Obviously simple games written ten years ago have a lot of relevance to complex modern multi-player games...
The client/server model offers a lot of benefits, the most notable of which are having an authoritative source that can mitigate cheating and the ability for a single client to fall behind without ruining everyone else's experience.
Gameplay doesn't really factor into the equation like that. You don't need big budget to design a fun system of play, it takes a little inspiration, planning and polishing. Content is the thing driving up budgets almost entirely on it's own. Programming work, even on the graphics side of things, hasn't increased in volume nearly at the rate that content creation has. Especially if you consider the fact that so many modern games are made with largely recycled code (be it a licensed engine or one developed in house that is incrementally improved), something you can't really do with art assets.
Creating a huge world full of detailed props with multiple high resolution textures on each one just takes a lot of man hours and there is no way around it. Sure, there is some noise about procedural assets right now, but in most cases those ideas are quite far from being useable. (Maxis' upcoming "Spore" is probably the only really notable exception).
This is something I've been saying for a while myself... It sounds real cool as a bullet point to say "over 140 hours of gameplay!!" or whatever, but do you really want to be locked into the same thing for that long? It's a lot of work to get the payoff of a completed story. What I would really like to see in the case of huge epic tales is an episodic approach. A game that can actually be played to completion in the same time it takes to watch a movie is actually really appealing.
That's a very noble but misguided sentiment. I'm a huge proponent of "games as art", but I don't want to be developing every game that I play. I love making games and (hopefully) I like to the play the games that I make. Even so, I would hate to lose the pre-packaged complete made-by-someone else experience. When you made the monster that you're fighting, it kind of takes away some of the magic...
This is not special to Microsoft. No (major) console allows anyone to release software for it without going through the console makers approval process, this is the way things have been since the NES era.
If Valve under cut the retailers, the retailers would retaliate by not selling the game. The company I work at, S2 Games had a downloadable direct distribution for our game Savage, which we intended to offer up much cheaper, but we couldn't get any distribution deals without charging the full MSRP.
It's absolutely %100 not possible. Untill servers have the power to render every player's frame and the bandwidth to stream these frames to all the clients, it is absolutely impossible to stop people from cheating. (Even by the time we're there, it will be likely that the clients will have the processing power to analyze the frames *still* be able to do things like aim assistance...)
The simple fact is that whatever the client is trusted with is vulnerable to cheating. There are plenty of things that can be done to make the cheating more difficult (and most games do at least *something* to try and slow down cheat authors), but the sad part is any amount of clever engineering can be completely undone as soon as a tool is made publicly available.
Is legal action the best idea? I don't know. It's hard for me to jump on board and shout "Go get 'em!" because I hate the legal system medeling in technology it doesn't really understand as much as the next/.er, but something really has to be done about this issue. Cheaters destroy multiplayer games for legitimate players, no question, which translates to sales which translates to employment vs unemployment for people in the industry. It's really not harmless.
Do people have a "right" to cheat? Good question. I couldn't begin to answer it, but I'd say that if that's the way teh law book bounces right now, maybe it needs to change. We all love our right to free speach, but can also all agree (unless you're an anarchist) that there are certain limitations, like going to see a movie and standing up and shouting through the whole thing is not cool. These people making cheats available are the equivelant of having someone standing outside of every theatre running some particular movie and passing out air horns as you walk in the door. Not everyone is going to go nuts, but you know there will be at least one ass hole in every theatre setting the thing off.
Saying that the price of cames has risen too high really doesn't make much sense, if you think about it a little bit. If you go all the way back to the days of the 2600, the price of games since then probably hasn't even moved as much as inflation, despite the orders of magnitude in change that has gone into content.
First let me say I'm not here to argue with anyone. I'm not going to say anyone is wrong if they don't like that we won, but I want to let people know where we are coming from.
