I'm not so sure. It takes a very proactive stance in order to make a great game. That means not releasing the product until you're sure it measures up to your own standards. That requires two things: A developer who can actually pull this off in the first place. It's not smart to wait and wait and wait for some developers (see: Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever). And it requires a publisher with the financial backing and the patience to wait for the developer to iterate and polish, even though the game may appear finished to an untrained eye.
It's a pretty rare combination in this industry. I'm guessing we can name at least one company that does this routinely, and most of us can name a few others that do it fairly consistently. But most publishers are content to put out a high volume of "good enough". I'm sure we can all also name at least one publisher who this applies to as well.
And believe me - I've worked at development houses and with publishers who were much more concerned with timetables than with quality. It's typically because of budgetary restrictions. If you have a fixed budget, you have a fixed amount of time before the game is no longer profitable. It's as simple as that. Yes, they cared about quality of course, but only to the extent it didn't impact the schedule.
Yes, but we're fast approaching photo-realism with our current technology. The difference between the generations of consoles will be less dramatic with each iteration (or, the lifetimes will simply extend further). Honestly, I don't think some of the better-looking Xbox 360 or PS3 games will look horribly dated in 20 years (not compared to the difference between modern games and '80s arcade games). After all, both high-def TVs (which will hopefully not become obsolete for a while) and our eyes have a maximum resolution.
At the point where game developer can display just about any scene they wish to, the differences in game will come down to technique, innovation in gameplay, sheer scope of the virtual world, advances in AI, and the like.
KOTOR's gameplay was pretty bad? Speak for yourself.
If you went in expecting an action game, I suppose you might be disappointed, but I loved it. And apparently, quite a few others did. Not all of us are enthralled with twitch games.
Bonus for me: After a full day at work of programming (ironically, I'm working on a fairly fast-action game these last few years), I prefer not to strain my already sore wrists with too much fast action. As such, turn-based games are ideal for me anyhow.
Early reviews for the game are good, but not great, and developers recently mentioned that George Lucas himself provided input on the project...
Well, there you go...
"Good, but not great" was my reaction to the demo. I might try it again tonight. I'm not sure what it was exactly that threw me off. Maybe the camera was set reverse to what I normally do. For some reason, I kept trying to push the camera the wrong way. And after getting mauled by a "boss", I lost interest. Maybe I'm getting too old for hack-and-slash action games.
Still, it seems like an ambitious game, and I think a lot of people are likely to have fun with it for what it is.
You're correct. MS just doesn't have the corporate mentality to make games. I know some pretty bright and creative people in Microsoft's internal game division that have long since fled. I've had dealings with them as a 3rd party studio. They can be a great publisher (you really just need a lot of money for that, and a willingness to go the distance to make a great product), so long as they stay far, far away from any sort of decision making about the game design itself. But unless the studio has quite a bit of clout, that's not going to happen.
The problem, it's far too irresistible for manager-types to stick their finger in the creative pie of game design. Frankly, nearly everyone *wants* to design games at some level, but not everyone is really cut out for it. I've seen time and time again "helpful" suggestions by publisher's producers that did nothing but waste developer time and throw the project off track. BTW, this isn't necessarily an exclusive problem with MS - I've seen it with other publishers too. But this seems to happen pretty consistently when Microsoft is involved.
It's an eye-opening experience when you listen to internal meetings about how product managers and producers display an amazing arrogance regarding the product. They'll think nothing of belittling the developers (the guys who actually did the damn work on the game), all the while praising Microsoft's effort to "kick ass" and get the product out on time, or nonsense to that effect, ignoring the price damn near paid in human sacrifices by the actual developers in order to meet their timetables. Interestingly enough, I noticed this during the "Age of Empire" days. I'd be surprised if it's improved much since then.
In most cases (although admittedly not all), great games are created from the vision of a single creative director. In the movie business, this is the Director. The power of the Lead Designer varies from studio to studio. In my opinion, giving the designers a largely free hand to implement their vision means the best chance of success for a game. Nothing is bulletproof, of course (Daikatana anyone?), but having producers making game-related decisions seems to be a recipe for mediocrity at best, disaster at worst. Too bad about what's happening at Ensemble... I wouldn't be too surprised if managerial interference is running pretty high for them these days.
Like others have intoned, the real problem with this sort of dynamic and open system is people. A percentage of players in online games feel free to act in ways they would never think about in the real world because there are no real consequences for negative actions (worst that can happen is a ban). As such, they feel free to perform actions which, if done in the real world, would merit anywhere from a punch in the nose to lengthy jailtime.
