JANUARY 2002

GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6070

✎ GAME PLAN Publisher LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Jennifer Pahlka [email protected] EDITORIAL Editor-In-Chief Jennifer Olsen [email protected] Managing Editor Laura Huber [email protected] Production Editor Olga Zundel [email protected] Product Review Editor War Games Tor Berg [email protected] Art Director he game industry overall did joint effort between the Army (who provid- Audrey Welch [email protected] Editor-At-Large an admirable job of weathering ed $45 million in funding), game develop- Chris Hecker [email protected] the public criticisms lobbed its ers, Hollywood talent, and the University Contributing Editors way immediately following of Southern California, which recently Daniel Huebner [email protected] Jonathan Blow [email protected] September 11. Some popular announced development of two projects Hayden Duvall [email protected] genres, such as real-time tactical shooters, that will have both military and commer- Advisory Board T Hal Barwood LucasArts especially those featuring counter-terrorist cial applications. C-FORCE is being devel- Ellen Guon Beeman Beemania Andy Gavin Naughty Dog operations, came under fire for hitting too oped for consoles by Future Combat Joby Otero Luxoflux close to home in post–September 11 Systems (a venture between Sony Pictures Dave Pottinger Ensemble Studios George Sanger Big Fat Inc. America. In just one among many similar ImageWorks and Pandemic Studios), and Harvey Smith Ion Storm actions by game publishers, Ubi Soft CS-12 will come to PC from Quicksilver Paul Steed WildTangent announced shortly after September 11 that Software. Effectively, these are the first two ADVERTISING SALES it would be delaying the release of Red commercial games ever commissioned by Director of Sales & Marketing Greg Kerwin e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6218 Storm’s ROGUE SPEAR: BLACK THORN indefi- the military and developed with DOD’s National Sales Manager nitely to modify sensitive content. direct input, through the Army’s Training Jennifer Orvik e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6217 Senior Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe What a difference a month makes. Not & Doctrine Command bureau. Afton Thatcher e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6224 only was the modified BLACK THORN Such efforts could end up being good PR Account Manager, Northern California & Southeast Susan Kirby e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6226 released with fanfare less than a month after for the game industry at a time when public Account Manager, Recruitment its original ship date, but by then Ubi Soft interest in the military is particularly high. Raelene Maiben e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6225 was proudly publicizing the fact that they DOD-backed games could also serve as a Account Manager, Western Region & Asia Craig Perreault e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6223 had recently licensed the ROGUE SPEAR recruitment aid for the Army (much the Sales Associate engine to a contractor working for none same way Top Gun, produced under the Aaron Murawski e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6227 other than the U.S. Department of Defense beaming auspices of the U.S. Navy, sent ADVERTISING PRODUCTION (DOD). New maps and scenarios will be aspiring Mavericks to Navy recruiting Vice President, Manufacturing Bill Amstutz Advertising Production Coordinator added in order to train Army troops in offices in droves). However, we are also Kevin Chanel Reprints Stella Valdez t: 916.983.6971 urban counter-terrorist strategy and tactics. opening our industry up to a whole new GAMA NETWORK MARKETING Technology sharing between the game level of scrutiny. What headway we’ve made Senior MarCom Manager Jennifer McLean and defense industries is nothing new, of convincing the general public that Marketing Coordinator Scott Lyon course. But our industry’s collaborations videogames aren’t sophisticated training for Audience Development Coordinator Jessica Shultz with DOD suddenly takes on a whole new would-be high school snipers may well CIRCULATION significance as ground troops, possibly reemerge when people realize that the Army Group Circulation Director Catherine Flynn Circulation Manager Ron Escobar trained in part on technology that originat- is co-developing commercial applications Circulation Assistant Ian Hay Newsstand Analyst ed from game developers for entertainment for its own training purposes, and with tax- Game Developer Pam Santoro products, begin fanning out through payer dollars. (The difference, of course, is is BPA approved Afghanistan. Perhaps some of the game that the Army has no interest in using these SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES industry’s most outspoken critics will find applications to train soldiers to shoot For information, order questions, and address changes themselves unsure of whether to continue to weapons. The emphasis, say Army officials, t: 800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928 f: 847.647.5972 e: [email protected] chastise the game industry or raise a hand is strictly on strategic and tactical training.) INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION in salute. Strange times tend to make for It would be wise for our industry to contin- Mario Salinas strange bedfellows. ue to keep tabs not only on our known crit- t: 650.513.4234 f: 650.513.4482 e: [email protected] We’ve come a long way since 1980, ics but also on those who would ride our CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT when Atari’s tank simulation arcade game, coattails to further their own goals. President & CEO Gary Marshall Executive Vice President & CFO John Day BATTLEZONE, caught the attention of Penta- Welcome, Hayden. This month, we’re President, Business Technology Group Adam K. Marder gon officials who wanted Atari adapt it for pleased to welcome Hayden Duvall as our President, Specialized Technologies Group Regina Starr Ridley President, Technology Solutions Group Robert Faletra military training. To say that most game new Artist’s View columnist. Hayden brings President, Electronics Group Steve Weitzner developers — then and now — don’t fit the with him a wealth of experience in both art President, Healthcare Group Vicki Masseria Senior Vice President, Human Resources & Communications Leah Landro mold of your typical straitlaced defense and the game industry, and currently works Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing Bill Howard contractor is an understatement. as lead artist at Confounding Factor on Senior Vice President, Business Development Vittoria Borazio Vice President & General Counsel Sandra Grayson ALLEON Nonetheless, collaboration efforts have their upcoming console title, G . Vice President, Creative Technologies Philip Chapnick stepped up in recent years. One organization to keep an eye on is the Institute for Creative Technologies (www.itc.usc.edu), founded in 1999 as a

2 WWW.GAMANETWORK.COM SAYS YOU C THE FORUM FOR YOUR POINT OF VIEW. GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK...

Sound Design Kudos have a different development cycle than We strongly encourage any licensed just wanted to thank Andrew Boyd for the current standard one, most of his Playstation 2 or Gamecube developers out I his kind words and intelligent observa- article seems to suggest that mobile plat- there to evaluate our product themselves. tions about the sound design of MEDAL OF forms have lesser hardware and what we If you’re interested, let us know by sending HONOR and MEDAL OF HONOR: really want is better hardware, so we can a message to [email protected]. UNDERGROUND in “Escape from Bad play on them the same games that we Brian Gildon Audio” (October, 2001). We here in the play on PCs. Director, Entertainment Products audio department at Los On the game design side, it might be Metrowerks Corp. Angeles/DreamWorks Interactive have been interesting to see games designed for enjoying reading it and we're pleased that mobile platforms, instead of adapted to PRODUCT REVIEW EDITOR TOR BERG RESPONDS: you so astutely picked up on some of our them. Thinking games (which include While it is not our practice to run com- techniques. It was an excellent article. adventure games) seem like a good match parative reviews of development tools, in Erik Kraber to PDA-style games, because they fit the the case of Jamie’s review of ProDG, both Senior Sound Designer control method and the goal of saving bat- he and I felt that mentioning a competitive MEDAL OF HONOR tery life. For action games, the control lim- product established a tone for the review MEDAL OF HONOR: UNDERGROUND itations may also not be that serious, espe- that would be helpful to the reader. Trey- via e-mail cially when targeting non-hardcore audi- arch had evaluated Codewarrior for ences. My father liked some action games Dreamcast and found it to be inappro- enjoyed Andrew Boyd’s “Escape from on my old VIC 20. These days, he doesn’t priate for the studio’s specific develop- I Bad Audio.” I am a member of the play any action games, although he likes ment needs. This experience led Jamie AIAS Best Music category panel, and I can MINESWEEPER and such. I’d imagine that and the team to examine SN tell you your points are right on. We are one reason is the complex control methods Systems’ ProDG 2 for Playstation 2. all very dedicated to great music and of current games. Simpler hardware could In today’s game industry, development sound. One of the problems we have faced mean a simpler interface, and that might tools are generally too specialized to com- is that many noteworthy games don’t not be a bad thing. pare to one another. Feature sets are rarely make it for our review because the game Eyal Teler even similar, let alone equivalent. So a fea- developer or publisher didn’t submit them. via e-mail ture-by-feature comparison is inevitably We have been working to improve this by unfair to one product or the other. Thus, communicating throughout the year about Apples vs.Codewarrior we regret implying a comparison between games we think are great, which should ProDG and Codewarrior. improve the pool of excellent games for amie Fristrom’s product review of Codewarrior has indeed been an indus- final review. J ProDG in the November issue of Game try leading product for a long time and has Thanks for bringing audio to forefront Developer (“SN Systems’ ProDG 2 for been used in the development of many cut- of thought among developers and publish- PlayStation 2,” Product Reviews, ting-edge titles. We look forward to ers with this article. November 2001) implies a comparison of reviewing Codewarrior on its own merits Lennie Moore Codewarrior on Dreamcast to ProDG on in the near future. via e-mail Playstation 2. We feel that this could be misleading to readers of the magazine in CORRECTION Mobile Platforms? that this is not an apples-to-apples com- In the information box included in the review of parison, and implies that CodeWarrior is SN Systems’ ProDG 2 for Playstation 2 on page he issue of games for mobile devices not a mature enough product on 9 of the November 2001 issue of Game T is interesting. While RJ Mical gives PlayStation 2. Developer, the price of the product was listed some lip service (“Some Assembly The situation is quite the contrary. incorrectly due to an editing error. Required,” Soapbox, November 2001) to Codewarrior is the industry-leading prod- The correct price for ProDG 2 for Playstation 2 the idea that we might take new risks and uct for PlayStation 2 and Gamecube devel- is $5,000 per unit for the first nine units, with opment. Feature for feature, we match or reduced volume pricing for larger orders. Let us know what you think: send us an exceed those described in the product We apologize for any confusion that this error e-mail to [email protected], or write review, but also have some unique prod- may have caused. to Game Developer, 600 Harrison St., ucts, features, and services exclusively for CSan Francisco, CA 94107 Codewarrior users.

