It's been a long time since games relied on processor speeds for timing. Consoles typically use the video hardware vertical sync. Poorly written region conversions don't compensate for the 50Hz/60Hz difference between PAL and NTSC, but the majority do.
This press release on the BPI site explains how 2005 was the best year for sales in history, beating 2004, which in turn beat 2003, which beat 2002, which beat... and so on.
From the press release: This high comes after six years of year-on-year growth in artist album sales from 87.7m [units] in 1999 to 126.2m in 2005, an increase of 44% in just six years.
It's sad to see this once powerful industry decimated by p2p piracy.
I remember that, too... I think this was it. Ah yes, it was discussed here, too. That's probably where I ran into it. This bit suggests the tax loophole has now been closed.
It's my understanding that this is a standard requirement for console games - for Sony, MS and Nintendo. Any game that has a cinematic sequence that cannot be skipped (at least within a few seconds) will fail it's submission for publishing.
As someone else pointed out, it would be nice if pause, rewind and replay were also standard requirements. Sometimes when these things kick in, you're not always in the right state of mind to take proper notice of any important information they may be giving.
If no-one's reading it, you need to look at how you're writing it.
If you drop a 500 page tome in the middle of the room and expect people to start at page 1 and not stop until they've read through to the end, then yes, you're going to be disappointed.
It needs to be a source of reference, not an epic novel. I need to be able to flip to the AI section, spawning subsection and find a list of parameters that need to be definable when I'm preparing to implement that bit in the editor. If I have to trawl through up to 499 other pages before finding what I want, then it's not likely I'll be coming back to the doc for the next stage.
I had a similar reaction when I first tried reading an article on this site. However, the articles are generally quite good, so I persisted and found that in Firefox you can navigate back and forth through the pages using the page-up/page-down keys. This doesn't seem to work in IE, though.
Now I'm used to it, I actually quite like flipping through the pages on a key press.
Re:Has any devoloper ever released a full design d
on
How Not To Make An MMOG
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Grandparent post is quite alarming. I've been developing games for many years now and a thorough design documentation is pretty much essential to completing a good quality game on time and within budget.
It's possible to get by without one if you're creating a relatively simple game with an extremely small tight-knit team, but otherwise you're going to need that documentation to at least make sure everyone is building the same game. Producing a coherent design on paper is hard work and may not be as fun as jumping in and starting to build the game, but it forces you to think about the consequences of each design element you add. It's much easier to change the design at this stage rather than lose 2 months of development time because something added on a whim breaks another gameplay mechanic or renders something redundant. Trust me, I've seen it happen.
Having a robust design at the start of the project doesn't mean that it won't change over time. Many features you just can't really tell how "fun" they're going to be until you try them. Having the documentation there as a foundation will allow you to make changes more easily with minimum impact on the rest of the game. We've found it easiest to use a design wiki, so that the documentation can be kept up to date without too much hassle.
I've refused to work at companies that don't put in the effort at design stage; one company told me that in games development you don't have time for design - they closed down about two months later. And from the other side of the table, candidates who don't show the necessary appreciation for design will not do favorably in interviews. Call me a design nazi if you like, but I've wasted too much of my life poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly thunk-out projects.
Ruby of Rails is so old hat. Anyone who's anyone these days is using "Java on Rails.NET" with LAMP-enabled tomcat backends. And loving it. Or so my boss tell me.
The trick is to add enough variations to make automated parsing difficult. Plus, throw a few word based questions in there...
What is 6 minus the sum of 2 and 2? Is 2 higher than eighteen? Which of the following is an animal? Brick, horse, factory, sky. Type four letter Q's then the letter N. How many P's in pineapple?...and so on. Not so easy to write an automated parser if there's a few thousand variations to cope with.
As long as legislation stays within the realm of "you can't sell M and AO games to kids", I have no problem with it. Hell, I practically support it.
I don't have a problem with that either, but what irks me is that the same rules should apply to all forms of entertainment media, not just games. So unless there's legislation to stop the sale of M and AO movies (DVDs or cinema tickets) to children, there shouldn't be any such legislation applying to games.
While I was quite happy driving around in my little 1.1 liter Peugeot 106 in the UK, driving a similar sized car in the US is somewhat scary. Looking out of your driver's side window into the wheel arch of a pickup that's swerving closer to your lane because the driver's too busy on their cell phone to notice is often enough incentive to buy something a little larger yourself.
I was kind of lucky in that it was only a Buick Roadmaster that totalled my Honda Insight. I could walk away from that one.
Getting your money's worth is a problem. I'd like to see a monthly fee of, say, $10, but you only pay that fee if you play more than a set number of hours. Play half of that time, you pay half the fee. Don't get chance to play at all and you're not charged at all.
