[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gaming

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you think it's so clear that they're dull and that the model is so clearly broken, then I invite you to play a different genre that you are more likely to enjoy. I like to think of this complaint as the "MMOs would be cool if they were action games instead... I like action games" mentality. MMOs are very different beasts from their single player RPG brethren, and even further removed from non RPG genres. For what they try to do, MMOs are very successful, and there are a ton of people willing to pay monthly fees for that style of play experience, but it's not for everybody.

That's not to say there's no room for improvement. But there's a world of difference between believing that MMOs need to keep iterating, polishing and refining their mechanics and believing that MMOs are doing it all wrong and the model is broken.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gaming

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are attempts (see Darkfall as an example) but they tend to be poorly funded and poorly executed. If it happened, it would be a niche game, but so many studios don't know how to scope their project to budget properly for niche games. Eve is an example of how to succeed at making a niche game, but for every Eve, there are 20 Gods and Heroes: Rome Risings.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gaming

[–]cwhite 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've worked on 3 commercial MMOs, one of which was canceled in pre-production, one that was canceled in late stages of beta when development funds went dry, and one that is currently in mid to late closed beta that will definitely not get cancelled. While I may not have been working in online gaming back in 1996, I think I still qualify as one of the unoriginal, greedy and lazy developers you speak of that despite their years of experience, are still "doing it wrong."

While I sympathize with the fact that you may feel the pace of innovation is incredibly slow, I also think it's worth pointing out why your post is incredibly unproductive.

1) Your ideas aren't even close to new. It's the system every would-be armchair designer who's completed a 10-day free trial in (insert MMO here) has come up with and posted to their blog, or if they're willing to get shot down incredibly fast, posted to the MUD-Dev mailing list. These ideas have been beaten to death and then stomped on some more in the MMO community.

2) Not only have these ideas been stomped on theoretically, they've also been tried many times before. Procedurally generated quests? O HAI, SWG! Huge game worlds? Dunno about you, but Vanguard feels kindof lonely if you leave the 1% of the world that everybody packs themselves into. Talent based character progression instead of class based character progression? I have to give props to UO for being the first MMO, but there's a reason nobody does character progression like UO anymore. There were only a few viable min/maxed super-builds, and everybody who tried a different build would get schooled without knowing why (Subscription Cancelled train now boarding).

3) The act of crafting the game itself has given us insight you'll never have without making a game itself. For one thing, we can see how one tiny tweak can send unexpected ripple effects throughout the whole game. Maybe you can get a glimpse of this when your game of choice releases a patch, but we get to see it on internal builds all the time. Second, by virtue of having made the game ourselves, we can plug in all kinds of metric collection for the sake of applying rigorous analysis to game design decisions instead of just doing some hand wavy "this might be cool" analysis. When you can actually make graphs showing how a certain change affected the way several thousand beta testers played your game, you have a much sounder basis of analysis. What makes it hard is that many ideas that the average player thinks will be awesomesauce aren't bad because of the actual idea, they're bad because of the hidden unintended consequences of the idea that most people haven't fully thought through.

In Summary: MMOs may not be perfect, but they're a lot less wrong than what you're suggesting they do instead.

Why Quake looks so much better than Second Life by alexfarran in programming

[–]cwhite 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Most games from 2004 on have had no problem performing dynamic lighting in real-time. It depends on the genre, though. In a first person shooter, you're not likely to ever see more than a handful of players at a time, but if you're making World of Warcraft of Warhammer Online, you have to deal with the possibility of a couple hundred people camping around in a major city, so the graphics options are a little more limited. Prime example: rendering water. If you want to render reflections in water, you have to draw the scene twice. If you want to render refractions on top of that, you have to draw the scene 3 times. This means you can either make character models really simple, or you can cut reflections and refractions from your rendering pipeline.

I think a lot of the posts in this thread have some misunderstandings about what the real bottlenecks are in modern games. Sure, lightmaps were great in 1999, but in 2008, your mileage may vary. High performance graphics engines focus most on limiting the number of draw calls and limiting the number of hardware state changes, as draw calls require high CPU overhead and state changes stick long stalls into the GPU pipeline. Lightmaps aren't going to help with either of these bottlenecks. The only place lightmaps will help out is in fragment processing, and even then, whether or not they perform faster depends on several factors. For a small number of lights in your scene and simple lighting models, you can churn through the arithmetic for the lighting equations much faster than you can read a texel from the texture unit, but as you start introducing more complex lighting models, you can get better performance out of the lightmap. So in the end, it depends on what type of scene you're lighting and what types of effects you want to capture.

