12. Ongoing player content (endgame content if you will) should involve diplomacy, trade or conflict with neighboring aliens...
This reminds me a lot of MULE. I could see doing something where players are Klingon, Vulcan, or Human aligned and any of the three factions can enter battle with any other one, then strip the loser for supplies. But all 3 would need supplies that only the other races can provide. Add in some feedback systems which encouraged a degree of pilfering without going overboard, and it could be an interesting, dangerous universe.
11. At some point player Admirals*** should have the ability to take information collected by players and make missions out of it, for example sending a star ship to a planet that has a unique NPC culture or artifacts.
And / or the endgame IS creating missions for players, using the content creation tools of the developers. This setup worked very well for MUDs, and ensured that lots of unique content went into those systems, keeping players hooked for years.
I like your potential flow, though it seems to me like things could be sped up a bit.
The inherent problem with MMORPG's is that you need to have enough there to engage the player for literally thousands of hours. Most do this through advancement hooks and other addiction qualities which, while compelling, can't really be described as "fun." The gameplay itself is largely incidental to the experience.
Star Trek has two unique additional problems: 1. The problem resolution mechanisms in the series hardly ever involve having superior firepower. Picard realizes that Farpoint Station is a living creature, and feeds it power until it can escape. Beverly finds everyone around her disappearing, until she realizes that she is trapped in a collapsing warp bubble and the traveller helps her to escape. Moriarty tricks Picard into leaving from the fake holodeck onto the real holodeck, but Picard tricks Moriarty into leaving from the real holodeck onto a fake one. This is all compelling watching, but how do you structure a game around it?
2. There are a whole lot of people in the show who don't really do anything in particular. What, exactly, does the comm-ops officer do during a battle? You have navigation, who makes sure the ship is pointed at the bad guys. You have a battle station attendant, who pushes an orange button to lock onto a ship and pushes a red one to fire. And you have everyone else sitting there waiting for a chance to go on an away mission and get some screen time.
So what you need is a system that doesn't rely upon combat to be entertaining, still gives all of the players something to do, and yet remains fun from moment-to-moment over months.
The closest design that I can think of which satisfies all of these criteria is Puzzle Pirates.
"This hack is as contrived as 'The Net' but without Sandra Bullock's allure. If it were an action figure, it would be by Playmates, and I wouldn't hesitate to open the packaging. This hack makes Everquest look like Everquest 2. In short... Worst... Hack... Ever."
Everyone making an MMORPG has NO ideas and is copying the people who went before them, its really very sad. Why not get some people who a) Have some ideas on how to do an original and fresh MMORPG and b) are die hard trekkies who would laugh customisable uniforms out the room
Because when a financer sees a 30 million dollar MMORPG development price tag, they want to ensure that the game will be a financial success by copying everyone else's financial successes (doesn't work, sadly). They want lots of control over who gets into positions of power in the game development team, and largely put in other toothbrush salesmen who also don't know the industry. These people generally hire the kinds of people who will do their bidding like a good employee, and listen too much to the marketing department.
With so much money riding on the line, the project generally changes direction in a major way a few times over its life, depending upon the nervous whims of the leader or financers. Workflow and cost considerations ensure that the moment-to-moment content for the game is created by interns with no shipped titles under their belts. Employees get quickly burned out like some resource to be expended.
On the other hand, you really do need some degree of visual customization of your avatar in a mmporpg, much more so than in a regular game. Otherwise the world quickly becomes a creepy endeavor of bumping into your long lost twins.
Limiting downloads is actually a feature, sort of. The X360 isn't a PC. Games expect to get complete hardware performance every time they run (technically 5% or so of one of the cores is devoted to the GUI, but you understand what I mean).
Yes, but you should at least be able to navigate the dashboard, start other downloads, chat with friends, etc. Downloading itself isn't a particularly processor intensive task, and it shouldn't be too difficult for the system to put up a "download in progress... game is paused" message for anyone who tries to enter or resume a game.
I expect we'll see this improve as MS releases more dashboard updates.
The box constantly logs me in and out - some things need me in, some out. Like your problem with unexpected reboots, this sounds like an issue with software updates for a new system. I'm not sure I consider it a problem myself, but you won't really have to worry about it now.
This rather bothers me as well. I'd much rather be logged in or not depending upon how I feel, rather than what the internal state of the box wants.
When you quit a game, the OS doesn't know if you've saved the game or not... A little communication between the OS and games, please! This is more of an issue with shoddy games that don't autosave, generally lazy multiplatform releases.
Lots of games on the PS2 autosave, just as lots of Xbox games didn't. There seems to be a lot of developers around who haven't quite understood that it isn't save and autosave anymore, it is save and manual save.
DOA can get away with autosaving without warnings because there really isn't any moment-to-moment progress to be lost. However, in an RPG every resource you consume or action you take could count as progress, and as such unless you're going to hit the memory card every second or two, you need to warn the player.