Until this fundamental problem is addressed in some manner, online games will and must remain fairly tightly controlled affairs. Otherwise, chaos will reign and the vast majority of gamers will leave for greener and more pleasant pastures. With the enormous cost of developing MMOs, that's just not something most developers are willing to risk.
Well, any game you play is going to have some sort of "system" internally. Computers are not so good at understanding abstract, nebulous concepts, such as "a large, interactive world". You need a concrete set of rules to determine how all the various pieces of the world interact. We can't just model reality.
I actually wrote the battle music system for a major PC title (not Oblivion). It seems like a fairly simple thing to do, but because of the fast-paced and dynamic nature of combat in that game, it actually ended up being a real challenge to tune. For example:
* It sound bad if you start some epic battle music as your high-level party goes and kills a few low-level critters. I measured the collective party strength versus nearby enemy creatures to determine if the battle would likely be difficult enough to warrant battle music.
* It sound bad if ambient music just starts up, only to be immediately interrupted by more combat. Therefore, I set the threshold for ending music much lower than for starting it up. Nearby enemies will cause the battle music to continue, because it's likely the players will run there next and start the next battle.
* It sounds bad if a second piece of battle music start (our music didn't loop - I just started another piece of battle music) only to be cut off after a few seconds. Therefore, before another piece of music starts, it tries to determine if combat is soon to be over anyhow. If so, the ambient music continues.
You can see, it ends up being a lot more complicated than you'd think. And, it's difficult to tune it so that it works properly at all player levels and in all areas of the game.
Re:If the same amount of DSP was devoted to audio
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The State of Game Audio
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Actually, sound processing is moving *away* from specialized DSPs and moving toward software mixing and processing. The difference is that multi-core CPUs are standard, both on PCs and consoles. So, developers are simply allocating a core (or part of a core) to audio processing. I wouldn't look to DSPs. Just wait for general-purpose CPUs to advance in speed enough to be able to do all sorts of interesting things.
I wrote the new sound engine and tools for an upcoming title - we're completely ditching hardware acceleration in favor of the flexibility that software mixing gives us. The Creative X-Fi, while a great card, holds around 1% market penetration, according to our customer hardware survey. For most other cards, and for ALL onboard audio, there's no real advantage to dedicated hardware.
We're still nowhere near doing real-time synthesis for most types of sounds. Physical modeling sounds nice, but it would likely require a complicated and time-consuming process of programming and tuning these models. Even though true physical modeling isn't practical at this time, we're looking at ways of synthesizing combinations of sounds (such as impacts - footsteps is a prime example) as a way of reducing the combinatorial explosion of (terrain_type x avatar_type x movement_type x number_of_variations).
I see a future more of blended synthesis than pure physical modeling - that is, advanced filters applied to pre-recorded samples in order to create more dynamic and believable variations, and more advanced ways of mixing and blending raw samples to create new sound sets. This seems to be a much more straight-forward problem to solve, and would be far easier for sound designers to tune.
Incidentally, why do you say water and gas are out of the question? Oddly enough, while these are horribly complex to model using true fluid dynamics, these are typically the easiest sounds to recreate using fairly simple algorithms. A waterfall is pretty close to being pure noise (just requires a bit of frequency filtering to color it), for example. And things such as water drops, steam hissing - I've heard good modeling of all these things in instruments such as NI's Reaktor, in addition to their excellent SteamPipe physical modeling instrument.
I'm under the impression that it's not *that* unusual for game developers to bring testers in. I seem to remember mention of it in the Portal commentary. Getting an audience to test you game seems easy and obvious. It seems like the hard thing would be knowing what to do when your audience tells you the game isn't fun.
You're correct. For most substantially-sized game I've been involved with, testers were brought in to provide feedback near alpha and beta stages of the project, which is when a lot of gameplay balancing occurs. It would be sort of insane not to get outside opinions of your potential customers given the time and effort spent on a modern game. At my current company, we would bring in new groups of testers on a weekly basis, and one of our internal QA folk's full time job was organizing and managing the playtest sessions, as well as reporting the results of the playtests and surveys they were given.
Oddly enough, it's not too unusual to be so busy with your part of the game that you don't really even have a lot of time to play it yourself - most developers (except the designers) don't "play" their own games so much as occasionally test out small, specific features throughout the development cycle, so it's great to have outside opinions that help to fill in the big picture. As a developer, you're unlikely to be able to view anything all that objectively anyhow, being so close to the game.
