Rather Infrequent Open Thread
Space Shuttle Atlantis leaves the ISS for the last time.
End of an era. Sad.
So just how did NASA train the Apollo astronauts?
Wired marks the anniversary of the first man on the moon with a gallery of images showing the strange, often gruelling things that Apollo astronauts were subjected to as part of their training.
I’m generally of the opinion that they are not, although I’ll grant the point that some titles — The Witcher, Dragon Age — do chew up a darn lot (30 to 50) of hours for a complete playthrough. That’s good in many respects, but one almost always encounters parts of the story which illustrate all too clearly that it’s not always easy (or possible) to tell an engaging story for two days straight.
I suppose it comes down to investment. If you’re paying AAA prices, you want an AAA time investment. In the social and mobile gaming market(s), where game prices are typically lower, there are both economic and practical arguments for keeping games shorter.
Apple more than doubled their profits in the last fiscal quarter.
Actually, their profits shot up 124%, tipping the scales at around $7 billion. Naturally, strong sales of iPhones and iPads were responsible for much of this, although Apple computers have also (I gather) been seeing record sales figures. The fact that app users are buying 61% more apps compared to last year also helps. China was evidently a key factor in all these record-setting results.
Apple is now trading north of $400 a share on the stock market, and that’s probably gone up yet more with today’s release of OS X Lion.
Of course, not all is flowers and unicorns; China is proving to be a problem as well as a boon, with fake Apple stores springing up in places.
The FBI rounds up more ‘Anonymous’ suspects.
A sting operation in London saw the arrest of a 16-year old, while at least 14 others have been detained in raids in the US.
Don’t make excuses: reframe them!
If you haven’t started reading Lifehacker’s various tips and tricks for bettering yourself, maybe now’s a good time to start.
Google will start detecting whether your PC is infected.
Well…sort of. They will look for a particular kind of malware, and warn you in your search results if it is detected on your system.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
Battlestar Galactica reference nonwithstanding, the story here actually concerns Gameloft, a mobile game developer that has been churning out a lot of top-notch titles lately. It turns out that there may be a sinister reason for that, as one of their former employees has revealed that Gameloft developers work insane hours…as in: they make the “EA Spouse” issue seem tame by comparison.
Most Mass Effect players are missing out, it seems.
Only 18% of Mass Effect players opt to play the game as the female Commander Shepard. I’m sure there’s all sorts of reasons why that is, and frankly I don’t really intend to get into those (nor do I much care).
But really…82% of Mass Effect players are missing out; Jennifer Hale is a much better voice actor than Mark Meer, and the game’s narrative is just that much more enjoyable when playing as FemShep…purely on account of Hale’s talent.
How to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors!
It. Is. Science!
Who wouldn’t want to blow craters in asteroids?
For science, of course.
Apparently, according to EA’s figures, consoles now account for 40% of the gaming industry.
Well…shit.
Tonight’s post brought to you by stairs:
Halfway Up the Stairs
Non-dedicated games platforms are certainly booming, if that 40% figure is accurate. The growth of gaming in its various forms continues at a rapid pace.
As far as Mass Effect goes, I’m not sure playing as a female Shep would have enhanced my experience of ME1/2 much. It’s the same dialogue, and I do tend to skip it anyway. I feel like the move to fully voiced games kinda left me behind, I always preferred Baldur’s Gate and the like, where a line or two might be voiced but the majority would be just text.
Game length though, has always been an mixed bag, for cRPGs at least. For every game like Ultima VII which doesn’t require any amount of grinding, you get games like Final Fantasy et al which require regular amounts of grind to level your characters appropriately. Constant repeated combat does nothing for me these days (didn’t mind so much back in the day though). I’d much rather have a shorter game filled with higher quality content than a long game with big gaps between the good parts.
I’ve been thinking about what it would take to make an Ultima or Baldur’s Gate style game using a modern platform. Just for kicks, I started looking at the Unreal Development Kit (UDK). What would it take in this age to make Ultima on it?
Well, obviously there are the models and levels, which any game requires. Then there is (re)creating the spellcasting system, adding the roleplaying elements, and other systems like sleeping, food, reagents, etc. Now you put together a good story and you have BG.
To make it Ultima tho, you have to go the extra mile and add NPC schedules, interactivity with any object, and all of the creation/crafting systems. But what else. What makes it Ultima. Is it just the karma and interactivity, or is there more.
If we make an ‘Ultima Development Kit’, what needs to be there before a game can be developed?
Jayson: We’ve* discussed such a thing before, I think. It would have a pretty steep list of requirements.
To take just one example, consider what it would have to include for magic. At minimum, it would need three magic systems, two reagent-based and one akin to the runic magic from the Underworld games. The two reagent-based systems would have to approximate, respectively, the simple spellbook-driven system from U6 and U7, and the complex ritual-driven systems from U8 or U9.
NPC scheduling would have to include things like work spaces for NPCs, meal times, “office hours”, and of course sleeping. That in turn would require scenery to be both player-interactible and NPC-interactible, which in a 3D engine is no easy feat…especially if you want it to look non-awkward.
