Anatomy of an Achievement 157
Whether they annoy you or fulfill your nerdy collection habit, achievements have spread across the gaming landscape and are here to stay. The Xbox Engineering blog recently posted a glimpse into the creation of the Xbox 360 achievement system, discussing how achievements work at a software level, and even showing a brief snippet of code. They also mention some of the decisions they struggled with while creating them:
"We are proud of the consistency you find across all games. You have one friends list, every game supports voice chat, etc. But we also like to give game designers room to come up with new and interesting ways to entertain. That trade-off was at the heart of the original decision we made to not give any indication that a new achievement had been awarded. Some people argued that gamers wouldn't want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements. Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious."
Re:News (Score:5, Funny)
Re:News (Score:2, Funny)
Huge numbers of people find it really interesting, and there's no way nerds would want to know about the beginnings of the most recent universal adoption to the entire industry, across all platforms?
And get off my lawn!
Re:News (Score:5, Funny)
http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/7033/achievement.jpg [imageshack.us]
Whew! All that works saved! (Score:4, Funny)
I was about to implement my own Achievement system until I saw the code Snippet! That's going to save me a lot of work!
Re:No, they need to die (Score:5, Funny)
There are many things going for achievements, even if you don't care (or track) how high your total is.
Re:No, they need to die (Score:2, Funny)
A false sense of achievement.. [friendsoffoamy.com]
Re:Here's how (Score:4, Funny)
An achievement for telling 5 people you fucked their mother[...]
An achievement for calling the opposing team's sniper "gay"?
Actually, it'd be cool if the insulted player got the achievements ("1000 fathers", "well dressed").
Re:News (Score:3, Funny)
The first principle of news-ish nerd-ish moronicity is 'stand by your beliefs, no matter how wrong-headed, in the face of adversity, critisism, flaming, facts, or the law'.