Savage was built over the course of about three years, with a total of seven people contributing to development. Three programmers, four artists at the peak of development. When the game started for it's first few months, it was two people. We're in no way big, and dealing with press, distributers, and the rest of the industry we were reminded of that over and over. A couple million dollars doesn't make anyone care who you are, and it still doesn't even begin to touch the average of budget of a big title. We used free/open source libraries every where we could, the only things we ended up licensing were Bink (for the intro movie) and fmod. We did make it into stores, but I only wish we were as ubiquitous as the article describes. When our release date was approaching, we combed the area hitting up every game store we could find, casually asking about the game and were met with puzzled looks, they hadn't heard of the game.
We answered to no one in the development process, our "publisher" was an equally small group of people assembled for the soul purpouse of releasing our game. Only one person on the team had ever had a development job at another game company prior to this project. I think there is no question that we fit the definition of independant, the thing that seperated us from the group was that we got paid, so we were able to work on the game full time.
We entered the IGF because we were proud of what we have accomplished, as an independant developer and hoped to gain some exposure for it. Our intention was never to stomp on anyone, we all have a lot of respect for other indies, since we all came from there ourselves.
Is the ease of portability between PC and XBox. With GC and PS2 you are looking at entirely different architecture anyway, but when you pair OGL and D3D, your tradeoff is essentially:
OpenGL: PC and Linux DirectX: PC and XBox
From a perspective of sales, there is really no question where the profit is.
Plenty, we had a full featured demo available. The point is that they did it because they could, then when they couldn't anymore they either bought it or quit.
First, I'd like to re-iterate some of the things expressed in a previous "Developer's perspective" post: The fact that there is no demo isn't an excuse to pirate. It means that if you don't trust the developer, you just don't bother yourself with it.
Moving on, from my own personal experience, I can refute some of the claims that I see a lot of people make about "how it could be". The game that my company recently released was an online multiplayer only title, with the only form of copy protection being a unique key that could only have X active instances at any given time. No CD checks whatsoever. We made it that way because, as gamers ourselves, we hate stupid copy protection schemes. Also, the game was available for purchase on the web, as both an installation package and an ISO, for both win32 and Linux. The retail CD included both versions as well. We released a demo that included two maps, and one of the two playable races in it's entirety.
Initially, the number of instances of a key that we allowed play simultaneously was rather forgiving. After the game had been out for a while though, we noticed that many keys were often in use up to their maximum number of instances. Obviously people were doing a whole lot of sharing, so we tightened down the number and saw a moderate spike in sales follow immediately, without a noticeable decline in player base.
I guess the real point I'd like to make is this: it's completely debatable how much harm is being done by piracey, but the fact remains that it's not doing anybody any good.
After taking a random sampling of game manuals I have lying around, *every* single console game had this warning printed in both the manual for the game and the manual that came with the system. I know this has been a common practice going back at least as far as the NES.
No PC game manuals I looked at had any such warning, however the EULAs (for whatever they're worth) all contain passages disclaiming responsability for damages, including personal injury.
After some brief googling, it would seem that 15-20hz is the key danger frequency for triggering photosensitive epilepsy, as well has high contrast patterns in a cycle of 1-4hz per degree. So having guidelines that would make games safe most photosensitive people seems to be a possability, but I think it would be rather difficult to make all developers aware of this. This may be a good thing though to have an independant organization like the ESRB evaluate, I think it would be a worthwhile cause to take up with them.
The people making the game, in almost all cases, have pretty much nothing at all to do with advertising. Advertising comes from the realm of the publisher, not the developer.
Can't argue with you that big budget advertising raises the cost, but they do it because it does sell games. Ideally, games would sell entirely on their merit, but fifty boxes on a shelf versus two behind the counter probably makes more of a difference than anything. It's just like any other form of entertainment: the vast majority of people like what is marketed best, not necessarily what constitutes "good art". It's easy to forget that online communities like/. are from representative of the general public.
I'm one of the programmers at S2, I can answer some of the questions people have brought up:
The 2.00b (most current patch) should improve everyone's framerate significantly over 1.2, optimizations were made to the rendering code, CPU usage, memory usage... pretty much all around. Also, we're pretty sure we've caught all the memory leaks at this point.