Still, at that point, it's generally too late to do anything about really fundamental problems with the game. This is why a number of companies also try to complete smaller scoped gameplay demos. Essentially, they try to create a small "vertical slice" of the game as much as possible. This is feasible so long as your schedule is limited more by content creation than programmer time. These sorts of early demos are typically internal, as it is probably too early to risk showing the public anything at that stage (the project may not be even announced at that point).
And yes, it's hard to have someone pick up a controller, spend 15 minutes playing your game, and find out that the feature you've been slaving away on for the last month or two "isn't fun". You just have to step back, try to look at *why* it wasn't fun for the player, and figure out a way to correct the issue while hopefully not throwing away all your work.
True, any sort of "fun and frivolity" quickly goes out the window during 60+ hour crunches. I've got good news for you though... The game development industry is actually starting to grow up. A large number of my co-workers are married (with children - gasp!), and having a life outside of work is increasingly important to a good many very talented and very senior developers. This, combined with the fact that employers don't want to get a reputation for burning out their employees, means that the situation is slowly improving, at least from what I can see.
My current company was actually founded by ex-developers who hated that "always crunch-time" mentality, so my bosses are often the ones shooing people out the door if it gets too late. So, I feel pretty lucky that I work normal hours. And, from what I hear in the industry, work-life balance is becoming an increasingly important topic. I think the watershed moment of realization for the game development industry was probably "EA Spouse" (Google it if you haven't read it).
Generally speaking, in the 10 years I've been a game programmer, the attitude about mandatory overtime and crunches has slowly but significantly improved. When I started, the attitude was "that's simply the way it is". Nowadays, people aren't as quick to buy that line. They understand that, in many cases, it's simply an excuse for poor planning and project management.
My real estate agent drove over the corner of my soon-to-be lawn, which slightly annoyed me. The tire indentations lasted a couple of years - and I live in the Northwest, with plenty of rain and greenery. But I don't think it's fair to say there was damage in the environmental sense, any more than construction of a solar plant would necessarily "damage" the surrounding environment.
I don't mean to nitpick, as I understand your point (naturally, we'd have to be very careful, especially in sensitive areas like the desert), but I disagree with the notion that an ecosystem is "damaged" just because there are signs of human life / activity. No longer pristine, fine, but not necessarily damaged. I think we have the technology and desire in these times to create these sorts of power plants while still being good stewards of the environment.
Lots of things sound pretty simple when described in nice, clean theory. As a game programmer, I can assure you that the devil is ALWAYS in the details. You're correct that the basic physics of conversation of momentum are simple enough. What's tricky is fixing all the edge cases that invariably pop up when trying to write physics code in a game.
I'd recommend listening to the Portal commentary to hear some of the specific difficulties involved in getting everything working smoothly in all cases. You'll notice that the descriptions tend to bear this out - that the basics were pretty easy to get right, but it gets harder as you find and fix all the edge cases and optimize.
And a lot of games use the "pneumatic door open/close" sound effects from id Software's Doom.
...I'd start by assuming good faith and guess that Jumpgate and B5 just happened to license the same stock sound effects library.
Good guess. I can't answer specifically about Jumpgate and Babylon 5, but I know a bit about the Doom sounds. Quite a few of the sounds in Doom are pulled (often completely unaltered) from a huge general-purpose sound library called "The General 6000" from Sound Ideas. Most game companies I've worked for own a copy of this as part of the core of their sound library. Of course, if possible, modern sound designer will not use such common stock sound effects anymore unaltered, as a lot of these sounds are pretty recognizable. http://sound-ideas.com/6000.html
Technical artists in our company are artists who perform tasks that bridge the gap between what artists and coders normally do. For instance, they create all our materials using a visual shader creation tool that generates shader code from wiring nodes together visually (we have a proprietary tool, but there are a few free ones out there).
This is a complex task that requires a balance between artistic talent and a knowledge of basic shader mechanics. I don't consider it to be a kludge to cover bad engineering. It's an acknowledgment that game developers are doing some pretty damn complex stuff nowadays, and you need a gamut of talented artists to cover a fairly wide range of jobs. The artists absolutely love the flexibility this system gives them, and because they're talking to other artists instead of programmers, the communication is easier. Essentially, this is empowering artists to do what they've always wanted to do. Generally speaking, anytime you can take content creation out of the hands of programmers and put it into the hands of artists and designers, it's a big win for your game (I'm a programmer, incidentally).
