User comment history
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| News Comments > Morning Q&As |
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| 70. |
Re: No subject |
May 14, 2004, 10:21 |
m00t |
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Reguardless, the decision to do another Doom game lead the firing of an id employee. btw i do beleive you quoted me as saying "or someone important" and yes it was Paul Steed but the name escaped me at the time.
Steed was a bit of a jerk anyway. 
When he was fired it seemed more a retaliation and control trip... "We control you. Do what we say" Made an example of him I guess.
I dunno. He always seemed pretty immature to me.
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| News Comments > Morning Q&As |
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| 69. |
Re: The real reason Co-op isn't on the PC |
May 14, 2004, 10:15 |
m00t |
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"Actually the original legacy based Doom series were bitmap/ sprite based characters and the walls were polygonal. What this meant is that the subroutines that involked the simple manners of telling one avatar to focus on the first John(s) that moves or strikes resulted in a food fight. "
I'm not exactly sure how that is relevant to the discussion at hand. The walls weren't polygonal. In fact there wasn't a single polygon in the game. The whole engine was a raycast-based sector algorithm. It wasn't 3d at all. Basically it takes the player's x,y position and draws lines from there out along a 90 (or something around 90) degree arc in front to determine where the walls are. Scales the walls by distance at each edge and draws the wall up to the point where the sector "ceiling" would clip in front of it. It was an illusion of a 3d world but in reality it was 2d.
Doom and Quake always had the ability to handle multiple targets. Ever notice what happens if a grunt shoots another grunt in the back? But overall the AI was pretty dumb. "I see an enemy, therefore I path toward it and attack it". No complex behaviors. No use of cover, no waiting for backup. Just mindless attacking until the player was no longer in range/view.
Quake1 had very simple scripts (mostly door triggers and monster triggers). They didn't seem like big elaborate scripted sequences because they weren't. But they did have scripts. Having multiple players made it easy to abuse. (IE, "Wait here while I trigger this door. Jump through the exit so we don't have to fight any of the monsters" or sometimes the action would trap one player in a section causing them to wait for the level to finish).
Quake2 had quite a bit more scripting and was even easier to break due to the semi-persistent level design and hub structure but it still didn't play a major role in gameplay, it was mostly just fluff and triggers for doors and platforms.
Valve saw the flaws in Q1 and Q2's lack of story and wrote a... wait for it... script to make the game environment more lifelike and interesting. But then, I don't recall there being a co-op mode in Half-Life. The reason scripting played a big part in half-life is because they built the game for it when they started. It wasn't something they tacked on 3 months from ship. They knew what they wanted when they started (well, sort of.) and planned for that.
Half-life was as linear as quake was. I have yet to see a truly non-linear FPS. Far cry is pretty nice with choices but ultimately you have to go down a certain cooridor. There is no simple way to make a game that is not linear but still has a coherent story. I challenge you and every other person, developer or not, to come up with a detailed system that works. If you do it and prove that it works you've got a million bucks in your hands. Seriously.
Starcraft is the same. They knew they wanted large scripted sequences and planned for it from the beginning. The "responded to more than avatar" is less fore-thought and more a result of the nature of RTS games. Each player has multiple units, therefore each entity has to consider the possibility of more than one unit. "Avatars" really were just units with names and different stats. They weren't all that different from regular units in regards to code.
You have to design for co-op in advance or it makes it very easy to see broken areas of the game which makes the game look sloppy. Good co-op is hard. You have to keep track of where all the players are in each script and handle for them not being together. Make sure they don't stick around in an area that a single player would have to backtrack to in order to complete the level. Your AI has to account for multiple targets. Your level spawns have to be balanced for multiple people, including items. What if player A picks up a Key and leaves the game? B, C and D are screwed because the key is gone from the world. Give it to the other 3 players automatically? Well B was standing by the door that needs the key. He just walks in to the exit and advances the game. Player A doesn't have to forge his way through a million monsters that a single player would. Have the key respawn? Well in the single player game a wall came down after entering the key room, I guess BCD are trapped on the other side of it.
The list just goes on and on. Every single trigger, switch, key, monster spawn, item spawn, player respawn, script, save game point, and hallway has to take in to account everything you could do with more than one player. It is not a simple task. I applaud Vicarious Visions for taking it on and I don't blame id for avoiding it. VV gets a lot of stuff straight from id so they don't have to do it themselves. That frees up a lot of dev talent to work solely on the co-op consequences.
The powers that be did not decide that it was cheaper. The nature of linear tracks simply is that it is cheaper than multiple tracks. There is no way around that. It always will be cheaper. More content presented in more complex manner will always be more expensive to produce and maintain than a single track story. That's simply the economics of the situation. I would *love* for it to be more simple. I seriously want this sort of thing. It's just prohibitively expensive to design and build. Look at the sacrifices MMOs have to make. There's really no plot or story in any of them. There's narrative, but not story line. No plotline to follow and discover that hasn't been discovered before. Just kill this monsters, read the same story that everyone else gets to read in the MMO, pick up the same item already being vended by a hundred different players. Not the same kind of immersion as a single player game at all. And I think they suffer for it.