www.gdmag.com 4 INDUSTRY WATCH daniel huebner | THE BUZZ ABOUT THE GAME BIZJ

EA improves, Midway lags, SNK clos- $9.75 million for the company. Hawkins es. Electronic Arts managed to post better bought 3.9 million of a total of 4.7 million sales and a smaller second-quarter loss shares. The shares we were issued at $2.06 than last year, but the company’s net loss per share. still reached $32.8 million on revenues of $240.2 million. EA lost $38.9 million on Sega teams with Microsoft and THQ. sales of $219.9 million in the second quar- Sega continues to cut deals in its bid to ter one year ago. The results were largely become the industry’s largest third-party within analyst expectations. Prior to software provider. Sega and Microsoft releasing its second-quarter financials, the LEGENDS OF WRESTLING, helped Acclaim Entertain- unveiled a new partnership at the Tokyo company made a move to improve the per- ment return to profitability in its fourth quarter. Game Show which will bring a number of formance of its online subsidiary, EA.com, Sega games exclusively to the . Most by announcing layoffs of 200 to 250 staff much of the improvement, leading Acclaim notably, the next game in the SHENMUE from the unit. EA executives said the cuts to raise its guidance for revenue and profit series will only appear on the Xbox in had to be made in order for the company for the fiscal first two quarters of 2002. North America, and Sega will also port to make that unit, which trades as a sepa- also reported encouraging PHANTASY STAR ONLINE to the Xbox as rate tracking stock, profitable by fiscal financials, posting solid second quarter well. New online PC games may also result 2003. numbers despite lower revenues and profits from collaborations between the compa- While EA boosted its sales and cut its than last year. The company’s net revenues nies. Sega and Microsoft also said their losses, Midway announced a steep drop in for the quarter were $139.6 million, down work together would extend into the arcade revenue. The company’s revenues slid 40 from $144.4 million last year. The compa- market by designing an arcade mother- percent from last year to just $28.3 mil- ny’s profits were also off from last year’s board based on the Xbox technology. lion. Despite the lower sales, Midway man- results, down 47 percent to $2.2 million. Sega also reached an exclusive, multi-title aged to cut its loss to $7.7 million from Despite the slip, Activision’s results exceed- co-publishing agreement with THQ to pub- last year’s $10 million. ed analyst expectations, and the company lish 16 Sega titles for Nintendo’s Game Boy Japanese hardware and software devel- raised guidance for the year-end quarter Advance. THQ said it will co-publish Game oper SNK Corporation has ceased opera- and predicted continued strong sales. Boy Advance titles featuring Sega brands in tions entirely. The company, which created THQ, for its part, translated a strong North America through 2003. the NeoGeo arcade system as well as leg- Game Boy Advance catalog into a 144 endary games like VANGUARD, filed for percent increase in third-quarter profit. bankruptcy last April, and had earlier The company reported net income of $3.2 closed down many of its offices. million, compared to $1.3 million last year. Revenues for the quarter reached UPCOMING EVENTS McNally family donation increases IGF $68 million, up from $53.3 million a year Grand Prize stakes. The Independent ago. 51 percent of THQ’s sales for the CALENDAR Games Festival is sweetening the grand quarter came from Game Boy and Game prize pot by posting an additional $5,000 Boy Advance titles. THQ also increased its MILIA 2002 to the giant check handed out with the Seu- forecast for the coming year. PALAIS DES FESTIVALS mas McNally Award for Independent Cannes, France Game of the Year. The total amount of the 3DO quarterly sales fall by half, February 4–8, 2002 prize is now set at $15,000, with the addi- Hawkins underwrites new stock. 3DO Cost: variable tional funds coming from the Seumas cut costs in its second quarter but couldn’t www.milia.com McNally Memorial Fund created in honor match its savings with increased sales. For AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL of the lead programmer of Longbow Digi- the quarter, revenues dropped by more TOY FAIR tal Arts. The IGF Grand Prize was posthu- than 50 percent to $9.9 million from $20.2 JACOB K. JAVITS CONVENTION CENTER mously named in honor of Seumas McNal- million in the same period last year. Cost New York, N.Y. ly after his death of Hodgkin’s lymphoma cutting helped 3DO trim its quarterly loss February 10–14, 2002 shortly after the festival in 2000. by 42 percent to $9.7 million from a loss Cost: none of $16.7 million in the second quarter last http://www.toy-tma.com/AITF Acclaim, Activision, and THQ raise year. These results were in line with analyst expectations. Acclaim reported fourth- expectations for the company. D.I.C.E. SUMMIT quarter earnings of $2.9 million on revenues CEO again stepped in to HARD ROCK HOTEL of $46.5 million, marking a return to prof- provide the company with desperately Las Vegas, Nev. itability after a loss of $63.5 million in the needed working capital, using personal February 28–March 1, 2002 same period last year. The company said funds to purchase over $8 million of 3DO Cost: variable that its DAVE MIRRA FREESTYLE BMX and shares in a recently completed private www.interactive.org CRAZY TAXI franchises were responsible for placement round of financing that raised

6 january 2002 | game developer PRODUCT REVIEWS XXTHE SKINNY ON NEW TOOLS NXN Software’s Alienbrain 5 by chris corry

fter spending a few weeks with the latest version of NXN Software’s flagship product, Alienbrain, I find myself returning again and Aagain to the same conclusion. These guys have taken the complicated and daunting task of enterprise-wide asset management and made it . . . sexy? That’s right, sexy. Alienbrain is a beauti- ful and altogether elegant client/server solu- tion for managing a game project’s files and multimedia assets. And version 5.0 moves the product toward NXN’s ultimate goal of fully digitizing the entire production pipeline. While not without its flaws, Alien- brain comes closer to organizing and man- aging the entire cradle-to-grave life cycle of a development team’s collective output than any other product. In fact, were it not for the product’s 24-carat price tag, I’d be com- pletely comfortable recommending Alienbrain as a must-have product for any development team. As it is, however, the Alienbrain helps you keep a complete version history of every file in a project. story is a bit more complicated. As you’re no doubt aware, keeping track vigilant, keeping track of all this inherent fact, you can place any sort of file that you of all the resources required to a con- complexity can be an absolute nightmare. want into Alienbrain and it is likely to han- temporary game title is a huge task. On a Alienbrain straightens out this dire state of dle the data with aplomb. The main client’s day-to-day basis, game developers must affairs, helping team members coordinate elegant user interface allows for rapid, real- deal with many different file types, each of the modification and creation of new assets time previewing of most standard file for- which may appear in a dozen different in a controlled and methodical fashion. mats without resorting to external viewer forms or stages within an art pipeline. We At its core, Alienbrain is built around a programs that need to be spawned in a sep- need to worry about art files, version control engine that has been specif- arate window. For those not-so-standard sounds, scripts, exported art, preprocessed ically designed to handle the media types proprietary file formats that we all find art, postprocessed art, bundled art, plat- commonly used in the development of ourselves relying on from time to time, form-specified art . . . you name it. Even a interactive titles. In other words, Alien- Alienbrain has a robust and comprehensive relatively small title typically needs to deal brain is tuned to deal with exactly those plug-in architecture for referencing exter- with thousands of different files, and unless sorts of large binary files that bring other nal viewers or, for the more ambitious the team is well organized and eternally version control systems to their knees. In among you, custom-built viewers that inte- grate seamlessly into the client. Overall, the CHRIS CORRY | Chris is a brash but harmless fellow, often found lurking in the shad- main, artist-oriented Alienbrain client is a ows of LucasArts Entertainment Company. He may soon be bald. You can reach him at model of flexible user-interface design. chrisc@.com While it can, at times, threaten to over-

8 january 2002 | game developer XXXXX excellent XXXX very good XXX average =XXdisappointing X don’t bother

The administrator can set up new users quickly View side-by-side comparisons of two files in a Comprehensive productivity reports offer a and give each unique permissions. file history. detailed snapshot of a project. whelm you with its inherent customizabili- allow or disallow multiple check-outs on a client is actually implemented in JScript ty, virtually every user is assured of being per-file-type basis, some programmers (Microsoft’s take on JavaScript), and while able to set up the interface in whatever might complain about the lack of support there’s a lot here to wrap your head way he or she desires. for branching and version pinning. While around, once you’ve mastered the land- Alienbrain supports all of the standard the requisite integration with Visual Studio scape of the programming environment, version-control features and then some. is well done, a source-code-oriented ver- you can perform some remarkable modifi- The software tracks the history of a file as sion control system such as Perforce may cations. One customization example that it evolves over time, encouraging users to still be a better choice for programmers. At particularly impressed me was a script that associate comments with each new ver- the very least, if you do decide to commit hooked the client’s “Post_CheckIn” event sion and allowing effortless rollbacks to your programmers to Alienbrain, you’ll and used an external utility to process the previous versions. Version rollbacks are want to invest in a beefed-up utility such as newly checked-in file into a platform-spe- nondestructive; the previous, rolled-back Araxis Merge to help with differencing- cific format. Such functionality could version of the file becomes the new tip of related tasks. The good news is that NXN ensure that users always had locally the revision tree, and you can still access makes it relatively easy to substitute a processed, platform-native resources that any previous version. The main client third-party merge application, so a moti- were ready for use. Because files can have even offers a fancy visual version compar- vated project manager is likely to find a custom properties associated with them, ison feature that, for certain supported way to get the entire team using and because these properties are all file types, lets you compare multiple ver- Alienbrain. exposed to the scripting system, the cus- sions of an image file side by side. You If the Alienbrain client is our sexy tomization possibilities are nearly limitless. can check files in and out directly from femme fatale, the server is her well-mus- As if this level of control weren’t enough, within common applications such as cled bodyguard. Alienbrain’s server-side NXN also supplies an SDK that lets Photoshop, Maya, and 3DS Max, and the databases support robust user-management Alienbrain users modify and extend the client even extends the Windows shell tools that provide a tremendous degree of product using C++. If all this talk of script- namespace, allowing you to manipulate control over user rights and feature access. ing and programming intimidates you, version-controlled files directly from an For example, you can easily set up a group NXN offers a variety of consulting and Explorer window. that allows check-ins and check-outs but customization services — at an additional There are a few lapses. The Alienbrain disallows file deletions from a project. The charge, of course. server is only available on Windows plat- Alienbrain administrative user interface is With version 5.0, Alienbrain is moving forms, and overall the whole product has a well designed and powerful, allowing you beyond simple asset management by incor- very Windows-centric feel to it. Macintosh to configure projects and monitor server porating tools to help manage and track the (OS 9.x or higher) and Linux clients are performance in real time from any machine production process. As an art resource available, but they provide only basic func- on the network. moves through an approval process, tionality such as check-in, check-out, and Alienbrain is also a marvel of customiz- Alienbrain can attach a status to the file, previewing. For text and source code files, ability. Beyond the aforementioned indicating the current state of that file. For Alienbrain does provide rudimentary dif- chameleon-like abilities of the client, there example, an artist can create a bitmap file ferencing and merge facilities, but because is almost no functional aspect of the pro- with a status indicating that the file is still a NXN relies on the Windiff and WinMerge gram that cannot be modified through “Work In Progress.” Once completed, the utilities, these features are far from best of scripting or with a bit of programming file can be marked as “Awaiting Sign Off,” breed. And although projects can opt to elbow grease. Much of the Alienbrain after which time a lead artist can review the

