New Horizon on 25/11/2009 at 04:18
Quote Posted by Bakerman
Interesting point. How much control over Doom 3 do you guys have? For example, can you mod the source code? If not, how in-depth does the engine's scripting take you? I obviously have an agenda behind these questions ;), but I'm genuinely interested in an unbiased look at the situation.
Yes, of course we can mod the source code, the majority of the source code was released in the D3 SDK. That's what id software is famous for, and it's why we chose the engine 5 years ago. Most of the renderer and some of the collision code was not released, but it all will be in time.
Scripting is similar to C++ and is very flexible. I'm not a coder myself, so I can't speak for exactly how powerful scripting is. I do know that most of our original Dark Mod AI were programmed using scripting, and they were very robust. I think we moved it into the game engine to gain some performance though.
In any case. I did some tests early on, and we realized that no matter what we did...a physical body in first person did nothing to actually further or enhance the gameplay. It was just something else to put work into.
jtr7 on 25/11/2009 at 04:27
Wow. We still have to remind the same people that there's a major difference between can and should, technical feasibility and wasted time, what one wants and what one knows is not important in the context of the given reality of EM's game development goals, essential and wishful-thinking, powerful elegance and excess, genius simplicity at the heart and superficial complexity, doing much more with much less that's well-decided and doing little with the kitchen sink and all, pushing technical boundaries and pushing the boundaries of intelligent design, maximizing processing needs and maximizing soul, playing it safe and taking exciting risks, calling the same old thing "new" and calling the different and unorthodox "old".
driver on 25/11/2009 at 04:43
I do wonder what fantastic gameplay innovations people think EM can deliver with T4 over the previous Thief titles if they don't waste time on BA. Do you have any examples?
:edit:
Innovations, I might add, that are far more important than accurately portraying the player's avatar in a given game environment. Bare in mind that over other first-person genres like shooters, in Thief knowing exactly how you're positioned is vastly more important given that you're trying to conceal yourself from view.
New Horizon on 25/11/2009 at 05:09
Quote Posted by driver
I do wonder what fantastic gameplay innovations people think EM can deliver with T4 over the previous Thief titles if they don't waste time on BA. Do you have any examples?
No, I'm not going to sit here and think for you.
You go play Thief 1 and 2...then sit down and write up a list of things you feel could take the core gameplay to the next evolutionary level.
That's what we did on TDM.
Although our AI aren't as polished yet as they eventually will be, we spent a lot of time fleshing them out. When we're finished, they will still behave similarly to how the AI in Thief behaved, but also seamlessly incorporate more.
As I've said before, I think Body Awareness is great for some games...it just doesn't have to be in all games. Just because something can be done, does not mean it must be done.
Creating a system in a game is the easy part....debugging, and balancing it to work within the game is the time consuming part. Probably more than half the time in game development is spent bug fixing.
Chade on 25/11/2009 at 05:18
Quote Posted by driver
I do wonder what fantastic gameplay innovations people think EM can deliver with T4 over the previous Thief titles if they don't waste time on BA.
There's an entire forum full of ideas here, and plenty more besides.
The argument that "they have limited resources and must spend them on the most important things first" is obviously valid. In fact, it can be applied against 99% of the ideas that have come up in this forum. The trouble with the argument is that it short-circuits the interesting side of the discussion, and leads directly towards a lot of unverifiable and uninteresting statements.
There are two separate issues here: 1) how much benefit do you get from BA, and 2) how much effort would it take to implement.
We know a lot about issue 1, and the resulting discussion has often been worthwhile, albeit repetitive.
We know very little about issue 2. We don't know EM's internal development situation, we don't know what libraries they have access to, we don't know what knowledge their programmers have, we don't know how hard they are finding it to "get the basics right". We know a little bit about some of the necesary algorithms, but none of us appear to be experts, and the resulting discussion has mostly been ideological crap.
Fafhrd on 25/11/2009 at 05:43
Quote:
we don't know what libraries they have access to
Seeing as they're professional developers with a full license to whichever engine they're using, I'm guessing they have access to ALL OF THEM. This isn't a fucking mod we're talking about.
And we've got a pretty good idea about what engine it is that they're using (Crystal Dynamics's Tomb Raider engine, same as DX3). And lest everyone's forgotten, EM has been given an unusually long dev cycle for both DX3 and Thief 4. A
planned 24 month cycle is absurdly long, and considering it's been almost exactly two years since DX3 was announced, I think we can assume they're going longer for both projects.
Quote:
we don't know what knowledge their programmers have
(
http://www.eidosmontreal.com/en/team.html) Not like you can look up bios for some of their programmers or anything.
Bakerman on 25/11/2009 at 06:50
Quote Posted by New Horizon
Yes, of course we can mod the source code, the majority of the source code was released in the D3 SDK. That's what id software is famous for, and it's why we chose the engine 5 years ago. Most of the renderer and some of the collision code was not released, but it all will be in time.
Scripting is similar to C++ and is very flexible. I'm not a coder myself, so I can't speak for exactly how powerful scripting is. I do know that most of our original Dark Mod AI were programmed using scripting, and they were very robust. I think we moved it into the game engine to gain some performance though.
Okay, I had to make sure... though right after I posted I realised it would be kind of infeasible to do everything you guys have done in script only :p. (I guess that depends on the scripting language... but that'd be one hell of a scripting language.) I realised id had released older tech, but I've never looked into it much, so I didn't realise that included up to D3.
Quote Posted by New Horizon
In any case. I did some tests early on, and we realized that no matter what we did...a physical body in first person did nothing to actually further or enhance the gameplay. It was just something else to put work into.
Yep, you're pretty much right. Until we get more advanced control systems, the body is still going to be baggage - but even if it didn't
add to the gameplay, I feel like it'd be worthwhile. For me. If not for everyone. It's a gripe I have about basically every FPS, not just Thief.
Arg, I will not get sucked back in... :p
Fafhrd on 25/11/2009 at 08:37
Yeah, seriously. If a mod team can't do it right, there's no way a professional development team working full time could pull it off.
sparhawk on 25/11/2009 at 14:05
Care to explain the difference between a "professional programmer" and one working on a mod team? I, for example are what you would call a "professional programmer" and when I'm working on a mod in my spare time, I'm still a "professional programmer" just not getting paid for this particular project. We have several professionals on our team so judging on the basis of being a mod doesn't say much about a professional team being able to do it or not.
There are technical limitations which a professional team could get around, and others they can not. And just because a team is professional doesn't mean that they have unlimites resources, because they might still have to pay a lot lof additional license fees if they want to do certain things, which they may not be prepared to pay.
On the other hand, there is a lot of stuff that a professional team can NOT do, because they have time and budget constraints we don't need to care about. A good example is TDS, because, after realizing that the renderengine changes are total crap, a dedicated team could have rewritten it properly so that there wouldn't be the need to sacrifice the content as they did.
driver on 25/11/2009 at 14:50
Quote Posted by New Horizon
No, I'm not going to sit here and think for you.
So it's a waste of time yet you can't tell me what the time could be better spend doing. Nice work.
Quote:
You go play Thief 1 and 2...then sit down and write up a list of things you feel could take the core gameplay to the next evolutionary level.
And what if I think adding BA would improve gameplay for various reasons stated multiple times in this thread?
