machine to play anything else besides FPSs? Most of the people I see arguing for PC over console is that net distribution makes it easier for weird new experiments to find an audience, but he's just going on about Doom, Doom, Doom, and how about five FPSs after it have ever even tried to get narrative into the picture. It's not until like six pages in that I skimmed down and saw a screenshot of EVE with a caption along the lines of "We used a snazzy render of EVE because the real game is so boring."
FPSs bore the hell out of me. Gridrunner Revolution was the best $20 I have ever spent on a game in a long time, and it's only available on Windows.
egypt urnash minimal art.
"Flaw" lol.
Lack of any story in DooM(apart from a screen of text telling you how cool you are here and there) is one of it`s strong points. Cuz there is no melodramatic b-movie-like shite like in modern games, there is only monsters and you. Get out alive is the best story ever made in shooter games.
>Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented
Not that I'd advocate it, but stuff like gun wobble and on-screen feedback is exactly the kind of bullshit that's being granted patents these days. Doesn't Apple have a patent on the 'bounce' you see when you scroll past the end of a list on the iPhone? Utterly nuts, but let's imagine for a minute that id had gotten patents on this stuff. What would that have done to the course of game development?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Bad Splash Panel Art was a commonplace in the DOS era.
As games grew in power, scope, ambition, and budget, I was surprised at how badly the art continued to suck -- especially the figure drawing. (Epic, I'm thinking of you -- Unreal Tournament at least as late UT2004 still looked like it was drawn by earnest geeks rather than trained or gifted artists.)
-kgj
Exactly. "interrupt the game in order to tell"
I just bought warhammer 40,000: dawn of war. It is so frustrating. Multiple times in a short 20-30 minute mission you are locked out of moving your character in the middle of shooting to be told a snippet related to the story.
The right way to do that would have been a small tv/com window that told you while you continued to play. Instead it is like playing a video game and pausing it every 5 minutes, changing your focus to a TV, and watching 45 seconds of a movie related to the game, but in no way required to actually play it.
I fired up an Amiga 500 emulator the other day and played Populous. I can't believe I spent a few months immersed in that game!
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
I can't help but notice that three of the five games they mention by name on the last page describing where things are now are also on consoles. (Oblivion, Left 4 Dead and GTA IV)
The cake is a pie
I'm sure most of the people who played Doom are going "There was a manual?!?
Everyone I know just started playing, died a few times, and figured it out.
it's a game, part of the game was finding out what was going on and getting to an end. It (they) didn't need some intro/story to get you in the mood. BAH!! I think of DOOM as something that HAD been ported to almost every hardware platform.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
My favourite passage from that article:
While there have been some massive steps forward in terms of what games can and are willing to do story-wise though, plot is actually the aspect of game design which has come on the least in the last twenty years.
Graham Linehan recently said on Charlie Brooker’s GamesWipe that he thinks a lot of that is because game designers don’t read enough books and that modern games are made by people who watch more films than they read stories. He’s probably onto something there, we reckon – especially when you consider the rambling nonsense which is the Metal Gear Solid series.
Doom (1993) was just a stripped-down version of hack-and-slay dungeon games. Examples of such games are Eye of the Beholder (1990), which had limited 3D rendering, but tile-based movement. Ultima Underworld (1992) had 3D graphics and you were able run around freely. Doom just replaced the swords with guns and left out the story, which didn't appeal to me, and wasn't new to me.
I cant believe this guy only went back to Doom. There were plenty of fun games for computers(apple II, commodore, atari st)
Here's a partial list:
- Gold Box D&D (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, etc)
- Choplifter
- Wasteland
- Elevator Action
- Burgertime
- Ultima I
- Zork
- Bard's Tale
- Police Quest
- Wings of Fury
hAxe is a fairly robust Actionscript compiler which can produce fully funtioning SWF movies.
The last time I looked into haXe, it mentioned loading assets from a .swf file created with swfmill or Sam Haxe. But unless I have Flash, I can't make vector animations; I can only import PNG and JPEG. If I'm limited to raster assets, I might as well code for JavaScript Canvas to run in Chrome Frame; at least that'll run on an iPhone.
Apparently C# XNA code isn't too bad to port across to Objective C and the iPhone SDK.
There is more than one model of developing an application for multiple platforms. First, there's the waterfall model, where a program is completed on one platform and then translated line by line into the language of the other platform. Translation errors between languages can and do happen, and changes to the old version don't propagate automatically to the new version.
But then there's the front-and-back-end model related to MVC, where the "back end" (gross physics, AI, and arguably map loading) is implemented once and linked into each version, while the "front end" (graphics, audio, input) is implemented for each platform, and the two call into each other. An advantage of the front-and-back-end model is that if a bug is fixed in the back end on one platform The big disadvantage of the front-and-back-end model is that all platforms have to support the language in which the back-end is written, and that's more difficult if you have to deploy the same app on XNA, SWF, Java, and iPhone, all of which use different languages.
To which model were you referring?
As far as physics goes, apparently Bullet has both iPhone and XNA flavors and uses the zlib license
By "physics", I mean it in a generalized sense, including all rules of a game such as how much damage an attack does.
again, C# translates fairly readily to Objective-C.
Can it be done automatically, so that any changes I make in the C# are reflected in the Objective-C? Or does it leave open an opportunity for errors in manual translation if I try to keep codebases in sync?