I've cancelled subscriptions because sometimes I just haven't had the time to play enough to warrant paying out month after month.
Reminded me of a porting project I had a few years back. We had pretty much all the source code from the game, but only binaries for the proprietary libraries it relied heavily on. In fact, it was only when we started pulling the thing apart that we found out just how much stuff was hidden away in the libraries. For example, a lot of the code seemed very disjointed - most sections didn't seem to be called from anywhere. We found that all entities (player, enemies, effects, menus, sounds, and so on) were set up as tasks with common data structure headers containing function pointers and linkage, and the whole thing got build up as a tree. Re-implementing the task manager from the library code was a huge step towards getting the port to run.
We had the game running on the original platform, with a debugger and disassembler, so disassembling the libraries wasn't too bad - actually it was quite fun. The libs were compiled c code, which made it easier to pull out a c implementation, especially as we knew from the library stub name roughly what it was supposed to do and what data was going in.
I'm currently pulling apart an old 8-bit game to see how it worked; it's only 26kb, but it's all hand optimized and self-modifying 6502 code. Takes a little longer to figure out, but it's still fun.
And as with all hardware, I guess, make sure that it's compatible with Linux if you wish to run such a beast at a later date.
I didn't bother checking about my HP 36-something-something. I recently switched to using Ubuntu, and SANE won't touch my HP with a bargepole.
It works fairly well with Windows, but uses some ActiveX functionality for its document store/display which IE tends to worry about being a security issue. Might scare the uninitiated.
The one thing I didn't know about the final year project at my university was how important it was to get in as early as possible with the professor you want to supervise the project. I made the mistake of going to lectures first and turning up at 11am to find the professors with the projects I was interested in were all fully booked. I ended up working on a project dealing heavily in logic theory and prolog programming, which was fine, but not my first choice by a long shot.
A couple of interesting projects suggestions that I remember:
Aural debugger: investigation into how well the human ear can detect bugs in software. Kind of like how a mechanic may be able to diagnose problems in a machine purely by the noises it makes. Analyse code, match sounds to various constructs and find out how easily bugs can be detected through listening for unexpected sounds while running. May or may not have any practical use, but definitely interesting.
Ethernet pager: implement a paging system using interference from ethernet cabling. This was a while ago, so forgive me if I'm a little bit off with the details! Apparently it was noticed that various patterns of data sent over network were producing different flavors of interference on a small portable radio. The project was to attempt to create a pager that receives signals through this interference and a transmitter that worked by sending recognisable patterns of data over the network.
No idea if anyone tried them at the time, or at any time since...
That's a fair point about testing any new patches first. I feel an anecdote coming on...
A couple of years ago, there was a windows patch that somehow affected 3dsmax. Files saved from 3dsmax on a patched machine could only be read on other patched machines, while files from unpatched machines couple be happily read on either. Much confusion ensued. I think it took a day or so to uncover what was really going on, but it caused us more problems than we'd ever had with viruses.
Quite what the patch or 3dsmax was doing to accomplish this feat, I don't know. Utterly brilliant.
TBH I've no idea how much money or coercing it would take for an indie group to become licenced console developers, but I imagine this is in itself a huge hurdle for any small group. As far as "indie" is concerned, I was referring to people developing for more accessible platforms like PC, Mac and such like.
The guys behind Alien Hominid went from flash to consoles, in a classic tale of indie-team-done-good. Ok, they had plenty of console experience behind them, and I've no idea how much money they had to put up, but it shows it's not entirely impossible to do.
No, you don't need 40+ man teams or millions of dollars, unless you're trying to create a game to compete side by side with the big publishers/developers. Indie game development is alive and well, and producing some excellent games, but let's face it, it's a different league. Two people working part time on a project are just simply not going to be able to produce the same quantity and quality of content within a game compared to a full time, full size team.
Part of the problem is consumer expectation: if the game isn't crammed full-to-busting with highly detailed models and textures, and doesn't push every last cycle of performance out of their console, then it'll generally be overlooked or perceived as mediocre, whether it's a good game or not. This is one of the issues raised here (ppt presentation).
The only way for smaller developers to continue is to produce smaller, cheaper games, and hope they still get sufficient sales. This is a big gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a long time since games relied on processor speeds for timing. Consoles typically use the video hardware vertical sync. Poorly written region conversions don't compensate for the 50Hz/60Hz difference between PAL and NTSC, but the majority do.
None.
However, most (NTSC) TVs can display 60.
Yay Beeb! I used mine from 1984 through till 1991, when I moved up to an Acorn A3000.