www.gdmag.com 9 XPRODUCT REVIEWS

work and either approve it as final or bump powerful product that has much to offer, tial problems that needed to be examined it back to the artist for modification. Alien- but a typical installation using the full-fea- and addressed. brain can be customized to accommodate tured Power Client will cost approximately Beyond its power of static code analysis, your company’s specific development work- $2,000 a seat. You can purchase a less Lint’s appeal lies in the broad range of flows, while an innovative color-coded expensive, lower-fidelity Base Client for platforms and compilers that it supports. reporting feature makes tracking and people like programmers, who don’t need For Windows users, Lint is released as an reporting progress a cinch. These features all of the Power Client’s bells and whistles, executable. But for other platforms, Lint is are likely to be a godsend for projects with but at the end of the day you’re still look- released as a shrouded, or obfuscated, set complicated production processes. ing at a significant expense for migrating an of source files. Lint also doesn’t favor one Alienbrain offers a host of other features entire team to Alienbrain. On top of the compiler or library over another, support- that I haven’t the space to describe fully high price, NXN Software has an utterly ing configurations for more than 30 com- here. These run the gamut from an exten- bizarre policy of not providing prospective pilers and many common programming sive reporting engine to an integrated customers with evaluation copies. In an libraries out of the box. instant messaging system to a secure, VPN- industry that’s used to paying thousands One of Lint’s few compiler-specific fea- like feature that allows remote clients to upon thousands of dollars for state-of-the- tures is its new support for Microsoft access off-site Alienbrain databases safely art 3D modeling tools, maybe some of the Visual C++ Developer Studio Project files and securely. larger studios can roll the and justify (.DSP). Visual C++ users can now feed Make no mistake about it, Alienbrain is an expense like this with little or no hands- their .DSP file directly into Lint, eliminat- a large, sophisticated system that performs on experience. Most companies, however, ing the need to copy the preprocessor set- well and promises a tremendous amount of cannot. If Alienbrain cost $750 a seat, I tings from the Visual C++ IDE into Lint’s value to those customers brave enough to have little doubt that it would become a de configuration files. However, Visual C++ tackle it head-on — and to those customers facto industry standard. As it is, it’s a terrif- users must still manually add other set- with deep pockets. My biggest complaint ic product that will sadly remain out of tings, such as the include directories, from about Alienbrain is its price tag. This is a reach for most of us. the Tools Directories menu to the Lint con- figuration files. As long as Lint already GIMPEL PC-LINT supports the Visual C++ project files, ALIENBRAIN 5.0 XXXX VERSION 8.0 Gimpel should have gone the extra step by herb marselas and included the ability to read additional STATS impel PC-lint 8.0 (Lint) is arguably configuration information directly from NXN SOFTWARE one of the most powerful, and yet the Microsoft Windows registry. Sonnenstrasse 19 G daunting, tools for C/C++ programmers. Perhaps the most important new fea- 80331 Munich, Germany The power of Lint lies in the exhaustive ture in Lint 8.0 is the interactive value +49 (0)89 27 32 240 www.nxn-software.com number of warnings, errors, and informa- tracking. When it’s enabled, interactive PRICE tional messages that its static code analysis value tracking attempts to verify and Pricing varies depending on the size and generates, informing you of virtually every track values passed between functions by requirements of the project. Contact NXN for potential peril and pitfall waiting in your making up to six passes over the code more information. code. The messages generated by Lint being analyzed. This function can help SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS range from strict C/C++ error information find value-out-of-range conditions or Server: Windows NT 4 SP 5/2000; 256MB to coding recommendations from Dan Saks other situations in which parameter pass- RAM. Client: 128MB RAM; Windows and Scott Meyers (the author of Effective ing could cause problems. While I was 98/ME/NT 4 SP 5/2000, Mac OS 9.x or higher C++). The latest version of Lint doesn’t dis- able to see this functionality at work with (with MacOS Runtime for Java), or Linux appoint, adding nearly 90 new messages the sample programs that Gimpel supplies Server 4 SR 2 or later. and 40 enhanced messages and options to with the Lint package, in practice I was PROS the range of information supplied. unable to find any issues of this type The problem with all this power is that using a sampling of files from Ensemble’s 1. Flexible and effective main client user it can lead some programmers to dismiss large source code base. interface. Lint’s bountiful and seemingly extraneous Another change with this version is that 2. Customization options are legion. messages. This complaint is not unjustified. the documentation is now completely 3. Powerful project management and pro- Although our own code base at Ensemble online in Adobe Acrobat format. The doc- duction tracking tools. compiles without a problem on our com- umentation is relatively complete, though CONS piler’s highest warning level, a fresh install it could include more examples illustrating 1. Price. of Lint generated a 56,000-line message the messages that Lint generates. 2. Geared more towards artists than file when run on just one of our files. NuMega’s BoundsChecker, for instance, programmers. Within a few hours, I was able to identify includes a small code example for each of 3. Servers are available under Windows only. and disable all of the extraneous messages its errors; a similar glossary could only and get down to a meaningful set of poten- enhance Lint’s usability.

10 january 2002 | game developer XPRODUCT REVIEWS

The only major problem that I encoun- The Standard Template Library (STL) is the broken STL implementation and tem- tered while testing Lint 8.0 was a crash bug made up of generic data structures and plate support in Microsoft’s Visual C++. that surfaced while parsing some of our algorithms that can be used across many But STL isn’t perfect. Readers will gain template code. However, Gimpel’s technical compilers and platforms, including most some ideas of where STL is lacking, but support staff was able to get us a current consoles. The library is imple- these issues aren’t spelled out explicitly. workaround after just a few days and a mented with templates, so the resulting Sometimes you’ll need to read between the half-dozen e-mails. Unfortunately, we had code is quite efficient, possibly even more lines and consider how STL applies to to wait almost a month for a patch to fix so than hand-coded structures and algo- game development. For example, memory the crash, so in the meantime we had to rithms. Additionally, STL has been imple- allocation can be an issue, especially for modify our code whenever we wanted to mented, tested, debugged, and optimized those doing console development; game run Lint. by thousands of peo- developers will I also found that Lint doesn’t correctly ple, so it’s generally probably want to add itself to the path during installation if reliable code. STL write their own you’re running Microsoft Windows NT, also empowers its allocators. Effective 2000, or XP. This seems like a glaring over- users by putting pow- STL has a brief dis- sight, as Gimpel has added other Windows erful constructs at cussion of alloca- NT/2000/XP features, such the ability to their fingertips. tors but doesn’t reduce the priority of the process if you Previously, a common provide enough want to run Lint as a background task. approach was to information to If you don’t have Lint, get it today. If you throw a bunch of guide developers already have the last major version, careful- objects into an array who need to write ly evaluate whether these new features are and search through their own. enough to justify the upgrade. Regardless of them in linear time Another of STL’s your choice in compiler and platform, using (does that sound oft-cited shortcom- Lint can only improve the quality of your familiar?). STL lets ings is the difficulty code if you take the time to configure it you put these objects debugging STL properly and use it regularly. into a hash table and code. Developers XXXX | PC-lint 8.0 | Gimpel Software thus have constant- working with STL www.gimpel.com time access to them. often face cryptic Effective STL begins multi-line error Herb Marselas is a programmer at with a fairly thorough discussion of con- messages and experience difficulty viewing Ensemble Studios. tainers (vector, list, map, and so on) and the elements of a container in the debugger. iterators. Meyers immediately goes beyond Effective STL shows readers how to parse EFFECTIVE STL: 50 SPE- a typical description of the containers and the intimidating error messages and CIFIC WAYS TO IMPROVE their O(n) performance characteristics by includes pointers to STL resources on the YOUR USE OF THE addressing important, real-world ques- Internet. STANDARD TEMPLATE tions: Is the memory for the elements allo- Effective STL works well both as a book LIBRARY cated contiguously? Are the iterators inval- to read cover to cover and as a reference BY SCOTT MEYERS idated when the elements change? What is later on. Meyers only uses source code reviewed by noel llopis the most efficient way of removing ele- where it’s necessary; he doesn’t bore his ave you read Effective C++, also by ments for a specific container? readers with pages and pages of pointless H Scott Meyers? No? Go buy it right Meyers then moves on to algorithms and code. As a matter of fact, this book won’t now, read it, reread it, and then come back functors. Just as with his discussion of con- bore you at all, since it packs a lot of infor- here. I guarantee that it will make a huge tainers, rather than simply listing all the mation into a mere 250 pages. Overall, you difference in the way you work. available algorithms, he points out com- simply must read Effective STL before you O.K., welcome back. Here’s the good mon mistakes and how to deal with them. decide to use (or not to use) STL in your news: Effective STL is to STL what Meyers reveals, for example, different ways next game or tools. If you’re currently Effective C++ is to C++. Meyers’s latest of sorting elements, or how std::remove using STL, then this book should already book is equally great and is written in the really works (and why it doesn’t really be on your bookshelf. q same light, conversational tone that made remove anything). XXXX | Effective STL reading his earlier work such a pleasure. It The final chapters present more general, Addison Wesley | www.aw.com assumes that the reader has a basic knowl- but still very useful, information on the edge of STL (and C++) and builds on that STL. Meyers discusses when to use STL Noel Llopis a software engineer at knowledge to show how to use it effective- algorithms and when to use your own, Meyer/Glass Interactive, where he special- ly and avoid common pitfalls. style guidelines, or even how to deal with izes in 3D graphics.