This is really only a problem for the X360 because that's the only console that has the concept of "quitting" a game. You don't quit anything on the PS2, you just turn the machine off.
And really, that summarizes all of the growing pains the X360 is experiencing. It took a very simple thing, a console, and expanded it out in new directions. Some of those are painful and confusing. Some aren't.
About 10 years ago, installing a computer game wasn't as simple as it is today, and you were never sure if it would run on your computer... it's really disheartening to hear that Microsoft has over-looked the key advantage of consoles and screwed it up.
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. "
Allow all characters to participate in space combat in a meaningful way. If you have a minor ship, you may have to hide behind a major ship to keep from getting squished, but you should still be somewhat useful. Likewise, a swarm of 10 or 20 low-level ships should still be able to take down a high-level ship. Play the packs of rabble rousers against the single monolythic guardians.
No single overarching "level." If players have engineering experience, they have engineering experience. If they make money and can afford a larger ship, their status in ship size is better. But no player should be "level 19" or "Level 105" or level anything overall.
Put showmanship into your missions. Don't hire entry-level game designers to setup missions: hire entry-level film students.
Shake up the world. The satisfying climax of Star Wars is the transformation of the galaxy. The interesting parts of Bound are the ones where the rug is pulled out from underneath you. When the player doesn't expect it, transport him to an alternate universe. Or temporarily dissolve the fedaration council, allowing him to get attacked with impunity. Or do any one of a number of things to alter the course of history. Maybe it is for everyone, like AC, or maybe it is just for them... like Guild Wars.
I definitely agree that security minded individuals should find ways of attacking systems in order to find defences against them. Nearly all software holes are found this way, and are patched within weeks of discovery.
But this seems excessive. We're just starting to hear about real Windows based rootkits in the wild, and a front page Slashdot article gives everyone and their mother an exploit route that is both nasty, nearly impossible to protect against, and hasn't been seen in the wild.
Please Stop. Find a good, solid fix... or find code in the wild, then post about it.
--This post intentionally left inflamatory. Please let me know where I'm wrong.
"knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer (a defined term that includes the laptop that Citrin used)"
Hey, the information you've transmitted over slashdot has damaged the company's lawyer's protected computer fund. Expect a warrant for your arrest.
Even if he was violating his agreement with the company, they loaned him the laptop. The law was not put in place to regulate how an employee may use an employer's computer, but to protect people from hackers. Non-case.
Games vary quite a bit in terms of utilization. Deus Ex 2 hit the main processor pretty hard. Half Life 2 destroys RAM. World of Warcraft sucks no matter what you do thanks to the server on the other end.
There is really no way to benchmark every game out there, so you have to go on the "feel" of the games that you are playing.
If your game experiences sudden large performance hits, you probably have run out of RAM and are hitting the hard disk. Any time you hit the hard disk is bad.
If you want to see if your CPU is maxed out, go to a relatively visually quiet section of the world and start knocking objects over. This shouldn't increase render times, but will show you if you have processor clock to spare.
If you want to see if your graphics card is maxed out, find a relatively static section of the world without NPC's or moving objects, and go from a very narrow view to a fully pulled back vista. Assuming you aren't hitting a we-render-it-so-we-add-physics-to-it wall, you should be hitting the graphics processor pretty hard while staying light on the other components. This should also be able to be sensed in gameplay... if your framerate glitches vary a lot from moment-to-moment based upon your vision cone, you're probably hitting the graphics card. If your framerate glitches are relatively constant within an area or an encounter, you're probably hitting something else.
FSB speed is tough to judge, as that effects everything else. But really the only way to improve that is to get a new motherboard, at which point you should be upgrading everything anyway.
To complicate matters further, which "bottleneck" you hit depends upon what your graphics settings are. Want to max out your graphics processor? Turn on 8x sampling and turn the resolution all the way up. Want to max out your ram? Use the maximum texture size on the largest maps.
Out here in Boston the Brattle and somerville theaters play just about the same role, and they too are struggling to survive. There used to be a lot more independents in San Jose / Santa Clara, but those went under years ago.
On the other hand, several "mainstream" movie theaters in this area now show exclusively foreign and original stuff, but in a Lowes-sized theater. They've seen the decline of movies like "What you did a few summers ago is getting hazy" and "Black Guy in a White Guy Situation: Starring Ice Cube." I wonder if they are cutting into that market.
Whenever I buy a game, the first thing I do is run the No-CD crack on it. Then I scour my system for the anti-piracy security software and spend 1/2 hour deleting it. If you don't think those things sap resources, try saying that after you've had a machine for 6 years and installed 30 or 40 different games with competing security systems.
Then I generally have about 10 minutes left to play the game before real life rears it's ugly head.
