(Shakes head in wonder) I thought that library was pretty VGA card specific. But I guess it did have a simple interface. I appreciate the praise and am honored that people have found usefulness in it.
More on topic though, It was Sandy and John (Romero) that got to work with the original tool set and earliest limitations of the Doom Engine. I think their reaction to seeing just how far the open source community and latest doom designers have taken the experience will make them go "Wow! That's impressive!" After all, who else would know so well what effort it took?
I'll agree that SS could come the closest - they have a great character renderer -- but they still wouldn't be close.
Did you play the Helms Deep Doom Level? Freaking hundreds of moving imps and demons in your view at times... You can empty all your ammo into the cround and not feel like you made a dent!
From the intro flyby, to the waves of units on boths sides, and all the things like the colored units, scripted events, sloped floors and night sky turning to dawn, this is not your big brother's Doom.
I was quite impressed. As I played the level, I felt like a "hero" character, running around and offing the various monsters as they fought the troops. And slowly as my ammo and health reserves faded, I felt a sense of impending.... (duh) Doom. And finally I made to the dawn, trying to stay alive until the waves of plasma rifle toting marines came down the far slope to my rescue, with only 7% health left.
Currently, I know of no "true 3d" FPS engine that could have created a comparable experience in level size and number of units.
In fact, I am going to take it to work tomorrow morning and show it to my co-worker, Sandy Petersen. If his name doesn't ring a bell, just know that he designed pretty much all of episode 2 and 3 of the original doom, 20+ levels of Doom 2, and was responsible for the first use of gratitous crates in a FPS. I think he will really get a kick out of it.
I've personally dubbed it the 'Carmack Effect' (Sorry John, but the fishbowl you guys live in at id is the best example), where people have a very incorrect impression that we sit around all day playing games, then go out to dinner in our Ferraris and Hummers. Those who are programmers, etc., or understand the job... They know that we don't play games all day, but still see it as as a far 'cooler' job than 'ordinary' software development for the most part. I think that may stem from the fact that a generation of computer industry people played around with games on TRS-80's, Apples and C64's, typing in listings and programming their own in BASIC... Somewhere in there is a bunch of unrealized dreams and dissatisfaction with what it takes to pay the bills some days.
Being a game programmer myself, I've noticed it a lot over the years to the point where I automatically play down what I do and have a canned spiel I tell people to keep them from getting wild ideas about my job.
Being an unusually successful game programmer (I wrote a good chunk of the 4th best selling PC game of the last 10 years among others) makes me only that much more uncomfortable at times as I know that most programmers who go into the game industry will not get to enjoy some of the rewards I have. It's not fair or equal, but then no one said it would be.
...is more important sometimes than preserving the actual machine itself.
Manuals get lost. Tapes and Floppy Disks wear out. And then capacitors and other components go bad and without technical info, you're often left with an interesting doorstop.
With that imformation, emulators can get developed, software can be archived into modern formats, and new floppy disks containing software for these systems can be custom created so we don't have to worry (too much) about the originals wearing out.
I like to collect early 8-bit/Pre-PC computers. At the moment I have the following machines (among many others):
Of those three, I have the technical service manuals and schematics for the first two. I can fire them up and amuse myself by making them do things. I also have some software for them. I've made it a point to freely provide copies of all my technical documentation to other people interested in these old machines, in order to spread the knowledge and lower the chances of it getting lost.
For the Compucolor II though, I acquired a unit that had been converted to 240 volts (Australia). I have it because it was one of the very first computers I ever used, and a cool machine (8080, 48K RAM, 8 Color Display: 80x25 text, 160x100 graphics). I had no idea how rare it was even back then (1978), so decided I wanted to acquire one to add to my collection.
So far, I have no schematics or technical information, and no software (it had a single floppy drive built into the monitor), and have been unable to use it given my limited hardware reverse-engineering skills. The company that made it disappeared over 20 years ago. Thus, with out information and software, it's likely that in time no one will even remember it existed.
One of the technical book publishers I was talking to recently was telling how they discovered whenever they would release a new title to Amazon (programming or software development usually), that they would immediately get a rash of very bad reviews -- all of which came about the same time from the same IP address which happened to belong to a rival publisher. He told me that now it's almost accepted industry practive to have your employees post bad reviews of your competitors products online.
Myself, I look for the reviews that are by people who clearly have actually read the book/used the product. There is sort of an art to picking them out.
I have worked on low-level systems for commercial PC games for over 6 years now.
When I started in the mid 1990's the current thinking about optimization among those who cared was all about reducing cycle counts, and paring instructions for a Pentium. Memory system and bus behavior was mostly ignored or assumed to be rendered irrelevant by on-chip caches.
During this time, while I was working on the graphics core for Age of Empires, I had lunch with Michael Abrash, who was at id software working on Quake at the time. While eating Mexican food, he casually mentioned the results of some memory bandwidth testing he had done and how he was shaping the rasterizer to make use of the time spent waiting on memory writes. This interested me enough to perform similar tests on my own work, and the results were telling.
