Smokedaddy's College of Videogame Knowledge -

[Smokedaddy]

But seriously folks, I've been pounding them out for more than 20 years. I've worked for a bunch of small shops, plus done time at Activision, EA, Midway, and some other joints you may have heard of. At one time, I was the only full-time programmer at tiny Activision; I've got an AAA design that sold 7.2 M copies and multiple GOTY titles under my belt. Plus all kinds of weird stories and interesting stuff on the bookshelves and walls.

If you wanna know anything about INDUSTRY INSIDER POOP or pretty much anything else, ASK AWAY in this here thread, or forever hold your peace.

All non-jerks of legal age are invited to the first annual student-faculty mixer over at the Dean's place.

 

[Grand Number of Pounds]

Good morning, dean.

Someone asked in another thread, but if you wanted to get started in video game design (or just programming in general) where would you start?

 

[c-no]

Smokedaddy, I just wonder what sort of AAA design it was. I'm rather interested in knowing what is and what year it came from.

 

[Surtur]

Smokedaddy, I just wonder what sort of AAA design it was. I'm rather interested in knowing what is and what year it came from.

I think this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechWarrio ... ury_Combat

 

[Smokedaddy]

Yeah. Pretty much before the time of anyone here. Activision was about 12-15 people when I started; I was the only person on the project for the first few months.

The flight simulator company where I worked (first job out of college) laid off the engineering staff in the wake of the post-Gulf War 1 aerospace crash. There were something like forty thousand engineers looking for work in Los Angeles alone, I'd just bought a $300,000 house, and my credit cards were all maxed out from the holidays. In desperation, I took a gig to play saxophone on a cruise ship for Royal Norwegian. I had friends that had done it, and if you didn't have a problem with white powder (no worries here - can't stand the stuff) and don't go wild in port everywhere, you could easily come home with $40 or $50K cash after six months. I went to the airport on a Thursday to pick up my ticket to fly to Miami the following Monday (no e-tickets or Internet travel back then) but the ticket booth didn't open until fifteen minutes later, so I bought a copy of the LA Times and was scanning the classifieds when an ad caught my eye. Bankrupt Activision had somehow rematerialized in Los Angeles and was advertising for a programmer. I hit the pay phone, interviewed the next day, and pissed off Royal Norwegian by starting Monday as the only full-time programmer.

I worked insane hours, by choice. I had nothing better to do, so I regrettably may have started a trend in the industry. One Sunday night (lemme see -- would have been January 16, 1994) I left work around 3:15 AM. Two of my artist buddies were still plodding away in the art room. I got home about 3:30 and busted my roomdog, who was sitting at that ungodly hour in front of my computer playing this new game he professed to dislike (a little thing called "Doom" -- uh-huh, I can see just how much you hate that game.) I was asleep as soon as head hit pillow. 45 minutes later, someone started rocking the bed (or so it felt), kind of a rock-rock-rock motion, then it turned into wham-wham-wham progressing into wham-wham-WHAM-WHAM as the room was lit with bright blue flashes from transformers exploding on power poles outside. I realized happily it was a major earthquake and I didn't have to go to work tomorrow! ('Twas the 1/17/94 Northridge earthquake.) About when I started wondering if I should get out of bed, the quake tapered off.

It was a really, really weird time. Imagine a producer telling the senior+lead programmer that he knew all this stuff about triangles was bullshit and if it were being done right, it'd be ray-traced and run in high-res. At that time, the project had missed its official ship date by two months, there was no such thing as commercial 3D accelerators (the 3D stuff was ten thousand lines of assembler code) and a straight-out VGA card was the best you could do. It switched between the most and least fun it is possible to have at a job. At a company that small, you know everybody; Bobby Kotick and I had each other's home phone numbers.

My engine got re-used and incrementally updated for several more titles: I-76, I-84, Battlezones 1 & 2, Heavy Gear 1 & 2, and a couple more.

It's a long story. I've got most of it written down and I'll stick it up on my bloggity-thingy Real Soon Now™ ififeellikeit.

 

[KatsuKitty]

What's the game industry gonna do with Linux? I just played HL2DM on my Ubuntu install and I love not having to reboot into Windows whenever I want to do so (as I use Ubuntu practically full time).