I've moved back largely to console games. It just isn't worth an hour or two of hassle to play a game that is legally purchased. At a time when publishers should be pushing to raise the value of the retail product, instead it is much easier to get an illegal copy with the useless crap stripped out than to live with the restrictions the box set forces upon you. I don't have the slightest idea where my copy of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is, and so if I wanted to play it without the No-CD crack I'd be out of luck. And I worked on that thing!
As a side note, most of the people I've spoken to in the industry don't like copyprotection schemes. But everyone feels that if they don't use them, they will be liable to their shareholders. It's the safe option. And the toothbrush salesmen look to Macromedia (or whoever)'s presentations on how 1st month sales can improve by 20% by investing 500,000 dollars in their scheme. They're not math deficient, they just forget sometimes that ticking off your customers does not make for a happy client base.
These are hand-picked images from a quick google images search. Hopefully that balances both ways. I'll let you all be the judge of the aesthetic quality of EQ2.
You'll also note that the imagery has gotten much more stylized as the series has progressed into the desert of flames expansion. I suspect this has been a touchy subject within Sony, which is why they had the strong reaction they did to the criticism.
I can't say for sure, but I'm betting that's exactly what the console manufacturers fear.
Big publishers would never support a console that cut them out of the equation entirely. Madden would never shout "Boom!" on a machine that cut out EA. EB wouldn't be too thrilled about pushing a console that pushed them out.
With downloadable games, a lot of development houses could cut out the publisher. More and more people these days are willing to throw some high-risk funds at video game developers. And developers have the tools and talent to do basically everything but manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution. Cut those two things out, and the publisher doesn't really have a role.
And I'm sure watching people upgrade the HDD's in Xbox and PS2's to rip game after game had something to do with the decision as well. 20 GB will hold 5 full-sized retail games. 260 would hold 65.
On the other hand, you can max out your X360 HDD with just what is available on Xbox Live right now. In a year, the disk will be downright cramped. If Sony is smart, they'll use a full 3.5" drive (instead of the laptop drives in the X360) and put in a decent amount of space. Right when Xbox 360 owners are groaning about how they can't download anything without deleting something, they can look over and drool at the PS3's full 200 GB of space.
Nintendo, I'm guessing, will measure their disk space in Super Mushroom Blocks.
At the risk of rambling, the play-from-the-hard disk analogy is great for some people, but putting a disk in a tray is still a hugely intuitive and simple process. My girlfriend asked me once to show her how to install Katamari Damacy on the playstation. When I just dropped it in and turned it on, her jaw dropped. She has since asked for a copy of Macromedia's Developer suite on a cartridge.
The problem I found, which turned into my thesis, was that the US will be put to work over distances that would make me a crate of condoms if even breathed the word girlfriend.
However, don't forget that the Saturn undercut the Playstation release date and launched early on 5 / 9 / 95... "Saturn Day." Sony was caught completely by surprise. Retailers were caught completely by surprise. The public was taken completely by surprise. They basically jumped ahead of everyone else and launched before anyone was ready to buy or sell the thing.
Unless you were paying daily attention to the gaming press, one day you walked over to the store and the thing you were hyping yourself up for getting in few months was just sitting on the shelf. It was oddly anti-climactic. It felt like it needed this guy.
Nobody was ready for it, and nobody bought it. Having launched early, there wasn't a lot of software for it, and there wasn't going to be much ready until the original release date. All in all, they blew their launch wad without getting much for it.
On a side note, that was more than ten years ago. Damn, I'm getting old.
There is a full design track in most companies, starting with level design or assistant design and working up to lead design. In some companies there is a director position above lead design, in others a producer. So you may come out of school and immediately be doing level design under the direction and tutalige of a more experienced designer. Or you may spend some time doing design grunt work like writing proposals for other people's designs or designing non-critical systems in the game like menu flows. Or you may go straight into QA to get your feet wet before being promoted up.
Either way, most of what most people consider "design" comes from ideas kicked around by programmers, artists, the publisher, web forums, late-night chats with janitors, interns, etc. A lot of design work is really distilling that down into a coherent whole, finding ways to communicate that to the relevant developers while getting them excited about the idea, and then ensuring that what comes out the other end of the process is everything that it can be. Level design is more hands-on than that, but less so at high levels.
You certainly wouldn't determine overall makeup of a 5 million dollar game just on the strength of having gone to CMU.
They had to have something modern, and the Game Cube would have been a really controversial choice.
The Xbox launching with that thing was pretty controversial. It was like someone had taken a regular controller and stung it repeatedly by bees, and was taken as a sign that Microsoft didn't know what it was doing. It was also symbolic of how generally huge the Xbox was.
The bead buttons were also quite uncomfortable for unaccustomed hands. I tested with that thing for a few weeks, and the divot in my right hand was pronounced and painful. They didn't have the tactile feedback, they were too "slick," and they dug into your fingers in odd ways. Thankfully the Type-S controller fixed these problems.