12 january 2002 | game developer PROFILES chris hecker | TALKING TO PEOPLE WHO MAKE A DIFFERENCE Jay Stelly, Technically Speaking

ay Stelly is a senior engineer at Valve. He was on the HALF- that building the LIFE team, and he’s leading the engineers developing the tech- code we throw Jnology for Valve’s next generation of games. We recently away is a neces- caught up with Jay to discuss his take on the challenges of bal- sary step to get- ancing the roles of programmer, designer, and manager. ting the final Game Developer. How much of your time do you spend managing code just right. versus programming? Do you try to stay out of the critical path on your Having things own code? split out into Jay Stelly. The management demands change as the project goes components on, but most of the time I spend about one to two days per week makes it much doing that. I’m still on the critical path, but my schedule does easier to manage reflect having fewer hours to spend on coding. I still love to write the iteration. code. I have to be on the critical path to enjoy my job! Much of the I’ll get a few hours each day to code without distractions. I’ll change happens Valve’s Jay Stelly. shut off e-mail and the phone and just focus on what I’m coding. behind interfaces, For some of the other time, I’m still coding, but I’ll be interrupted without large effects on the rest of the system. We’ve got enough often with various meetings or issues. Obviously, there are some automation built in to allow us to keep the content up to date as tasks I can only get done with the proper amount of focus — so it we make changes. takes a little extra planning as well. But regardless of process, most GD. What’s the interaction between game design and engineering at of the management comes back to hiring. I think that having the Valve? How do you keep the game design iterative and flexible without right people is a bigger part of the problem than how you organize constantly churning and rewriting code? those people. JS. This is the hard part, isn’t it? In the beginning of develop- We try to hire great people and stay out of their way as much as ment, we got a bunch of people together across disciplines to possible. We don’t have any hierarchy in our engineering group. make the high-level game design and technology plan. Most of Everyone is responsible for a product; there are no technology- the new technology was driven directly by our game design. But only developers at Valve. once we started to implement that technology and build the game, GD. You have the legacy HALF-LIFE code, licensed physics, and a we had to deal with a bunch of challenges. Probably the biggest large team of programmers doing custom technology. How do you cost when adding new technology is the amount of time it takes integrate all this, and is this heterogeneity the future of high-end for the artists and designers to get comfortable with it. At that games? point, they have lots of really good ideas for improvements and JS. Games have already reached this level of complexity. Many further development. So we try to bring those guys into the developers are reusing code now; I’d say it’s the present as well as process as early as possible. Each new technology has at least one the future. Gamers are asking us to push the bleeding edge but not artist or designer acting as an advisor and tester far in advance of take any steps back along the way. Our code base has become the rest of the team. more and more component oriented as it has grown. We’ve got This procedure lets us figure out a bunch of the design prob- clear interfaces between components, and really tight communica- lems earlier, and lets programmers fix these problems before they tion about the overall architecture. become overly difficult or costly. It also means that we can start GD. With long ship cycles, how do you make sure components that working on second-order features sooner, because we’ve gotten are developed early on are still relevant to the game that actually that early feedback. It’s kind of odd, but another part of the solu- ships? tion to this problem is to avoid being too flexible with the code. JS. This has been a really interesting shift. At the high level, our Our game designers come up with incredibly creative solutions to overall technology goals don’t change much over the course of a problems when faced with technological constraints. We’re not project. But underneath, we’re incredibly iterative. We constantly trying to simply remove these constraints from the design process bring in new bits of technology or upgrade existing code. We cer- wherever possible. Some of the best stuff happens when designers tainly aren’t just implementing something that was completely are forced to think about how to create the game in the face of designed up front. We’re attempting too many things that we did- constraints. So it’s important to be careful about choosing which n’t know quite how to do when we started. So, we take small constraints to change — and not to make these decisions without steps, and keep the engine running and stable at all times. When giving the design enough time to react. Having constraints be big new features come online, there is usually some loss in stabili- inflexible is really valuable. Lack of certainty about technology ty, but it’s temporary. We do throw away some code, but I believe will paralyze a game design. q

14 january 2002 | game developer INNER PRODUCT jonathan blow

Mipmapping, Part 2

et’s continue our quest for defined. Texture maps are pictures meant to higher-quality mipmaps that evoke in the viewer’s mind the nature of the we began with last month’s represented surface. We need to think about column (“Mipmapping, Part the mathematical consequences of the way 1,” December 2001). Last in which we store texture maps and com- Lmonth we saw that Kaiser filters produce pare that math to our mental model of the output of a fairly nice quality. According corresponding surface. We will see that the to the tenets of signal processing, the more two are in conflict. CPU we are willing to spend, the wider we FIGURE 1A (left). Original image of a road sign. Figures 2 and 3 show a simple texture: can make our filters and the higher the FIGURE 1B (right). A close-up of the corner each pixel is the same shade of green, output quality will be. But when we tried after mipmapping via the discrete Fourier except for one spot that is white. We inter- to make our filters very wide, we saw dis- transform. Note the unwanted bands of color pret this as a surface that is uniformly turbing ripples in our output images, so we (“ringing”). green everywhere except in that white settled on a filter that was not very wide spot. Ideally, all the math we perform on after all. ing with an infinitely wide sinc. Since we the texture should be consistent with this We suggested that these ripples were are perfectly enacting the rectangular pulse mental interpretation, so that the caused by oscillations in the frequency frequency response, we won’t have any processed image matches our expectations. response of the filter. But the output ripples problem with a finite filter causing frequen- Our mental model of the image surface is didn’t go away even as the filters became cy response ripples. Therefore our output a continuous function, but the texture map ridiculously large and their frequency will be perfect, or so we might expect. is not continuous. It exists only as a series responses approached the ideal. This sug- But our output isn’t perfect. The texture of samples, which is why Figure 3 is gests that additional causes lurk behind the map still has horrible ripples in it, as you drawn the way it is. scenes. As it happens, identifying the guilty can see in Figure 1. It looks much like the Let’s talk about sampling and reconstruc- phenomena is important for our under- output of last month’s Figure 4, which was tion. When we sample an arbitrary (not standing of much of computer graphics, not processed with a 64-sample Kaiser filter. band-limited) continuous function at n just mipmapping. Life isn’t simple, so there are multiple points, then those points are the only infor- causes for these ripples. We’ll look at the mation we have. In between, there could be Ditching Filters two most important causes. First, though, anything at all. So suppose we take a set of I’ll mention that this month’s sample code ide Kaiser filters are just approxima- (which can be downloaded from W tions to an infinitely wide sinc pulse, www.gdmag.com) implements the Fourier which we said would remove the high fre- transform method of mipmapping. On quencies from our image. Sinc does what some images, such as the human face in the we want because its Fourier transform is a Choir Communications billboard, the rectangular pulse; when applied to the results are better than the Kaiser filter. But Fourier transform of our signal, this pulse on some other images, the results are terri- multiplies the low frequencies by 1 and the ble. So what’s going on? high frequencies by 0. FIGURE 2 (left). A solid green texture containing In applications such as live audio process- Darn a single white spot (pixels depicted as big ing, you want to respond to a signal coming squares. FIGURE 3 (right). The same texture as over a wire with low latency; for these he biggest problem is that our concept Figure 2, drawn differently to emphasize the cases, the filtering form of antialiasing is T of a texture map is mathematically ill- point-sampled nature of the data. well suited. But because we are mipmapping as a batch process, we have the option of just performing the Fourier transform on JONATHAN BLOW I Jonathan Blow is a game technology con- our texture map, manually writing zeroes to sultant living in San Francisco. His e-mail is [email protected]. the high frequencies, and then transforming Game that influenced this article: Konami’s POLICE 911, arcade ver- it back. sion. That game rocks! Mathematically, this is the same as filter-

16 january 2002 | game developer samples and try to reconstruct a continuous shrink the texture to build mipmaps, we are graphics to have infinite resolution, so that function. We need to interpolate all the val- essentially zooming out our view of the we can draw surfaces at arbitrary scales and ues in between, but because we threw away continuous function. Visible ripples appear orientations with impunity. Unfortunately, most of the original data, no interpolation because the change of scale and the added we don’t yet have the means to do that, so algorithm will get us back to where we low-pass filtering disrupt the delicate coinci- we’re using this digitally sampled image started. We just have no idea what was sup- dence of our sample point positions. stuff instead. Antialiasing is an important posed to be between those samples. If we enlarge the source texture instead tool that helps us cope with the constraints Here’s where digital filtering comes in. of shrinking it, we will see the ripples at our imposed by digital sampling. But it also new sample points. As we move to higher causes some problems, so it should not be and higher resolutions, we converge toward visualized as a goal in itself. the continuous function in the limit. Antialiasing is usually touted as some- Last month I mentioned that Don thing that only fixes problems, that has no Mitchell, who has helped with this column downside. That’s because an awful lot of by discussing many of the ideas, has a filter people in computer graphics (and game pro- named after him. The Mitchell filter result- gramming) work from day to day using a FIGURE 4. A one-dimensional cross-section of ed from experiments about enlarging set of concepts that they don’t understand the texture from Figure 2, viewed from the side; images without making them look icky. It is down to the core. They’re just repeating the cyan curve shows the band-limited continu- intentionally imperfect from a signal recon- what they heard from someone else, and ous function represented by these samples. struction standpoint, because perfect recon- what we get is much like the game of tele- struction isn’t very much like what our phone, where we whisper in each other’s The Shannon Sampling Theorem is a cor- brains are thinking about. But the Mitchell ears, and after a few transmissions the mes- nerstone of information theory. It says that Filter doesn’t stray too far from the perfect “I biked with Pete on Friday” becomes if you restrict your input functions to con- upsampling either, because then nasty arti- “I’d like to eat a fried egg.” tain only a certain range of sinusoid fre- facts would appear. That’s not to say that anyone should be quencies (that is, the function is band-limit- In the same way that the Mitchell filter is blamed — it’s hard to understand all this ed), then you can reconstruct the continu- not a perfect resolution-increasing filter, our stuff. I didn’t understand it until writing this ous function exactly from the samples. mipmap filters, intended to decrease resolu- article. But there you have it: Antialiasing is That’s a powerful idea. tion, look best when they hover in a sweet not really what we want. We want elimina- But there’s a consequence to that idea. spot between badness and goodness. tion of objectionable artifacts, which is a When reconstructing, we’re not allowed to different thing. Antialiasing can help in that dictate what the function does in between Do We Really Want to regard, but it’s not a total solution, and it the sample points; we have to take what Antialias? can hurt too. we’re given. Because the continuous func- And that’s assuming that we actually tion must be band-limited, it will oscillate here is another important point here. know how to antialias — which we don’t. between samples in ways that we may not T The band-limited continuous-function Here’s why. expect. Figure 4 shows a one-dimensional representation, with all the unacceptable cross-section of our green-with-white-spot ripples, is a prerequisite to digital sampling. Questionable texture and the continuous function it rep- That is, if you walk up to a real-life green Interpretations resents when we use sinusoids as our recon- wall with a white spot on it, and you wish struction basis. Note that the continuous to create a texture map from it, then to pre- he Fourier transform is all about treat- version is not flat in the green area, as we vent aliasing you must low-pass the incom- T ing your data as a big vector and pro- would imagine it. Instead, it ripples. It can’t ing image before digitizing it. This filtering jecting it onto a set of (complex-valued) possibly be flat, because the band-limitation produces the unacceptable rippled function, sinusoids that serve as basis functions. Each constraint means that the function is unable and the ripples will show up in your sam- sinusoid is of a different frequency. The to ease down to a slope of . ples. Thus, digital cameras don’t try to length of the vector in the direction of each As far as the math we are using is con- antialias this way, and they don’t collect basis function tells us something about the cerned, here’s what happened: To generate point samples to use as the photographed frequency content of the signal for that our texture, we started with some band-lim- image. If we then treat the image as a col- given frequency. ited function with ripples all over the place, lection of band-limited point samples, a But what it tells us is not the actual fre- but when we sampled it, our sample points practice that seems to be in vogue, then we quency content. If you have a single cosine just happened to hit the right spots on the introduce ripples that weren’t there in the wave of the same frequency as a basis func- ripples to generate constant intensity values. natural lightfield. tion and you push it through the Fourier Because the samples represent the entire Antialiasing causes the ripples. We don’t transform, you’ll get what you’d expect: a continuous function, the ripples are still want the ripples. Therefore, antialiasing is single spike in the output at the appropri- there, and our signal processing operations not really what we want. ate frequency. But if that cosine wave has a will reproduce them faithfully. When we What we actually want is for all of our frequency somewhere in between the basis

