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Games Entertainment

Games With Crates Get No Twinkie 93

Posted by Zonk from the items-can-come-from-other-containers dept.
Gamasutra's reoccuring feature "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie" covers the subject of crates and barrels in games, (ala Old Man Murray) courtesy of designer Ernest Adams. From the article: "If there are crates in a place, there had better be pallets under them and at least one forklift as well. In fact, somebody wrote to me (unfortunately I lost his name in an E-mail crash) and pointed out that wooden crates are completely passé now anyway. Modern shipping is done in piles of cardboard boxes all held together with industrial-strength plastic wrap. Wood is heavy and expensive, cardboard is light, cheap, and recyclable. But our FPSes are still displaying 40-year-old shipping technology, even in futuristic science fiction games." He also touches on Rumble implimentation, Easy Mode, Split Screen, and Camera Angles.
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Games With Crates Get No Twinkie More

Games With Crates Get No Twinkie

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  • Why is is that almost every feature posted on (the admittedly good) Gamasutra makes a slashdot post about 12hrs later? Someone is really milking that site ;)

  • first thing we do... (Score:4, Funny)

    by LewieP ( 883971 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @06:47PM (#12726168)
    ...every day before work is have a forklift race, where u can win different prizes depending on what position you come in, then we spend the rest of the day moving aroun 15 wooden crates about the harbour.
  • Do I really care? If I'm playing competitively I'll have all the textures disabled anyways (r_max_size 1), If I'm playing to try and get immersed in some alternate reality, then in that reality maybe they use crates to move everything around.

    Although I think this was targetting console games. You're playing a game where the means of getting your objective accomplished is shooting people, and the game even aims for you because you use a dinky analog stick. Do you care if the textures are bad?

    • Re:Eh. (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Suddenly_Dead ( 656421 )
      1) No one cares how "hardcore" you are.
      2) These games attempt to create a certain mood, and having crates in them may ruin that
      3) Console gamers care, because they only have a dinky analog stick (and often simple or shallow gameplay) and so the games make up for it with "story" and "atmosphere"

      Voila
  • Wow... Honestly, who cares? No game is ever going to be perfectly accurate, I'd rather have a game with a good story and playability then small insignificant details such as this.

    • Re:News at 11? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by roseblood ( 631824 )
      Well, this detail probably isn't even in error. I've yet to recieve an engine (think V-8, automotive) that didn't come in a WOODEN enclosure that looked an awful lot like a crate. Sure, thigs like brake pads, calipers, and other smaller and lighter items come in cardboard boxes, but for the BIG HEAVY stuff, crates still rule the shipping world.
      • I agree that crates are still in common use for many things, but how many of the gigantor crates you see in games make sense?

        I was actually going to point out how things larger than an engine would be put in something else, but I'm at a loss for what that actually is. What do you put something that's 8' tall into other than a crate?
      • Guess it all depends on what kind of stuff you're dealing with. Most of the furniture and appliances I've seen shipped just come in cardboard boxes, perhaps with a built-in pallet on the bottom. These weren't little items, either; we had 450 pound armoires and entertainment centers coming in with nothing but a chintzy layer of cardboard to protect them from being banged around in shipment. The number of open freight claims we had at any given time was just insane.

        In about two years of work, I think I can

        • Most of the large lab equipment that comes in at my job is packaged as the article notes, very large cardboard boxes shrinkwrapped and belted to wooden pallets, usually with foam peanuts or rigid polystyrene forms to cushion the device inside. Forklifts and pallet jacks can then be used to easily move incredibly heavy objects around.

          I do not doubt, though, that many items are still packed in wooden or metal crates. The problem with these crates in video games, in my opinion, is not the mystery of how cr

      • How many engines should a spy run into? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Man. Everyone is focussing on a strange part of this article.

        Ok. Yes. You can argue that crates still *exist.*

        At the same time, when you walk around in videogame worlds, you hardly see anything *but* crates.

        From Doom, we learn much of Hell is constructed from the still-growing bones of the sinning masses... and from crates.