It also had too much of an inward curve, leading to a slightly ackward arm position, though that could just be from years of practicing on other controllers. Still, it always felt like it was going to slip in towards you.
The thing about a small controller is that anyone can hold it, and more importantly there are a myriad of subtly different ways that you can hold your hand and still have it be comfortable. You can hold it elbows out, elbows at your side. You can ride your hands up so that you're closer to the top buttons, or you can slide down towards the lower sticks. You can rest so low on a PS2 controller that you can hardly reach the top buttons. You can engulf the thing with your entire hand, wrapping your pointer fingers around it like claws.
With a large controller, there is only one way to hold it and still have your hands reach the buttons in a usable fashion. Like the Jaguar, if that happens to be the way you hold the controller, then it will work great for you. And if it isn't, you're not going to be able to come to a compromise with the controller. That's why most successful controllers don't have finger grooves... exactly where the player puts their fingers varies by person. It may feel wonderful to the developer, but put it in the hands of someone with a slightly different bone structure and it is downright torture.
Strangely enough I always found the Jaguar controller just right for my hands, though the buttons needed to be raised from the surface about 2 millimeters and given a smoother activation pressure. But everyone else I've given that thing to was deeply uncomfortable, and could never figure out a way to hold it that was right for them.
Despite what some people are saying here, the article is basically correct. The cross-pollination of ideas is what makes for great gaming. Original takes, fresh ideas... these are all essential. You need a broad knowledge and love of history, dance, psychology, engineering, sociology, and a lot of other fields. And all of these interact in interesting ways.
For example, say you're knocking out another wrestling game for THQ, and you're grappling with the problem of how to represent grappling. A few perspectives:
The gamer perspective: Press the A button rapidly / wag the sticks until one player achieves dominance. That player then executes an attack by pressing the A button again. This attack should be of similar magnitude to if the players had been simply smacking eachother around in the ring, though increase that if they've hardly grappled this round and decrease that if they've been grappling constantly. The dancer perspective: Using the joysticks, the two players are trying to direct eachother's energies around eachother in a game of chicken. Commit too much to a movement, and your opponent can take advantage of your momentum and lose you. Commit too little, and you will never win. The film criticism perspective: The player who "is on a comeback" or "is the underdog" gets a big boost to do a series of dramatic moves culminating in an amazing near-victory that is quickly shattered by a last-minute stunning turn of events, hopefully not involving yet another metal chair. The engineering perspective Wrestling involves a series of roughly 15 positions and holds, and 19 reversals. The transitions between these states usually follows a set pattern of movements, each of which can be blocked by the opponent if they can react in time to the visual clues. The game, therefore, is a glorified back-and-forth of rock paper scissors to first manipulate your opponent into the position you want them and then release your damage move.
I often feel that my weakest trait as a designer is that I know too much about videogames. When a problem arises I know the solution, which just happens to be the same solution I've seen seven or eight other games employ. Pushing back against the easy answer during a crunch period when everyone has a 24 hours worth of stuff to do every day is difficult.
Likewise, game criticism plays a fault for a lot of the overall blandness. If you listen to Miyamoto talk about gaming, he talks about the wonderment of finding bottlecaps underneath bushes when you're outside as a kid. If you listen to the Silent Hill 4 team, they talk about the isolation of modern living in a apartmentalized, regimented society. If you listen to Game Pro, games are about polygon seams and framerates. We need deeper criticism. We need to be able to look at the ways in which games reflect the human condition. Film criticism does this pretty well, and is one reason why film crit is a valid if not necessary thing to study if you're going to become a film maker. Game criticism is, by comparison, hollow. That's one of the reasons why designers need to study everything: they each need to discover on their own how to take a critical yet humanistic eye to the finished product of gaming.
Other things they don't teach you in design school:
The team's enthusiasm is your most important resource. Sometimes it is worth throwing in a cheap but useless feature that everyone wants just to keep people happy. Sometimes you have to yank a great idea so that your programmer can see his wife.
Two to three weeks at the end of the project will be lost to nitpicky, contradictory requirements that the console manufacturers push onto everyone. Even if you've gone through it before and know that "This time it won't happen to us." it will. And ultimately it will have no bearing on the quality of your game: you're just tearing your hair out to keep the big three happy.
There is polish that developers notice, and polish that gamers notice. A develope
Slashdot Mirror
12. Ongoing player content (endgame content if you will) should involve diplomacy, trade or conflict with neighboring aliens...
This reminds me a lot of MULE. I could see doing something where players are Klingon, Vulcan, or Human aligned and any of the three factions can enter battle with any other one, then strip the loser for supplies. But all 3 would need supplies that only the other races can provide. Add in some feedback systems which encouraged a degree of pilfering without going overboard, and it could be an interesting, dangerous universe.
11. At some point player Admirals*** should have the ability to take information collected by players and make missions out of it, for example sending a star ship to a planet that has a unique NPC culture or artifacts.