I wound up with core rendering code that, if you used the conventional cycle counting wisdom of the time, appeared to be slower than what it replaced... but in fact was faster, especially for various effects processing. Both games had very large hand-written assembly software rendering routines, in the size 10K+ lines.
The reason for this of course was that memory bandwidth was being maxed out and with clever restructuring of code, it was possible to put the wait time to use on related processing, even if the code appeared to be more awkward and cumbersome that way. Though the exact memory behaviors would vary from system to system, one thing that was true and only got more so was that CPU speed was outstripping memory speed. Games like Quake and Age of Empires would have to process, in what usually amounts to a mutated memory copy, large amounts of textures or sprites each frame; so the data in question was pretty much guaranteed not be in the CPU caches.
You would think that with the current generation of games using Hardware 3D only, this issue would be reduced to upload speed across the AGP Bus, but if Age of Mythology is any indication, that's not going to happen. In Age of Mythology we were able to make some significant performance gains by using the same techniques of coding to make the most of the slower speed and latency of main memory.
As long the effort keeps paying off in increased FPS rates, we're going to be coding our games to account for and best deal with the realities of how the CPU relates to and waits on Cache and System memories.
One thing I have found though, and it may apply to your work, is that when the process is computation intensive, particularly 80-bit precision FPU intensive, then the FPU processing time is sufficently large enough to mask variations in memory designs. That is, you're FPU speed bound not memory bound.
There is truth in what you saying. However, you need to remeber that it is a liability as well as an advantage, because all that marketing and promotion costs money. Big money.
If a game sucks as a game but is heavily promoted, it will suffer a backlash of bad word-of-mouth and review publicity making it harder to recoup the money spent on the marketing. It also does damage to a franchise's reputation.
On the other hand, it can really help a great game from an unknown source.
It's not that a random company can't make an AAA game, its just that for *anyone* to do so these days requires spending a lot of money to make competitive content. If they are going to spend serious bucks, then you can assume some of that will be spent on marketing and distribution, making it sort of self-fufilling.
All the/.'ed article does is ask the question "Why do game studios fail?" and muse about possible reasons for a few specific games. The author's musings are those of an outsider and don't really provide any insight.
I make this assessment as an Industry Insider and someone who helped build a very successful Game Studio from almost nothing, and has insider information on some the companies and games he muses about./plug For those wanting references, just check my link, or know that I programmed significant portions of all of the Age of Empires games, and my latest game, Age of Mythology, just hit stores this weekend. I've also spoken many times at industry conferences, written numerous articles, and had my writings on multiplayer cheating subject me to the slashdot effect on multiple occasions. Along the way, I've gotten to know many, many people in this business and see how a lot of different companies operate./end plug
What that said to establish my knowledge, know that I would love to write my own version of the question with a detailed look at what I consider to be the real answers. However, that would take weeks and result in about a 20,000 word novella.
That said, there are a few big themes that loom over the industry that I can summarize. (This is not a complete list)
1) Production Values and feature demands for an "AAA" title in 2002. In a word: HUGE Moore's Law applies here too. 2) The large number of titles (PC and consoles) released that compete for the player's dollars and attention. 3) The cost of development. Because of #1 and #2, you get pressure to out-do your competition. This leads to #4 4) A "Tiering effect" of PC games (and console games). You have the "best" titles taking home the lion's share of the money, shelf space, review space, and mindshare. The majority of titles can't make money at the top level of production values leading to #5 5) A substantial (majority?) of game projects don't make back the money used in production. This means you either a) eventually close shop or b) have a system where successful titles subsidize the unsuccessful ones. 6) The side effect of 1 through 5, that causes publishers to be conservative in an effort to stay profitable. That leads to increased emphasis on franchises and less support for innovative and risky titles. 7) How talent is defined and treated. Many, many companies are created by their owners as vehicles to make wealth for themselves by most efficiently exploiting their workers. Game developers and programmers especially consider themselves to be more than mere assembly line workers. This is why you get a lot of churn of staff and people that consider themselves exploited. This is partially the fault of the employees because... 8) A lot of people get into the Game industry because they love games, and approach it as a passion, not a business. Reality (life, family, needs, mortgages, etc) intrudes with personal maturity. If the initial setup was exploitive, you see a lot of burnt-out, disillusioned people leave the industry. 9) The production demands of an extreme niche of the software industry on people. That is 90 hour work weeks as normal only to have something shipped despite your protests because to make a release date. 10) Equitable distribution of credit, recognition and compensation. John Carmack's Ferraris may have inspired thousands of dreams, but the state of the business has left a trail of broken promises of royalties, credit, recognition, or even a sane working environment. 11) Companies that believe that the games are produced by the top people; the C?O's, the management and marketing people, not the artists, designers, sound engineers and programmers. (*cough*) Believe that "Those people" are just there to mechanically realize the vision of the "creative" people, and they get what they deserve. 12) I'm getting tired of typing...:)
!!! Nothing in the above list is an absolute that can be applied to every single company in the industry. They just are general issues that push my hot buttons.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect or represent his employer in any way.