I can see the required ranks of technical artists growing in the near future rather than shrinking. When you think about it, just about any artist in the game industry already has to have a pretty substantial technical grasp in order to operate Photoshop, Maya or Max, and whatever other commercial and proprietary tools they need to use on a day-to-day basis. This just takes it a step farther for some individuals with a propensity for solving more complex technical issues.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
It's not that simple. Corporations must also account for lost future sales due to bad publicity. Public perception / pressure is a strong motivating factor for corporations. Even if it didn't make sense in a purely financial sense, it's highly likely that a company wouldn't be willing to risk ruining their long-term reputation for quarterly profits.
Still, maybe Apple feels they have public credit to burn... no pun intended.
Er, I'm replying to you, but when I say "you", I mean OP, of course. I agree with your assessment that this seems like a reasonably civil conversation.
In any case, the warnings are a minor problem compared to the invalid airfoil data. I hope that you manage to get it all straight though. The software might be impossible to 'fine tune' properly (but I simply have no idea about it), but a lot of real-world data is available in various books and publications, so it hopefully shouldn't be a major issue.
Seriously, that's an Internet bully? Sorry, but you need to grow slightly thicker skin if you want to interact with people. I mean ANY people, not just on the net. Yes, he came across as a bit of a know-it-all, and pointed out some perceived flaws in something you've obviously spent a lot of time on and care about. It's always hard to hear one's work criticized, but try not to take it personally. The guy seriously didn't strike me as the type that's going out of his way to offend you. Try not to take it in this light.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of an insult to him to describe him as a bully. Over-bearing, maybe, but certainly not a bully.
How in the world could they feel that game companies would be opposed to sharing of game videos in any way? At my current company, we have occasionally sent around links among ourselves to some of the better videos our fans have created. The companies I've worked for are always happy with (and actively encourage) any sort of fan-produced publicity they can get.
There's something else going on here, I think. Maybe too much bandwidth was being consumed by game videos? Besides which, I have to admit I hadn't even heard of this company. Would have been bigger news if it was YouTube that made this decision, I suppose.
As things stand, I don't think UBI will get the full legal hot water, however, they've just taken a massive PR hit, and the whole "holier than thou" stance taken by the games industry on copy protection has also been tainted.
A massive PR hit? Meh. I'd call it more a "storm in a teacup", as is typical of most Internet dramas. A minor embarrassment, sure, but I'll stick my neck waaaay out there and say this will be all but forgotten in a week or so.
Not to mention that I'm really not interested in paying anyone $x dollars a month for the privilege of playing their game. I have a feeling that a lot of companies see the cash cow of WoW (not to mention the fact that MMOs, being server-based games, are inherently difficult to pirate) and want to get a piece of that, but with pay-per-month MMOs, players are only going to be willing to play so many of these games at a time. Its a much more limited market, and I think a lot of companies are going to get burned before this realization sinks in.
And, as you pointed out, MMOs are really never a good choice if you're actually interested in playing the hero/center of the universe, or don't have huge amounts of time to invest.
This is NOT why Blizzard is so successful. When game companies delay products, even for just a month or two, the usual result is catastrophic losses, like losing 1/5 of projected sales.
In the industry, games get delayed all the time, and the rule of thumb is that it has a high probability of gutting your sales.
I'd love to hear where you get your numbers from. It's not that simple, saying that delaying for a few months means catastrophic losses. How in the world could you even measure something like that? It's speculation even in the best of cases, because you'd never have a control group to measure two identical scenarios against.
I've been a game developer long enough to see a variety of product cycles, and how the scheduling works. It actually depends on when your game is scheduled for launch as well as what type of game you're making as to the seriousness of slipping a schedule. Obviously, the Christmas holiday season is the most profitable time to release, but not all games are scheduled for that period. Some games with very long development cycles don't target a specific time frame, opting instead for a rougher timeframe, even internally, while others are scheduled right up front down to the release date, and these are hard dates - sometimes for budgetary reasons, sometimes because of seasonal concerns (sports games), or perhaps movie tie-ins.
What makes it clean? From what I've read, one solution is to burn coal in pure oxygen.
I should probably rephrase "we have the technology" to "promising technology is being investigated". The technology does require sequestering of the CO2 gas emitted, but of far more concern to me is ensuring the much worse toxins contained in coal aren't released.
Essentially, we'll have to see how this technology pans out. The fact that they can build a pilot plan seems to indicate they have a pretty good grasp on how to, at least theoretically, solve this problem.
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I'm not so sure. It takes a very proactive stance in order to make a great game. That means not releasing the product until you're sure it measures up to your own standards. That requires two things: A developer who can actually pull this off in the first place. It's not smart to wait and wait and wait for some developers (see: Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever). And it requires a publisher with the financial backing and the patience to wait for the developer to iterate and polish, even though the game may appear finished to an untrained eye.