And / or the endgame IS creating missions for players, using the content creation tools of the developers. This setup worked very well for MUDs, and ensured that lots of unique content went into those systems, keeping players hooked for years.
I like your potential flow, though it seems to me like things could be sped up a bit.
The inherent problem with MMORPG's is that you need to have enough there to engage the player for literally thousands of hours. Most do this through advancement hooks and other addiction qualities which, while compelling, can't really be described as "fun." The gameplay itself is largely incidental to the experience.
Star Trek has two unique additional problems:
1. The problem resolution mechanisms in the series hardly ever involve having superior firepower. Picard realizes that Farpoint Station is a living creature, and feeds it power until it can escape. Beverly finds everyone around her disappearing, until she realizes that she is trapped in a collapsing warp bubble and the traveller helps her to escape. Moriarty tricks Picard into leaving from the fake holodeck onto the real holodeck, but Picard tricks Moriarty into leaving from the real holodeck onto a fake one. This is all compelling watching, but how do you structure a game around it?
2. There are a whole lot of people in the show who don't really do anything in particular. What, exactly, does the comm-ops officer do during a battle? You have navigation, who makes sure the ship is pointed at the bad guys. You have a battle station attendant, who pushes an orange button to lock onto a ship and pushes a red one to fire. And you have everyone else sitting there waiting for a chance to go on an away mission and get some screen time.
So what you need is a system that doesn't rely upon combat to be entertaining, still gives all of the players something to do, and yet remains fun from moment-to-moment over months.
The closest design that I can think of which satisfies all of these criteria is Puzzle Pirates.
What are women doing with a duck?
"This hack is as contrived as 'The Net' but without Sandra Bullock's allure. If it were an action figure, it would be by Playmates, and I wouldn't hesitate to open the packaging. This hack makes Everquest look like Everquest 2. In short... Worst... Hack... Ever."
Everyone making an MMORPG has NO ideas and is copying the people who went before them, its really very sad. Why not get some people who
a) Have some ideas on how to do an original and fresh MMORPG and
b) are die hard trekkies who would laugh customisable uniforms out the room
Because when a financer sees a 30 million dollar MMORPG development price tag, they want to ensure that the game will be a financial success by copying everyone else's financial successes (doesn't work, sadly). They want lots of control over who gets into positions of power in the game development team, and largely put in other toothbrush salesmen who also don't know the industry. These people generally hire the kinds of people who will do their bidding like a good employee, and listen too much to the marketing department.
With so much money riding on the line, the project generally changes direction in a major way a few times over its life, depending upon the nervous whims of the leader or financers. Workflow and cost considerations ensure that the moment-to-moment content for the game is created by interns with no shipped titles under their belts. Employees get quickly burned out like some resource to be expended.
On the other hand, you really do need some degree of visual customization of your avatar in a mmporpg, much more so than in a regular game. Otherwise the world quickly becomes a creepy endeavor of bumping into your long lost twins.
Limiting downloads is actually a feature, sort of. The X360 isn't a PC. Games expect to get complete hardware performance every time they run (technically 5% or so of one of the cores is devoted to the GUI, but you understand what I mean).
Yes, but you should at least be able to navigate the dashboard, start other downloads, chat with friends, etc. Downloading itself isn't a particularly processor intensive task, and it shouldn't be too difficult for the system to put up a "download in progress... game is paused" message for anyone who tries to enter or resume a game.
I expect we'll see this improve as MS releases more dashboard updates.
The box constantly logs me in and out - some things need me in, some out.
Like your problem with unexpected reboots, this sounds like an issue with software updates for a new system. I'm not sure I consider it a problem myself, but you won't really have to worry about it now.
This rather bothers me as well. I'd much rather be logged in or not depending upon how I feel, rather than what the internal state of the box wants.
When you quit a game, the OS doesn't know if you've saved the game or not... A little communication between the OS and games, please!
This is more of an issue with shoddy games that don't autosave, generally lazy multiplatform releases.
Lots of games on the PS2 autosave, just as lots of Xbox games didn't. There seems to be a lot of developers around who haven't quite understood that it isn't save and autosave anymore, it is save and manual save.
DOA can get away with autosaving without warnings because there really isn't any moment-to-moment progress to be lost. However, in an RPG every resource you consume or action you take could count as progress, and as such unless you're going to hit the memory card every second or two, you need to warn the player.
This is really only a problem for the X360 because that's the only console that has the concept of "quitting" a game. You don't quit anything on the PS2, you just turn the machine off.
And really, that summarizes all of the growing pains the X360 is experiencing. It took a very simple thing, a console, and expanded it out in new directions. Some of those are painful and confusing. Some aren't.
About 10 years ago, installing a computer game wasn't as simple as it is today, and you were never sure if it would run on your computer... it's really disheartening to hear that Microsoft has over-looked the key advantage of consoles and screwed it up.