 

[Smokedaddy]

Valve is totally behind Linux at this point, and that well might be a game-changer. If it weren't for that, the laissez-faire Linux vibe might be its undoing. It's enough of a hassle to release a Windows version of anything, and that all falls under MS's umbrella. But with Valve in the Linux camp, i'd say the future looks pretty good.

What developers want is an OS that will get the hell out of the way when you want it to - kinda like DOS in the Olde Days - and Linux will do that, while Windows won't. The presence or lack of a consistent graphics API will be the make-or-break.

 

[KatsuKitty]

What developers want is an OS that will get the hell out of the way when you want it to - kinda like DOS in the Olde Days - and Linux will do that, while Windows won't. The presence or lack of a consistent graphics API will be the make-or-break.

Doesn't OpenGL serve that purpose? What other ones are there? I've never heard of others other than OpenGL, at least for 3D graphics.

 

[homerbeoulve]

Ok, Smokie, can you please explain to me why Nintendo is somewhat embargoing games from being released outside of Japan, or maybe sometimes not releasing it on the US, but it's a hit in EU(example: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles and Pandora's Tower).

 

[Anchuent Christory]

Ok, Smokie, can you please explain to me why Nintendo is somewhat embargoing games from being released outside of Japan, or maybe sometimes not releasing it on the US, but it's a hit in EU(example: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles and Pandora's Tower).

That is unusual, as we in the UK are used to waiting on the stuff coming to us. My guess would be that Europe represents a smaller risk in terms of distribution and we are used to "test the water" as such.

It could also be that (at the time anyway) The Xbox 360 had more of a stranglehold on the US market and a release of a game like Xenoblade, on a console like the Wii may have seemed like a lost cause? Lets face it, there have been quite a few games of a more "hardcore" variety released for the Wii and then been largely ignored because that audience just wasn't on the Wii.

(My two cents)

 

[Smokedaddy]

Good morning, dean.

Someone asked in another thread, but if you wanted to get started in video game design (or just programming in general) where would you start?

Believe it or not, most "designers" start out in test. The usual path is test -> assistant producer -> associate producer -> producer / designer. The reason most of them start in test is because it isn't either a) programming, or b) art -- people who are good at one or the other tend to stay in their bailiwick. (There are of course exceptions. My big design credit just kind of happened because there was nobody else working on the project for a long time, so it pretty much turned out how I felt like making it.) Testers tend to be people that like to play games but aren't specifically skilled in one area or another, and if the cruel reality of how much work test really is doesn't faze them they may be able to climb the ladder to designer or producer. The high end of testing can get pretty rarefied -- I know a guy with a master's in computer science who is an XBOX tester for Microsoft. He pulls in a good $150K and doesn't write a line of code. There's a legend that testers are the programmers' worst enemy, but it's not true. I always had buddies in test who were good to go burn a fat one with after hours would keep me updated on whatever bullshit the producer was trying to pull.

The job title "designer" is actually pretty rare, it's mostly done by the people running the show. "Producer," in games, is code for "project manager," and it takes someone really sharp to be good at it. A game is really two massive projects: there's the technical side of creating software that does what you need it to do, then there's the art side that shows what you need to show. A better term (and one you'll hear most often) is "assets," because it includes things like sound and writing.

A designer has to be able to understand the technical side. Not necessarily intricate details of the programming, but at least a sense of what's possible, what isn't, and a better-than-broad view of how it gets done. Simultaneously, the designer has to understand how the art pipeline works; what is and isn't possible, how it all interrelates, and how to manage the (tens of) thousands of individual little chunks. Not a lot of people have the background to do this well. Rule #1 here is you absolutely have to know enough about everything that's going on so that you can't be bullshitted. Corollary #1a is "if you don't know what you're doing, deal with people who do." There is a lot of shit you have to know, and it's almost impossible to know all of it. An aerospace company making a new cruise missile (or whatever) doesn't hire a project manager who just thinks things that fly around and go bang are cool, and can make some pencil sketches of how it should look. You have to be ruthlessly competent at all facets to be effective.

A "game design," per se, is a document that will usually end up running several hundred pages. It's not to be confused with "concept" or "idea" -- both those are necessary before the real design begins, but are the sort of thing that can be slammed out in one to half a dozen pages of text. The design has to describe what the game does, and that includes what it runs on, how its controlled, what the shell is like (what the options and "metagame" controls will be) and everything else in nauseating detail. It of course changes over time and the design doc at the point of release is going to be quite different from what you start with, but you have to start somewhere. If I wanted to submit a design to a publisher or developer, I wouldn't hand anyone anything less than a hundred pages long. You really have to think everything out as best you can ahead of time.