My uncle was on the verge of finishing a bit petrochemical deal he had been working for several years. It would have be worth around US $100 Million to him. He would have truely "made it".
It took only five months from the first pains until the leukemia killed him.
The deal was never finished, and it didn't matter to him. What did matter was the hope that an experimental drug could give him another five years to live. It didn't.
Don't get me wrong - Money is NICE --- but at what price? That makes all the difference.
I have to ask - how are you being compensated for the additional time spent working? Are you getting overtime pay? Do you have equity in the company? Profit sharing or royalties for the project you are working on? a big bonus? extra time off in proportion to overtime given?
And the kicker: What does the owner of the company, who is issuing this order, get out of it? Does he get richer while you get nothing? Is he going to take a bunch of personal time off when it's done while expecting you to continue working normally?
I think where I am going with this is obvious: Can you tell if you are being exploited or working in your own best interests?
If you and your team reasonably share in the rewards of the project being successful, then that is a very different situation than if you are giving up part of your life (which you can never get back) to your detrament for the sole purpose of rewarding someone else. Given the nature of employment in this modern era, there is no 2-way street or life-long contract anymore, so you have to be looking out for your own best interests as nobody else is going to.
I've worked in such situations in the past. When I was young, I felt I needed to do whatever it took to keep my job. I was afraid. I'm older now, and I've developed some common sense and a spine. I won't let my self be exploited. Since the original poster didn't elaborate as to the circumstances, I can't say if the situation is exploitave. But if it is, I say leave, and leave now. Your sanity, health, peace of mind, and precious moments of life are worth too much.
You can say this, with a straight face (I assume), on/., while the article linked to is severly bogged down because of some hard-core readers hog the connections, naturally limiting the number of other people who can read it.
That why I used the mirror site:-)
Many, Many Multiplayer works are probably missing
on
Timeline of Online Gaming
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have to assume that, becasue I doubt anyone remembers the first on-line multiplayer realtime game that I wrote* and there must have been a thousand others like me - individuals who wrote something that was enjoyed by a very small audience and then forgotten a few years later.
* = in 1986, I wrote a game I inventively(ha!) called "CompuTrek" for the Computalk BBS in the Dallas/Ft Worth (Texas, USA) area - a 7-line BBS running on 48K RAM Atari 800's that shared access a 20 Mb hard-drive and had a hand-build gizmo to resolve write access contentions connected to joystick port #2 on each machine.
The game was a real-time update of the classic '70 mainframe star trek, played on 64x64 grid. Players picked from one of 5 races and had money to outfit ships that were stored in asteroid bases when they were logged off. They could move around, (facing counted as they had front, rear, and side shields) and they earned money by blowing up ship of other races. 2400 baud modem users had a significant advantage over 1200 and 300 baud users.
The problem was that 4 or 5 people really got hooked on the game -- and kept the lines BUSY to those computers.. this was back in the day when one user took an entire machine's resources. So only 1 or 2 or sometimes even none of the lines were available to other users. We tend to forget about that, but BBS users from the early 80s probably remember pulling stunts trying to beat the busy signals (like calling someone you suspect is on-line so that call waiting would disconnect them).
In the process of having a few hard-core players hog the BBS, it naturally limited the number of other people who could find out about it and play. If there is one good thing about the 'Net as we know it today, it's that we can all be on it at the same time.
For a long time, I though that CompuTrek would have been my only on-line game and no one but 10 or so people would even remember it, but then I wrote a bunch of the code for Age of Empires (and the games that followed it: Rise of Rome, AoE2:Age of Kings, and The Conquerors, which have been played by a million times more people. For that I am eternally humbled. (and eternally on a crusade to combat online cheating).
You can not quote exceprts from historically significant literature and use them to place relevant and insightful thoughts into the brains of other people (see 1984 EULA sec 256.1.0.2.4) even if said people have a valid license (to view and store in their short term memory only) the copyrighted material in question.
You have been reported to the Book Publisher Industry Assosiation (BPIA) and will be prosecuted for copyright violations and failure to uphold corporate profits.
Please stay by your computer while we send the authorities to pick you up for reeducation.
It's actually a little more complicated than that, I should have elaborated, but I was trying to make a point.
If I am going somewhere known and don't expect to go somewhere else, I am usually near a land line when I'm not in my car, so my wife (etc) just calls me on that line.
Some of the time, I just forget that I wanted to bring it along.
If I am going somewhere out of the ordinary I take the phone along, in case I have an accident etc.
It is true though - If I got into a car accident on the way to work, I'll probably have to someone else to make a call. But how was that any different than before I had a cell.
Now, my wife, who is a full time mom, keeps hers with her at all times, as she has our child to look after.
In the last year, I've have a number of surreal incidents brought about by the fact that I didn't have a cell phone with me, kept it turned off if I did, or asked other people the seemingly obvious questions about why they are bothering with a cell phone instead of ignoring their caller.