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. "
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
In hell, the servers all run Access.
There is also the "transmission" thing, and only a highly philosophical engineer would consider typing into a laptop a "transmission."
Allow all characters to participate in space combat in a meaningful way. If you have a minor ship, you may have to hide behind a major ship to keep from getting squished, but you should still be somewhat useful. Likewise, a swarm of 10 or 20 low-level ships should still be able to take down a high-level ship. Play the packs of rabble rousers against the single monolythic guardians.
No single overarching "level." If players have engineering experience, they have engineering experience. If they make money and can afford a larger ship, their status in ship size is better. But no player should be "level 19" or "Level 105" or level anything overall.
Put showmanship into your missions. Don't hire entry-level game designers to setup missions: hire entry-level film students.
Shake up the world. The satisfying climax of Star Wars is the transformation of the galaxy. The interesting parts of Bound are the ones where the rug is pulled out from underneath you. When the player doesn't expect it, transport him to an alternate universe. Or temporarily dissolve the fedaration council, allowing him to get attacked with impunity. Or do any one of a number of things to alter the course of history. Maybe it is for everyone, like AC, or maybe it is just for them... like Guild Wars.
I'd find you another copy but, well...
I definitely agree that security minded individuals should find ways of attacking systems in order to find defences against them. Nearly all software holes are found this way, and are patched within weeks of discovery.
But this seems excessive. We're just starting to hear about real Windows based rootkits in the wild, and a front page Slashdot article gives everyone and their mother an exploit route that is both nasty, nearly impossible to protect against, and hasn't been seen in the wild.
Please Stop. Find a good, solid fix... or find code in the wild, then post about it.
--This post intentionally left inflamatory. Please let me know where I'm wrong.
"knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer (a defined term that includes the laptop that Citrin used)"
Hey, the information you've transmitted over slashdot has damaged the company's lawyer's protected computer fund. Expect a warrant for your arrest.
Even if he was violating his agreement with the company, they loaned him the laptop. The law was not put in place to regulate how an employee may use an employer's computer, but to protect people from hackers. Non-case.
Games vary quite a bit in terms of utilization. Deus Ex 2 hit the main processor pretty hard. Half Life 2 destroys RAM. World of Warcraft sucks no matter what you do thanks to the server on the other end.
There is really no way to benchmark every game out there, so you have to go on the "feel" of the games that you are playing.
If your game experiences sudden large performance hits, you probably have run out of RAM and are hitting the hard disk. Any time you hit the hard disk is bad.
If you want to see if your CPU is maxed out, go to a relatively visually quiet section of the world and start knocking objects over. This shouldn't increase render times, but will show you if you have processor clock to spare.
If you want to see if your graphics card is maxed out, find a relatively static section of the world without NPC's or moving objects, and go from a very narrow view to a fully pulled back vista. Assuming you aren't hitting a we-render-it-so-we-add-physics-to-it wall, you should be hitting the graphics processor pretty hard while staying light on the other components. This should also be able to be sensed in gameplay... if your framerate glitches vary a lot from moment-to-moment based upon your vision cone, you're probably hitting the graphics card. If your framerate glitches are relatively constant within an area or an encounter, you're probably hitting something else.
FSB speed is tough to judge, as that effects everything else. But really the only way to improve that is to get a new motherboard, at which point you should be upgrading everything anyway.
To complicate matters further, which "bottleneck" you hit depends upon what your graphics settings are. Want to max out your graphics processor? Turn on 8x sampling and turn the resolution all the way up. Want to max out your ram? Use the maximum texture size on the largest maps.
Out here in Boston the Brattle and somerville theaters play just about the same role, and they too are struggling to survive. There used to be a lot more independents in San Jose / Santa Clara, but those went under years ago.
On the other hand, several "mainstream" movie theaters in this area now show exclusively foreign and original stuff, but in a Lowes-sized theater. They've seen the decline of movies like "What you did a few summers ago is getting hazy" and "Black Guy in a White Guy Situation: Starring Ice Cube." I wonder if they are cutting into that market.
Whenever I buy a game, the first thing I do is run the No-CD crack on it. Then I scour my system for the anti-piracy security software and spend 1/2 hour deleting it. If you don't think those things sap resources, try saying that after you've had a machine for 6 years and installed 30 or 40 different games with competing security systems.
Then I generally have about 10 minutes left to play the game before real life rears it's ugly head.
I've moved back largely to console games. It just isn't worth an hour or two of hassle to play a game that is legally purchased. At a time when publishers should be pushing to raise the value of the retail product, instead it is much easier to get an illegal copy with the useless crap stripped out than to live with the restrictions the box set forces upon you. I don't have the slightest idea where my copy of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is, and so if I wanted to play it without the No-CD crack I'd be out of luck. And I worked on that thing!