www.gdmag.com 17 INNER PRODUCT

= ∑ fsi s i

where fi are the filter coefficients and s is the sample value. This implies = ∑ fi 1 i Thus, the sum of the filter’s coefficients is 1. We have a problem, though. We want the same number of photons per unit area to shoot out of the user’s monitor, no mat- ter which mipmap level we’re displaying. But that doesn’t happen, even though our FIGURE 5 (top left). A low-frequency cosine wave (green) that could be sampled easily at the inter- filter’s coefficients sum to 1. This is vals marked in white. FIGURE 6 (top right). The magnitude of the frequency content of Figure 5 because we tend to do our image process- (graphed in yellow), as reported by the Fourier transform. It is the sum of two sinc pulses. The red ing in a color space ramped by the moni- step function depicts the cutoff pulse of an ideal low-pass filter. FIGURE 7 (bottom left). A high-con- tor’s gamma, which messes up the energy trast texture at full resolution. FIGURE 8 (bottom right). The high-contrast texture reduced by three conservation properties. mipmap levels (box filter). The text has become somewhat dim, and the outlining rectangle has Figures 7 and 8 demonstrate this. Figure become extremely dim. This is energy loss due to the gamma ramp. 7 is a high-contrast texture at full resolu- tion. Figure 8 is a lower-resolution functions, you don’t get a spike anymore. Moving On mipmap constructed in the naive way; the You get a smear of frequencies across the areas containing fine features have gotten entire spectrum. Figures 5 and 6 illustrate e’ve looked at some difficult issues significantly dimmer. this. The peak of the Fourier-transformed W underlying not only mipmapping Here’s a quick gamma recap: Unless we data is in the right place, but what is going but many other areas of computer graphics do weird tweaking with our graphics on with all that other stuff? as well (pixels on the screen are, after all, card’s color lookup-tables, the amount of Even though each Fourier basis function samples). It’s important for engine pro- light coming out of a CRT is not propor- consists of a single frequency, in the end grammers to understand these issues. But tional to the frame buffer value p. It is they’re still just basis functions. If you as of today there’s no magic bullet for proportional to psγ, where sγ (gamma) is a ascribe any interpretation to the transformed them. I can’t just give you code that magi- device-dependent value typically above 2. data, aside from “the inner product of my cally shrinks your textures while simulta- Our eyes interpret light energy logarithmi- input data with each basis function,” then neously preventing aliasing, bluring, and you do so at your own risk. “Frequency rippling. Maybe in the future we’ll have a FIGURE 9A (top). A content of the signal” is just an inter- new paradigm to help sort out these prob- highway shield pretation, and it’s a slightly misleading one. lems. Maybe, if we’re vigilant and our aim mipmapped using a When we low-pass filter in order to is true, the community of sci- typical game’s box fil- antialias, we are acting on this misleading entists will develop the new concepts and ter. FIGURE 9B (cen- interpretation. Consider that the cosine in techniques. Who can say? ter). A Kaiser filter Figure 5 could be downsampled into a But this is an action-oriented column, so does a better job of mipmap just fine, as it stands. But when I’m obliged to provide some news you can preserving the shapes we filter it, we cut off all the high frequen- use today. The good news is that there’s of the numbers and cies to the right of the red line in Figure 6. something we can do, having nothing to the sign border. These frequencies aren’t really there; when do with choice of filter, that improves the FIGURE 9C (bottom). we subtract them from the cosine wave, quality of our mipmaps. Moving the Kaiser fil- the shape changes. We were shooting at tering into light-linear ghosts, so we hit ourselves in the foot. Conservation of Energy space, we maintain This is important: some kind of imaginary the contrast between true antialiasing would have left the cosine n important goal of mipmap filters is the numbers and the unscathed; but all we know is how to A that they don’t add or subtract energy background, and we eliminate aliasing as the Fourier transform from an image; mipmap levels of a single preserve the white sees it through its own peculiar tunnel texture should all be equally bright. This is border around the . This causes problems. equivalent to saying that as you sweep a fil- edge of the shield. If we can’t even antialias a dang cosine ter across a given sample, the sum of all wave without messing it up, then what can that sample’s contributions does not exceed we antialias? the sample’s original magnitude. Or:

18 january 2002 | game developer cally, so this exponential outpouring of FOR MORE INFORMATION energy looks somewhat linear by the time Blinn, Jim. Jim Blinn’s Corner: Dirty Pixels. Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. it gets to our brains. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We store all our texture maps in a non- Hamming, R.W. Digital Filters. Dover Publica- linear way — they expect the CRT to The “Phoenix 1 Mile” texture in Figure 4 is by tions, 1998. exponentiate them in order to look right. Dethtex, see http://users.nac.net/schwenz. Poynton, Charles. Digital Video and HDTV This serves as a compression mechanism. Thanks to Don Mitchell, Sean Barrett, and Jay Algorithms and Interfaces. Morgan We would need more than 8 bits per chan- Stelly for fruitful discussion. Kaufmann, 2001. nel if each channel held values proportion- al to light energy. Suppose we pass a simple box filter, coefficients [.5, .5], across a sample of magnitude s. We get 2 contributions to the image, of magnitude .5s and .5s. That adds up to s again — so far so good. Now the CRT raises these values to the power gamma. Now we have two adja- cent pixels of magnitude (.5γ sγ). For sim- plicity, suppose gamma is 2. Then the total amount of light energy is (.25 s2+ .25 s2 = .5s2) . . . but this is only half as bright as it should be (the unfiltered pixel would have brightness s2). Our image got dimmer. We can fix this by filtering in a space where pixel values are proportional to light energy. We convert our texture into this space by raising each pixel to the power gamma. Then we pass our filter over the texture, ensuring conservation of energy. We then raise each pixel to the 1/γ to get back to the ramped space so we can write the texture into the frame buffer. (The CRT will raise each pixel to the gamma again during output.) It would be cleaner to set up the frame buffer so that all values stored in it are linear with light energy; the RAMDAC would perform any necessary exponentia- tion. High-end film and scientific render- ing all happens in linear-light; game ren- dering will switch to this paradigm soon. When the frame buffer is linear-light, you can correctly add radiance to a surface just by adding pixel values in the frame buffer. (Right now, when we shine multi- ple lights on a surface, we just add the values together, but the gamma ramp makes that wrong. This is one reason why lighting in PC games is dull and limp.) This month’s sample code implements mipmapping in linear-light space, and you can see the results on a game texture in Figure 9. q

www.gdmag.com 19 ARTIST’S VIEW hayden duvall

Building the Future, Part 1: Architecture

hy is it that we play environment that successfully gives players To the DeLorean, videogames? Is it to the feeling that they are in the future, with Marty… learn something specific reference to the architecture. about ourselves as aving established that architecture human beings? Is it Buildings Are Not Fun Hwithin a game is important, and that toW hone our social skills and make us more this is particularly the case when designing attractive to the opposite sex? Do video- hat makes a game’s visuals excit- the future, we now need to decide what games strengthen the fabric of society? Do Wing? Insane particle effects when future we are going to be dealing with. we find answers to life’s most profound you fire your cannon? Exquisitely Perhaps the first and most obvious ques- questions when we plug in our consoles detailed zombies tripping over their own tion is how far into the future we’re going. and fire up our joypads? Or is it just enter- intestines? Beautifully animated female Near-future games, like near-future films, tainment? Call me shallow if you like, but ninjas with real-time physics in all the are based in a world that we know and the game industry is, by its very definition, right places? The answer to all of these recognize, albeit with a few, often superfi- in the business of entertaining. questions is, of course, yes, but as sexy as cial, changes. Travel farther into the future O.K., some games come along that give the central characters and their effects may and the restrictions of our current sur- us insight into the microeconomics be, without a high-quality environment to roundings begin to evaporate. Extrapola- involved in running a chain of pizza give the game its context and location, the tion gives way to hypothesis and the possi- restaurants or simulate what it’s like pilot- atmosphere and overall feel of the game bilities become more varied. ing an Apache helicopter. But we still play will suffer. Even when avoiding extremes like the them for fun. Games that attempt to be Architecture is an indication of the time diaper-wearing future world of Sean about real life, like their TV counterparts, period in which the game is set, but more Connery’s Zardoz or that of H. G. Wells’ run the risk of becoming tedious, and once than that, it can be both a backdrop and hairy, subterranean Morlocks in The Time you remove the element of voyeurism the stage on which the action takes place. Machine, the most common future arche- (which is unlikely to play a large part in a As game environments become increasing- types are that of utopian and dystopian game, anyway), you can easily be left with ly interactive, and as we are constantly civilizations (Figure 1). These reflect the nothing more than the mundane. Which is, being allowed to use greater detail as well positive and negative possibilities we imag- of course, no fun at all. as a wider variety of visual tricks in our ine as potential futures, and are polar With this in mind, it’s easy to see why worlds, creating the architecture, exteriors opposites of what will, for us, likely turn such a large percentage of games are set in and interiors, is no longer the thankless out to be a combination of both. a fantasy world that doesn’t actually exist. task it once was. The days when the lowli- The utopian ideal often describes a place The ability to design a game that takes est of all art monkeys was assigned the where technology has been used to produce players beyond the things they can experi- job of making “some buildings for the a world of beauty, peace, equality, and more ence in their real lives, as well as the cre- background” are long gone, and the quali- often than not, a whole lot of white molded ative freedom that this affords, is hard for ty of our architecture is now a strong con- plastic. In the utopian future, the designer is game developers to resist. tributor to a game’s visual impact. concerned primarily with aesthetics, and As with film, the choice of fantasy set- tings often splits broadly into either a sword-and-sorcery troll-bashing dragon HAYDEN DUVALL I Hayden started work in 1987, creating air- fest, with pointy weapons and more than brushed artwork for the games industry. Over the next eight years, its fair share of beards, or the sci-fi staple Hayden continued as a freelance artist and lectured in psychology at that is the world of the future. Perth College in Scotland. Hayden now lives in Bristol, England, In this column, I will take the second of with his wife, Leah, and their four children, where he is lead artist these and look at some ways in which we, at Confounding Factor. as artists and designers, can put together an

