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Nihilistic Software
www.nihilistic.com
User Name.........Innerloop
Full Name.........Robert Huebner
Description.......Lead Programmer
12/30.5/99
Wow.. Really slow day here at Nihilistic HQ.. Everyone is either
jetting off to Vegas, holed up in a Y2K mountain bunker with a cache
of weapons, or still in bed after an EQ all-nighter..
So it seems a fitting time to goof off and do a .plan update rather
than the more important work of adding UV animations to our material
shader system (sorry Veldrin..)
So what's new here? In the month leading up to the Christmas holiday
I worked almost exclusively on the multiplayer stuff, which is why the
content of the screenshots hasn't changed that much (unless you got
screenshots of the multiplayer UIs, which you didn't, in which case
you would see massive changes, which you didn't..). The multiplayer
aspects were the least-complete part of the overall game pre-Xmas, so
it was an important goal for us to "go alpha" on that stuff, getting
all the UIs in there and functional. We knew that implementing the
storyteller aspects of the multiplayer game would be time consuming,
but probably didn't fully anticipate how complicated things can get.
In the end there are probably something like 10 uniuqe interface panels
to support the storyteller aspect, including special versions of the
status bar display, setup screens, and the like.
Our payoff for all this work was the ability to host our first public
testing of the game, for which we borrowed the LucasArts terminology
"pizza orgy" (not nearly as exciting as the name implies). This is
basically like a one-night beta test with other game developers and
friends from the local community to come in, play the game, and give
anonymous feedback, while sucking down pizza and beer. The feedback
from this sort of test is very critical because its the first chance
we get in a while to see someone sit down and try to figure this thing
out without any coaching. That feedback has already led to some really
good interface/UI tuning, and we have a pile of gameplay suggestions,
most of which will probably make it into the full game.
The other big milestone was our first demonstration to the press of the
storyteller aspects of the game. Ray was the designated storyteller
and our in-house Activision tester Sion was the "red-shirt NPC" for
the evening. We were working on various aspects of the storyteller
system just hours before the demo, so I wasn't enjoying things too much,
always expecting a massive crash to happen at any moment. Ray was
STing (DMing) a pre-packaged chronicle called "To Curse the Darkness"
which will ship with the final game. The interface was still a bit
clunky, and Ray had to manually type a lot of the dialog that will
be "triggerable" in the final version. The chronicle starts in a
tavern in the city of Temesvar. The amazing thing, to me at least,
was that the opening tavern scene, which sets the stage and gets the
players started on the plot, ended up taking more than an hour to
complete. And it wasn't because of bugs or problems, it was because
the players were having so much fun just sitting around in the
travern interacting with the various NPCs (mostly played by the
Storyteller, of course), that the story took on quite a bit more depth
than we had anticipated. Watching this, it became clear just how big
a deal an experienced storyteller can be for an on-line RPG session.
I can't remember ever spending an hour interacting with canned RPG
NPCs without wanting to smash by monitor, but this first 'real'
Storyteller experience wasn't like that at all, Ray had to practically
have a bouncer come over and toss them out of the travern to move them
along.
There were of course some problems, mostly UI stuff for the storyteller
and a ton of enemy/weapon/stat balancing. Its pretty easy for PCs to
die currently, since only a first-pass tuning on stats and items has
been completed. And we did have a crash or two and forced some restarts,
but besides those few problems, the test went really well and everyone
on the team was pretty excited about it. It seemed a bit risky to have
a magazine guy here for what was essentially the first session ever
played, but it all worked out in the end.
One amusing feautre at the moment is the giant head. When the storyteller
wants to move around the world invisibly without posessing an NPC he/she
can click on a button and use the "ghost" object, which is currently
modeled as this giant creepy head model. The giant head floats around
the levels (the players can't see this of course) and it has a weird idle
animation where the head turns slowly from side to side. Its very odd
and disturbing looking for some reason, and I'm not sure why the story-
teller is represented as a giant head, but whatever the reasons, that's
what's in there at the moment. We also had some odd moments where the
storyteller could posess a door and start walking around the level as
a big wooden door and talking to people, but we got that one worked out.
Come to think of it we had a bug in Jedi Knight during QA where one of
the player became a door that ran around and shot lasers.. Guess its a
running theme with us...
So now that the multiplayer milestone is done, I've been going back to
doing some rendering and tuning work. Got some new tools from Intel
I've been playing with, fixing some soft-skinned problems with some of
the 3D models, and adding some new functionality to the shader language
to support stuff like water flows and cool effects. Also continuing to
tweak T&L support on the GeForce and tuning the texture caching under D3D.
Hope to also enable cast shadows from static geometry into the world
lightmaps, which will help a lot to make work objects look more "in" the
worlds they're placed in.
My top games for 1999. I always suck at these lists because I can never
remember what came out in what year, so forgive me if I missed something
obvious.
EverQuest. Even though it eventually drove me away with too much
repetition and slow progression, I have to admit it give me a lot of fun
hours for my $45.
Alpha Centauri. Not a perfect game, but I keep coming back to it for
some reason, and playing most games through to completion. The good
far outweighed the bad aspects for me.
Q3Arena and Unreal Tournament. Both pushed the graphical envelope and
set the bar for the rest of us. Just wish I was better at both.
Freespace2. I love a good space combat sim, and this was one of the best
I've played.
Baldur's Gate. Was that this year or last year? Can't remember, either
way its on the list. Didn't get Planescape yet. Still time for a late
Christmas gift, Feargus :)
Railroad Tycoon 2. Don't laugh, it was a damn fun game.
Zelda64. Actually come out in 98, I guess, but I wasn't able to play it
until 1999, so I can still put it on my list.
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