        If you read the Old Man Murray article, they test how long it takes to get to the first crate in various games. Usually, it's under thirty seconds.

        These crates never seem to contain
    • Unfortunately, people like shiney things, not good plot and stuff.
  • ...but missing a few interesting ones in most cases, like being able to shoot people through walls. Real live battles would be a lot safer if twelve millimeters of wood stopped missiles and massive electric arcs.

    • Real live battles would be a lot safer if twelve millimeters of wood stopped missiles and massive electric arcs.

      Yeah, it always cracks me up to watch TV and movie gunfights where the antagonists hide behind wooden tables and drywall, which miraculously stop bullets. I'm so used to sneering at it that a recent episode of 24 caught me by surprise: the bad guy (actually a girl in this case) was trading shots with Jack Bauer and ducked behind a drywall column. Jack simply put three shots through the column

      • I've never liked that assumed reality about fights in space.

        If I'm designing a human-ship interface for a fighting ship in space, I'm going to make sure that you can tell where other vessels all around you and what they're doing, (i.e. you'll know if it's moving, if it's coming closer and when it blows up, you'll hear that too).

        Of course, I'll be synthesizing the noises, and an outside explosion won't shake the bridge or throw anyone out of their chair or anything like that. But you'll hear other ships i

        • If I'm designing a human-ship interface for a fighting ship in space, I'm going to make sure that you can tell where other vessels all around you and what they're doing, (i.e. you'll know if it's moving, if it's coming closer and when it blows up, you'll hear that too).

          The scenes I was referring to were EVAs where they fired a rifle or set off explosives (or simply banged on things) and it was completely silent. LIke the exterior shots of the Jupiter atmospheric braking in 2010. The interior shots dur

          • I really liked 2001 when Bowman gets locked outside the ship. The silence of an exterior shot is broken up by the heavy breathing of him inside the suit. It really gets across a feeling of controlled panic.


            • The silence of an exterior shot is broken up by the heavy breathing of him inside the suit. It really gets across a feeling of controlled panic.

              Yeh, that's the point I've been trying to make. Some people just don't seem to grok it. Exterior space shots are SILENT. Interior shots (with atmosphere) can be as noisy as you like.

        • Re:Playing with old tactics and attitudes too... (Score:4, Funny)

          by Nexzus ( 673421 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @03:42AM (#12727928)
          Make sure to include fuses in the control panels. Who knows how many nameless crewmembers have been killed by a console exploding in their face.
      • "...scenes in Firefly and noticing that there was--correctly, for a change--no sound."

        It's only 'correctly' if the characters in the story hear the sounds as well. We can nitpick sound in space to death, but nobody ever EVER complains about incidental music. They're the same thing.

        • We can nitpick sound in space to death, but nobody ever EVER complains about incidental music. They're the same thing.

          No, they're really not the same thing at all. In most cases, it is always assumed that the characters in a movie cannot hear the musical score -- unless, of course, the music is shown to be coming from something in the character's environment.

          Sound effects, on the other hand, are always assumed to be coming from within the environment (with the exception of a laugh track), and are

          • "Sound effects, on the other hand, are always assumed to be coming from within the environment (with the exception of a laugh track), and are thus audible to the character."

            Really? Ever watch one of those suspenseful moments where a bomb or an ordinary watch makes beeping noises every time the seconds tick by? How about the foot steps or breathing that we can hear that the potential victim cannot? (Terminator 3 springs to mind. The TX is looking for Catherine Brewster, she's in the room breathing nerv

          • In most cases, it is always assumed that the characters in a movie cannot hear the musical score -- unless, of course, the music is shown to be coming from something in the character's environment.

            And that can even be broken if you don't know whether the music is meant to be on the background or not. That ambiguity can often be interesting until revealed. (see the movie Spy Hard and game Metal Gear Solid, just to mention a few notable examples...)

            Sound effects, on the other hand, are always assume

            • ...and roar of the engines and zaps of laser guns in vacuum, and little things like that...

              No, those are definitely suppposed to be coming from within the environment. The roar of the engines? It comes from the engines. The zaps of laser guns? They come from the laser guns.