20 january 2002 | game developer these within the framework of our engine necessary. This combination of the natural and platform limitations. and the manufactured can provide some When looking at large-scale city build- unique surface qualities (Figure 2). ings, the move from brick to concrete and Once we begin to look toward a dirtier then toward shiny surfaces is clearly visi- future, the kind of surfaces we are dealing ble. Highly reflective materials became with become more recognizable to us. It’s associated with high-tech, and as the nigh on impossible to talk about a dystopi- 1970s saw the gratuitous proliferation of an future city without reference to Blade mirrored sunglasses, so the 1980s began Runner (see, I’ve already done it twice). in earnest to produce huge, monolithic But without lapsing into spasms of wor- mirrors at the centers of our largest cities. ship at the alter of Syd Mead, his vision of The portrayal of future cities of chrome a future city has had a vast impact on visu- and glass has long been a science fiction al representations of our future in films staple, but besides being a slightly dated and games alike. FIGURE 1A (left). Utopia. FIGURE 1B (right). approach, real-time environment mapping Using the dirtiest, most unkempt pieces Dystopia. and refraction within a world that is of a contemporary city as a starting point, packed with shiny, semitransparent sur- and extrapolating out to a seething mass architecture becomes less about function faces will have any programmer bleeding of giant, twisted structures, decaying, part and more about form. Advances in science from his or her ears in no time at all. derelict, the surfaces we begin to encounter have allowed the city of the future to Despite huge advances of late in areas would be at home in an abandoned chemi- become a clean, bright, happy place, where such as hardware transformation and cal plant. Taking materials and dirtying the harmony of human achievement is lighting, reflective surfaces on a large scale them down is certainly part of the way reflected in the surroundings. within a game are still not practical. toward the look we’re after, but another Dystopia, however, is a little bit darker In a similar vein, one indication that we important element is that of making the and a whole lot dirtier. Rutger Hauer may are indeed dealing with the architecture of underlying technology visible. have seen it as an ideal holiday destina- the future is the presence of exotic or out- In a dystopian future, the aesthetics of tion in Blade Runner, but the dystopian of-the-ordinary materials. Examples of this design are crushed under the weight of city of the future takes the worst of soci- have been evident for some time in preren- shoddy workmanship and dereliction. ety’s ills and straps on decades of indus- dered backgrounds or FMV sequences, and Instead of a single, coherent whole, in trial madness. with the graphical grunt behind today’s which all elements are combined in har- Both versions of the future present the gaming platforms, the game artist can now mony, things are grafted together, creating game artist with a variety of challenges. achieve some of these effects in real time, As always, the easiest environment to without the hardware they’re working deal with in a game is a small, interior with bursting into flames under the strain. space. Once we venture outside, things Taking materials out of context and tend to get larger, and the areas that we building with them can be used to suggest need to fill with meaningful visuals get a futuristic world, and using the detail of larger also. Whether organic or man- organic surfaces such as tree bark or coral made, large spaces are both labor inten- can be a good starting point. Combining sive and resource hungry, and solutions these kinds of natural materials with some involving complex systems of LOD, tex- element of human design can produce FIGURE 2A (left). Utopian texture 1. FIGURE 2B ture streaming, and clever layout can all interesting results. In graphics, the mathe- (right). Utopian texture 2. help ease the pain. matical precision of computer-generated Although our game worlds often com- features and geometry is usually a problem ugly hybrids. What are usually hidden bine elements of both utopian and dystopi- that detracts from the realism of a scene. workings break through to the surface, an futures, as far as the creation process Our eyes are extremely sensitive to this with pipes, ducts, and wiring all becoming for the game artist goes, it’s useful to break kind of perfection, as the real world is gen- exposed (Figure 3). Architect Renzo Piano it down into the three areas of surface, erally full of flaws and shapes that are may have won huge acclaim for designing structure, and scale. much less exact. We can, however, use this the Pompidou Center in much the same regularity and order to place features with- way, but combine this externalization with Surface: Shiny Happy in an organic texture to show that it is dilapidation and a good coating of dirt, People and Urban Decay being manipulated by humans and used as and the result is somewhat less attractive. a material for construction. When dealing with the surface (in other n this context, surface refers to the The simple addition of fabrication joins, words, textures), it is often useful to add I materials that we are attempting to por- rivets, bevels, and the like can be all that’s mechanical detailing, or to expose circuit- tray, their properties, and how we convey needed to give a surface the extra detail ry. High-magnification images of micro-

www.gdmag.com 21 ARTIST’S VIEW

industrial design. In architecture, especially runs everything from the police to the when dealing with large structures, the burger-matic fast food vending machines restraints are somewhat more stringent is not that hard to imagine (I think we can than when dealing with a vacuum cleaner, already name a few contenders), and cities for example. But as we probe the future of the future like to base these corporate for possibilities, one potential direction to monsters in buildings scaled to reflect explore is a move toward organic forms. their immensity. A simple indicator that the player is Specifically, the height of a structure has roaming around in the future is the pres- always shown man’s defiance of natural ence of structures that would not be possi- laws and his ever-growing command of the ble to build in the present (Figure 4). It is elements. In the future, we can theorize that FIGURE 3A (left). Dystopian texture 1. FIGURE also vital to remember that any structures our architecture will doubtless take advan- 3B (right). Dystopian texture 2. must function within the context of the tage of incredible scientific breakthroughs, game in which they exist. Gameplay consid- and the scale of our largest buildings will processors can be extremely useful as a increase accordingly (Figure 5). starting point for adding the precision- When building a game environment, an machined look to a surface. “Greeble” overindulgence in large-scale architecture plug-ins are also useful if you wish to ren- can, however, be counterproductive. Unlike der out an image to use in texture genera- the real world, our perception of scale with- tion, as these can take most of the work in a game is almost completely relative, and out of generating a large amount of if too much of a character’s environment is detailed geometry. built on a massively large scale, we run the One additional aspect not to be over- risk of creating the impression that it is looked when considering surfaces in a actually the character that is in miniature. game is the way in which they are encoun- tered by the player. Detail in a texture is, Constructing the Future of course, wasted if the player is never FIGURE 4A (left). TWA inside. FIGURE 4B (right). going to be near enough to appreciate it, TWA outside. uccessfully creating a game world set in especially when dealing with potentially Sthe future obviously depends on a large-scale objects such as buildings. As erations and level design have to take prece- whole range of contributing factors. Archi- always, a sensible allocation of resources dence over pure aesthetics, and successfully tecture is certainly one element that we, as will achieve the best results. combining the functional with the beautiful artists, can use to locate the player in the is the ideal. desired time period and create an atmos- Structure: The Shape of phere that enhances the experience. There Things to Come Scale: How Big Is Yours? is, of course, no correct way to

uildings have historically been fairly ne common view of the future city is Bsquare. Maximizing usable space, and Othat it will somehow have to accom- minimizing the complexity of the physics modate vast numbers of people, whether for involved has generally led to boxlike struc- work or simply as a place to live. This idea tures. Even when departing from a cuboid, of expansion in all directions is already in straight lines remain an important feature. evidence in places such as Tokyo, where Seeing this as somewhat of a challenge, severe limitations of available land have architects of recent times have availed them- caused the city to expand vertically and also selves of vastly improved technology, as to compact more into less space. FIGURE 5. Megastructure. well as huge advances in the understanding This high-density living has, on occasion, of the science involved in construction, to been used to show that the post-apocalyptic the buildings of the future, as every game create buildings that are anything but angu- landscape is no longer inhabitable (Mega has its own particular demands and every lar. Some err on the side of crazy (the City One in Judge Dredd for example), but world we build can be unique. Guggenhiem Museum in Spain, for exam- it can also simply be a caricatured version Despite this array of possibilities, we ple). The trend, however, has been to chal- of the overcrowding seen today in most of have the present to use as a starting point, lenge convention, and in the city of the the world’s major cities. Whatever the and there is a wealth of visionary architects future, we are free to break all the rules. underlying rationale, architectural scale is a whose work already challenges convention The battle of the curve, struggling to useful component of the future landscape. and can give us a glimpse of what may be overcome its idiot cousin, the straight line, The well-worn science-fiction idea of to come. Our task is to pin it down and has featured throughout most areas of the huge, all-powerful corporation that make it work. q

22 january 2002 | game developer FRONT LINE AWARDS

t gives me great pleasure to introduce Game Developer’s As always, Game Developer magazine owes a huge debt of grati- 2001 Front Line Awards. In this, our fourth annual tude to our Front Line Award judges. Our judges this year threw awards program, we’ve found that the best and brightest themselves into this project with aplomb, enduring a rigorous peri- of the game industry’s development tools mirror the evo- od of hands-on evaluation and open debate. Furthermore, since our lution of the game industry itself. This year’s crop of judges were drawn from the ranks of working game developers, I’m FrontI Line Award honorees tends to reflect efforts to formalize confident that their concerns and final choices are relevant to the and codify, and in a way professionalize and legitimize, the prac- readers of this magazine. So without further ado, I would like to tice of game development. recognize the contributions of our 2001 Front Line Award judges. Indeed, the common thread that connects most of our winners Programming: Independent developer Scott Bilas, Chris Corry of is their utility in creating and enforcing standards, best practices, LucasArts, Mark DeLoura of Sony Computer Entertainment reusability, version control, and extensibility, all hallmarks of tra- America (and formerly of Game Developer magazine), Herb ditional, so-called corporate software development. Our industry Marselas and Matt Pritchard of Ensemble Studios, and Michael has arrived in the mainstream, ladies and gentlemen, and the Saladino of Presto Studios. advent of products such as Alienbrain, Quantify, and the GeForce Art: Hayden Duvall of Confounding Factor, Spencer Lindsay of 3 are plain evidence of this professional maturation. Etribe Studio, and Todd Siechen of RealEyz Imaging.