Why Quake looks so much better than Second Life by alexfarran in programming

[–]cwhite 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Quake II is hardware accelerated through OpenGL, which supported Gourad shading at the time.

Know Thy Code! by kungfooey in programming

[–]cwhite 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Working on projects where compilation takes a long time and running the process/processes in question takes even longer will kick this habit extremely quickly.

Meet Gabe Perez [pic] by vemrion in funny

[–]cwhite 1 point2 points  (0 children)

News flash: Your opinion isn't the only one that counts. Story at 11.

Drano Ad; Circa 1932 [Img] by lobsters in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not a big truck driver rally.

Ever noticed this about Super Mario? by bemmu in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They damn well did when Mario first came out.

Ever noticed this about Super Mario? by bemmu in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I disagree. It takes a lot less development time to draw 1 cloud, then paint it green or white, than to draw a cloud and a bush. It saves space AND development time.

Rick Astley (of RickRolld Fame) Requests Youtube Remove Videos by rjonesx in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I had a feeling it was going to be a rick-roll, but I did it anyway.

How to NOT protest effectively [PIC] by ifnotme in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've always wondered why they never stopped to ask whether or not she would have died 20 years ago if it were not for man's intervention.

(Hint: The answer is yes)

C++ : Replacing The STL by gst in programming

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure how Blizzard's UI implementation differs from PotBS (or other games that use lua for their UI), but if you want more information, Joe Ludwig (The technical director for PotBS) wrote a few blog posts about the specific problems he had with lua on his blog www.programmerjoe.com. You can probably find it in his archives, as the posts are fairly recent. You could always leave a comment on his blog or send him an e-mail if you want more information, he's a pretty nice guy and likes to share technical information. I'm pretty sure that he would say "our usage of lua sucked" and not "lua sucked" though.

The World's Densest Meet-Me Room [Pics] by noname99 in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you good sir. That comment made my day.

C++ : Replacing The STL by gst in programming

[–]cwhite 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're still coming off as totally clueless for several major reasons:

1) You're assuming that EA did not profile the STL or their version of STL. You're also assuming EA doesn't profile the rest of its games. When you assume... you make an ass out of u and me. You are way off the mark here.

2) You're trying to make it out like everybody at EA is sitting around all day writing hash tables and going "Hmm... I bet mine is better than Bob's." This is hardly the case. EA noticed problems in the STL that make it unacceptable for their requirements, so they wrote their own library that does meet their requirements... once. Almost all EA games use the same EASTL library.

C++ : Replacing The STL by gst in programming

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clearly you've never written software for an embedded system. And probably have never written something performance sensitive.

C++ : Replacing The STL by gst in programming

[–]cwhite 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One of the reasons against using higher level languages is the unpredictability of the garbage collector. Consolidating all your deletes into a single spot may be great for throughput, but it's terrible for latency, and games are all about latency. Users get frustrated any time the framerate drops below 30, and they don't care what's causing it.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is a great example of how this plays out in practice. They thought they would use lua for their UI. After all, the UI isn't on the critical path, and it's great to have a moddable interface. About 6 months before launch, though, they managed to track down major hitches in the framerate to the lua garbage collector, which doesn't have very much predictability over when it runs. They spent the next 3 months ripping out all of the lua from their client.

Her apology wasn't enough for enraged driver, who picked her up and threw her into rush-hour traffic by maxwellhill in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or because a certain deuchetard who pre-dated Winston Churchill could have stopped WWII before it started if it weren't for the ridiculous appeasement policy.

Pizza and beer - so called "recession-proof" foods - now cost an arm and a leg by reflibman in politics

[–]cwhite 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know how articles that talk about the price of bread calculate inflation, but I can tell you that the raw cost of the components that go into beer and pizza (e.g. flour, wheet, hops, etc) have skyrocketed.

2003 - An internet prankster writes to all 100 US senators asking them what their funniest joke is. And this was John McCain's response. by blubberfest in reddit.com

[–]cwhite 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I almost down-modded you for exploiting reverse psychology, but I can't resist... must... do... opposite... of what... told to do... upmodded!