              Whether or not we (or anybody) should be able to laser guns in space, is beside the point. The audience is given enough information (in this case, sound) to make things interesting.

          • I think the Andromeda quotes go something like: "Of course I had to come save you, and anyhow, they were playing Bhrams" Tyr, refering to the musical score played over the fire-fight scene. "You know I bet it's alot easier to find us with you playing that music" -Cpt. Hunt refering to Tyr smaller-than an i-pod, but super-loud walkman blasting out yet another musical score durring another fire-fight.
    • Yep. That's probably the lesson you can draw from the Iraq war.

      Modern weapons are so deadly you can't stand up to an army equipped with them. And they're talking about weapons that would make an individual solider even more lethal, like explosive rounds that will be computer programmed to detonate above their targets -- no more foxholes.

      So, if you are on the short end of the stick (i.e. the part that might be fun to play in a game) individual heroics don't count for much. Pretty much the only way you ca

  • Wooden crates are completely passé? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Saturday June 04, 2005 @07:20PM (#12726313)
    Says who? Prettu much anything bigger than a few feet on a side that weighs between 250lbs and 1 ton comes in wood.

    A crate made out of particle board and 1x4s is about as cheap as it gets for strong shipping containers for heavy, expensive items. Order a full rack storage array, or an 5' industrial water filter or a V8 engine sometime and see for yourself.

  • Crates with no pallets (Score:2, Informative)

    by Makzu ( 868112 )
    Perfect Dark handled crates without pallets very well, I think. It had a nifty device attached to some of the crates that made them hover so that you could easily push them around. Likely some antigravity device or something similar. No need for pallets, forklifts, or anything.

  • I see crates everywhere (Score:5, Informative)

    by bitingduck ( 810730 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @07:47PM (#12726473) Homepage
    I work in a high tech place that would be a great setting for a game, and there are crates all over the place. There's every sort of crate you could imagine-- big wooden ones, big plastic ones, metal ones, medium sized ones of wood, plastic or metal, little ones of all materials. All sorts of different paint jobs from bare wood to fancy bright paint with all sorts of warnings. We even have an internal website for sharing surplus material and it has a whole category with hundreds of used crates and shipping cases, with pictures of them available on-line. And most crates large enough to fit over the forks of forklift have rails to hold them high enough off the ground so they don't need to be palletized to be forked. Smaller cases get palletized, and sometimes saran wrapped to hold them in place.

    I hardly think we're unique, either-- all those crates come from somewhere, and when I see other peoples' facilities, they have lots of crates, too.

    If you spend much time in a place where people make actual stuff as opposed to arranging ones and zeros in useful ways, you'll see lots of crates.

    What is unrealistic are the signs that they put on them, but hey, they're games.

  • Hang on a minute... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Saturday June 04, 2005 @08:34PM (#12726663)

    If the crates are made of metal, then how am I going to break into them with the crowbar?

    As for crates made of cardboard, they just aren't as satisfying to break...sorry.

    Now...crates made of glass or ceramic...now that's something I could get behind...

    ^_^

    • Crowbars work on metal crates. Metal bends nicely once you get the sharp point in a crack. It isn't as satisfying as popping nails from a wood crate, and it is much more work. (though I suppose you could design a fancy latch so you can pry a crate open)

      Generally though you are better of with a wrench to remove the bolts holding the top on, or using a key (lock pick) to unlock it, depending on the crate design. Still a crow bar will work if you have the patience and muscle to use one.

  • But they're so easy to render...
    • Big, unbreakable crates are remarkably useful for other things, too. Firstly, they're handy cover for the player to duck behind, and generally don't look out of place no matter where they get put. Secondly, a large crate parked in front of a door may actually be blocking visibility, making the map run at many, many more frames per second than it might otherwise.

      Still, crates can get so utterly cliched, along with their traditional warehouse homes - I have managed to build a map with neither [man.ac.uk], fortunately. :

  • Why stick with warehouses anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @09:25PM (#12726857) Homepage
    It makes me wonder why shoot and kill in one location at all? Think of de_dust, which makes more sense... hunting down terrorists in a small village. Although de_dust has practically no houses or even shops or vehicles, and too many crates.