I do own a cell phone. I reluctantly bought one for my wife and I only because we had a child. Two people, not counting myself have my phone number: My wife and my father (well 3 if you count my mom). Usually I don't bring the phone with me, unless I am expecting to hear something specific from my wife. And even then, I will *never* bother to take or make a call while driving, and my wife knows that. (What's the point of a having a super-performance car if you're not dedicated to driving it?)
People are amazed to find out I own a phone but don't have it with me, and that I could care less. I would swear that it is becoming a status thing to not have to immediately answer to anyone who calls you -- rather they have to wait for you to contact them at your convienence. The expressions I see on people's faces after questioning why they let someone else interrupt them are priceless. It's as if they never realized it until just now...
What's happened here? Are we now all beholdend to answer someone and anyone's call at any hour of the day? Sorry, but that's a quick way to lead a high stress life. What about time and place that is our own? Did people just give that up without realizing the price paid?
Sure, other people have more ligitemate callers and calls to make --- but really, are they all necessary? or are we just conditioned to talk on the phone because it's there? I'll bet most people can't see or admit to themselves that their calls are alot more noise and less signal then they'd like to think... i.e. many of their calls could be eliminated and they wouldn't be any worse off.
Must all calls allways be answered? Does that mean everyone calling is more important than you are?
I wonder if this phenomonom of a growing lack of respect of all sorts by people at public performances has caused the trend towards creating media rooms, Home theatre systems, etc, in people's homes -- where they can enjoy movies without the idiots....
... or...
has the wide spreading presence of home theatre experiences caused people to value less going out to a public venue to see a show turning them into the idiots in quesion?
First off, it seems like the last US manufacture stopped production about 3 years ago and there was a story here on/. about it. (I'll let someone else dig up the link).
Secondly, pinball machines couldn't keep evoloution-wise. They are too maintainence intensive compared to video arcade games (which break often enough as it is).
To the point: here at the office where I work, there are about 16 arcade machines: 15-video and one pinball. The video games include Lunar Lander, Space Duel, Assault, Mortal Combat 3, pac man, sinistar, soul edge, virtua fighter 2, xybots, crystal castles, a D&D game, Blitz 99, sinistar, and star wars.
The lone pinball machine is Star Trek: The Next Generation.
When it is working, The Star Trek Pinball machine is the most popular arcade machine we have (followed by Mortal Combat 3).
And that is the problem: It's been in a state of disrepair for more than 6 months.
Over the last couple years we have had it repaired 3 times. I remember watching the first repair sessions and was astounded by the large numbe of individual mechanical repairs that had to be made: Bumpers, solnoids, lights, track alignments, and whatnot. Not to mention the table surface then had to be waxed - which changed the play characteristics (until it was played a lot and worn in again).
And then there was a problem with the plastic ball storage holder underneath the deck. The balls had worn a small groove in it, which caused problems for the ball sensor to report no balls available when there really were. Since that custom molded piece wasn't available from the manufacturer anymore, the repair guy took it and filled in the groove with some substance several time - sanding between coats, to bring it back to new condition.
So my conclusion is that modern pinball machines have too many custom parts, and are too physically demanding on them to have the uptime to compete with video games. And not to mention the knowledgable repairmen are hard to find.
And that was in a private setting. In an arcade setting, the operator can not afford for the machine to be down half the time, producing no revenue, and requiring him to spend $$$ on repair guys. The economics just don't work today.
If I recall correctly, (and I've just woke up so my memory isn't fully warmed up), the University of North Texas (And others in the UT system) has been experimenting with game programming and development classes and content in other classes for a few years now.
I believe several of my co-workers at Ensemble Studios (located in Dallas) have responded to inviations from UNT/UT and have gone to the campuses to speak or otherwise give presentations.
As game development has matured from the garage band to the full fledged studios, it only makes sense that the instructors would want to show their students the combination of programming, project management, art, music, and magic mojo that game development really is.:-)
that the news.com article focuses mostly on the "cheating" side of the problems and barely touches the more general purpose "hacking the console game via the new".
However, if you hack the console, cheating is a automatically a problem by definition.
It's interesting that the definiton of online cheating has expanded to included a myraid of things a person can do disrupt the game, host systems, or even the network connections of other players. All that seems to matter is hurting another player in some way.
Console systems will be vulnerable to the standard problems (buffer overflows, poor design, etc), but just how much can you loose? On the Xbox, it will be necessary to save executable code to the hard-drive to make a hack persistant, and I'm not sure that a game currently running is even allowed any access to those paritions. On the PS2, what if the hard drive isn't even present? Just reboot and reset.
On the flip side - it's a royal pain to patch a console game. You have to issue new disks.
can be found at news.com and of course there is that little article I wrote for Game Developer (which has already been covered twice here) at gamasutra.com
Slashdot Mirror
(Shakes head in wonder) I thought that library was pretty VGA card specific. But I guess it did have a simple interface. I appreciate the praise and am honored that people have found usefulness in it.