Fred, Jim and Shiela are still on my Christmas card list.
You seem to be confusing evolution with abiogenesis, which are completely different things.
This press release on the BPI site explains how 2005 was the best year for sales in history, beating 2004, which in turn beat 2003, which beat 2002, which beat... and so on.
From the press release: This high comes after six years of year-on-year growth in artist album sales from 87.7m [units] in 1999 to 126.2m in 2005, an increase of 44% in just six years.
It's sad to see this once powerful industry decimated by p2p piracy.
"Oh, wait..."
I remember that, too... I think this was it. Ah yes, it was discussed here, too. That's probably where I ran into it. This bit suggests the tax loophole has now been closed.
It's my understanding that this is a standard requirement for console games - for Sony, MS and Nintendo. Any game that has a cinematic sequence that cannot be skipped (at least within a few seconds) will fail it's submission for publishing.
As someone else pointed out, it would be nice if pause, rewind and replay were also standard requirements. Sometimes when these things kick in, you're not always in the right state of mind to take proper notice of any important information they may be giving.
If no-one's reading it, you need to look at how you're writing it.
If you drop a 500 page tome in the middle of the room and expect people to start at page 1 and not stop until they've read through to the end, then yes, you're going to be disappointed.
It needs to be a source of reference, not an epic novel. I need to be able to flip to the AI section, spawning subsection and find a list of parameters that need to be definable when I'm preparing to implement that bit in the editor. If I have to trawl through up to 499 other pages before finding what I want, then it's not likely I'll be coming back to the doc for the next stage.
I had a similar reaction when I first tried reading an article on this site. However, the articles are generally quite good, so I persisted and found that in Firefox you can navigate back and forth through the pages using the page-up/page-down keys. This doesn't seem to work in IE, though.
Now I'm used to it, I actually quite like flipping through the pages on a key press.
Grandparent post is quite alarming. I've been developing games for many years now and a thorough design documentation is pretty much essential to completing a good quality game on time and within budget.
It's possible to get by without one if you're creating a relatively simple game with an extremely small tight-knit team, but otherwise you're going to need that documentation to at least make sure everyone is building the same game. Producing a coherent design on paper is hard work and may not be as fun as jumping in and starting to build the game, but it forces you to think about the consequences of each design element you add. It's much easier to change the design at this stage rather than lose 2 months of development time because something added on a whim breaks another gameplay mechanic or renders something redundant. Trust me, I've seen it happen.
Having a robust design at the start of the project doesn't mean that it won't change over time. Many features you just can't really tell how "fun" they're going to be until you try them. Having the documentation there as a foundation will allow you to make changes more easily with minimum impact on the rest of the game. We've found it easiest to use a design wiki, so that the documentation can be kept up to date without too much hassle.
I've refused to work at companies that don't put in the effort at design stage; one company told me that in games development you don't have time for design - they closed down about two months later. And from the other side of the table, candidates who don't show the necessary appreciation for design will not do favorably in interviews. Call me a design nazi if you like, but I've wasted too much of my life poorly planned, poorly managed and poorly thunk-out projects.
Ruby of Rails is so old hat. Anyone who's anyone these days is using "Java on Rails.NET" with LAMP-enabled tomcat backends. And loving it. Or so my boss tell me.
The trick is to add enough variations to make automated parsing difficult. Plus, throw a few word based questions in there...
...and so on. Not so easy to write an automated parser if there's a few thousand variations to cope with.
What is 6 minus the sum of 2 and 2?
Is 2 higher than eighteen?
Which of the following is an animal? Brick, horse, factory, sky.
Type four letter Q's then the letter N.
How many P's in pineapple?
As long as legislation stays within the realm of "you can't sell M and AO games to kids", I have no problem with it. Hell, I practically support it.
I don't have a problem with that either, but what irks me is that the same rules should apply to all forms of entertainment media, not just games. So unless there's legislation to stop the sale of M and AO movies (DVDs or cinema tickets) to children, there shouldn't be any such legislation applying to games.
I recall paying £40-45 for PS1 games when Sony's console was new to the market. They'll come down eventually.
While I was quite happy driving around in my little 1.1 liter Peugeot 106 in the UK, driving a similar sized car in the US is somewhat scary. Looking out of your driver's side window into the wheel arch of a pickup that's swerving closer to your lane because the driver's too busy on their cell phone to notice is often enough incentive to buy something a little larger yourself.
I was kind of lucky in that it was only a Buick Roadmaster that totalled my Honda Insight. I could walk away from that one.
Just hope my Civic hybrid lasts a bit longer...