Sam was working on the Linux patch today, looks like the link is working as of right now. If the auto-updater isn't grabbing it yet, I'm sure it will be soon (the bandwidth of delivering the patch has really been killer, bear with us for a few days). Our official servers are all running on linux, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't really give it up;) We did recently lose one of programmers (slothy), who happened to be the Linux guru, leaving Sammy and myself who both have only some moderate Linux experience, so don't be too hard on us if we make a few noob mistakes with the linux support, we're both learning, and slothy is still willing to help us out when we get stuck.
We're going to release a patch to bring the demo up to date, as well as a full new package of the demo soon, that's the next thing in the pipes at the moment.
Lastly, as pointed out in the update, iGames isn't closing up, but not really being a part of them I can't say exactly what's going on. On the other hand though, I can tell you S2 will be around for a while to come, we're gearing up to get started on the next big thing right now:)
Graphical things like wallhacks are less affected by this, although having full access to the source definitely makes it easier. Writing an aimbot when you have the full core engine source (not the part that would be released in an SDK) becomes trivial though, because it removes all the effort of decoding network traffic to try and figure out where everything is in the world, how the messages are formatted, and how to properly generate false input that the server won't think is suspicious.
The game uses OpenGL so it supports any hardware that properly supports OpenGL. You can get it upand running in a passable state with the earliest generation geforce/radeon cards, with newer cards of course yielding higher frame rates with higher detail settings.
Check out http://www.q3f.com
This was done by the same group that went on to form Splashdamage, and make Enemey Territory (an awesome expansion to Wolfenstein multi-player, available for free)
It's a faithful re-creation with a lot of excellent improvements. It even has a limited form of bunny-hopping... not that I think intentionally putting a bug back into a game is a great idea, but at least they did it in a controlled way...
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously simple games written ten years ago have a lot of relevance to complex modern multi-player games...
The client/server model offers a lot of benefits, the most notable of which are having an authoritative source that can mitigate cheating and the ability for a single client to fall behind without ruining everyone else's experience.
Gameplay doesn't really factor into the equation like that. You don't need big budget to design a fun system of play, it takes a little inspiration, planning and polishing. Content is the thing driving up budgets almost entirely on it's own. Programming work, even on the graphics side of things, hasn't increased in volume nearly at the rate that content creation has. Especially if you consider the fact that so many modern games are made with largely recycled code (be it a licensed engine or one developed in house that is incrementally improved), something you can't really do with art assets.
Creating a huge world full of detailed props with multiple high resolution textures on each one just takes a lot of man hours and there is no way around it. Sure, there is some noise about procedural assets right now, but in most cases those ideas are quite far from being useable. (Maxis' upcoming "Spore" is probably the only really notable exception).
Spike TV broadcast this, but they are not responsible for handing out the awards, it is still fine to think that they are ridiculous.
The awards were actually awarded by these people: http://www.gamecriticsawards.com/
This is something I've been saying for a while myself... It sounds real cool as a bullet point to say "over 140 hours of gameplay!!" or whatever, but do you really want to be locked into the same thing for that long? It's a lot of work to get the payoff of a completed story. What I would really like to see in the case of huge epic tales is an episodic approach. A game that can actually be played to completion in the same time it takes to watch a movie is actually really appealing.
That's a very noble but misguided sentiment. I'm a huge proponent of "games as art", but I don't want to be developing every game that I play. I love making games and (hopefully) I like to the play the games that I make. Even so, I would hate to lose the pre-packaged complete made-by-someone else experience. When you made the monster that you're fighting, it kind of takes away some of the magic...
This is not special to Microsoft. No (major) console allows anyone to release software for it without going through the console makers approval process, this is the way things have been since the NES era.
Because of retail.
If Valve under cut the retailers, the retailers would retaliate by not selling the game. The company I work at, S2 Games had a downloadable direct distribution for our game Savage, which we intended to offer up much cheaper, but we couldn't get any distribution deals without charging the full MSRP.
