Natural Selection 2 News Update - Friday Update - Podcast 28
Max
Technical Director, Unknown Worlds Entertainment Join Date: 2002-03-15 Member: 318Super Administrators, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts, Future Perfect Developer
Technical Director, Unknown Worlds Entertainment Join Date: 2002-03-15 Member: 318Super Administrators, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts, Future Perfect Developer
Comments
Thanks !
just a tip next time record away from the window cause I can hear every car that drives by.
other than that nice podcast guys, keep the good work and keep it coming ;)
Just had to say that, and now onward to listening...
Seems odd. You're getting a chance to hear what's going on in the heads of those who are making the game. Their inspirations and take-aways from one of the biggest developer conferences, and you get to hear what kind of things are influencing them. For me, the interesting part was Charlie talking about getting a lot of ideas from the farmville presentations and stats-based game development procedures.
Because that suggests that even if NS2 isn't horribly addictive crack in the beginning, it won't take it too long to become such.
I know UWE doesn't owe us anything. I know that my preorder doesn't entitle me to anything other than what's stated on the preorder page.
That being said, I can't help but be disappointed by this update. So many things "on the horizon"- fade reveal, engine test, Alpha- and we get a few minutes of audio. Oh, well. I still expect great things from UWE in the future.
Thanks for the update guys! :) (not sarcasm)
Just had to say that, and now onward to listening...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I forgot to say that allso.
thank you guys for doing this early.
other than that nice podcast guys...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No that belongs to the oldschool Podcast style, they have to do that :)
Edit: +1 to the early release this friday all people in other time zones will thank you. Have a nice day, I'm going to sleep :)
The statistics part was pretty sad and dangerous, they are data-mining to the extreme... there is a very fine line between social engineering and "optimizing" for a better "game".
Blizzard doing all of that hardware stuff is just them using their money, they have unlimited funds and I was actually kind of surprised by how crude their methods were for that sort of company. Having near-realtime feedback for in-game performance is obviously the next step... throw the game to the cloud, compute the results, and give back performance specs in near real-time. With enough of this sort of automation you could automate the creation of content with custom texture/poly specs for individual hardware (especially for LOD models) and just brute force it rather than having generics settings or having to manually optimize for the cards. Rendering farm for game content. Not fair, but very cool. Imagine having a content pack for every video card on steam and all the user has to do is select their card from the list or choose "Generic performance". As long as its done fairly, eg: no nvidia optimized content pack exclusives, it could be really cool ;)
The color correction thing is not really telling you that people should use photoshop for their work, but rather that the game tools are clearly not up to par OR the game is missing something and you must try to correct it with these effects. For the tools make a visual tab, allow the person to nest attributes, use sliders, and make it quick. Real-time feedback will be a ton faster and more accurate than hoping the transfer of the settings will properly translate in real environments. What if you turn to the left more and there is a patch of really bright content, will it mess up the contrast settings? Will a light off to the right coupled with the effects clip and look awful? And lastly what happens when you turn around? Post processing in such a manual and static way can be pretty dangerous, ideally you would want it to only apply to the area under the effect and not to the entire vision while the user is in the area. Anyway...
Glad you guys had a good time and didn't have to spend 2 grand a piece, now get to work on test! :D
I like the idea of mapping how players play games, the approach seems very scientific, look at everything, look for trends, look for things people avoid, it's essentially like being able to give every player a survey without them having to fill it out, so you get greater accuracy and participation, and you can do it for anything. You could look for common interface issues that people have where they keep going into the wrong menu or something, and you could look for areas of the map people don't use because they don't know they're there, and you could make tiny changes like reordering the menus or adding a new light or something.
Seems pretty awesome, a really intelligent way of improving games. Could lead to a vastly improved understanding of interface and level design.
Nice to see a podcast back and glad to hear you guys enjoyed touring GDC :)
a personal stats page would be nice, an eventual <i><b>opt-in</b></i> stats page could be cool too.
Because that suggests that even if NS2 isn't horribly addictive crack in the beginning, it won't take it too long to become such.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hearing the devs thoughts on such things is all well and good, but given that Fridays are pretty much the only time we get any new information, I can't help but feel disappointed that both this, and last weeks updates have been "wasted" on stuff which doesn't tell us anything of real substance.
Let's face facts here; developer commentary on the game industry and engine run-downs might be interesting to some (and indeed, the forums show this) but they're hardly interesting to all. Stuff like the Lerk reveal, or shots of new Marine/Alien buildings are interesting to everyone. Therefore, if UWE has something to show that everyone will be interested in, they'll show it off. If they don't, they fall back on something less interesting to more people.
