JUNE 2002 GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE GAME PLAN 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6090 Publisher ✎ Jennifer Pahlka [email protected] LETTER FROM THE EDITOR EDITORIAL Editor-In-Chief Jennifer Olsen [email protected] Managing Editor Everard Strong [email protected] Are We There Yet? Production Editor Olga Zundel [email protected] Product Review Editor Daniel Huebner [email protected] Art Director noticed something wandering much higher if profit is to remain a goal Elizabeth von Büdingen [email protected] around the GDC Expo floor this (yes, we said that when they first broke a Editor-At-Large past March. Middleware is making million dollars, and look where we are Chris Hecker [email protected] Contributing Editors serious progress with game devel- now), development times can’t get too Jonathan Blow [email protected] opers. At GDC ‘99, when Sony much longer (the risk of permanently los- Hayden Duvall [email protected] Noah Falstein [email protected] Ishowed off the newly unveiled Playstation ing our industry’s top talent increases with Advisory Board 2 and its adjunct Tools & Middleware every thankless, death-march crunch Hal Barwood LucasArts Ellen Guon Beeman Beemania program, “middleware” was the ubiqui- mode), and Christmas still comes but once Andy Gavin Naughty Dog Joby Otero Luxoflux tous buzzword of the day. At the time it a year. Dave Pottinger Ensemble Studios was a buzzword in the sense that there The current generation of consoles has George Sanger Big Fat Inc. Harvey Smith Ion Storm was little to show for all of the grandiose presented some interesting trends so far. Paul Steed WildTangent promises of painless development and There is already a whole lot of software ADVERTISING SALES seamless integration. Developers were out on the market showcasing these new Director of Sales & Marketing characteristically skeptical. hardware platforms, and all these games Greg Kerwin e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6218 National Sales Manager In the three years since then, three new need to be able to differentiate themselves Jennifer Orvik e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6217 game consoles have entered the market, in a crowded field. But graphical gewgaw Senior Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe Afton Thatcher e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6224 many PC developers have migrated to doesn’t seem to be what’s resonating with Account Manager, Northern California & Southeast console development, and many middle- mass market consumers or capturing their Susan Kirby e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6226 Account Manager, Recruitment ware vendors have been slowly and imagination — it’s gameplay. Whether it’s Raelene Maiben e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6225 painstakingly improving their tools. The a brand-new game experience or a sub- Account Manager, Western Region, Silicon Valley & Asia smart ones have listened carefully to lime refinement of an existing theme, Craig Perreault e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6223 Account Representative developer feedback and feature requests, gameplay is the front on which this gener- Aaron Murawski e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6227 and worked toward better integration ation of consoles will wage war, many ADVERTISING PRODUCTION with other vendors’ offerings. Many of believe. PCs will be way out in the graphi- Vice President, Manufacturing Bill Amstutz Advertising Production Coordinator Kevin Chanel those who didn’t have quietly departed cal lead soon enough anyway. Reprints Cindy Zauss t: 909.698.1780 this game development vale of tears. Here we are at a point where many GAMA NETWORK MARKETING Whereas up until recently technology respected, successful, and innovative Senior MarCom Manager Jennifer McLean licensing for AAA titles was far more the games have come out using licensed tech- Marketing Coordinator Scott Lyon exception than the rule, developer trepida- nology, and taking the middleware plunge Audience Development Coordinator Jessica Shultz tion toward middleware seems to be on is getting easier. Essential elements such as CIRCULATION Group Circulation Director Catherine Flynn the decline as more and more commercial- refining control mechanisms (critical in Circulation Manager Ron Escobar ly successful titles are released that have crowded console genres), online and mul- Circulation Assistant Ian Hay Game Developer Newsstand Analyst Pam Santoro been developed with various kinds of tiplayer components (for adding value), is BPA approved licensed technology. Three of our last five and systems integration (to streamline SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES Postmortems have featured games that development) can benefit when program- For information, order questions, and address changes licensed crucial engine technology; mers are liberated from the onus of build- t: 800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928 