More on topic though, It was Sandy and John (Romero) that got to work with the original tool set and earliest limitations of the Doom Engine. I think their reaction to seeing just how far the open source community and latest doom designers have taken the experience will make them go "Wow! That's impressive!" After all, who else would know so well what effort it took?
I'll agree that SS could come the closest - they have a great character renderer -- but they still wouldn't be close.
Did you play the Helms Deep Doom Level? Freaking hundreds of moving imps and demons in your view at times... You can empty all your ammo into the cround and not feel like you made a dent!
From the intro flyby, to the waves of units on boths sides, and all the things like the colored units, scripted events, sloped floors and night sky turning to dawn, this is not your big brother's Doom.
.... (duh) Doom. And finally I made to the dawn, trying to stay alive until the waves of plasma rifle toting marines came down the far slope to my rescue, with only 7% health left.
I was quite impressed. As I played the level, I felt like a "hero" character, running around and offing the various monsters as they fought the troops. And slowly as my ammo and health reserves faded, I felt a sense of impending
Currently, I know of no "true 3d" FPS engine that could have created a comparable experience in level size and number of units.
In fact, I am going to take it to work tomorrow morning and show it to my co-worker, Sandy Petersen. If his name doesn't ring a bell, just know that he designed pretty much all of episode 2 and 3 of the original doom, 20+ levels of Doom 2, and was responsible for the first use of gratitous crates in a FPS. I think he will really get a kick out of it.
-Mp
I've personally dubbed it the 'Carmack Effect' (Sorry John, but the fishbowl you guys live in at id is the best example), where people have a very incorrect impression that we sit around all day playing games, then go out to dinner in our Ferraris and Hummers. Those who are programmers, etc., or understand the job... They know that we don't play games all day, but still see it as as a far 'cooler' job than 'ordinary' software development for the most part. I think that may stem from the fact that a generation of computer industry people played around with games on TRS-80's, Apples and C64's, typing in listings and programming their own in BASIC... Somewhere in there is a bunch of unrealized dreams and dissatisfaction with what it takes to pay the bills some days.
Being a game programmer myself, I've noticed it a lot over the years to the point where I automatically play down what I do and have a canned spiel I tell people to keep them from getting wild ideas about my job.
Being an unusually successful game programmer (I wrote a good chunk of the 4th best selling PC game of the last 10 years among others) makes me only that much more uncomfortable at times as I know that most programmers who go into the game industry will not get to enjoy some of the rewards I have. It's not fair or equal, but then no one said it would be.
-Mp
He could at least have given the courtesy of a reply.
-Mp
...is more important sometimes than preserving the actual machine itself.
Manuals get lost. Tapes and Floppy Disks wear out. And then capacitors and other components go bad and without technical info, you're often left with an interesting doorstop.
With that imformation, emulators can get developed, software can be archived into modern formats, and new floppy disks containing software for these systems can be custom created so we don't have to worry (too much) about the originals wearing out.
I like to collect early 8-bit/Pre-PC computers. At the moment I have the following machines (among many others):
* Exidy Sorcerer (1979-1983-ish)
* APF Imagination Machine (1980-ish)
* Compucolor II (1978-1979 ish)
Of those three, I have the technical service manuals and schematics for the first two. I can fire them up and amuse myself by making them do things. I also have some software for them. I've made it a point to freely provide copies of all my technical documentation to other people interested in these old machines, in order to spread the knowledge and lower the chances of it getting lost.
For the Compucolor II though, I acquired a unit that had been converted to 240 volts (Australia). I have it because it was one of the very first computers I ever used, and a cool machine (8080, 48K RAM, 8 Color Display: 80x25 text, 160x100 graphics). I had no idea how rare it was even back then (1978), so decided I wanted to acquire one to add to my collection.
So far, I have no schematics or technical information, and no software (it had a single floppy drive built into the monitor), and have been unable to use it given my limited hardware reverse-engineering skills. The company that made it disappeared over 20 years ago. Thus, with out information and software, it's likely that in time no one will even remember it existed.
-Mp
One of the technical book publishers I was talking to recently was telling how they discovered whenever they would release a new title to Amazon (programming or software development usually), that they would immediately get a rash of very bad reviews -- all of which came about the same time from the same IP address which happened to belong to a rival publisher. He told me that now it's almost accepted industry practive to have your employees post bad reviews of your competitors products online.
Myself, I look for the reviews that are by people who clearly have actually read the book/used the product. There is sort of an art to picking them out.
I have worked on low-level systems for commercial PC games for over 6 years now.
When I started in the mid 1990's the current thinking about optimization among those who cared was all about reducing cycle counts, and paring instructions for a Pentium. Memory system and bus behavior was mostly ignored or assumed to be rendered irrelevant by on-chip caches.