As a side note, most of the people I've spoken to in the industry don't like copyprotection schemes. But everyone feels that if they don't use them, they will be liable to their shareholders. It's the safe option. And the toothbrush salesmen look to Macromedia (or whoever)'s presentations on how 1st month sales can improve by 20% by investing 500,000 dollars in their scheme. They're not math deficient, they just forget sometimes that ticking off your customers does not make for a happy client base.
Liqudity by month:
January: 100,000 dollars
February: 0 dollars
March: 120,000 dollars
April: 0 dollars
May: 150,000 dollars
June: 0 dollars
July: 190,000 dollars
August: 0 dollars
September: 0 dollars
October: 0 dollars
November: 0 dollars
December: 0 dollars
"He's dead, Jim"
To be fair to Sony...
Everquest 2
World of Warcraft
Everquest 2
Lineage 2
Everquest 2
A Tale in the Desert
Another Lineage 2, just because I like the art style.
Everquest 2
Asheron's Call 2
Everquest 2
Everquest 2
Final Fantasy XI Online
Everquest 2
Ragnarok Online
These are hand-picked images from a quick google images search. Hopefully that balances both ways. I'll let you all be the judge of the aesthetic quality of EQ2.
You'll also note that the imagery has gotten much more stylized as the series has progressed into the desert of flames expansion. I suspect this has been a touchy subject within Sony, which is why they had the strong reaction they did to the criticism.
I can't say for sure, but I'm betting that's exactly what the console manufacturers fear.
Big publishers would never support a console that cut them out of the equation entirely. Madden would never shout "Boom!" on a machine that cut out EA. EB wouldn't be too thrilled about pushing a console that pushed them out.
With downloadable games, a lot of development houses could cut out the publisher. More and more people these days are willing to throw some high-risk funds at video game developers. And developers have the tools and talent to do basically everything but manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution. Cut those two things out, and the publisher doesn't really have a role.
And I'm sure watching people upgrade the HDD's in Xbox and PS2's to rip game after game had something to do with the decision as well. 20 GB will hold 5 full-sized retail games. 260 would hold 65.
On the other hand, you can max out your X360 HDD with just what is available on Xbox Live right now. In a year, the disk will be downright cramped. If Sony is smart, they'll use a full 3.5" drive (instead of the laptop drives in the X360) and put in a decent amount of space. Right when Xbox 360 owners are groaning about how they can't download anything without deleting something, they can look over and drool at the PS3's full 200 GB of space.
Nintendo, I'm guessing, will measure their disk space in Super Mushroom Blocks.
At the risk of rambling, the play-from-the-hard disk analogy is great for some people, but putting a disk in a tray is still a hugely intuitive and simple process. My girlfriend asked me once to show her how to install Katamari Damacy on the playstation. When I just dropped it in and turned it on, her jaw dropped. She has since asked for a copy of Macromedia's Developer suite on a cartridge.
The problem I found, which turned into my thesis, was that the US will be put to work over distances that would make me a crate of condoms if even breathed the word girlfriend.
...wait. What?
Yes, exactly.
Now they just need to reverse their Tali Ban.
Interesting thought.
However, don't forget that the Saturn undercut the Playstation release date and launched early on 5 / 9 / 95... "Saturn Day." Sony was caught completely by surprise. Retailers were caught completely by surprise. The public was taken completely by surprise. They basically jumped ahead of everyone else and launched before anyone was ready to buy or sell the thing.
Unless you were paying daily attention to the gaming press, one day you walked over to the store and the thing you were hyping yourself up for getting in few months was just sitting on the shelf. It was oddly anti-climactic. It felt like it needed this guy.
Nobody was ready for it, and nobody bought it. Having launched early, there wasn't a lot of software for it, and there wasn't going to be much ready until the original release date. All in all, they blew their launch wad without getting much for it.
On a side note, that was more than ten years ago. Damn, I'm getting old.
Oh neat! If you've got space, put me down for the public beta.
Chris Canfield,
Harmonix Music Systems
mode7[at]chriscanfield[dot]net
There is a full design track in most companies, starting with level design or assistant design and working up to lead design. In some companies there is a director position above lead design, in others a producer. So you may come out of school and immediately be doing level design under the direction and tutalige of a more experienced designer. Or you may spend some time doing design grunt work like writing proposals for other people's designs or designing non-critical systems in the game like menu flows. Or you may go straight into QA to get your feet wet before being promoted up.
Either way, most of what most people consider "design" comes from ideas kicked around by programmers, artists, the publisher, web forums, late-night chats with janitors, interns, etc. A lot of design work is really distilling that down into a coherent whole, finding ways to communicate that to the relevant developers while getting them excited about the idea, and then ensuring that what comes out the other end of the process is everything that it can be. Level design is more hands-on than that, but less so at high levels.
You certainly wouldn't determine overall makeup of a 5 million dollar game just on the strength of having gone to CMU.