It's absolutely %100 not possible. Untill servers have the power to render every player's frame and the bandwidth to stream these frames to all the clients, it is absolutely impossible to stop people from cheating. (Even by the time we're there, it will be likely that the clients will have the processing power to analyze the frames *still* be able to do things like aim assistance...)
/.er, but something really has to be done about this issue. Cheaters destroy multiplayer games for legitimate players, no question, which translates to sales which translates to employment vs unemployment for people in the industry. It's really not harmless.
The simple fact is that whatever the client is trusted with is vulnerable to cheating. There are plenty of things that can be done to make the cheating more difficult (and most games do at least *something* to try and slow down cheat authors), but the sad part is any amount of clever engineering can be completely undone as soon as a tool is made publicly available.
Is legal action the best idea? I don't know. It's hard for me to jump on board and shout "Go get 'em!" because I hate the legal system medeling in technology it doesn't really understand as much as the next
Do people have a "right" to cheat? Good question. I couldn't begin to answer it, but I'd say that if that's the way teh law book bounces right now, maybe it needs to change. We all love our right to free speach, but can also all agree (unless you're an anarchist) that there are certain limitations, like going to see a movie and standing up and shouting through the whole thing is not cool. These people making cheats available are the equivelant of having someone standing outside of every theatre running some particular movie and passing out air horns as you walk in the door. Not everyone is going to go nuts, but you know there will be at least one ass hole in every theatre setting the thing off.
Saying that the price of cames has risen too high really doesn't make much sense, if you think about it a little bit. If you go all the way back to the days of the 2600, the price of games since then probably hasn't even moved as much as inflation, despite the orders of magnitude in change that has gone into content.
I feel like I should comment on this.
First let me say I'm not here to argue with anyone. I'm not going to say anyone is wrong if they don't like that we won, but I want to let people know where we are coming from.
Savage was built over the course of about three years, with a total of seven people contributing to development. Three programmers, four artists at the peak of development. When the game started for it's first few months, it was two people. We're in no way big, and dealing with press, distributers, and the rest of the industry we were reminded of that over and over. A couple million dollars doesn't make anyone care who you are, and it still doesn't even begin to touch the average of budget of a big title. We used free/open source libraries every where we could, the only things we ended up licensing were Bink (for the intro movie) and fmod. We did make it into stores, but I only wish we were as ubiquitous as the article describes. When our release date was approaching, we combed the area hitting up every game store we could find, casually asking about the game and were met with puzzled looks, they hadn't heard of the game.
We answered to no one in the development process, our "publisher" was an equally small group of people assembled for the soul purpouse of releasing our game. Only one person on the team had ever had a development job at another game company prior to this project. I think there is no question that we fit the definition of independant, the thing that seperated us from the group was that we got paid, so we were able to work on the game full time.
We entered the IGF because we were proud of what we have accomplished, as an independant developer and hoped to gain some exposure for it. Our intention was never to stomp on anyone, we all have a lot of respect for other indies, since we all came from there ourselves.
Is the ease of portability between PC and XBox. With GC and PS2 you are looking at entirely different architecture anyway, but when you pair OGL and D3D, your tradeoff is essentially:
OpenGL: PC and Linux
DirectX: PC and XBox
From a perspective of sales, there is really no question where the profit is.
Plenty, we had a full featured demo available. The point is that they did it because they could, then when they couldn't anymore they either bought it or quit.
First, I'd like to re-iterate some of the things expressed in a previous "Developer's perspective" post: The fact that there is no demo isn't an excuse to pirate. It means that if you don't trust the developer, you just don't bother yourself with it.
Moving on, from my own personal experience, I can refute some of the claims that I see a lot of people make about "how it could be". The game that my company recently released was an online multiplayer only title, with the only form of copy protection being a unique key that could only have X active instances at any given time. No CD checks whatsoever. We made it that way because, as gamers ourselves, we hate stupid copy protection schemes. Also, the game was available for purchase on the web, as both an installation package and an ISO, for both win32 and Linux. The retail CD included both versions as well. We released a demo that included two maps, and one of the two playable races in it's entirety.