If you know so much, why aren't you making the game you describe? Grab an engine off garagegames. Write some AI. Get your name out there, make a million. If you really have the talent then there's obviously a market out there for you and the game you want to make.
P.S.
If you are refering to Peter Molyneux...
I think I'll just keep my mouth shut about him. >:(
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| News Comments > Morning Q&As |
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| 60. |
The real reason Co-op isn't on the PC |
May 14, 2004, 00:08 |
m00t |
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They didn't want to do it.
Simple as that.
That wasn't the game they wanted to make.
Why is that hard to believe?
And co-op (good co-op) is hard to do.
Co-op in Quake and Doom was patched on top of the single player game. It was very easy to cheat the scripts and get through the game faster and was horribly unbalanced. Yes, it was fun, but at this stage if id wanted to put co-op in the game as an official feature they would have to balance it and make it so that there was no way to break the scripts.
Vicarious Visions built their version of it from the ground up to support co-op. This is not a small task and at this point it would probably delay the PC version at least a year to add. The Xbox version has had to make some serious sacrifices to fit into memory (64mb really isn't all that big when it comes down to it.). Several levels have been broken apart to compensate for the RAM limitation. Texture resolutions dropped, monster polygon levels dropped (won't be that noticable due to the normal mapped lighting when viewed on a TV).
The games will be different experiences and the experience that the version on the XBox will offer is not the vision id had when they got down to what they wanted in the game. If you don't like it then by all means don't buy the game. The game really is as much for them as it is for us.
That said, I want my fucking co-op.
Praise be to mod authors.
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| News Comments > Morning Q&As |
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| 32. |
uhh.. |
May 13, 2004, 14:26 |
m00t |
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The Dude...
You know where Gabe Newell used to work... right?
Ever wonder why there are no linux ports of half-life?
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| News Comments > Alienware's Video Array |
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| 31. |
Video Array |
May 12, 2004, 18:25 |
m00t |
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From reading the article it sounds like it will go something like one of the following options. I will not speculate on how non-identical cards would behave:
All solutions present the problem that you have to duplicate the data in memory of each card. I'm not up to snuff on the PCI bus but I think this is possible by just telling both cards to read the data off the bus at the same time (as opposed to sending it to each of them individually)
1) Each card renders 1/2 the screen (either SLI or a split along some axis). Video Array hub stitches the image together and passes it to the video card.
2) Each card renders the full scene, doing 1/2 8xAA. The Video Array hub combines the 2 halves of the AA image together and reduces the resolution as normal and hands off to video card.
3) Each card renders alternating frames. The Video Array hub is used simply to alternate which card the monitor is reading the image from.
3 Seems to be the easiest solution to implement but has some drawbacks that make it infeasible. Some effects that use the frame buffer would not be possible due to having the frame buffer across two cards (after images/ghosting tricks, motion blurs). It would be possible to copy the buffer between the cards but that would tax the bus pretty heavily.
1) Presents a lot of the same problems as 3) due to each card only having half of the picture available to them to work on. Additionally if one card takes longer to render than the other one card will be waiting for the other to finish. This is a minor consideration in the long run (and gives the card time to grab things out of main memory) but depending on how the image is split may result in one card doing a lot more work than the other. SLI would probably be the fastest but would also be one of the worst when considering after image effects and the like.
Option 2) seems to be the best possibility. Each card would have the full frame information to do after image effects on, would be doing exactly 1/2 the work of a single card renering the same image. The Video Hub would have to be more complex and the their added layer should be able to handle the task of telling which card what to render, but it seems to be the most likely option.
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 17. |
No subject |
Apr 28, 2004, 11:45 |
m00t |
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No problems with popups here...
but then I run Opera and XP SP2 which both block pop-ups by default.
I can stand the once a day ad. I can stand ads in the page.
I cannot stand pop ups.
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| News Comments > DoJ Goes Pirate Hunting |
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| 55. |
Re: Anyone affected? |
Apr 22, 2004, 19:44 |
m00t |
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Legally speaking Piracy is not theft.
It is copyright infringement.
By downloading a game someone does not deprive someone from purchasing the copy downloaded. It still exists on the store shelves to be purchased.
This is one key distinction a lot of people don't seem to get. It is not stealing. It is not theft. That is not to say it is not wrong. Which is also not to say that the practices of the game publishing industry aren't wrong either.
And by decline of CD sales you mean increase?
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| News Comments > Perimeter Demo |
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| 20. |
Re: No subject |
Apr 20, 2004, 00:30 |
m00t |
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Interesting concept. PATHETIC implementation.
The AI is so weak that they have to build it up completely to the maximum tech level to compete with a newbie player.
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| News Comments > Morning Tech Bits |
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| 3. |
No subject |
Apr 1, 2004, 13:35 |
m00t |
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heh.. "What exactly is RAID"
Apparently that site thinks it's a "Random" array of Inexpensive Disks.
I certainly hope not... I like my data to be consistently accessible...
