December 10, 2004
Gamewag Half-Life 2 and CS:Source Mapping Guide
Since the release of the Source SDK, there has been a flurry of activity in the development community. Quite a few people have created tutorials and solved problems in the usual forums, but finding useful information can be tough. The goal of this guide is to provide a categorized listing of help topics for mappers. We're not addressing coding resources yet, but may in the future.
We created this list initially for our own mapping uses, but it quickly grew to the point of becoming useful for the public. Sharing is good.
Visit the Gamewag Half-Life 2 and CS:Source Mapping Guide
Posted by jb at 12:38 PM
October 17, 2004
DOOM III SDK released: let's see some mods!
The long-running joke is "DOOM III is a great engine, I can't wait until someone makes a game with it". It's pretty true, as the game itself gets a little boring. The upside being those eager mod developers have an incredibly powerful platform from which to launch their own creations.
"The Code is where all the real fun starts to happen. The Doom 3 SDK comes with pretty much half the source code for the game. I will briefly go over the major portions in the SDK, and touch on some subsystems that are in the main engine."
You'll need Visual Studio.Net to compile (although the savvy can probably get it to work with VS 6).
If you're having trouble getting the files from the id site, you can try this mirror.
Posted by jb at 08:50 AM
September 28, 2004
Your chance to be in The Movies
It's a Lionhead-filled day here at Gamewag. Their upcoming title, The Movies, will let you choose from a number of pre-defined studios to run. Lionhead/Activision have launched a contest, in which they will select 3 fan-submitted studio logos to ship with the game.
"The best entrants, as judged by The Movies team, will be used in the final game, guaranteeing the winner immortality and smugness for all time, but note that even if you fail to be one of the lucky winners, you can still add your logos to the game at home and on your personal Movies homepage. So get creating and when you've got something you like, send it to us!"
The contest deadline is October 20th, so fire up Illustrator and get cracking!
Posted by jb at 10:17 AM
September 08, 2004
JVM goodness
The August slowdown led us to take a little break here at gamewag. Well, I decided to put up a little post before heading out on vacation.
Via /. Some crazy folks at Bytonic software have a project called Jake 2, for which they have ported the Quake II engine to Java. Performance appears to be good, although not quite as fast as in Q2's native C.
Posted by jb at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2004
The ten trendiest concepts in game design
The Guardian has written a great summary of the ten concepts that are getting the most attention in game design today. I think they nailed it, but should have added full dynamic lighting (a la DOOM III and Unreal 3 engines).
Posted by jb at 09:43 PM
August 13, 2004
DOOM III SDK next week?
At the QuakeCon DOOM III seminar Thursday, some interesting details emerged. For one, Robert Duffy said that the id folks are shooting for an SDK release sometime next week, followed by "Don't quote me on that". So, of course we're quoting him.
Also of note:
- A patch for D3 is forthcoming to address some multiplayer expoits
- While not in the game, DOOM 3 does support vehicles. The SDK will contain a sample map that has a six-wheeled buggy.
Posted by jb at 09:47 AM
August 11, 2004
OpenGL 2.0 released
Go ARB! Some features:
- Programmable shading
- Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass
- Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption
- Two-sided stencil
- Point sprites
Posted by jb at 09:17 PM
August 09, 2004
Canned fear
After a few hours of playing DOOM III, I began to tire of the things that made the game interesting at the start. In the first few levels, I would get freaked out upon hearing a noise behind me. After awhile, it became obvious that events were being triggered whenever certain points in the level were reached. This scripting, once terrifying, became routine, nay, annoying.
game girl advance has written a nice piece on this very subject, outlining the pitfalls that come with over using scripted events.
Posted by jb at 09:52 AM
August 07, 2004
Make Something Unreal 3rd round winners announced
Epic has announced the 3rd round winners of the Make Something Unreal contest. The winners are grouped into 11 categories:
- Best first-person shooter (FPS) – Red Orchestra
- Best non-FPS – Alien Swarm
- Best Level – CTF-CBP2-Pistola
- Best Level With Original Contest – DM-CPB2-KillyBilly Barn
- Best Mutator – Unreal4Ever MSU Edition
- Best Model – MonstAr
- Best Voice Pack (or Audio Modification) – Alien Swarm
- Best Vehicle – Clone Bandits
- Best Tool – Ushock
- Best Game Type – Jailbreak 2004
- Best Use of Karma Physics – Unwheel
Posted by jb at 11:56 AM
August 05, 2004
Carmack: Quake 3 open source by end of this year
John Carmack posted on Slashdot that the Quake 3 engine source code will be available by the end of the year. This is in line with their current strategy of making older game engines available to the open source community. The creative assets are not usually released as such, just the engine.
"By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon.