24 january 2002 | game developer HALL OF FAME AWARD

3DFX VOODOO CARD 3Dfx

he Front Line Hall of Fame is for products that have T made a lasting impact on the direction of game development. All Front Line judges from all categories debate the significance of various historic development tools until they final agree on a single inductee. The original Voodoo card, along with its killer app, GLQuake, caused game developers everywhere to stop in our collective tracks. Before Voodoo’s arrival on the scene, we had never seen a video card targeted at the end user that elevated the performance of our games to some- thing that was clearly more than the sum of the CPU, clock speed, and installed memory. So convincing was Voodoo that we added a new variable to the equations that made up our games: The Hardware 3D Accelerator. Illustration by Peter Ferguson by Peter Illustration And Glide, 3Dfx’s 3D API, ripped the covers open on this wonderful new device and laid its inner workings open for us to use and manipulate with a minimum of interfer- Audio: Chuck Carr of Sony Computer Entertainment America, ence. And though there had always been some of us who Tom Hays of Novalogic, Aaron Marks of On Your Mark had used 3D in our games, the presence of the Voodoo Music, Robb Mills of Stormfront Studios, independent audio accelerator and the rewards that it gave was what push so developer Gene Porfido, and Rob Ross of Sound Endeavours. many of us who had never before considered 3D to start Production: John Williamson of Zombie, Troy Dunniway of the journey. For the next few years, a lifetime in the com- Microsoft, and Alex Dunne of Gamasutra.com (formerly of puter industry, 3Dfx evolved the Voodoo chip and stayed Game Developer and, in fact, the founder of the Front Line on top of the consumer 3D industry. Awards). Though eventually overtaken by its competitors, Hardware: The hardware category was open to balloting by all Voodoo’s impact was enough to change the very shape of our judges in all categories, and the results reflect the dis- and direction of mainstream game development. And parate roles and opinions of our judges. that is perhaps how we will remember it in the future: as Finally, it seems appropriate to thank you, our readers, first a signpost on our journey, marking the spot where the for your help in nominating an initial list of over 90 remark- heart of PC gaming changed direction from 2D to 3D. able tools, and second for your continued interest in the Front —Matt Pritchard Line Awards and in Game Developer magazine. 3Dfx • www.3dfx.com —Tor Berg www.gdmag.com 25 FRONT LINE AWARDS

PROGRAMMING

PERFORCE 2001.1 ARAXIS MERGE 2001 v6.0 FOR WINDOWS Perforce Software Araxis

early all game companies are using version-control raxis Merge is a tool that you won’t think you need. Use N systems for code, and many are using such systems for A it once, however, and you’ll question how you ever got game assets, which seem to grow exponentially in size each any work done without it. Merge is hands down the most fully year. Perforce easily handles the huge files that are becom- featured, easy to use, graphically intuitive file and directory dif- ing common in today’s production environments. It uses a ferencing/merging utility available. Merge is what you get when client-server model built on top of TCP/IP, making syncs to you take a tool to its extreme, polish it to a high shine, and large databases extremely fast. A defining feature of then add a few more features for good measure. Its differenc- Perforce is its model for version control, the change list, ing/merging interface is fast and easy, and is friendly to both which is a logical grouping of files that are changed for the mouse and keyboard users. Among its notable features are same purpose. Change lists are submitted to the database unlimited undo, in-place editing, and highlighting of changes automatically, receive the same comment, and have one within lines. For those times when you know some differences entry in the history listing. This can be a powerful tool for are safe, Merge provides the ability to ignore differences via a organizing and tracking game development. Pending change regular expression match. Its default GUI is two-way, but a lists are also viewable by the entire team, so it’s easy to see unique three-way option enables two versions to be merged into what teammates are working on. Perforce supports integra- a third. This feature is particularly useful for engine licensees tion with a variety of popular programming tools, and also needing to merge the latest code drop against their own local comes with C++ and Perl APIs to enable automation or changes, as well as simultaneously differencing with the previ- integration with custom tools. Ready to switch over right ous code drop. Araxis Merge is truly one of this year’s most now? Perforce even has a tool to convert SourceSafe, RCS, innovative and useful programming products. CVS, and ClearCase databases. —Scott Bilas —Scott Bilas Araxis • www.araxis.com Perforce Software • www.perforce.com

FINALISTS Game Programming Gems 2 by Mark DeLoura – Charles River Media; Perforce 2001.1 – Perforce Software; Visual Assist – Whole Tomato Software, Merge 2001 v6 – Araxis; Vtune Performance Analyzer 5 – Intel; Mathcad 2001 – Mathcad; 3D Game Engine Design; A Practical Approach

26 january 2002 | game developer PRODUCTION

RATIONAL QUANTIFY v2001A ALIENBRAIN 5 Rational Software NXN Software

ational Quantify is a first-rate call graph profiler that ith Alienbrain, NXN Software has created an entire- R should be in every programmer’s toolbox. What real- W ly new class of development tool. While past efforts ly sets it apart from other profilers is its combination of to implement various flavors of asset management systems in power and simplicity in providing many angles of attack game development have resulted in clever but quaint collec- to optimizing CPU usage. Any programmer can pick up tions of scripts and other homegrown tools, NXN’s Alienbrain Quantify, do a few profile runs, and quickly find out is an extremely powerful version-control system straight out of where the game is slow and how to speed it up. Instru- the box, and only gets better as users uncover its extensibility menting an executable is hands-free, fairly speedy, and is and ease of customization. (See page 8 of this issue for a more done at the binary level, so there’s no need to recompile. detailed review of Alienbrain by FLA judge Chris Corry.) For analysis, Quantify provides four separate views into NXN built Alienbrain to handle file types commonly the profile databases — an innovative pie-chart-style view, associated with interactive software development. The inter- a global table view, a call graph, and the inevitable source face is a wonder of GUI design, presenting a wealth of code view, complete with per-line profile stats. Navigating information about a file’s status and history in a clear and these views is simple and fast, which is vital to make sense well-organized manner. Alienbrain’s functionality is well- of the millions of function calls that happen in just a few integrated with many standard game development tools, seconds of game execution. Multiple sessions can be such as 3DS Max, Photoshop, and Maya. And if Alienbrain loaded at once, and merged and differenced to provide doesn’t already do what you want it to do, NXN’s extreme- new databases for further analysis. Quantify also exports ly eager support team will fix it so that it does. several APIs, including one that lets the game control sam- Unfortunately, Alienbrain remains really pricey. With a pling sessions, which can be used to enable fully automat- product so heavily dependent on its human (and expensive) ed profiling. Few tools provide this much bang for the component, NXN must charge its customers a relatively high buck, and in such a polished, friendly package. licensing fee. —Scott Bilas This expense is going to stand in the way of smaller stu- dios purchasing Alienbrain, which is a shame, because NXN Rational Software • www.rational.com has done an admirable job of trying to fill a gaping hole in game development production needs. —Tor Berg NXN Software • www.nxn-software.com

FINALISTS Xbox Development Kit – Microsoft; Codewright 6.6 – Starbase; Alienbrain – NXN; Project 2000 – Microsoft; ICQ 2000b – ICQ by David Eberly – Morgan Kaufmann; Quantify 2001– Rational

www.gdmag.com 27 FRONT LINE AWARDS

ART

MAYA 4 3DS MAX 4.2 Alias|Wavefront Discreet

aya is something of a small miracle in 3D produc- his latest incarnation of Discreet’s 3DS Max is a prod- M tion. It remains true to its PowerAnimator heritage T uct that really shows its maturity. In addition to a com- and really shines by bringing the tools to a polished and pletely redesigned IK and bones toolset, the very Maya- usable state for customization in the pipeline. The way esque quad-view toolbar is exceptionally useful when one is Maya can be molded to fit any sort of environment, user, deep in a modeling or animation task. The interface is com- or task is ironically synonymous with its ability to allow pletely redefinable. Users can modify the positioning, col- the artists and programmers to craft fantastic imagery in ors, and keystrokes of the tool bars with MaxScript and short periods of time with minimal obstacles beyond their Visual MaxScript. own imaginations. Maya often leaves you with a feeling of Although in the past, 3DS Max has had a bad rap as a amazement at its ability to work in the way that you had modeling package, the extensibility of the standard polygo- always wished that a piece of software would work. There nal modeling tools via plug-ins and scripting has made this is no doubt that with future versions of Maya, we can version a really great modeler. The subdivision surfaces expect further refinement of key areas such as subdivision (NURMS) are logical and easy to work with, and Patch Modeling is a breeze. The NURBS modeling portion of surfaces and rendering. Max 4 is still not up to the level of Maya or Rhino, but it Undoubtedly, May has a steep learning curve, but there proves to be a very reliable modeler in its own right. is a very big payoff once that learning curve has been tack- With the release of Character Studio 3.0 and the addition led. Molding Maya’s interface to your own personal style of many standard interactive controls such as the Wire will make you soon almost forget about the interface alto- Editor and manipulators, character animation is easier than gether and pay more attention to the craft itself. ever. —Todd Siechen I’ve been using Max since it was 3D Studio DOS beta 1.0, and this version is by far the best one yet. Alias|Wavefront • www.aliaswavefront.com —Spencer Lindsay Discreet • www.discreet.com

FINALISTS Maya 4 - Alias|Wavefront; Bones Pro 3 – Digimation; FaceGen – Digimation; 3DS Max 4 – Discreet; Deep Paint 3D – Right Hemisphere; Reactor – Discreet; Zbrush 1.23 – Pixologic; Vroom for Maya – Testarossa

28 january 2002 | game developer AUDIO

DEEP PAINT 3D CHANNELSTRIP Right Hemisphere Metric Halo

xcellent integration with Photoshop plug-ins allows hannelStrip from Metric Halo is a Mac OS plug-in E digital artists to benefit from Deep Paint 3D’s extensive C for MAS (MOTU Audio System, the format for customizable set of painting tools in conjunction with those Digital Performer) and Pro Tools that brings the look, they are most likely familiar with already. Effects available feel, and sound of a high-end digital console to the com- in the 2.5D mode give artists the ability to give work a puter. It includes a gate, compressor, and six-band fully false depth, allowing the easy creation an image with a configurable EQ, along with animated visual graphs of hand-painted look (compatibility with Wacom Intuos each parameter (just like the big boys). tablets makes this a useful function). Not only is ChannelStrip’s design and concept right on In 3D mode, Deep Paint 3D works seamlessly with 3DS the money, the audio quality is exceptional. ChannelStrip’s Max, Maya, and Softimage, allowing models to be paint- EQ has been able to capture that sound for which many of ed directly, with control of color, bump, opacity, shine, the classic recording consoles and elite outboard boxes (all and glow. hardware) are famous. The high-end EQ is notably as clean Documentation and online tutorials provide an excel- and clear as you could imagine, thanks to 64-bit processing, lent introduction to the package, and a friendly interface and adds an open air to music and voice-overs that’s magic. allows the artist good access to Deep Paint 3D’s powerful The EQ’s ability to morph from a shelf or wideband features. through the most intricately accurate notch is also impres- Although many of Deep Paint 3D’s tools are not neces- sive. On vocals and delicate instruments such as acoustic sarily going to be useful to the average game artist, this guitar or violin, the quality truly shines through. Add the powerful program can provide the user with more control noise gate and compressor and you’d think you just over their 2D work, as well as some additional help when dropped an SSL into your Mac. working in 3D. To top it off, company support is unrivaled in attention —Hayden Duvall to user satisfaction. The bottom line is that Metric Halo simply got it right all the way around with ChannelStrip. Right Hemisphere • www.us.righthemisphere.com It has excellent sound, a great price, and the people to back it up. I don’t record or mix anything without it. —Gene Porfido Metric Halo • www.mhlabs.com

