Randy Smith interview posted at EvilAvatar... - by Jandar
OrbWeaver on 15/6/2006 at 09:03
There are actually two different interviews.
It is interesting that Randy was solidly behind the "consolisation" of TDS, and largely blames his own behaviour for his departure from ISA.
Vigil on 15/6/2006 at 09:25
I'm happy to see the "Randy is a nice guy so he must have been against [my least favorite design decision] but got overruled" speculation nipped in the bud, as I was getting thoroughly sick of that in the other thread.
demagogue on 15/6/2006 at 16:15
Agreed. Puts things much more in perspective in terms of the development process being the issue, not ideology or personality (per se) or anything like that.
When I read it, I have in mind Krypt's (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1383249#post1383249) comments on the technology problems and the whole thing paints a consistent picture of what was going on:
Quote Posted by Krypt
It's sort of a funny story how that happened really. The creation of the Flesh engine wasn't really planned. Early on in the development of DX2 and T3 we bandied about the idea of using dynamic shadows for gameplay. A certain programmer who will remain nameless was given the task of adding this into the Unreal engine. He went off on his own for a couple weeks and programmed an entirely new per-pixel lighting renderer. No one really asked him to make a completely new engine, but we didn't mind at first because it looked pretty cool. This was before we discovered the crippling limitations it would put on us.
It wasn't until we had worked with it for a while after said programmer was let go that we found out how crappy the engine really was. By the time we realized how much it sucked, we were already beyond the point of no return and just had to try to make the best of it. Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run. Instead of developing the game we wanted, we had to develop whatever we could get to work. We had to cut features left and right, shrink down the levels and comprimise our design because of the craptacular engine and physics implementation, and the difficulty of fitting it all into 64mb of Xbox memory.
DX2 suffered the most from this because it was our first try in the engine and we were under a lot of pressure to ship the game for Christmas. T3 fared better because we had more experience on how to get a game working and didn't have to make quite so many comprimises. Still, if we had stuck with Unreal we could have made both games a lot better, I think.
So I can imagine in this situation how Randy could have been
de facto being pushed out of a position, I mean, "Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run" inverts the whole development hierarchy from top-down planning to bottom-up crisis-control, consistent with what Randy was saying in his interview. I guess the lesson here (?), is that it shows how a few mis-steps at the start of a development process can really explode in your face if you don't get things under control from early on (e.g., choosing to stick with Unreal Engine and keeping the design agenda on a realistic track). Oh, the first part of Krypt's post is also interesting because it suggests that it wasn't really anyone's explicit fault why they fell into the problem (with Flesh), and not even a bad calculation per se. It was more path-dependent. They wanted real-time shadows, a programmer gave it to them in a new engine, and only later did they find out the engine was crippling but now they're out of time. What can you do? I guess be more authoritative and clamp down on the seams of the project so things like this can't slip through the net (?).
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One thing, I didn't know Randy and Harvey were blood brothers (was he serious with that?) ... since iirc Harvey just spoke about Randy as "also a friend" in another interview (when he left IS, which I just read while googling about Randy). If so, it was interesting they left about the same time, although Harvey said there was no connection, just "weird timing" ... but if they are brothers, what a month that must have been for the family.
jtr7 on 15/6/2006 at 18:55
Thanks, Jandar.:)
ZylonBane on 15/6/2006 at 19:06
Firing the guy who coded your custom rendering engine has to rank pretty high on the "bad move" scale too.
Vigil on 15/6/2006 at 19:42
Indeed. I wonder why he got canned; presumably it was for something other than the state of the engine, since they only found out later how deep in the hole they were.
jermi on 15/6/2006 at 22:46
How the hell do you get that deep in the hole? One day working with the TDS editor should reveal most limitations, while simple mathematics reveals that normal mapping and XBox is a horrible combination.
demagogue on 16/6/2006 at 00:52
Well, only someone that was there can really answer that question. But my sense is...
(1) If you've been keeping up with the T3Ed forum, people picked up on a lot of the engine limitations early on, but there was an undying optimism that they could really make it do everything they want if they just put a little effort into it (I'm not trying to denegrate it; I'm on their side) ... and since that time they've gotten something like rope arrows working, something "like" swimmable water, and putting out quite good levels, etc, and that without the code ... But the more subtle problems with the engine keep coming back when it counts, and these admittedly real victories start seeming more pyhrric.(
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=Pyrrhic%20Victory) * So you can imagine a situation where people *want* to be optimistic, and a few early indications of success can goad people on to think they can really make it work, until a point comes when you realize you're really fighting an uphill battle and you have to start producing with time now a factor.
(2) So why not switch midstream, at the first signs of smoke? One is the idea that they passed the point of no return. But associated with that is the idea that there's good reason to stick with an in-house coded engine, because some of the inner workings can be specially geared to the game needs, but also, as the team invests in learning its inner workings (remember they already put DXIW out on that engine) it just puts that much more pressure against switching gears midstream to have to go through that learning curve all over again ... the qwerty effect. Also, you get the picture from Randy's interview that engine troubles weren't the *only* problem, just maybe one catalyst.
(3) As for "simple mathematics reveals that normal mapping and XBox is a horrible combination", I think it's been said before that there's nothing mutually exclusive between the limitations of the xbox and bad or troubled design; that really shouldn't be any excuse, and remember that xbox limits were in mind from the very beginning. The problem wasn't the xbox limitations per se, it was having to channel the design through a crappy engine into something the xbox could swallow, that is, when old plans (which might have fit into xbox specs with a different engine and better design discipline, but which assumed an overly-optimistic view of what was possible with the engine) had to be themselves regeared midstream when the engine limitations (and perhaps production limitations; wrong people in the wrong place?) really became apparent, leading to cutting features, adding load zones, etc... That's when the really hard decisions starting having to be made and trouble brewed.
* (
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=Pyrrhic%20Victory) definition, in case you don't know what pyhrric means.
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Edits:
Also, caught this on Evil Avatar, regarding Part 2 and a surprise:
Quote Posted by Liquidize105 on 15 June
I'm beat, dead tired.
I'll post the 2nd part during peak hours tomorrow, folks.
And I got a special update up my sleeves for next week. It's related.
__________________
I wonder what kind of update he has in mind? A new project Randy is working on?
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Quote Posted by Liquidize105 on 16 June
I'm delaying it again, sorry guys.
This next part of the interview is just so good that I just have to get some clarification on certain things.
hgrrr.....