During this time, while I was working on the graphics core for Age of Empires, I had lunch with Michael Abrash, who was at id software working on Quake at the time. While eating Mexican food, he casually mentioned the results of some memory bandwidth testing he had done and how he was shaping the rasterizer to make use of the time spent waiting on memory writes. This interested me enough to perform similar tests on my own work, and the results were telling.
I wound up with core rendering code that, if you used the conventional cycle counting wisdom of the time, appeared to be slower than what it replaced... but in fact was faster, especially for various effects processing. Both games had very large hand-written assembly software rendering routines, in the size 10K+ lines.
The reason for this of course was that memory bandwidth was being maxed out and with clever restructuring of code, it was possible to put the wait time to use on related processing, even if the code appeared to be more awkward and cumbersome that way. Though the exact memory behaviors would vary from system to system, one thing that was true and only got more so was that CPU speed was outstripping memory speed. Games like Quake and Age of Empires would have to process, in what usually amounts to a mutated memory copy, large amounts of textures or sprites each frame; so the data in question was pretty much guaranteed not be in the CPU caches.
You would think that with the current generation of games using Hardware 3D only, this issue would be reduced to upload speed across the AGP Bus, but if Age of Mythology is any indication, that's not going to happen. In Age of Mythology we were able to make some significant performance gains by using the same techniques of coding to make the most of the slower speed and latency of main memory.
As long the effort keeps paying off in increased FPS rates, we're going to be coding our games to account for and best deal with the realities of how the CPU relates to and waits on Cache and System memories.
One thing I have found though, and it may apply to your work, is that when the process is computation intensive, particularly 80-bit precision FPU intensive, then the FPU processing time is sufficently large enough to mask variations in memory designs. That is, you're FPU speed bound not memory bound.
There is truth in what you saying. However, you need to remeber that it is a liability as well as an advantage, because all that marketing and promotion costs money. Big money.
If a game sucks as a game but is heavily promoted, it will suffer a backlash of bad word-of-mouth and review publicity making it harder to recoup the money spent on the marketing. It also does damage to a franchise's reputation.
On the other hand, it can really help a great game from an unknown source.
It's not that a random company can't make an AAA game, its just that for *anyone* to do so these days requires spending a lot of money to make competitive content. If they are going to spend serious bucks, then you can assume some of that will be spent on marketing and distribution, making it sort of self-fufilling.
All the /.'ed article does is ask the question "Why do game studios fail?" and muse about possible reasons for a few specific games. The author's musings are those of an outsider and don't really provide any insight.
/plug For those wanting references, just check my link, or know that I programmed significant portions of all of the Age of Empires games, and my latest game, Age of Mythology, just hit stores this weekend. I've also spoken many times at industry conferences, written numerous articles, and had my writings on multiplayer cheating subject me to the slashdot effect on multiple occasions. Along the way, I've gotten to know many, many people in this business and see how a lot of different companies operate. /end plug
:)
I make this assessment as an Industry Insider and someone who helped build a very successful Game Studio from almost nothing, and has insider information on some the companies and games he muses about.
What that said to establish my knowledge, know that I would love to write my own version of the question with a detailed look at what I consider to be the real answers. However, that would take weeks and result in about a 20,000 word novella.
That said, there are a few big themes that loom over the industry that I can summarize. (This is not a complete list)
1) Production Values and feature demands for an "AAA" title in 2002. In a word: HUGE Moore's Law applies here too.
2) The large number of titles (PC and consoles) released that compete for the player's dollars and attention.
3) The cost of development. Because of #1 and #2, you get pressure to out-do your competition. This leads to #4
4) A "Tiering effect" of PC games (and console games). You have the "best" titles taking home the lion's share of the money, shelf space, review space, and mindshare. The majority of titles can't make money at the top level of production values leading to #5
5) A substantial (majority?) of game projects don't make back the money used in production. This means you either a) eventually close shop or b) have a system where successful titles subsidize the unsuccessful ones.
6) The side effect of 1 through 5, that causes publishers to be conservative in an effort to stay profitable. That leads to increased emphasis on franchises and less support for innovative and risky titles.
7) How talent is defined and treated. Many, many companies are created by their owners as vehicles to make wealth for themselves by most efficiently exploiting their workers. Game developers and programmers especially consider themselves to be more than mere assembly line workers. This is why you get a lot of churn of staff and people that consider themselves exploited. This is partially the fault of the employees because...
8) A lot of people get into the Game industry because they love games, and approach it as a passion, not a business. Reality (life, family, needs, mortgages, etc) intrudes with personal maturity. If the initial setup was exploitive, you see a lot of burnt-out, disillusioned people leave the industry.
9) The production demands of an extreme niche of the software industry on people. That is 90 hour work weeks as normal only to have something shipped despite your protests because to make a release date.
10) Equitable distribution of credit, recognition and compensation. John Carmack's Ferraris may have inspired thousands of dreams, but the state of the business has left a trail of broken promises of royalties, credit, recognition, or even a sane working environment.
11) Companies that believe that the games are produced by the top people; the C?O's, the management and marketing people, not the artists, designers, sound engineers and programmers. (*cough*) Believe that "Those people" are just there to mechanically realize the vision of the "creative" people, and they get what they deserve.