It's a pretty rare combination in this industry. I'm guessing we can name at least one company that does this routinely, and most of us can name a few others that do it fairly consistently. But most publishers are content to put out a high volume of "good enough". I'm sure we can all also name at least one publisher who this applies to as well.
And believe me - I've worked at development houses and with publishers who were much more concerned with timetables than with quality. It's typically because of budgetary restrictions. If you have a fixed budget, you have a fixed amount of time before the game is no longer profitable. It's as simple as that. Yes, they cared about quality of course, but only to the extent it didn't impact the schedule.
Yep. It's just as awesome today as it was ten years ago.
If that isn't withstanding the test of time, I don't know what is.
Yes, but we're fast approaching photo-realism with our current technology. The difference between the generations of consoles will be less dramatic with each iteration (or, the lifetimes will simply extend further). Honestly, I don't think some of the better-looking Xbox 360 or PS3 games will look horribly dated in 20 years (not compared to the difference between modern games and '80s arcade games). After all, both high-def TVs (which will hopefully not become obsolete for a while) and our eyes have a maximum resolution.
At the point where game developer can display just about any scene they wish to, the differences in game will come down to technique, innovation in gameplay, sheer scope of the virtual world, advances in AI, and the like.
At least, that's what I'm hoping...
KOTOR's gameplay was pretty bad? Speak for yourself.
If you went in expecting an action game, I suppose you might be disappointed, but I loved it. And apparently, quite a few others did. Not all of us are enthralled with twitch games.
Bonus for me: After a full day at work of programming (ironically, I'm working on a fairly fast-action game these last few years), I prefer not to strain my already sore wrists with too much fast action. As such, turn-based games are ideal for me anyhow.
Early reviews for the game are good, but not great, and developers recently mentioned that George Lucas himself provided input on the project...
Well, there you go...
"Good, but not great" was my reaction to the demo. I might try it again tonight. I'm not sure what it was exactly that threw me off. Maybe the camera was set reverse to what I normally do. For some reason, I kept trying to push the camera the wrong way. And after getting mauled by a "boss", I lost interest. Maybe I'm getting too old for hack-and-slash action games.
Still, it seems like an ambitious game, and I think a lot of people are likely to have fun with it for what it is.
You're correct. MS just doesn't have the corporate mentality to make games. I know some pretty bright and creative people in Microsoft's internal game division that have long since fled. I've had dealings with them as a 3rd party studio. They can be a great publisher (you really just need a lot of money for that, and a willingness to go the distance to make a great product), so long as they stay far, far away from any sort of decision making about the game design itself. But unless the studio has quite a bit of clout, that's not going to happen.
The problem, it's far too irresistible for manager-types to stick their finger in the creative pie of game design. Frankly, nearly everyone *wants* to design games at some level, but not everyone is really cut out for it. I've seen time and time again "helpful" suggestions by publisher's producers that did nothing but waste developer time and throw the project off track. BTW, this isn't necessarily an exclusive problem with MS - I've seen it with other publishers too. But this seems to happen pretty consistently when Microsoft is involved.
It's an eye-opening experience when you listen to internal meetings about how product managers and producers display an amazing arrogance regarding the product. They'll think nothing of belittling the developers (the guys who actually did the damn work on the game), all the while praising Microsoft's effort to "kick ass" and get the product out on time, or nonsense to that effect, ignoring the price damn near paid in human sacrifices by the actual developers in order to meet their timetables. Interestingly enough, I noticed this during the "Age of Empire" days. I'd be surprised if it's improved much since then.
In most cases (although admittedly not all), great games are created from the vision of a single creative director. In the movie business, this is the Director. The power of the Lead Designer varies from studio to studio. In my opinion, giving the designers a largely free hand to implement their vision means the best chance of success for a game. Nothing is bulletproof, of course (Daikatana anyone?), but having producers making game-related decisions seems to be a recipe for mediocrity at best, disaster at worst. Too bad about what's happening at Ensemble... I wouldn't be too surprised if managerial interference is running pretty high for them these days.
Like others have intoned, the real problem with this sort of dynamic and open system is people. A percentage of players in online games feel free to act in ways they would never think about in the real world because there are no real consequences for negative actions (worst that can happen is a ban). As such, they feel free to perform actions which, if done in the real world, would merit anywhere from a punch in the nose to lengthy jailtime.