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code.
Running the majority of the back-end in an interpreted language has downsides:
But back to the topic: The big reason we need to think about all this complexity is because PC gaming hasn't come far enough.
Would you trust a tool which claimed to [translate code into several target platforms' preferred languages] automatically without bugs?
Of course, as long as the translated code passes a test suite. I already trust GCC to translate my C++ code to x86 assembly language, PowerPC assembly language, and ARM assembly language without bugs.
We are the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah The followers of the Path of Now and Forever! You are filth. We shall cleanse. You WILL be annigilated... I mean annihigated.. damn! CUT! CUT! Let's start over! Hey, mister director... can you PLEASE think of SOME other word besides agnigilate... I mean, oh what's the use. I give up.
The game is awesomeness
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code.
Apple has been rejecting apps because they're scriptable.
Apple has been doing a number of things which seem pretty shortsighted with the iPhone app store. A lot of what they were doing would make sense if there was any reason to believe that they were trying to mimic Nintendo's success from the 1980s which was largely because of their draconian quality controls on software. Apparently the ever-sticky rule 3.3.2 expressly prohibits software which first downloads then interprets code, so as long as all of the scripts are included with the application, that shouldn't be a problem unless you plan on including a built-in updater.
As far as the speed issue for games in general goes, LUA is a pretty good example of a scripting language which actually is used in significant amount of games despite its limitations because of its speed and low memory usage. It's extremely frustrating to try to do any traditional OO design in LUA due to those limitations, however it's extremely fast and lightweight - the speed hit is virtually negligible and the memory overhead is small. Most open-source projects I've seen which use LUA extensively mingle it with non-hardware-specific native code to do its heavy lifting or things that LUA doesn't do very well at the binding level.
Don't forget that many scripting languages include platform-targetting compilers which can produce binary code. Frets on Fire is entirely written in Python
But back to the topic: The big reason we need to think about all this complexity is because PC gaming hasn't come far enough.
It's certainly finally maturing. I've been a PC gamer for 20 years and have watched countless renaissances come and go, though, so there's obviously some problems that have to be resolved. Obviously the extreme differences between producing Mac native software and Windows native software doesn't help unify PC gaming much. The fact that the Windows platform is factionalizing into dozens of content distribution systems doesn't help much either. Games for Windows Live, Steam, Battle.net, Impulse, Greenhouse, etc etc. It's going to be impossible to sell the PC as a gaming platform unless you can actually sell it as a platform. What this will unfortunately mean is giving somebody the keys and hoping they don't go for a joyride with your future. If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game, meaning that any computer bought from a platform-compliant vendor in that year or newer is capable of running the game, then you'd have a much more consumer-friendly market.
One of the reasons for the slow acceptance of PC gaming is the prerequisite consumer awareness to actually getting a good experience. I have relatives in Montana who can only barely use a computer, don't really understand anything beyond the idea that newer is usually better unless it's cheap and crappy and that older games might run on their older computer. No way for them to tell without buying it and bringing it home. However, they've got a couple of PS2s and a Gamecube, and they know they can buy anything for those and bring them home and they'll work.
Hell, even for the computer literate PC gamer, if you don't keep up with video technology, you quickly lose track of whether your hardware compares favorably with the recommended "Geforce GTS 250" or whether the whole situation will be a shitstorm on your computer. This is why I was saying that we need an actual platform with simple numbers. We also need a generally stated industry goal to stop trying to hit a moving target and instead try to do what the console manufacturers do - limit the rate of change in the prerequisite hardware. Bad for the PC hardware market, good for the consumer and
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
It's extremely frustrating to try to do any traditional OO design in LUA due to those limitations, however it's extremely fast and lightweight - the speed hit is virtually negligible and the memory overhead is small.
I already mentioned Lua in my last point; I'll give a more concrete example of this abstraction inversion. Say I have a big array of tiny integers (e.g. -100 to 100) representing what kind of object sits in each cell of the game map. In any other language, such as C++, Java, or Python, this would be stored as an array, at 1 byte per element, and elements aligned west-east are kept beside each other in the cache. But Lua has only one numeric type (double precision floating point, at 8 bytes per) and only one data structure type (associative array with a numeric or string key), so each element balloons to 16 bytes (double index, double value), and accesses to an associative array aren't nearly as friendly to the data cache as accesses to a plain array.
If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game, meaning that any computer bought from a platform-compliant vendor in that year or newer is capable of running the game, then you'd have a much more consumer-friendly market.
The "Certified for Windows Vista" label and Windows Vista's performance index were supposed to solve this, but Microsoft made the mistake of ranking Intel's Voodoo3-class "GMA" video chipsets, which offload all vertex shading to one of the CPU's cores, too highly. But apart from the Intel GMA problem, any game tested on an entry-level 2006 PC with an entry-level NV or ATI GPU of the time should run on the vast majority of PCs still in use, right? And it should be easier for Mac computers, where "any Intel Mac" guarantees at least a minimum level of performance. Finally, a free 1-level demo should help iron out "will it work?" issues while clarifying the customer's demand for the product.
Of course, then you're still leaving out target-specific optimizations.
I was talking about applying to the "model" or "back-end", which contains mostly gross physics, AI, and other game rules. These need generic optimizations. As I see it, target-specific optimizations relate more to eye candy than to the common core of game rules.