Hopefully punkbuster will keep the source release from having any negative impact on the player community.
John Carmack"
This is a great tradition at id; which allows young game developers to learn from the experiences of the experts in the field. I wish more development houses would do the same.
Via boingboing.net
Posted by jb at 10:36 AM
August 03, 2004
The history of Habitat and Lucasfilm Games
Habitat was a Lucasfilm Games and QuantumLink (now AOL) joint project that could arguably be called the first MMORPG. Chip Morningstar was there in the beginning, and was responsible for much of the design and architecture of Habitat. He's written a great article discussing how Habitat came to fruition, and what things were like for Lucasfilm Games in the very beginning.
"Because of the phenomenal success of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Lucasfilm existed in a weird kind of bubble that made it very different from other companies, especially companies in the computer games industry. Most of this weirdness had to do with money, or expectations about money. The basic attitude can be summed up as, "we are Lucasfilm, people will pay us." The fundamental business concept of making an investment in expectation of a future return was not part of the general mindset. The expectation rather was that people would pay us to do things, and then we would take a share of the profits of whatever resulted. In other words, we wanted a cut of the proceeds but were not interested in sharing any of the risk. This attitude is a luxury most business people would love to have, but quite correctly recognize for the fantasy that it is."
If you're interested in the game design side of things, there's a great, often cited paper titled The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer.
Via /.
Posted by jb at 11:42 PM
August 02, 2004
Artificial Driving Intelligence
I've often wondered if you had a team of crack programmers, AI specialists and physics gurus if it would be possible for a computer to beat a human driver on a race track. Sure you'd need to put a load of sensors on the car to get as much "seat of the pants" into the computer as possible. Certainly, a computer would be able to reproduce activities such as breaking points more accurately.
I think it would be great to have a version of the Grand Challenge on a more restricted playing field. Pick a dedicated race course, put beacons on each turn apex and on the track shoulders, get a fleet of cars with identical performance and see who can add sensors, write code and get the fastest lap.
In the meantime, there are two open source projects focused on optimizing driving AI via race simulations. TORCS and RARS are quite similar in concept, although TORCS allows a human to drive and looks much nicer. Both, however, allow developers to create their own driving robots. Using a combination of inputs such as force vectors, car positions and track surfaces, developers can create logic and try to set the fastest time (or just be purely defensive and not let anyone pass).
This is such an intriguing concept to me, as there seems to be quite a bit of "feel" in driving. To be able to quantify that feel and make the most of it is certainly a difficult task.
It would be great if racing sim developers started offering this type of AI extension. I would love to start seeing folks competing as geeks as well as drivers.
Posted by jb at 03:27 PM
July 27, 2004
Playstation 3 to use OpenGL?
There is a rumor going around that Sony is may use OpenGL for PS3 game development. Much of this rumor is based on the fact that Sony recently joined the Khronos Group which is dedicated to delivering non-royalty APIs such as OpenGL, OpenML and OpenVG.
If true, this will be a major, and much needed, boost to the OpenGL community.
Posted by jb at 11:14 AM
July 26, 2004
Adventure game revival
Some of my fondest gaming memories involve random clicking and princess saving. I grew up on Roberta William's brilliant King's Quest and LucasArts' Monkey Island, and I miss the old-school adventure genre. I want my Guybrush Threepwood!
Well, it seems that some ex-LucasArts folks have decided that adventure gaming needs a revival. Forming Autumn Moon, these talented developers are working on a project titled A Vampyre Story, and it sounds fantastic. They're still looking for a publisher, and completion is a long way away.
"You have heard of starving artists, right? They starve because they have to do what they love, market be damned. Well fortunately we love adventure games and they do sell, so we won't starve. But we create them not to get rich; we create them because we love it. Adventure games are an art form, very much like films and literature. But the great thing about them is that the viewer, or the audience, is the protagonist. The creators of these games still use all the time-tested techniques and conventions pioneered in the filmmaking, illustration and story-telling professions. We feel it is a natural next step in the evolution of story-telling."
You can also read about The Vampyre Story in the June edition of The Inventory.
Posted by jb at 05:30 PM
July 23, 2004
Game development in Singapore
Gamedev.net has posted the second installment of their GamePort: Game Development in Singapore series. This version takes a look at some existing shops in Singapore.
"There are challenges facing game developers in Singapore, like a shortage of skilled, experienced staff, limited funds, and a culture that has historically been more conservative than creative. However, this hasn't stopped passionate developers from doing everything they can to get their games made."
Posted by jb at 10:49 AM
July 22, 2004
Don't blame the pirates
An article over at JoeUser.com by the creator of Galactic Civilizations I and II discusses the real financial problem within the games industry.
"So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken."