Until this fundamental problem is addressed in some manner, online games will and must remain fairly tightly controlled affairs. Otherwise, chaos will reign and the vast majority of gamers will leave for greener and more pleasant pastures. With the enormous cost of developing MMOs, that's just not something most developers are willing to risk.
Well, any game you play is going to have some sort of "system" internally. Computers are not so good at understanding abstract, nebulous concepts, such as "a large, interactive world". You need a concrete set of rules to determine how all the various pieces of the world interact. We can't just model reality.
I actually wrote the battle music system for a major PC title (not Oblivion). It seems like a fairly simple thing to do, but because of the fast-paced and dynamic nature of combat in that game, it actually ended up being a real challenge to tune. For example:
* It sound bad if you start some epic battle music as your high-level party goes and kills a few low-level critters. I measured the collective party strength versus nearby enemy creatures to determine if the battle would likely be difficult enough to warrant battle music.
* It sound bad if ambient music just starts up, only to be immediately interrupted by more combat. Therefore, I set the threshold for ending music much lower than for starting it up. Nearby enemies will cause the battle music to continue, because it's likely the players will run there next and start the next battle.
* It sounds bad if a second piece of battle music start (our music didn't loop - I just started another piece of battle music) only to be cut off after a few seconds. Therefore, before another piece of music starts, it tries to determine if combat is soon to be over anyhow. If so, the ambient music continues.
You can see, it ends up being a lot more complicated than you'd think. And, it's difficult to tune it so that it works properly at all player levels and in all areas of the game.
Actually, sound processing is moving *away* from specialized DSPs and moving toward software mixing and processing. The difference is that multi-core CPUs are standard, both on PCs and consoles. So, developers are simply allocating a core (or part of a core) to audio processing. I wouldn't look to DSPs. Just wait for general-purpose CPUs to advance in speed enough to be able to do all sorts of interesting things.
I wrote the new sound engine and tools for an upcoming title - we're completely ditching hardware acceleration in favor of the flexibility that software mixing gives us. The Creative X-Fi, while a great card, holds around 1% market penetration, according to our customer hardware survey. For most other cards, and for ALL onboard audio, there's no real advantage to dedicated hardware.
We're still nowhere near doing real-time synthesis for most types of sounds. Physical modeling sounds nice, but it would likely require a complicated and time-consuming process of programming and tuning these models. Even though true physical modeling isn't practical at this time, we're looking at ways of synthesizing combinations of sounds (such as impacts - footsteps is a prime example) as a way of reducing the combinatorial explosion of (terrain_type x avatar_type x movement_type x number_of_variations).
I see a future more of blended synthesis than pure physical modeling - that is, advanced filters applied to pre-recorded samples in order to create more dynamic and believable variations, and more advanced ways of mixing and blending raw samples to create new sound sets. This seems to be a much more straight-forward problem to solve, and would be far easier for sound designers to tune.
Incidentally, why do you say water and gas are out of the question? Oddly enough, while these are horribly complex to model using true fluid dynamics, these are typically the easiest sounds to recreate using fairly simple algorithms. A waterfall is pretty close to being pure noise (just requires a bit of frequency filtering to color it), for example. And things such as water drops, steam hissing - I've heard good modeling of all these things in instruments such as NI's Reaktor, in addition to their excellent SteamPipe physical modeling instrument.
I'm under the impression that it's not *that* unusual for game developers to bring testers in. I seem to remember mention of it in the Portal commentary. Getting an audience to test you game seems easy and obvious. It seems like the hard thing would be knowing what to do when your audience tells you the game isn't fun.
You're correct. For most substantially-sized game I've been involved with, testers were brought in to provide feedback near alpha and beta stages of the project, which is when a lot of gameplay balancing occurs. It would be sort of insane not to get outside opinions of your potential customers given the time and effort spent on a modern game. At my current company, we would bring in new groups of testers on a weekly basis, and one of our internal QA folk's full time job was organizing and managing the playtest sessions, as well as reporting the results of the playtests and surveys they were given.
Oddly enough, it's not too unusual to be so busy with your part of the game that you don't really even have a lot of time to play it yourself - most developers (except the designers) don't "play" their own games so much as occasionally test out small, specific features throughout the development cycle, so it's great to have outside opinions that help to fill in the big picture. As a developer, you're unlikely to be able to view anything all that objectively anyhow, being so close to the game.
