Game Developers Burn Down the House 49
Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."
Inspiring... (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, Chris Hecker is an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously he hasn't looked at the performance profile for a game recently. The gnarly game logic doesn't really take up much of the time. The heavy-duty number-crunching is where all the cycles go. So, in fact, it's exactly the correct tradeoff to design hardware which makes those bits get faster, because those are the performance sensitive bits.
In addition, it's clear how throwing more processing power at graphics and physics makes for better graphics and physics. Whereas it's not at all clear that more processing power leads to better gamplay. You don't need more clock-cycles to make a more interesting game, just more imagination. So complaining that there isn't any more processing power available for 'gameplay-type' code is kind of a pointless complaint.
My opinion of Warren Spector just went up (Score:5, Insightful)
It might help that his games are huge bestsellers, but I much prefer this attitude to the "count every copy as a lost sale" mentality that the BSA uses in there numbers for the cost of piracy.
In this DRM headed world, how long before the media companies get congress to declare a "war on copyright infringement". Maybe we can start locking up people for an illicit copy of Doom 3. I guss they could hang out with the busted for a joint crowd.
Re:"games cost too much" (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's cost too much to make".
In fact, if anything, today's computer games are underpriced on the shelves.
Re:Of course, Chris Hecker is an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
No amount of imagination will make your game's AI better. What you need is enough processing power to be able to traverse and modify pretty complicated data structures that represent your agents. This kind of AI code is choke full of branching and random access to memory. It's the huge cost of systems like this that makes most modern's games AI weak. Physics are so 'in' that we spend all the time makign a car feel 'real', while the AI still goes on wheels.
If we make in order operations easier, all we're doing is make it even easier to go down the physics and graphics road. If every 1000 cycles you spend on AI can be transformed into 10,000, it's going to be tough to convince the publisher that AI is worth it.
For example, in the next Gran Turismo for 2006/7, do you think that Poliphony will spend the extra resources of the PS3 on realistic AI drivers that can overtake properly, or on damage modelling and an extra couple of layers of effects in the car's surfaces? My guess is that the AI will blow, as it does today, and all of the extra HP will be spent on graphics and physics.
Re:Of course, Chris Hecker is an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
How much processing power is needed for the gameplay portion of Katamari Damacy, Tetris, or Parapper the Rapper? The genuine innovations in gameplay have not, as far as I can tell, really come from doing more sophisticated AI, but rather from a designer (not a programmer) using their imagination to come up with a new idea.
In addition, remember that you are getting something back for being in-order: To tackle your traditional AI worry, recall that some AI problems do lend themselves to parallelisation. The tradeoff for losing out-of-order execution is that you get to have multiple-cores. If you have 100 agents that all need to do pathfinding, well, that's an embarrasingly parallel problem and this new hardware is probably well suited for it.
Basically, I think that traditional single-threaded spaghetti code is going to be no slower than before (due to higher clock-rates). Straight-line number crunching is going to be massively faster. And any problem you can make parallel will benefit from multiple cores. That's not to terrible a situation to be in, when you consider the alternative choices.
Yikes (Score:3, Insightful)
All three comments on piracy were stupid. If Warren Spector actually believes that, he's ignorant or out of touch. The fact that many people tried to pirate HL2 and then bought it when their piracy attempts failed (and then were subsequently banned) proves him wrong. Not just kind of wrong, but ignoring-that-which-is-blatantly-obvious wrong.
Warren Spector is, however, correct in that a digital distribution system would be nice. I'm speaking as a consumer rather than a game developer here. There are better reasons to want it than so you can let your schedules slip... after all open-source development teaches us that the only thing that makes software "finished" is deadlines. Steam is a step in the right direction, but the ability for Valve to arbitrarily shut off your access to the game isn't part of what I would call a good distribution system.
The rest of the talk seemed like people complaining about how The Man is stifling their ability to innovate. The industry is profit oriented... we all understand this. Yes, it affects how games are scheduled, funded, released, and distributed. Yes, this might not be the best thing for developers or consumers. But, if you don't like any of these things and you don't care how big your paycheck is, then you have no excuse not to go indie, right? If you're already indie, I wonder why you're complaining about any of this in the first place.
Why stay in an industry that's forcing you away from doing the things you want to do? Just so you can complain about it? That doesn't seem like a good reason.
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
Greg Costikyan was a firebrand and I thought he was insightful overall. A little cycnical, but that was in the spirit of the talk.
I felt bad for the guy in the mohawk who tried to related Blockbuster rentals with piracy. He got 100% owned by the panel. However, I think aside from Warren (who essentially said that anyone who worries about piracy is delusional, because those who pirate wouldn't have bought the game anyway - I agree), all the piracy comments from the panel were unbelievably stupid. Yes, we know you guys are militant anti-corporate whatevermajiggers - but that was pure grandstanding. You can try and get all artiste on us all you want, but you're all smart people and you have to realize that sales of your products are what fundamentally allow you to continue with your pursuits. But, that was at the end of the talk and I think they all just might have gotten carried away in the spirit of the moment.
Brenda retardowhatsits went as far as to say we need to get away from the "bad idea of publically owned companies". Back to Berkely with you, comrade.
Chris Hecker did indeed come dangerously close to breaking NDA with some of his talk. Even though he claims he never signed an NDA he clearly was on board with some of the more recent tech missives from the next-gen console companies. I half expected to see Blue and Green ninjas burst from the ceiling and kill him on the spot.
The rant session was a fun capper to the overall GDC experience. It would have been a 100% grand old time if that Brenda chick hadn't come in with her unwelcome ultra socialist rants (here's another clue Brenda : you were all excited about announcing you just got a job with Sun! That's completely inconsistent with your anti-male, anti-corporation rant. You hateful fucktard!
Re:Inspiring... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:zerg (Score:3, Insightful)
You're seeing a highly respected programmer saying he doesn't care if you pirate his games.
You're seeing an indie game creator say that game rentals are not the same as piracy.
You're seeing a respected game designer say that he doesn't believe piracy affects him.
You have here in order:
If you think that you have the moral high-ground to pirate games just because Chris Hecker is a hippy, then you're not really thinking straight about the whole issue, are you? Don't you think before you pirate a game Chris Hecker has worked on that you should ask the other 200 people that also worked on it to see if they mind?
Don't you already pirate games? Aren't you just scratching for any excuse to make your blatantly illegal activity seem morally OK?
Your conscience already seems to know what you don't: pirating games is illegal and rips off game publishers and developers. The only person it benefits is you, the ungrateful cheapskate.
Re:That was beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
While I might unfairly lump "developers" into one catagory, the fact remains that the game industry tends to eat its young. We hire kids straight out of college or art school because they are naive and cheap. Take an informal poll around the office. The demographics back my assertion up. There will be a high percentage of people who are in their twenties who have held only a few jobs outside of the industry. There precious few that have learned best practices outside of the game industry, which means they pick up the crappy ones that are currently in use.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not attacking the people in the industry, but the practices that we continually use that have always failed.