You’d need an excellent conversation system, preferably one that allowed the player to interject custom keywords or phrases. Books and maps…also a must.
You’d need a robust day/night system, weather effects, possibly eclipses, and a solid moongate system as well.
And…you’d need an excellent in-game scripting and cutscene system to play out narrative scenes (SI is the example here).
Heck, you’d probably need more than all that (e.g. open world environment? ease of use?), but I think I’ll stop there, because I’m already describing a monstrously complex toolkit that, really, no extant current-gen development kit even approaches.
* Not you and me personally, but the community here on the site.
EA’s game library, with the exception of the Sims series has become mostly geared towards consoles, so I wonder how indicative their numbers are of the entire industry. Just because THEY sell more games on console than PC doesn’t mean it’s the norm. Ultimately these “AAA” publishers can have the consoles. My 360 sits gathering dust anyway while the indie scene explodes on PC, and I love ever minute of it.
“Game length” is a tricky subject. By that do people mean “The time it takes to reach the end of the main plot” or “The amount of stuff there is to do in the game”? A lot of games that I love (Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) have no plot at all, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing them. At $10 a pop, talk about value! Also games WITH plots, like the Elder Scrolls titles and other open world games, I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing without touching the plot, or even after completing the plot because there’s other stuff to do. This is why I’ve fallen out of love with “next-gen” RPGs like Dragon Age, or Mass Effect. They may have well written plots and pretty graphics, but there’s simply nothing else to do in them, or what there is to do is no fun. (scanning for minerals anyone?) What it comes down to is I don’t think games from the big name publishers are long enough anymore. If I’m going to drop $50 (or bloody hell $60) on a game, it better last me more than 30-40 hours. Money’s too hard to come by these days and I need to make my entertainment dollar last. Damn the shiny graphics and high-paid writers! I just want to play!
Games too long? Uuuuuh games are far too short. I don’t really play a ton of rpgs anymore. But Brutal Legend could be called AAA, and it took 4-6 hours to complete… 40-50 bucks for 6 hours of fun? WTF IS THAT?!
It took me 6 hours, and I bought almost all the powerups, even though they were basically useless. I didn’t flip all those life statues that give you a higher health, but who needed them? “Wow, I could play this game for another hour or two by flipping stupid statues and get more health, but I don’t even approach ever needing that!”
How long are non-rpgs now-a-days? 5-12 hours of gameplay? Call me old fashioned, and not including multiplayer, I want 1 dollar – 1 hour of entertainment. And I don’t want to make up for it by buying 2 hour long dollar store dvds. If a game is 50 hours long, 50 dollars is a fair price.
Let me list a few games I’ve thrown money in the toilet over
Sonic Colours – 5-8 hours
Uncharted – 10 hours
MGS 4 – 10-15 hours
Wasn’t halo 2’s storyline only 2-3 hours? No wonder they planned making the trilogy just one game. It really only had one game’s worth of content in it. I -know- ODST had about 4-6 hours in it.
And obviously halo is more about multiplayer than anything else. But damn dude, any game that’s 50 bucks need more than 5 hours of gameplay. Games are too long now-a-days? So we’re going into the age of games being as long as movies and costing 150% more? When I play a zelda game that only takes 10-15 hours, I’m hanging up my hat. 10 bucks an hour or even 4-5 bucks an hour for gameplay is WAAAAY too much money. Minimum wage isn’t even ten bucks an hour!
I’ve looked at what it would take to add some of those to UDK, and while its not an easy project by any means, I’ve found that for the most part it is doable.
Day/Night cycle, moon phases, and moongates can be run on a single timing system. Since the moons change at regular intervals (although independently), it would be easy to create their cycle. The same timer would determine moongate opening and destination.
The magic system I started was just the standard reagent and spellbook (with scrolls, ala U7.5), and it seemed to be easy enough. Treat the reagents as ammo, and make each spell a “weapon” per-se. To add more spell systems would be doable, as would blocking off some areas where standard magic would not work.
Schedules is going to be the hard part. Since rigging the NPCs will allow me to create a number of custom animation sets, things like “cleaning the counters”, “sit down to eat” and “lying down to go to sleep” should be easy. Its making them obey a time restraint that is realistic, and making them pathfind to the correct area for each action. I’m looking at the crowd simulator as well; if I can make “generic NPCs” that perform some function, it can make the towns look a lot less empty.
Books, signs, maps, and scrolls are easily doable, either using the canvas or creating custom Scaleform pieces (I was leaning toward the latter for spell scrolls, so I could add “sparkly magic” to them).
You’d need an excellent conversation system, preferably one that allowed the player to interject custom keywords or phrases. Books and maps…also a must.
You’d need a robust day/night system, weather effects, possibly eclipses, and a solid moongate system as well.
I wasn’t planning a cut-scene system, since Matinee handles that pretty well. For in-game conversations, I added a camera rig to my model so it shows their face in a smaller window, and you can select responses to a dialogue tree. It looks similar to U7/7.5. Adding a typing area for custom input may require more work, since it would require each NPC to have a list of keywords they respond to. I can take a look at it.