They had to have something modern, and the Game Cube would have been a really controversial choice.
The Xbox launching with that thing was pretty controversial. It was like someone had taken a regular controller and stung it repeatedly by bees, and was taken as a sign that Microsoft didn't know what it was doing. It was also symbolic of how generally huge the Xbox was.
The bead buttons were also quite uncomfortable for unaccustomed hands. I tested with that thing for a few weeks, and the divot in my right hand was pronounced and painful. They didn't have the tactile feedback, they were too "slick," and they dug into your fingers in odd ways. Thankfully the Type-S controller fixed these problems.
It also had too much of an inward curve, leading to a slightly ackward arm position, though that could just be from years of practicing on other controllers. Still, it always felt like it was going to slip in towards you.
The thing about a small controller is that anyone can hold it, and more importantly there are a myriad of subtly different ways that you can hold your hand and still have it be comfortable. You can hold it elbows out, elbows at your side. You can ride your hands up so that you're closer to the top buttons, or you can slide down towards the lower sticks. You can rest so low on a PS2 controller that you can hardly reach the top buttons. You can engulf the thing with your entire hand, wrapping your pointer fingers around it like claws.
With a large controller, there is only one way to hold it and still have your hands reach the buttons in a usable fashion. Like the Jaguar, if that happens to be the way you hold the controller, then it will work great for you. And if it isn't, you're not going to be able to come to a compromise with the controller. That's why most successful controllers don't have finger grooves... exactly where the player puts their fingers varies by person. It may feel wonderful to the developer, but put it in the hands of someone with a slightly different bone structure and it is downright torture.
Strangely enough I always found the Jaguar controller just right for my hands, though the buttons needed to be raised from the surface about 2 millimeters and given a smoother activation pressure. But everyone else I've given that thing to was deeply uncomfortable, and could never figure out a way to hold it that was right for them.
Despite what some people are saying here, the article is basically correct. The cross-pollination of ideas is what makes for great gaming. Original takes, fresh ideas... these are all essential. You need a broad knowledge and love of history, dance, psychology, engineering, sociology, and a lot of other fields. And all of these interact in interesting ways.
For example, say you're knocking out another wrestling game for THQ, and you're grappling with the problem of how to represent grappling. A few perspectives:
The gamer perspective: Press the A button rapidly / wag the sticks until one player achieves dominance. That player then executes an attack by pressing the A button again. This attack should be of similar magnitude to if the players had been simply smacking eachother around in the ring, though increase that if they've hardly grappled this round and decrease that if they've been grappling constantly.
The dancer perspective: Using the joysticks, the two players are trying to direct eachother's energies around eachother in a game of chicken. Commit too much to a movement, and your opponent can take advantage of your momentum and lose you. Commit too little, and you will never win.
The film criticism perspective: The player who "is on a comeback" or "is the underdog" gets a big boost to do a series of dramatic moves culminating in an amazing near-victory that is quickly shattered by a last-minute stunning turn of events, hopefully not involving yet another metal chair.
The engineering perspective Wrestling involves a series of roughly 15 positions and holds, and 19 reversals. The transitions between these states usually follows a set pattern of movements, each of which can be blocked by the opponent if they can react in time to the visual clues. The game, therefore, is a glorified back-and-forth of rock paper scissors to first manipulate your opponent into the position you want them and then release your damage move.
I often feel that my weakest trait as a designer is that I know too much about videogames. When a problem arises I know the solution, which just happens to be the same solution I've seen seven or eight other games employ. Pushing back against the easy answer during a crunch period when everyone has a 24 hours worth of stuff to do every day is difficult.
Likewise, game criticism plays a fault for a lot of the overall blandness. If you listen to Miyamoto talk about gaming, he talks about the wonderment of finding bottlecaps underneath bushes when you're outside as a kid. If you listen to the Silent Hill 4 team, they talk about the isolation of modern living in a apartmentalized, regimented society. If you listen to Game Pro, games are about polygon seams and framerates. We need deeper criticism. We need to be able to look at the ways in which games reflect the human condition. Film criticism does this pretty well, and is one reason why film crit is a valid if not necessary thing to study if you're going to become a film maker. Game criticism is, by comparison, hollow. That's one of the reasons why designers need to study everything: they each need to discover on their own how to take a critical yet humanistic eye to the finished product of gaming.
Other things they don't teach you in design school:
The team's enthusiasm is your most important resource. Sometimes it is worth throwing in a cheap but useless feature that everyone wants just to keep people happy. Sometimes you have to yank a great idea so that your programmer can see his wife.
Two to three weeks at the end of the project will be lost to nitpicky, contradictory requirements that the console manufacturers push onto everyone. Even if you've gone through it before and know that "This time it won't happen to us." it will. And ultimately it will have no bearing on the quality of your game: you're just tearing your hair out to keep the big three happy.
There is polish that developers notice, and polish that gamers notice. A develope