Still, at that point, it's generally too late to do anything about really fundamental problems with the game. This is why a number of companies also try to complete smaller scoped gameplay demos. Essentially, they try to create a small "vertical slice" of the game as much as possible. This is feasible so long as your schedule is limited more by content creation than programmer time. These sorts of early demos are typically internal, as it is probably too early to risk showing the public anything at that stage (the project may not be even announced at that point).
And yes, it's hard to have someone pick up a controller, spend 15 minutes playing your game, and find out that the feature you've been slaving away on for the last month or two "isn't fun". You just have to step back, try to look at *why* it wasn't fun for the player, and figure out a way to correct the issue while hopefully not throwing away all your work.
True, any sort of "fun and frivolity" quickly goes out the window during 60+ hour crunches. I've got good news for you though... The game development industry is actually starting to grow up. A large number of my co-workers are married (with children - gasp!), and having a life outside of work is increasingly important to a good many very talented and very senior developers. This, combined with the fact that employers don't want to get a reputation for burning out their employees, means that the situation is slowly improving, at least from what I can see.
My current company was actually founded by ex-developers who hated that "always crunch-time" mentality, so my bosses are often the ones shooing people out the door if it gets too late. So, I feel pretty lucky that I work normal hours. And, from what I hear in the industry, work-life balance is becoming an increasingly important topic. I think the watershed moment of realization for the game development industry was probably "EA Spouse" (Google it if you haven't read it).
Generally speaking, in the 10 years I've been a game programmer, the attitude about mandatory overtime and crunches has slowly but significantly improved. When I started, the attitude was "that's simply the way it is". Nowadays, people aren't as quick to buy that line. They understand that, in many cases, it's simply an excuse for poor planning and project management.
My real estate agent drove over the corner of my soon-to-be lawn, which slightly annoyed me. The tire indentations lasted a couple of years - and I live in the Northwest, with plenty of rain and greenery. But I don't think it's fair to say there was damage in the environmental sense, any more than construction of a solar plant would necessarily "damage" the surrounding environment.
I don't mean to nitpick, as I understand your point (naturally, we'd have to be very careful, especially in sensitive areas like the desert), but I disagree with the notion that an ecosystem is "damaged" just because there are signs of human life / activity. No longer pristine, fine, but not necessarily damaged. I think we have the technology and desire in these times to create these sorts of power plants while still being good stewards of the environment.
Lots of things sound pretty simple when described in nice, clean theory. As a game programmer, I can assure you that the devil is ALWAYS in the details. You're correct that the basic physics of conversation of momentum are simple enough. What's tricky is fixing all the edge cases that invariably pop up when trying to write physics code in a game.
I'd recommend listening to the Portal commentary to hear some of the specific difficulties involved in getting everything working smoothly in all cases. You'll notice that the descriptions tend to bear this out - that the basics were pretty easy to get right, but it gets harder as you find and fix all the edge cases and optimize.
And a lot of games use the "pneumatic door open/close" sound effects from id Software's Doom.
...I'd start by assuming good faith and guess that Jumpgate and B5 just happened to license the same stock sound effects library.
Good guess. I can't answer specifically about Jumpgate and Babylon 5, but I know a bit about the Doom sounds. Quite a few of the sounds in Doom are pulled (often completely unaltered) from a huge general-purpose sound library called "The General 6000" from Sound Ideas. Most game companies I've worked for own a copy of this as part of the core of their sound library. Of course, if possible, modern sound designer will not use such common stock sound effects anymore unaltered, as a lot of these sounds are pretty recognizable.
http://sound-ideas.com/6000.html
It just pisses me off when so many are excited they find better ways to kill other people..
Wow, what sort of bad-ass binoculars are you envisioning? I was thinking they'd just provide a clearer image of distant objects...
Technical artists in our company are artists who perform tasks that bridge the gap between what artists and coders normally do. For instance, they create all our materials using a visual shader creation tool that generates shader code from wiring nodes together visually (we have a proprietary tool, but there are a few free ones out there).
This is a complex task that requires a balance between artistic talent and a knowledge of basic shader mechanics. I don't consider it to be a kludge to cover bad engineering. It's an acknowledgment that game developers are doing some pretty damn complex stuff nowadays, and you need a gamut of talented artists to cover a fairly wide range of jobs. The artists absolutely love the flexibility this system gives them, and because they're talking to other artists instead of programmers, the communication is easier. Essentially, this is empowering artists to do what they've always wanted to do. Generally speaking, anytime you can take content creation out of the hands of programmers and put it into the hands of artists and designers, it's a big win for your game (I'm a programmer, incidentally).