    Look around you. There are apartments (great setting for a game, have never seen a complete apartment map, or a good one, there are villages, mountains, and certain places like airports, hospitals, downtown, offices, railway yard etc. The 747 map in CS was original too, but they overused airplanes in other maps.

    I wouldnt mind seeing an underground parking lot map. Think of the parking lot scene in terminator2... I always thought that was a great setting for a game lots of glass to break and places to duck.

    I was gonna say a school is good too, but I suppose its not.

    And if youre gonna make a warehouse, add computer desks, trucks, weighing and wrapping machinery, forklifts and lifttrucks, piles of crates arranged properly to maximize space...

    A library would be great if pieces of paper will fly if you shoot the books...
    • SWAT 4 has all kinds of odd enviroments in it. Including a 3 bedroom house.

    • Re:Why stick with warehouses anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by christopherfinke ( 608750 ) <chris@efinke.com> on Saturday June 04, 2005 @11:23PM (#12727280) Homepage Journal
      The reason you've probably never seen a good/complete apartment map is because of the limitations of the rendering engine. I've just about finished what I think is a great (and greatly detailed) map of my apartment building, but I can't get it to compile because there's too much detail/too many polygons (MAX_MAP_MODELS and MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES, for anyone else who does HL/CS mapping). I've gone as far as deleting all of the furniture/irregularly shaped objects in the map, but just having 3 floors of 30 empty 2-room apartments is too much for the compiler. Oh, and there aren't any crates in my map.

      (Off-topic: If anyone has some hints on how to easily fix these errors, I'd love to hear it.)
      • Forget about furniture and walls and rendering with polygons, just construct it all from crates.

      • Re:Why stick with warehouses anyway? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @07:44AM (#12728623) Homepage
        (Off-topic: If anyone has some hints on how to easily fix these errors, I'd love to hear it.)

        Off-topic solutions!

        MAX_MAP_MODELS: I think this one's when you have too many brush entities. The limit for the HL engine is 400, but you'd be best sticking under 200 or so for a multiplayer game. Actually, for a network game, the fewer entities of any kind, the better.

        MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES: This one is a bit more fiddly, and is the result of the player clipping being too complex. First, if you're not using a custom build of the Half-Life compilation tools [www.zhlt.tk], I'd suggest moving over immediately - there are numerous tweaks and new features which are absolutely invaluable for someone building a larger map, such as turning ornamentation brushes into func_illusionary entities to remove their clipnodes completely (but watch the map models count!). There's also the glorious 'NULL' texture which is ridiculously useful, tricks for hugely increasing the maximum number of planes in the map, and last but not least, my lovely realistic light_environment hack.

        The main trick to reducing the clipnodes count, however, is to put 'CLIP' brushes around any complex geometry. If you've got some roughly-cylindrical pipes, put a cuboid around them - likewise, if you've got some unreachable ceiling details such as vents, skylights or whatever, put another 'CLIP' brush around those too.

        Turning something like, say, some chairs and tables into a func_wall will make visibility much easier to calculate, assuming you haven't done so already - to reduce the map models count, you can probably tie an entire roomful of furniture to one brush entity. Plus with a relatively modern HLRAD, you can get the furniture to cast shadows again, although it can dramatically increase lighting calculation time while compiling.