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| News Comments > Far Cry Patch Plans |
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| 70. |
No subject |
Mar 24, 2004, 18:30 |
m00t |
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By that token you'd be american if you were a citizen of a country in South America, Central America, and American Samoa...
Anyway...
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| News Comments > Far Cry Patch Plans |
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| 60. |
It's getting hot in here! |
Mar 24, 2004, 10:58 |
m00t |
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*doles out flame retardent suits*
Anyway, on to the topic I give a shit about:
AI programming is "hard". It is time consuming. It is easily broken. Nothing will ever come close to resembling a human's intelligence in our life time. Simply can't be done.
We can mimic human behaviour, but we will never see a machine that becomes truly inspired.
That said, it's easy to make something become alert when one of it's buddies gets popped. It's pure laziness and lack of foresight in design that it's not in virtually all games now.
The repeatedly fooling the same AI problem is simple to fix as well.
"Gee, I thought I heard something several times. I should get a squad to sweep the area."
Set a hard cap or better have an incremental value that increases each time you dupe the AI. Give a signal strength to whatever is tipping the AI off (sound, visual, whatever. How close he came to seeing you) and increment the 'how soon until I get a squad to bust your ass' value that slowly bleeds off over time (becoming less tense and going back to 'I'm a bored guard' mode). If the player exceeds a threshhold they remain suspicious and call in a report or investigate the area more thoroughly.
THESE ARE SIMPLE THINGS TO PROGRAM if you plan them in advance. Seriously. Not hard. You could even do it in a scripting language tacked on to the game if you put the right API interfaces in.
On another note:
Patriot Act did near nothing for the Police. It gave the federal law enforcement a lot more power, though. Like not having to get a sign off from a judge before doing a wide number of things (wire tapping, raids under certain circumstances, holding people without trial). And it's getting more, too. It is not a pleasant thing.
Regarding most of the comments on this thread:
Knee-jerk reactions tend to come from uneducated or uninformed people. Think about the things you say before you spout your vitriol.
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| News Comments > Stargate SG-1 Game News |
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| 26. |
Re: tv games |
Mar 22, 2004, 19:21 |
m00t |
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"I think the problem is they have budget X for a game. They have to spend part of that on the license, and it cuts into the development budget--hence the game sucks to varying degrees. Still better than movie games, which have a certain time frame for release (around the movie's time), while TV games can come out whenever. "
That depends. If the studio that owns the license gets behind the game big time (similar to ST:Elite Force and several of the SW games [NOT ALL. gag force commander gag]) they can get a wealth of help through voice acting and art direction that saves them a lot of time. Not to mention they might kick in extra funds to keep the project going if it needs that extra 10 months of polishing. Still, judging by Soldner's quality (or at least what we've seen of it) I don't think that last part will be an issue...
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| News Comments > Stargate SG-1 Game News |
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| 20. |
tv games |
Mar 22, 2004, 15:09 |
m00t |
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Not all games based on TV shows sucked. Or at least they didn't suck as much as the TV shows...
Voyager: Elite Force was actually a fairly decent game. I hate voyager with a passion, but the game is relatively fun. It's not stellar with regards to plot or new ideas, but the voice acting is spot on and the art is really well done. Gameplay is average for the genre.
I think SG1 is a great setting for a game. Huge number of plot possiblities. I think it would suit a number of game genres, FPS, RPG, action/adventure, turn based strat ala X-Com, just fine.
Then again, I can't really think of many other tv shows turned in to games...
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| News Comments > NVIDIA & DOOM 3 |
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| 113. |
Re: DOOMIII XBOX PICS |
Mar 5, 2004, 14:43 |
m00t |
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Doom 3 has never been delayed. Their ship date has not changed from the beginning of the project.
ID has stated that it has ALWAYS been "When it's done."
So, when it's done and it hasn't shipped, you can say it has slipped.
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| News Comments > Consolidation |
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| 15. |
Re: SBOX2 HD or lack of it |
Mar 5, 2004, 14:40 |
m00t |
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A big reason for cutting it would be that simply not enough developers used it. Sure, some games made extensive use of it, but they weren't the biggest sellers or they weren't played on Live! enough to warrant the extra cost on them and the consumer.
Also, there's a _lot_ of money to be made from storage catridges. Sony makes theirs for about $5/ea (or less) and how much do you see them at retail for? $20 - 30. Hrm.
1) Make console
2) Sell console for less than you made it
3) ????
4) Profit!!!
???? == Make cheap memory cards and sell them for a lot more. Make them the only way to save games!
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| News Comments > Morning Tech Bits |
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| 1. |
"File-swap killer" won't work. |
Mar 3, 2004, 12:19 |
m00t |
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There will always be more networks.
Even if everyone has this installed, WinZip defeats any possible attempt to compare the file with any non-zipped (with the same encryption key) file.
Just zip it up with a key, stick the key in the file name. Voila, no comparing. Once the database caches a copy of the zipped version, just re-zip it with a different key.
Simple and cheap. Unlike the software they're trying to write.
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386 Comments. 20 pages. Viewing page 18.
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