I can see the required ranks of technical artists growing in the near future rather than shrinking. When you think about it, just about any artist in the game industry already has to have a pretty substantial technical grasp in order to operate Photoshop, Maya or Max, and whatever other commercial and proprietary tools they need to use on a day-to-day basis. This just takes it a step farther for some individuals with a propensity for solving more complex technical issues.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
It's not that simple. Corporations must also account for lost future sales due to bad publicity. Public perception / pressure is a strong motivating factor for corporations. Even if it didn't make sense in a purely financial sense, it's highly likely that a company wouldn't be willing to risk ruining their long-term reputation for quarterly profits.
Still, maybe Apple feels they have public credit to burn... no pun intended.
Er, I'm replying to you, but when I say "you", I mean OP, of course. I agree with your assessment that this seems like a reasonably civil conversation.
This is how the conversation petered out:
In any case, the warnings are a minor problem compared to the invalid airfoil data. I hope that you manage to get it all straight though. The software might be impossible to 'fine tune' properly (but I simply have no idea about it), but a lot of real-world data is available in various books and publications, so it hopefully shouldn't be a major issue.
Seriously, that's an Internet bully? Sorry, but you need to grow slightly thicker skin if you want to interact with people. I mean ANY people, not just on the net. Yes, he came across as a bit of a know-it-all, and pointed out some perceived flaws in something you've obviously spent a lot of time on and care about. It's always hard to hear one's work criticized, but try not to take it personally. The guy seriously didn't strike me as the type that's going out of his way to offend you. Try not to take it in this light.
Honestly, I think it's a bit of an insult to him to describe him as a bully. Over-bearing, maybe, but certainly not a bully.
How in the world could they feel that game companies would be opposed to sharing of game videos in any way? At my current company, we have occasionally sent around links among ourselves to some of the better videos our fans have created. The companies I've worked for are always happy with (and actively encourage) any sort of fan-produced publicity they can get.
There's something else going on here, I think. Maybe too much bandwidth was being consumed by game videos? Besides which, I have to admit I hadn't even heard of this company. Would have been bigger news if it was YouTube that made this decision, I suppose.
As things stand, I don't think UBI will get the full legal hot water, however, they've just taken a massive PR hit, and the whole "holier than thou" stance taken by the games industry on copy protection has also been tainted.
A massive PR hit? Meh. I'd call it more a "storm in a teacup", as is typical of most Internet dramas. A minor embarrassment, sure, but I'll stick my neck waaaay out there and say this will be all but forgotten in a week or so.
Not to mention that I'm really not interested in paying anyone $x dollars a month for the privilege of playing their game. I have a feeling that a lot of companies see the cash cow of WoW (not to mention the fact that MMOs, being server-based games, are inherently difficult to pirate) and want to get a piece of that, but with pay-per-month MMOs, players are only going to be willing to play so many of these games at a time. Its a much more limited market, and I think a lot of companies are going to get burned before this realization sinks in.
And, as you pointed out, MMOs are really never a good choice if you're actually interested in playing the hero/center of the universe, or don't have huge amounts of time to invest.
This is NOT why Blizzard is so successful. When game companies delay products, even for just a month or two, the usual result is catastrophic losses, like losing 1/5 of projected sales.
In the industry, games get delayed all the time, and the rule of thumb is that it has a high probability of gutting your sales.
I'd love to hear where you get your numbers from. It's not that simple, saying that delaying for a few months means catastrophic losses. How in the world could you even measure something like that? It's speculation even in the best of cases, because you'd never have a control group to measure two identical scenarios against.
I've been a game developer long enough to see a variety of product cycles, and how the scheduling works. It actually depends on when your game is scheduled for launch as well as what type of game you're making as to the seriousness of slipping a schedule. Obviously, the Christmas holiday season is the most profitable time to release, but not all games are scheduled for that period. Some games with very long development cycles don't target a specific time frame, opting instead for a rougher timeframe, even internally, while others are scheduled right up front down to the release date, and these are hard dates - sometimes for budgetary reasons, sometimes because of seasonal concerns (sports games), or perhaps movie tie-ins.
What makes it clean? From what I've read, one solution is to burn coal in pure oxygen.
I should probably rephrase "we have the technology" to "promising technology is being investigated". The technology does require sequestering of the CO2 gas emitted, but of far more concern to me is ensuring the much worse toxins contained in coal aren't released.
Apparently, New York is building a pilot plant. Here's the story:
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2008/2008-06-12-094.asp
Essentially, we'll have to see how this technology pans out. The fact that they can build a pilot plan seems to indicate they have a pretty good grasp on how to, at least theoretically, solve this problem.