12) I'm getting tired of typing...
!!! Nothing in the above list is an absolute that can be applied to every single company in the industry. They just are general issues that push my hot buttons.
* The opinions expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect or represent his employer in any way.
My uncle was on the verge of finishing a bit petrochemical deal he had been working for several years. It would have be worth around US $100 Million to him. He would have truely "made it".
It took only five months from the first pains until the leukemia killed him.
The deal was never finished, and it didn't matter to him. What did matter was the hope that an experimental drug could give him another five years to live. It didn't.
Don't get me wrong - Money is NICE --- but at what price? That makes all the difference.
I have to ask - how are you being compensated for the additional time spent working? Are you getting overtime pay? Do you have equity in the company? Profit sharing or royalties for the project you are working on? a big bonus? extra time off in proportion to overtime given?
And the kicker: What does the owner of the company, who is issuing this order, get out of it? Does he get richer while you get nothing? Is he going to take a bunch of personal time off when it's done while expecting you to continue working normally?
I think where I am going with this is obvious: Can you tell if you are being exploited or working in your own best interests?
If you and your team reasonably share in the rewards of the project being successful, then that is a very different situation than if you are giving up part of your life (which you can never get back) to your detrament for the sole purpose of rewarding someone else. Given the nature of employment in this modern era, there is no 2-way street or life-long contract anymore, so you have to be looking out for your own best interests as nobody else is going to.
I've worked in such situations in the past. When I was young, I felt I needed to do whatever it took to keep my job. I was afraid. I'm older now, and I've developed some common sense and a spine. I won't let my self be exploited. Since the original poster didn't elaborate as to the circumstances, I can't say if the situation is exploitave. But if it is, I say leave, and leave now. Your sanity, health, peace of mind, and precious moments of life are worth too much.
That why I used the mirror site
I have to assume that, becasue I doubt anyone remembers the first on-line multiplayer realtime game that I wrote* and there must have been a thousand others like me - individuals who wrote something that was enjoyed by a very small audience and then forgotten a few years later.
* = in 1986, I wrote a game I inventively(ha!) called "CompuTrek" for the Computalk BBS in the Dallas/Ft Worth (Texas, USA) area - a 7-line BBS running on 48K RAM Atari 800's that shared access a 20 Mb hard-drive and had a hand-build gizmo to resolve write access contentions connected to joystick port #2 on each machine.
The game was a real-time update of the classic '70 mainframe star trek, played on 64x64 grid. Players picked from one of 5 races and had money to outfit ships that were stored in asteroid bases when they were logged off. They could move around, (facing counted as they had front, rear, and side shields) and they earned money by blowing up ship of other races. 2400 baud modem users had a significant advantage over 1200 and 300 baud users.
The problem was that 4 or 5 people really got hooked on the game -- and kept the lines BUSY to those computers.. this was back in the day when one user took an entire machine's resources. So only 1 or 2 or sometimes even none of the lines were available to other users. We tend to forget about that, but BBS users from the early 80s probably remember pulling stunts trying to beat the busy signals (like calling someone you suspect is on-line so that call waiting would disconnect them).
In the process of having a few hard-core players hog the BBS, it naturally limited the number of other people who could find out about it and play. If there is one good thing about the 'Net as we know it today, it's that we can all be on it at the same time.
For a long time, I though that CompuTrek would have been my only on-line game and no one but 10 or so people would even remember it, but then I wrote a bunch of the code for Age of Empires (and the games that followed it: Rise of Rome, AoE2:Age of Kings, and The Conquerors, which have been played by a million times more people. For that I am eternally humbled. (and eternally on a crusade to combat online cheating).
-Mp
You can not quote exceprts from historically significant literature and use them to place relevant and insightful thoughts into the brains of other people (see 1984 EULA sec 256.1.0.2.4) even if said people have a valid license (to view and store in their short term memory only) the copyrighted material in question.
You have been reported to the Book Publisher Industry Assosiation (BPIA) and will be prosecuted for copyright violations and failure to uphold corporate profits.
Please stay by your computer while we send the authorities to pick you up for reeducation.
It's actually a little more complicated than that, I should have elaborated, but I was trying to make a point.
If I am going somewhere known and don't expect to go somewhere else, I am usually near a land line when I'm not in my car, so my wife (etc) just calls me on that line.
Some of the time, I just forget that I wanted to bring it along.
If I am going somewhere out of the ordinary I take the phone along, in case I have an accident etc.
It is true though - If I got into a car accident on the way to work, I'll probably have to someone else to make a call. But how was that any different than before I had a cell.
Now, my wife, who is a full time mom, keeps hers with her at all times, as she has our child to look after.
In the last year, I've have a number of surreal incidents brought about by the fact that I didn't have a cell phone with me, kept it turned off if I did, or asked other people the seemingly obvious questions about why they are bothering with a cell phone instead of ignoring their caller.