I could spout about this for days but I want to go eat food, so I'll say more later ififeellikeit.

About programming: There is one (1) language you have to know. Everything, but everything (ok, not everything, but close enough) is written in C++. I've seen one good game written in Java (Minecraft) and one in C# (Terraria), but forget all the crap they try to teach you about those, Python, Eiffel and Godknowswhatelse because when it comes down to it you need the god-damned thing to run fast, and 100% of the code libraries supplied by the console makers or anyone else are C++. A lot gets touted about languages that do garbage collection for you / manage your memory for you / automagically redimension arrays for you / whatever, but all that crap comes at a price, and the price is speed. You have to eliminate all the behind-the-scenes crap a compiler does for you and hammer on the hardware when you want. You can get yourself into more trouble with C++ (or C) than any other high-level language, but the reason you can is because it isn't spending millions of instructions per second babysitting your sorry ass. If you wipe your butt and are halfway careful about it, you can write reasonably portable code that'll run so much faster than anything else it just isn't funny.

It doesn't hurt to have at least a passing acquaintance with assembly code. There is one purpose for writing anything in assembler, and that's "to optimize a section of code for the target microprocessor." Period. I write a heck of a lot less of it than I used to -- compilers and the hardware have come a long way -- but still, there'll be those chunks that would really make things go if they ran ten times as fast as they do. Doom was famous for having only one short routine in assembler, but it wouldn't have run in real time without it. (Carmack is famous for being 10% genius and 90% moron, but that's another subject.)

A résumé citing education from someplace like Full Sail used to be a one-way trip to the round file, but that's doesn't apply as much as it used to -- except with reactionary old farts like myself. I know people that paid four times what I did for my two four-year degrees for one semester at "game school." I've used every stinking thing I learned in college -- math, physics, statistics, programming, everything else -- in making games. By definition, a game-oriented curriculum has to leave some of that out. I don't know what gets left out, exactly, but I would much, much rather see a straight CS degree on someone's résumé than a "game creation" degree. Do you get enough math at Full Sail to write a routine that'll rotate a unit quaternion? (I don't know, but I kind of doubt it.) The best game programmers (i.e. those with "senior / lead" in their job titles a.k.a. those who make the big bucks) are overwhelmingly straight-out programmers who happen to love games. Two of my best friends pull in well over $200K/yr, and they're just "straight" programmers who happen to love games, and understand them really well. Game programming is a little different than most other flavors in that you have to run in real time, so delving into that aspect of things is always a plus. There will always be some tools and things that don't need it, so knowing PERL and such never hurts (!), but when the pixels hit the monitor you want it to run like a raped ape.

I guess my point is: to be a good game programmer, first be a good programmer. The rest will take care of itself.

(I will now go eat food. Food is good. Food is our friend.)

 

[Smokedaddy]

Ok, Smokie, can you please explain to me why Nintendo is somewhat embargoing games from being released outside of Japan, or maybe sometimes not releasing it on the US, but it's a hit in EU(example: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles and Pandora's Tower).

That is unusual, as we in the UK are used to waiting on the stuff coming to us. My guess would be that Europe represents a smaller risk in terms of distribution and we are used to "test the water" as such.

It could also be that (at the time anyway) The Xbox 360 had more of a stranglehold on the US market and a release of a game like Xenoblade, on a console like the Wii may have seemed like a lost cause? Lets face it, there have been quite a few games of a more "hardcore" variety released for the Wii and then been largely ignored because that audience just wasn't on the Wii.

(My two cents)

I have no idea why they do that, and Sony + everyone else are the same way. (Sony may actually be worse.) If you think the UK is bad, think of the poor sods in Australia who commonly have to wait nine months or more. Something to do with marketing, but Lord knows what. Localization really doesn't take long, especially when you don't have to translate anything to begin with. The whole region-specific thing blows huge tiddly-wankers in my book, and I wish they'd forget about it -- but Hollywood was first on the bandwagon with DVD region encoding, and for some reason game publishers assumed they had to follow along. Acts of civil disobedience, i.e. finding a good source for imports, are indicated.