Which draws me to the inevitable conclusion that they don't have anything more interesting to show us, and that therefore we're still a long way away from the alpha, let alone the beta. It's nearly the end of March, and UWE originally said they'd be releasing nearly 5 months ago. If they still can't show us the Fade, or death animations, or a quick video showing real gameplay footage with both sides fighting, building and dieing, I cannot for the life of me figure out just what they were planning to release then. I understand that the preorders allowed them to change the schedule to fit more stuff in, but from the looks of things, they don't even have the basic framework done at this point.
ps : u forgot to tweet this podcast
My university devotes a good percentage of their marks for my game development course to blogging.
Yes we are required to blog about how we are working, rather than just, you know, actually doing work.
So whenever any of my lecturers brings up blogging I look at them like they're insane.
Frankly I'm surprised UWE spends so much time on it, it would drive me insane to have to do it every week. I like that you do it because it means I get something interesting to read on friday, but I do wonder how you stand it.
<!--quoteo(post=1760194:date=Mar 19 2010, 11:38 PM:name=CyberMantis)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (CyberMantis @ Mar 19 2010, 11:38 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1760194"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Interesting discussion.
The statistics part was pretty sad and dangerous, they are data-mining to the extreme... there is a very fine line between social engineering and "optimizing" for a better "game".
Blizzard doing all of that hardware stuff is just them using their money, they have unlimited funds and I was actually kind of surprised by how crude their methods were for that sort of company. Having near-realtime feedback for in-game performance is obviously the next step... throw the game to the cloud, compute the results, and give back performance specs in near real-time. With enough of this sort of automation you could automate the creation of content with custom texture/poly specs for individual hardware (especially for LOD models) and just brute force it rather than having generics settings or having to manually optimize for the cards. Rendering farm for game content. Not fair, but very cool. Imagine having a content pack for every video card on steam and all the user has to do is select their card from the list or choose "Generic performance". As long as its done fairly, eg: no nvidia optimized content pack exclusives, it could be really cool ;)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You couldn't really do that, LODs can't be generated, you need to do them by hand or at the least you have to go over the results from a procedural system to check for errors, if you just throw it at a mesh destruction program you'll get loads of errors. Textures already come with half a dozen different resolutions in the form of mipmaps, and you can just clamp the max resolution like you would the max LOD in a HL2 model with your video settings. Plus that system only works for digital distribution and even then it massively ups your support requirements because everyone's using a different copy.
The usual advanced video settings are much easier, the best you could do is get automatic video configuration generation, which most games already have with the 'choose what's best for my PC' button.
AAAAGgghrhgrghrlgrghrlgrghrghgrhrhrhhrhrrrrrghhhaaaaaaaaaaa.
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Yes we are required to blog about how we are working, rather than just, you know, actually doing work.
So whenever any of my lecturers brings up blogging I look at them like they're insane.
Frankly I'm surprised UWE spends so much time on it, it would drive me insane to have to do it every week. I like that you do it because it means I get something interesting to read on friday, but I do wonder how you stand it.
You couldn't really do that, LODs can't be generated, you need to do them by hand or at the least you have to go over the results from a procedural system to check for errors, if you just throw it at a mesh destruction program you'll get loads of errors. Textures already come with half a dozen different resolutions in the form of mipmaps, and you can just clamp the max resolution like you would the max LOD in a HL2 model with your video settings. Plus that system only works for digital distribution and even then it massively ups your support requirements because everyone's using a different copy.
The usual advanced video settings are much easier, the best you could do is get automatic video configuration generation, which most games already have with the 'choose what's best for my PC' button.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Edit- what you say is basically right, I guess the only area where it would be useful would be in the area of "just make it work" for some crappy card. Every new crappy card blizzard could get their game to run on could mean millions of new customers, so I guess thats what it would be for.
And I'm also addicted to game oriented podcasts, so if anyone have some they can recommend, please do so! Here are some I follow: <a href="http://rps.libsyn.com/" target="_blank">http://rps.libsyn.com/</a> <a href="http://www.onelifeleft.com/" target="_blank">http://www.onelifeleft.com/</a> <a href="http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/three-moves-ahead/" target="_blank">http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/three-moves-ahead/</a> Great for when you are working!
Thanks again guys and please do more of these.
It pays huge dividends for them. Community size is probably highly correlated with # of sales. Speaking of statistics, that would be an interesting paper to read.