Initially, the number of instances of a key that we allowed play simultaneously was rather forgiving. After the game had been out for a while though, we noticed that many keys were often in use up to their maximum number of instances. Obviously people were doing a whole lot of sharing, so we tightened down the number and saw a moderate spike in sales follow immediately, without a noticeable decline in player base.
I guess the real point I'd like to make is this: it's completely debatable how much harm is being done by piracey, but the fact remains that it's not doing anybody any good.
After taking a random sampling of game manuals I have lying around, *every* single console game had this warning printed in both the manual for the game and the manual that came with the system. I know this has been a common practice going back at least as far as the NES.
No PC game manuals I looked at had any such warning, however the EULAs (for whatever they're worth) all contain passages disclaiming responsability for damages, including personal injury.
After some brief googling, it would seem that 15-20hz is the key danger frequency for triggering photosensitive epilepsy, as well has high contrast patterns in a cycle of 1-4hz per degree. So having guidelines that would make games safe most photosensitive people seems to be a possability, but I think it would be rather difficult to make all developers aware of this. This may be a good thing though to have an independant organization like the ESRB evaluate, I think it would be a worthwhile cause to take up with them.
The people making the game, in almost all cases, have pretty much nothing at all to do with advertising. Advertising comes from the realm of the publisher, not the developer.
/. are from representative of the general public.
Can't argue with you that big budget advertising raises the cost, but they do it because it does sell games. Ideally, games would sell entirely on their merit, but fifty boxes on a shelf versus two behind the counter probably makes more of a difference than anything. It's just like any other form of entertainment: the vast majority of people like what is marketed best, not necessarily what constitutes "good art". It's easy to forget that online communities like
I'm one of the programmers at S2, I can answer some of the questions people have brought up: The 2.00b (most current patch) should improve everyone's framerate significantly over 1.2, optimizations were made to the rendering code, CPU usage, memory usage... pretty much all around. Also, we're pretty sure we've caught all the memory leaks at this point. Sam was working on the Linux patch today, looks like the link is working as of right now. If the auto-updater isn't grabbing it yet, I'm sure it will be soon (the bandwidth of delivering the patch has really been killer, bear with us for a few days). Our official servers are all running on linux, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't really give it up ;) We did recently lose one of programmers (slothy), who happened to be the Linux guru, leaving Sammy and myself who both have only some moderate Linux experience, so don't be too hard on us if we make a few noob mistakes with the linux support, we're both learning, and slothy is still willing to help us out when we get stuck.
We're going to release a patch to bring the demo up to date, as well as a full new package of the demo soon, that's the next thing in the pipes at the moment.
Lastly, as pointed out in the update, iGames isn't closing up, but not really being a part of them I can't say exactly what's going on. On the other hand though, I can tell you S2 will be around for a while to come, we're gearing up to get started on the next big thing right now :)
Graphical things like wallhacks are less affected by this, although having full access to the source definitely makes it easier. Writing an aimbot when you have the full core engine source (not the part that would be released in an SDK) becomes trivial though, because it removes all the effort of decoding network traffic to try and figure out where everything is in the world, how the messages are formatted, and how to properly generate false input that the server won't think is suspicious.
... they didn't even include a "***SPOILERS!***" tag in the legal briefing. Now I know what happens in the movie. Thanks WW!
There will be a public dmeo available in close proximity to launch, for both platforms. -Jason Programmer, S2 Games
The game uses OpenGL so it supports any hardware that properly supports OpenGL. You can get it upand running in a passable state with the earliest generation geforce/radeon cards, with newer cards of course yielding higher frame rates with higher detail settings.
-Jason
Programmer
S2 Games
Check out http://www.q3f.com This was done by the same group that went on to form Splashdamage, and make Enemey Territory (an awesome expansion to Wolfenstein multi-player, available for free) It's a faithful re-creation with a lot of excellent improvements. It even has a limited form of bunny-hopping... not that I think intentionally putting a bug back into a game is a great idea, but at least they did it in a controlled way...