        Finally, when you've got completely sick of the Half-Life engine, move on to Source. It's utterly awesome - maps can be so utterly, terrifyingly huge... :-)
      • All you have to do is slightly change the atmosphere from an apartment to a college dorm. This allows you to use crates in place of all of the furniture, making it easier for the engine to render.
    • I take it you haven't seen the map cs_twilight for CS Source. It's... almost an apartment building. Some offices, hallways, stairs... a basement, if I'm not mistaken. And I don't think there are any crates.
  • Does anyone else think it's kinda *fun* to smash crates?
    • *looks up from smashing crates into people with the gravity gun*

      Nooooo...... :-D

      And hey, which is cooler, the warehouse scene where they're boxing the ark from Indiana Jones, or a bunch of pallets? How would you like it if the "very special award" arrived in a cardboard box full of peanuts rather than a wooden crate labeled "frage-eel"?
    • Exactly.. the cardboard boxes collapsing in Half-Life 2 were cool, but not nearly as satisfying/entertaining as the crates breaking.
    • A large part of Ratchet & Clank was breaking the million and one crates in that game, every one dropping useful bolts (the game's currency). I never got tired of it.
  • cardboard boxes are much nicer to sleep in when your parents kick you out of their basement.
  • Am I the only one that wondered what "an E-mail crash" was?

    I've had computers crash, servers crash, networks crash..... I've never had an "email crash" - I'm not really sure what that would entail. All the computers remain up but postfix or sendmail dies? Doesn't seem like that would cause me to lose my email... What sort of "E-mail crash" would cause me to lose a selective amoount of information, without trashing all of my information?

    • I've had computers crash, servers crash, networks crash..... I've never had an "email crash" - I'm not really sure what that would entail. I'm sure you've heard of a specially formed e-mail message that causes Microsoft Outlook to crash - it involves a buffer overflow on the Date field. (The crash was actually in a PGP module, but crashed MS-Outlook nonetheless.) This is a crash involving an e-mail, and can be used as an example of an e-mail crash.

      However, the term More commonly implies that a computer

  • Furthmore, we're playing games that deal in futuristic or past worlds that have little or no bearing to current events or technology. Now we're complaining about wooden crates? It makes no sense at all to compare what happens in fantasy to what exists in reality. Yes, wooden crates do exist in reality, so do packing peanuts. I haven't seen packing peanuts in a game either, so does someone want to submit a story here regarding the lack thereof?
    • Course if you really want to get picky - what annoys me about futuristic games are the ones that have keyboards. Doom 3, Xenosaga - don't you think by the year 21XX we'd have something better by then? Maybe voice recognition? Or the nifty interfacing of Minority Report?

      Naturally, robot humanoid characters who use keyboards are one notch above this oddness. ;)

  • Who needs palettes when you have one of these? [brian-oshaughnessy.com]

  • Any good game needs plenty of inanimate objects that can be blown up.

    He has a point on the easy mode. A game should have an easy mode that really is easy, and just default to normal difficulty when the user starts a new game. Playing Battle of Wesnoth, there are some levels that are actually impossible on "easy" if you fail to save up enough money from the previous levels.

  • HL2 (Score:3, Funny)

    by amliebsch ( 724858 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @01:44AM (#12727690) Journal
    That's why HL2 is the most realistic game ever. It has crates, oh yes. But it also has pallets. AND cardboard boxes!

  • Great quote... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cluke ( 30394 ) on Sunday June 05, 2005 @06:34AM (#12728425)
    from the article:

    "..[developers have] still got that outmoded notion that the player is your adversary. He isn't. He's your audience, the person you're trying to entertain and provide enjoyment to."

    Amen! I hope the next time a designer considers putting a jumping puzzle or a maze into a game, he stops and thinks of that.
  • The same article points out that you can't move crates without a forklift and a pallet for the crate to sit on. If there are crates in a place, there had better be pallets under them and at least one forklift as well.

    Because you know, it's not like crates have been around longer than forklifts.
  • I still want to know why in games, on roads, paper seems to be there. Everywhere you go, there always has to be newspaper on the road or blowing across the road somehow.

    Maybe I'm out of touch with the world of wooden crates, harbours and newspapers
  • The unplayable camera angle thing really annoys me. Resident Evil, for example, was a terrible game because you couldn't see what you were doing: what fun is fighting off zombies if the only reason it's hard is because the camera angle means you can't see what's going on?
  • ...set the game 40 years in the past.

    Seriously though, a film-noir-ish "On the Waterfront" kind of game would be pretty cool ... how come nobody has come up with a good 30s/40s/50s setting for a game, even a FPS?

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