As far as maps go, I’m trying to set up a overworld where pieces of the map stream in as necessary. I’m running out of space in the overworld, tho, so I’m not sure how feasible it is. I’m thinking of putting a dual-scale map for transportation, and streaming in the maps to a centralized location in the overworld. This would make it look like you are moving, but each map shares the same space. The world would still be one map; no loading screens between locations, however it would lose some of the depth of being able to travel across the continent by hand (you’d get to an “edge” and you’d get “teleported” to the next map, so it wouldn’t be seamless. If I can figure out a way to increase the size of the overland map, that may not be necessary.
I’ve also got a rudimentary karma system in place, although each “hit” to it (positive or negative) has to be coded by hand at the moment.
So… yes, very time consuming. Most of what I have is in different projects, or just paper notes about how it works, but I think this can be done. Once I get a little more comfortable with UDK, I think I’m going to try this.
On a somewhat related note, someone started to recreate Balmora (from Morrowind) in UDK. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81143 – though it looks like not much has happened since February, unfortunately.
30 to 50 hours? Feh, back in the day, a “long” game had 100+ hours in it.
Forgotten World Site update.
We are looking to add some books to the game. We essentially have unlimited space for book entries. So if you want to contribute, we will be taking submissions for the next several months. Read more about it at the website.
Readily available open source libraries and engines could be strapped together to create such an SDK, without sticking to just one and all its limitations. UDK is cool and all, but why compromise? Make a list of required applications, call it the SDK’s dependencies, then modify a few editors so they save in the same directory. Create a brief tutorial of how to string a simple world together and see if anyone uses it.
Engines/applications needed would be rendering (something like Ogre), scripting (LUA, C, bash, whatever), audio (SDL’s simple), input, network (just sending variables over UDP or TCP) and file or possibly database IO.
It could be done in half the time spent on art assets on some mod.
@ICEBLADE What’s the web site’s URL?
The Forgotten World team, of which Iceblade is a member, usually hang out at forgottenworld.de.
You could glue all that together, someone already has with GameKit. http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/ – what you’d lack are things like UDK’s UnrealEd. Stuff like Ogitor would work towards covering that gap, though.
Gamekit looks pretty neat; I might have to give that a try-out.
Wow, this discussion takes me back; I remember musing with someone (Dino?) about how we really need an Ultima Game DevKit (UGDK), with many of these features and not tied to any extant game.
Deja vu all over again.
What gets me going is when I hear people on here talking about all the compromises they’d have to make in choosing engine x versus engine y, when as I code my own engine I readily add whatever features I like. I don’t want Ultima projects to have to compromise at all and it saddens me to think of all the work being done in closed, proprietary engines with inflexible and limited features. Five years from now good luck getting Dungeon Siege, etc., running on a modern system. And many of these engines are not cross platform, leaving penguins and apples out in the cold.
Having an “Adventure Construction Set” that is open source, cross-platform and tailored specifically to our needs would be fantastic and potentially save hundreds if not thousands of hours of dev time. If properly maintained its shelf life would be forever.
gamekit does look pretty cool and appears to be under active development. Revision 942 was committed June 19th, so it looks like it started life somewhere other than Google Code. Looks like a small, possibly one-man dev team, although many others are reporting bugs which is a good sign. Last commit was today. 🙂
Something like this is exactly what I was talking about. That it can be extended with scripts (C++, Lua, logic bricks) is ideal, because libraries of functionality could be created specific to Ultima (NPC schedules, reagent mixing, day/night cycles, etc.) and reused throughout projects. Art assets could also be shared across Ultima projects, so when some random guy adds an asset to his obscure project that won’t get finished -all- would benefit. That is the most efficient use of resources, after all, “Creation takes time. Time is limited.”
Sanctimonia:
Which is actually a quote from Marathon, one of Bungie’s masterworks.
The catch, of course, is whether people possess the necessary skillset(s) to code their own engines from scratch. That’s the beauty of middleware; it opens up the possibility of game development to those who don’t have the necessary technical background and skill to create their own custom game creation frameworks. The drawbacks, of course, are as you have observed, echoing lamentations which have many times been made in other comment threads on the site here.
We hope to have something the functionality capable for other users to make their own maps in Ultima IX at some point down the road; however, several systems are too hardcoded to make changes to such as magic. Moongates would be pretty easy, though.
There are however other annoying limitations that reduces the use of Ultima IX as an engine such as max number of maps and such.
Ultima VII had that restriction until Exult removed it. Of course, that’s a completely different thing, but at least it sounds like it’d be possible…
Dunno about Dungeon Siege or NWN (and the latter has extra issues anyway, such as the D&D ruleset), but Morrowind at least might be somewhat easier to run on modern systems five years down from the line if projects like OpenMW or Project Aedra succeed.
Can’t say about NWN1, but the D&D ruleset isn’t so much an issue with NWN2 since you can pretty code your own systems above the D&D ones.
The underlying gameplay will still use D&D’s rule of course, but they can basically be rendered irrelevant by whatever you want to implement.
I was referring more to the fact about that D&D is copyrighted and all that. An open source NWN 1/2 implementation would have to remove/replace the hardcoded ruleset.