f: 847.647.5972 e: [email protected] February’s DARK AGE OF CAMELOT and ing an engine from scratch. The result can INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION May’s FREEDOM FORCE both used the be a more refined overall experience in Mario Salinas NetImmerse toolkit; this month’s MEDAL roughly the same amount of development t: 650.513.4234 f: 650.513.4482 e: [email protected] CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT OF HONOR: ALLIED ASSAULT was built on time. Most advantageous is that more and President & CEO Gary Marshall QUAKE 3. Mike Milliger, lead programmer better tools simply give developers that Executive Vice President & CFO John Day President, Technology Solutions Group Robert Faletra at 2015 and the author of this month’s many more options: build it if that’s your President, Business Technology Group Adam K. Marder Postmortem, identifies in his article a core focus and talent, buy it if you know President, Healthcare Group Vicki Masseria trend in technology licensing with intrigu- your game will benefit from efforts spent President, Specialized Technologies Group Regina Starr Ridley President, Electronics Group Steve Weitzner ing implications: that the more prized skill elsewhere. More options mean better odds Senior Vice President, Business Development Vittoria Borazio among game developers is now in evaluat- at merging creative vision with commer- Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing Bill Howard Senior Vice President, HR & Communications Leah Landro ing, choosing, and integrating licensable cial reality. Vice President & General Counsel Sandra Grayson technologies, not in developing new ones. Vice President, Creative Technologies Philip Chapnick Whether you agree with such an assess- ment or not, it’s yet another opportunity to look around and ask, where are we and Jennifer Olsen what are we doing? Budgets can’t go Editor-In-Chief 4 WWW.GAMANETWORK.COM SAYS YOU A FORUM FOR YOUR POINT OF VIEW. GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK...C Slerping Your Way to 0.25(2 + 2d), where d = cos ␪ is the dot has touted improved hand-eye coordina- the Top product of the two vectors (what Bill is tion as videogames’ single point of talking about). Multiplying the 0.25 into redeeming social value, and it has there- enjoyed Jonathan Blow’s April “Inner that gives us 0.5 + 0.5d as the squared fore been beset with criticisms of moral I Product” column, “Inverse length of the quaternion, which we pass and intellectual bankruptcy. No wonder. Kinematics with Joint Limits.” I espe- into the inverse square root approximator. I’m glad to hear a voice for subtlety and cially liked Listing 1, the “fastest sim- But that approximator already has spirituality amidst the cacophony of ple-rotation-finder in the West.” It had additive and multiplicative terms, so we screaming hylics. never occurred to me to use slerp to can factor these 0.5 terms into there, Second, it seems that the notion of compute the square root of a quater- and make a new function that is just a adding emotional depth to enrich the nion. My question is, why bother to factor of d. And there we go. I think it’s game experience might also have a ben- multiply all the components of the justifiable to have a special version of eficial psychological effect on the player. quaternion by 0.5f when it is normal- fast_normalize, assuming that a fast ver- For instance, in the case of the Subplot ized in the next step? In other words, sion of simple_rotation is important to symbology to identify a character’s we can improve the function further by your app. FLBWs and ensuing growth, if players’ omitting these multiplications. By the time we’ve done all this, we’ve FLBWs identify with the character, they Another optimization involves the call saved something like eight multiplica- may be tempted to enact their own to fast_normalize(). Since the input vec- tions and four additions over the origi- catharses in real life. It’s a stretch, I tors are unit length, it’s possible to get a nal function. For people who are used know, but we all identify with charac- simpler formula for the squared length of to calling functions like acos to do ters in movies all the time, and role- the quaternion that we have to normal- quaternion stuff, that doesn’t sound like playing is a bonafide psychological tool ize. It is (2 + 2 * dot), where dot is the very much; but since we’d already got- for operant conditioning, so deep game- inner product of the vectors. So it’s ten this task down to a couple handfuls playing could enable players to realize overkill to call q->squared_length(), as hap- of adds and multiplies, Bill’s improve- more about themselves. This point is pens in fast_normalize. Computing the dot ments eliminate a large percentage of especially interesting to me. I often won- product is usually pretty slow, so this the function’s work, and thus constitute der why we all are so incapable of see- could be worthwhile. The downside is a major optimization.