 

[Smokedaddy]

Doesn't OpenGL serve that purpose? What other ones are there? I've never heard of others other than OpenGL, at least for 3D graphics.

Well, there's DirectX, which does kind of the same thing for you -- but in either case, the operating system still lurks behind the scenes.

Part of the OpenGL standard says basically "anything that runs OpenGL runs all of OpenGL," which means if a card doesn't do something in hardware, its drivers have to do it in software. Which is OK, but the trick is there's no way to check what it's going to do -- throw silicon at the problem, or drop out of real time. This isn't much of a problem anymore since modern cards handle it all (pretty much) without making you jump through hoops, but when that overprivleged out-of-touch idiot Carmack famously said Direct 3D sucked (which was true) and everyone should use OpenGL, forgetting that most of us pond scum (i.e. everyone but him) didn't have people giving us $7,000 video cards. Anyone remember GLide? It was an API that ran on the VooDoo (later absorbed by nVidia) hardware that ran enough of OpenGL for Quake to work. People called it OpenGL, which it emphatically wasn't. In DirectX you could "query caps" (capabilities) that'd tell you what the hardware would and wouldn't do, so you could presumably avoid any calls that'd take (say) six seconds for software vs. (say) six milliseconds for hardware. In OpenGL, the application program's code to make such a call (say: "bump-map this here triangle") would look exactly the same whether it was hardware or not and there was no way to tell if you were going to run in real time or if you should just come back tomorrow morning to see if the frame had refreshed.

Like I said, though, this isn't much of a problem anymore given the state of today's hardware. DX and OpenGL have been good for each other. There are more Linux solutions for OpenGL than Direct 3D, so that may be the way everything goes, depending. Anybody gaming on Windows with Steam has seen "installing Direct 3D" umpty-milion times when running a game for the first time, so there's still plenty of backing. I read recently that Sony is supporting the Direct 3D API for the new Playstation, a smart move on their part.

It goes beyond just graphics. You all have doubtlessly seen games use a .wad file or equivalent -- the main reason behind that is so the game can get at its data by letting the operating system have its fun once, instead of every stinking time you want to play a sound or use a texture map. Then again, I have seen games that kept their assets in thousands of small files, but they were programmed by morons who think waiting for things is a fair trade for making it easy to program.

 

[Grand Number of Pounds]

Thanks, Smokedaddy. I appreciate your response.

 

[Hyperion]

Apparently the Red Faction franchise wasn't bought after THQ collapsed, and is without an owner. Does this mean another studio can take it over and make a new game?

 

[Smokedaddy]

Someone still owns the intellectual property and copyright. At the very least, it'd require permission. Who exactly owns it is the question.

 

[Hyperion]

In a perfect world the property would be returned to whoever came up with idea for Red Faction. If thats not possible then give it to the head designer or something.

 

[Anchuent Christory]

OK, here's one.

@ Smokedaddy. What's your opinion on the Oculus Rift?

 

[Null]

What's the game industry gonna do with Linux? I just played HL2DM on my Ubuntu install and I love not having to reboot into Windows whenever I want to do so (as I use Ubuntu practically full time).

Valve is totally behind Linux at this point, and that well might be a game-changer. If it weren't for that, the laissez-faire Linux vibe might be its undoing. It's enough of a hassle to release a Windows version of anything, and that all falls under MS's umbrella. But with Valve in the Linux camp, i'd say the future looks pretty good.

What developers want is an OS that will get the hell out of the way when you want it to - kinda like DOS in the Olde Days - and Linux will do that, while Windows won't. The presence or lack of a consistent graphics API will be the make-or-break.

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

Steam is coming to a new operating system
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

there you go NERDS

 

[PvtRichardCranium]

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

Steam is coming to a new operating system
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

there you go NERDS

I'm still going to use Windows though. Every other program runs on Windows, and I doubt many developers will want to develop their game AGAIN specifically for such a small, barely used OS. Valve will because Gaben is scared of Microsoft, but other companies? Nope.

Speaking of new trends in video games, how well do you think the new Steam OS/Steambox combo is going to do?
Also, what do you think will happen to 3D gaming? I mean, balls to the wall 3D gaming with video cards specifically built for that kind of work. I have a video card with AMD 3D support yet I've never used it even though all of my friends are constantly telling me it's the best thing in the world (They're all dirty console peasants)