I do own a cell phone. I reluctantly bought one for my wife and I only because we had a child. Two people, not counting myself have my phone number: My wife and my father (well 3 if you count my mom). Usually I don't bring the phone with me, unless I am expecting to hear something specific from my wife. And even then, I will *never* bother to take or make a call while driving, and my wife knows that. (What's the point of a having a super-performance car if you're not dedicated to driving it?)
People are amazed to find out I own a phone but don't have it with me, and that I could care less. I would swear that it is becoming a status thing to not have to immediately answer to anyone who calls you -- rather they have to wait for you to contact them at your convienence. The expressions I see on people's faces after questioning why they let someone else interrupt them are priceless. It's as if they never realized it until just now...
What's happened here? Are we now all beholdend to answer someone and anyone's call at any hour of the day? Sorry, but that's a quick way to lead a high stress life. What about time and place that is our own? Did people just give that up without realizing the price paid?
Sure, other people have more ligitemate callers and calls to make --- but really, are they all necessary? or are we just conditioned to talk on the phone because it's there? I'll bet most people can't see or admit to themselves that their calls are alot more noise and less signal then they'd like to think... i.e. many of their calls could be eliminated and they wouldn't be any worse off.
Must all calls allways be answered? Does that mean everyone calling is more important than you are?
has the wide spreading presence of home theatre experiences caused people to value less going out to a public venue to see a show turning them into the idiots in quesion?
Chicken meet Egg. Egg meet chicken.
First off, it seems like the last US manufacture stopped production about 3 years ago and there was a story here on /. about it. (I'll let someone else dig up the link).
Secondly, pinball machines couldn't keep evoloution-wise. They are too maintainence intensive compared to video arcade games (which break often enough as it is).
To the point: here at the office where I work, there are about 16 arcade machines: 15-video and one pinball. The video games include Lunar Lander, Space Duel, Assault, Mortal Combat 3, pac man, sinistar, soul edge, virtua fighter 2, xybots, crystal castles, a D&D game, Blitz 99, sinistar, and star wars.
The lone pinball machine is Star Trek: The Next Generation.
When it is working, The Star Trek Pinball machine is the most popular arcade machine we have (followed by Mortal Combat 3).
And that is the problem: It's been in a state of disrepair for more than 6 months.
Over the last couple years we have had it repaired 3 times. I remember watching the first repair sessions and was astounded by the large numbe of individual mechanical repairs that had to be made: Bumpers, solnoids, lights, track alignments, and whatnot. Not to mention the table surface then had to be waxed - which changed the play characteristics (until it was played a lot and worn in again).
And then there was a problem with the plastic ball storage holder underneath the deck. The balls had worn a small groove in it, which caused problems for the ball sensor to report no balls available when there really were. Since that custom molded piece wasn't available from the manufacturer anymore, the repair guy took it and filled in the groove with some substance several time - sanding between coats, to bring it back to new condition.
So my conclusion is that modern pinball machines have too many custom parts, and are too physically demanding on them to have the uptime to compete with video games. And not to mention the knowledgable repairmen are hard to find.
And that was in a private setting. In an arcade setting, the operator can not afford for the machine to be down half the time, producing no revenue, and requiring him to spend $$$ on repair guys. The economics just don't work today.
-Mp
...inlcuding UNT (hey, my wife went there) and schools in the UT system.
:-)
Remember, I had just woke up from playing too much war 3 when I posted that
If I recall correctly, (and I've just woke up so my memory isn't fully warmed up), the University of North Texas (And others in the UT system) has been experimenting with game programming and development classes and content in other classes for a few years now.
:-)
I believe several of my co-workers at Ensemble Studios (located in Dallas) have responded to inviations from UNT/UT and have gone to the campuses to speak or otherwise give presentations.
As game development has matured from the garage band to the full fledged studios, it only makes sense that the instructors would want to show their students the combination of programming, project management, art, music, and magic mojo that game development really is.
that the news.com article focuses mostly on the "cheating" side of the problems and barely touches the more general purpose "hacking the console game via the new".
However, if you hack the console, cheating is a automatically a problem by definition.
It's interesting that the definiton of online cheating has expanded to included a myraid of things a person can do disrupt the game, host systems, or even the network connections of other players. All that seems to matter is hurting another player in some way.
Console systems will be vulnerable to the standard problems (buffer overflows, poor design, etc), but just how much can you loose? On the Xbox, it will be necessary to save executable code to the hard-drive to make a hack persistant, and I'm not sure that a game currently running is even allowed any access to those paritions. On the PS2, what if the hard drive isn't even present? Just reboot and reset.
On the flip side - it's a royal pain to patch a console game. You have to issue new disks.
-Matt Pritchard
can be found at news.com and of course there is that little article I wrote for Game Developer (which has already been covered twice here) at gamasutra.com
-Matt Pritchard
.. eBay. Especially for ones that are out of print (OOP).
Unless it is a particularly collectable and rare CD you can usually find what you want for just a couple bucks on average.