"It's the demographic of people who allegedly do all this pirating that's been paying our bills. People with Internet connections who download games. They pay my salary. They are my overlord now. So I hope you can excuse me if I don't lose sleep at night that some 15 year old might have downloaded my game while some executive at a company (or former company) is sailing on their boat paid for by my hard work. The software pirate can go to jail on a felony, the business executive who doesn't pay royalties gets off the hook."
Posted by jb at 02:17 PM
July 20, 2004
First-Person Control Design for Dual Analog Stick Controllers
Gamasutra has a new feature addressing various options in designing first-person games for dual-stick controllers. We've never been a big fan of this type of control for FPS games; you lose so much precision compared to mouse gaming. Halo on the Xbox is an exercise in frustration if you've played the PC version.
Free registration required.
Posted by jb at 11:34 AM | TrackBack
July 16, 2004
3D Javascript development
Doing 3D in Javascript you say? If you haven't seen it, check out Wolf5k, which is a loose Wolfenstein clone written for the 5k contest.
There's a tutorial out now explaining how it was done (not written by the Wolf5k author though).
Posted by jb at 01:49 PM | TrackBack
July 14, 2004
Quake I never looked so good
Since Quake I has been open sourced, there are a number of folks that have done interesting things with it. Tenebrae has added stencil shadows and per pixel lighting to the original code, resulting in a dramatically improved look. This type of project provides a great opportunity for inexperienced game developers to learn the nuances of older and more modern FPS engines.
The site is a bit Slashdotted at the moment, so you may need to give it some time to recover.
Posted by jb at 10:24 AM | TrackBack
July 09, 2004
Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion
Gamasutra has a new feature written by Ernest Adams that covers the three types of immersion used in game development: tactical, strategic and narrative.
"I don't have any patience for this kind of self-indulgence. One of the worst annoyances of video gaming is the designers who want to show off how clever they are. Interrupting the players' immersion in order to remind them "Don't forget, it's only a game!" may be the designers being playful, but the game is supposed to provide gameplay for the players, not for the designers. Such cute gimmicks don't improve the players' experience; they harm it. It's a direct slap in the face. Imagine if Ridley Scott, for example, had done that right in the middle of the most suspenseful parts of Alien, or if Tom Clancy did it in the middle of Patriot Games. As the audience, we would be rightfully infuriated."
Free registration required.
Posted by jb at 03:13 PM | TrackBack
Nobody gets a tan at video game camp
NYU is offering a Summer camp centered around game design. Addressing the difficulty of getting experience in the industry, the camp will consist of 15-20 year olds who have a desire to learn while maintaining their pasty-white complexion.
Posted by jb at 01:19 PM | TrackBack
June 24, 2004
Games and the Imagination
GameDev.net has a feature written by Richard Dare (Dick Dare?), discussing how imagination factors into gameplay.
"In older, more knowledgeable gamers too we can see the primacy of an underlying fantasy. More than one gamer has admitted to me that he plays Civilization because he likes the idea of ruling a nation, waging war and taking over the world. One gamer of my acquaintance told me how he enjoys playing Civilization in a certain way, to create a situation where there are two main world powers in the game, himself and an opponent, both with advanced levels of technology. He would then plan a massive campaign against his enemy, creating an all-or-nothing war to end all wars. So in many games, a fantasy might "kick in" when their playing pieces become arranged in a certain way, creating a situation or process of interest to the gamer."
Posted by jb at 11:12 AM
June 23, 2004
High Dynamic Range (HDR) introduction
Using HDR, your whites will come out whiter, and your darks will maintain their vibrant colors. HDR allows for the specification of a greater range of lighting intensity, and can produce nice glow/halo effects seen when viewing bright light sources.
I recently picked up an ATI Radeon X800 Pro, which is the first card I've owned that supports HDR rendering (because it supports PS 2.0 and floating point textures). The difference is astounding.
Anirudh S Shastry has written a nice tutorial that will walk you through the steps to get your own HDR app running ASAP.
Posted by jb at 10:10 AM
June 17, 2004
GarageGames releases Torque Shader Engine - Early Adoper License
For the past few years, GarageGames has been selling a full blown game engine known as Torque. This is the same engine that powers Tribes 2, and is optimized for large outdoor venues. While the GarageGames community has released a lot of enhancements and content packs, the Torque engine is showing its age.
With the release of the Torque Shader Engine (TSE), GarageGames is giving developers some incredibly powerful features including: dynamic lighting, bumpmapping, glow, refraction and a brand new lighting system.
TSE is available now for US $150.
Posted by jb at 10:00 AM
June 13, 2004
OpenGL 2.0 feature set to be released at SIGGRAPH 2004
The OpenGL ARB announces that the 2.0 feature set will be released at this year's SIGGRAPH, which will begin August 8th.
Posted by jb at 01:03 PM