Getting your money's worth is a problem. I'd like to see a monthly fee of, say, $10, but you only pay that fee if you play more than a set number of hours. Play half of that time, you pay half the fee. Don't get chance to play at all and you're not charged at all.
I've cancelled subscriptions because sometimes I just haven't had the time to play enough to warrant paying out month after month.
isn't there some game about mowing grass?
Yep, there's a review here. Of course, the portable version will need to cut down on the graphics, but the gameplay's still there.
Honest, guv.
Reminded me of a porting project I had a few years back. We had pretty much all the source code from the game, but only binaries for the proprietary libraries it relied heavily on. In fact, it was only when we started pulling the thing apart that we found out just how much stuff was hidden away in the libraries. For example, a lot of the code seemed very disjointed - most sections didn't seem to be called from anywhere. We found that all entities (player, enemies, effects, menus, sounds, and so on) were set up as tasks with common data structure headers containing function pointers and linkage, and the whole thing got build up as a tree. Re-implementing the task manager from the library code was a huge step towards getting the port to run.
We had the game running on the original platform, with a debugger and disassembler, so disassembling the libraries wasn't too bad - actually it was quite fun. The libs were compiled c code, which made it easier to pull out a c implementation, especially as we knew from the library stub name roughly what it was supposed to do and what data was going in.
I'm currently pulling apart an old 8-bit game to see how it worked; it's only 26kb, but it's all hand optimized and self-modifying 6502 code. Takes a little longer to figure out, but it's still fun.
And as with all hardware, I guess, make sure that it's compatible with Linux if you wish to run such a beast at a later date.
I didn't bother checking about my HP 36-something-something. I recently switched to using Ubuntu, and SANE won't touch my HP with a bargepole.
It works fairly well with Windows, but uses some ActiveX functionality for its document store/display which IE tends to worry about being a security issue. Might scare the uninitiated.
Right. Did you ever get the impression the government agency might not have wanted you to complete the project?
The one thing I didn't know about the final year project at my university was how important it was to get in as early as possible with the professor you want to supervise the project. I made the mistake of going to lectures first and turning up at 11am to find the professors with the projects I was interested in were all fully booked. I ended up working on a project dealing heavily in logic theory and prolog programming, which was fine, but not my first choice by a long shot.
A couple of interesting projects suggestions that I remember:
Aural debugger: investigation into how well the human ear can detect bugs in software. Kind of like how a mechanic may be able to diagnose problems in a machine purely by the noises it makes. Analyse code, match sounds to various constructs and find out how easily bugs can be detected through listening for unexpected sounds while running. May or may not have any practical use, but definitely interesting.
Ethernet pager: implement a paging system using interference from ethernet cabling. This was a while ago, so forgive me if I'm a little bit off with the details! Apparently it was noticed that various patterns of data sent over network were producing different flavors of interference on a small portable radio. The project was to attempt to create a pager that receives signals through this interference and a transmitter that worked by sending recognisable patterns of data over the network.
No idea if anyone tried them at the time, or at any time since...
That's a fair point about testing any new patches first. I feel an anecdote coming on...
A couple of years ago, there was a windows patch that somehow affected 3dsmax. Files saved from 3dsmax on a patched machine could only be read on other patched machines, while files from unpatched machines couple be happily read on either. Much confusion ensued. I think it took a day or so to uncover what was really going on, but it caused us more problems than we'd ever had with viruses.
Quite what the patch or 3dsmax was doing to accomplish this feat, I don't know. Utterly brilliant.
TBH I've no idea how much money or coercing it would take for an indie group to become licenced console developers, but I imagine this is in itself a huge hurdle for any small group. As far as "indie" is concerned, I was referring to people developing for more accessible platforms like PC, Mac and such like.
The guys behind Alien Hominid went from flash to consoles, in a classic tale of indie-team-done-good. Ok, they had plenty of console experience behind them, and I've no idea how much money they had to put up, but it shows it's not entirely impossible to do.
I have mod points today, but I can't find the (+1, touché) option.
Sorry about that.
No, you don't need 40+ man teams or millions of dollars, unless you're trying to create a game to compete side by side with the big publishers/developers. Indie game development is alive and well, and producing some excellent games, but let's face it, it's a different league. Two people working part time on a project are just simply not going to be able to produce the same quantity and quality of content within a game compared to a full time, full size team.
Part of the problem is consumer expectation: if the game isn't crammed full-to-busting with highly detailed models and textures, and doesn't push every last cycle of performance out of their console, then it'll generally be overlooked or perceived as mediocre, whether it's a good game or not. This is one of the issues raised here (ppt presentation).
The only way for smaller developers to continue is to produce smaller, cheaper games, and hope they still get sufficient sales. This is a big gamble.