FINALISTS ChannelStrip – Metric Halo; SpectraFoo – Metric Halo; C4 Multiband Parametric Processor Native – Waves; SoundMax with SPX – Analog Devices/Staccato; GigaStudio – Nemesys

www.gdmag.com 29 FRONT LINE AWARDS

HARDWARE

GEFORCE 3 TITANIUM POWERBOOK G4 Nvidia Apple

ntil this year, 3D hardware acceleration had seen little pple’s latest Powerbook brings the multimedia studio U improvement in the functionality of chips since the A on the road in style. Powered by the G4 PowerPC original 3Dfx Voodoo. Improvements to triangle setup and chip with Altivec at speeds up to 667MHz, the Titanium fill rates were increasing the speed of the triangle engines, but has a beautiful 15.2-inch display, DVD-ROM drive, Mac specific feature innovations were at a standstill. Eventually, all OS 9 and X, and it’s all squeezed into a 1-inch thick, 5.3- chips handled bilinear filtering, mipmapping, and every blend pound titanium shell. Priced between $2,199 to $3,299 for mode that Direct3D offered. This stagnation was causing the top-of-the-line system, the Titanium Powerbook is most 3D games to appear the same. Then Nvidia introduced truly a sight to hold and behold. the GeForce 3 and changed the progress of 3D hardware. The Titanium Powerbook fits in perfectly for the multi- The GeForce 3’s programmable vertex and pixel process- media developer. Audio and graphics applications that take ing units finally gave game programmers the true flexibility advantage of the G4’s Altivec Velocity Engine are opening to create a unique vision. Nvidia’s first demos showed real- doors for artists and musicians that had been closed tightly time shadows, cartoon shading, hardware-accelerated mesh without it. Photoshop and some of its plug-ins move at skinning, volumetric fur . . . and this was just the beginning. burning speeds. A new plug-in for Mark of the Unicorn’s The GeForce 3 has also added speed to triangle setup and Digital Performer from Audio Ease even gives the user the pixel fill rates that is truly impressive. ability to sample and save different architectural spaces to However, creating a jump in technology was not enough process audio through as authentic reverbs. And there’s for Nvidia. The company also created an SDK with techni- more to come. cal support that was unmatched. Nvidia exposed its chip’s Apple has created the perfect portable studio with the new functionality through the Direct3D and OpenGL APIs Titanium Powerbook. The combination of speed, size, and instead of trying to enforce a new standard. Nvidia’s efforts software, along with the Mac OS’s legendary productivity, to instruct programmers in the correct ways to use its chip is why Apple’s latest Powerbook design deserves to be have been outstanding. The Nvidia GeForce 3 is a leap for- honored. ward in technology and support, making it an amazing tool —Gene Porfido for game programmers. Apple • www.apple.com —Michael Saladino Nvidia • www.nvidia.com

FINALISTS Titanium Powerbook G4 – Apple; ATI Radeon – ATI; GeForce 3 – Nvidia; DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive – Pioneer; Vaio Superslim Notebook – Sony

30 january 2002 | game developer CONTENT PRODUCTION charles london

ith project budgets ing the actual production of much of the Managing in the multiple mil- sprite art assets for these objects out of lions of dollars and house. New Pencil has been the studio virtually no margin charged with delivering on EA’s demanding Large-Scale for error, more and vision for these critical assets, from provid- moreW development teams are under ing auxiliary production capacity on the tremendous pressure to come out on top of original version of to the creation Game Content the entertainment software market’s cut- of most of the sprite assets on later expan- throat competition. No team manager sion packs, such as the recently released wants to contemplate dropping the ball THE SIMS: HOT DATE. Production when creating the vivid graphics necessary This article highlights the critical issues to help make a game a success. Electronic that govern the high-volume asset produc- Arts’ THE SIMS franchise is an excellent tion needed for today’s most demanding example of this pressurized situation. With games and some of the techniques upon record-breaking sales on its initial release which New Pencil has relied to create the of THE SIMS, as well as the subsequent suc- artwork for the Sims franchise. These prin- cesses of the expansion packs THE SIMS: ciples were developed at New Pencil and at LIVIN’ LARGE and THE SIMS: HOUSE PARTY, over the long association between EA had a lot riding on the success of its the two studios, and New Pencil has found content generation strategies. these techniques to be fundamentally good CHARLES LONDON | Charles has Much of THE SIMS’ appeal is due to the practices. Although New Pencil uses these worked in the game industry for 10 years very same element of the game that pres- principles to provide high-volume content and is currently the executive in charge of ents one of EA’s strategic production chal- outsourcing services, they can be employed production at New Pencil Inc., which provides lenges: the sheer number of highly detailed, by any internal development team with outsourced game art content for all platforms. technically complex objects that populate excellent results. If you are in the position Previously, Charles spent four years at Elec- its game world and provide interaction for of managing this kind of production tronic Arts/Maxis as the art director for THE the Sims, the little creatures that are at the capacity, there are some things you are SIMS franchise, developing the game’s look and core of this unique world. Designing, speci- going to need to consider. feel and leading the content creation team. He fying, engineering, and troubleshooting As New Pencil developed its systems over lives in San Francisco with his wife, Lori these objects is no small amount of work; repeated contracts with Maxis, four strate- Orson, and his goldfish, Mr. Fish. EA counts on balancing that effort by send- gic targets emerged that helped us generate

32 january 2002 | game developer a large body of game content on time and you to reserve buffer time for extra polish, SHOWN FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: on budget while still holding quality as the integrate new techniques, and create tai- uppermost value: time estimation and cost lored resource plans to handle special con- Yuan Zhang 3D artist modeling, style matching and cross-team cerns in the production without having to Josh Nadelberg 3D artist consistency, asset staging, and project track- rush too fast or cut too many corners on Greg Faillace creative director ing and team management. the look of any asset. Michael Murguia CEO These four fundamentals are corner- Once the time estimates are in place, it Adam Murguia art director stones of a solid production foundation. is then possible to institute good cost Disco Dog traditional artist Omit one, and your production may col- models. A solid cost model allows inter- Mat Smiley 3D artist lapse. Let’s take a closer look at what each nal teams to make the best use of their target entails. budgets and outsourcers to defend their Scot Tumlin project manager profit margins, which in turn allows them Charles London executive in charge Time Estimation and to be more flexible and service-oriented of production Cost Modeling toward their clients. It seems easy just to John Beebe lead technical artist take the average time you think an asset o project is going to be delivered on will require and multiply that by the Ntime and looking great without good number of assets. At that point, you need projections of how long each asset will to then add 20 percent right away as a take to make and how much it will cost to rule, as a rough stab at accounting for the make it. Too often, teams stop short and unknown developments that are sure to focus exclusively on the underlying techni- occur. No seasoned client or production cal issues that support time estimation manager, however, wants to depend on without going to the next step. This is that kind of superficial analysis; he or she especially true when work is being done knows that there are far too many effi- internally, where budgets often deal with ciencies to be found and dependencies to large numbers of assets as a group line be contended with for any such simple item such as “animations.” formula to reflect reality. In order to The reason for doing these projections develop a more in-depth cost analysis, we goes beyond just wanting to hit a budget focus on the following three general and a timeline; it goes to the deeper issue areas: the pipeline, the approval process, of quality. Good time projections allow and the aesthetic target.

www.gdmag.com 33 CONTENT PRODUCTION

FIGURES 1–5 (left to right): FIGURE 1. Design evaluation: The rudimentary blocking of the object to see if it’s even in the ballpark. FIGURE 2. First model: The model has most of the geometric detail it will receive. FIGURE 3. Final model: The model has all the geometric detail it will get and is ready for tex- turing and lighting. FIGURE 4. The first pass on materials and lighting. FIGURE 5. The final result.

The place to start in developing good a team with a long history of working get to more than one of these questions time estimates is the pipeline. Time esti- together, which is a huge plus when devel- about your approval process is “no,” or if mates need to be based on a pretty solid oping time estimates. Many new studios the questions cannot be answered at all, production pipeline, or else they are or teams are forced to rely on experiences get ready for rising costs. Sadly, it’s easier meaningless. This is not to say that a with other teams that may not reflect to say that the costs will rise because of a pipeline can’t be upgraded or amended their actual present skill sets, exposing faulty approval process than it is to say by during production, but unless the baseline them to potentially large errors in time how much, but a good rule of thumb is to is well understood by everyone who is estimation. As a result, New Pencil had a multiply the costs associated with any going to use it, those upgrades cannot be high level of confidence in estimating the existing approval process by 1.5 when evaluated for their impact on the sched- time the average basic asset would there is risk of multiple iterations. ule. Begin by posing a few questions require, excluding revisions. For internal development teams, calling about the pipeline: Who are the experts in Understanding the approval process and attention to this cost inflation, if done the use of the pipeline, and is there access the approval team is the next most impor- diplomatically, can be a useful way of to those individuals? If assets have tant factor. Are the members of that group generating the leverage at higher levels of already been through production on this in good communication with each other? the company to address the problems pipeline in the past, what were the time- Are the list of reviewers involved in regular within the team that underlie the frames associated with them? What tech- critiques of the submissions restricted to approval process’s instability. No execu- nical taboos or requirements are there in only those with clear responsibility for the tive wants to see money being thrown the creation of the assets, and are they final result? Is the review group casting a away because there are questions about documented? How modular is the well-aimed net to garner feedback from how solid the review team is. For out- pipeline? If an error has been made some- other individuals with influence on the sourcers, this is a more dicey proposition. where during production, how far back in product’s future, such as marketing or the Ideally, if your relationship with your the creation must the artist regress to publisher? Is there someone on the review client is solid, you can consider a gently bring the asset up to specification? team whose task is to manage the review candid conversation about your concerns. We relied successfully on Maxis to pro- team to timely consensus and with the If the relationship is not that strong, vide instruction and support on their freedom to make a command decision you’re left with few options besides sim- homegrown export tools and worked to when the team is at loggerheads? Is there a ply charging more for the work in order make sure the pipeline that we set up at clear progression of stages that an asset to reduce your exposure to these higher New Pencil was as close as possible in will pass through to avoid changes to pre- costs. However, in the bargain, you’re implementation to the pipeline at Maxis. viously approved work? Can the art team also throwing away your competitive THE SIMS’ sprite pipeline was well devel- expect to receive feedback from the edge. In any case, make sure the contracts oped before Maxis went casting for a reviewers in a timely manner? Is there a that you sign clearly state time limits and contract house to expand their capabili- general aesthetic vocabulary in use by the the format of feedback so that you can ties. Just as importantly, Maxis worked reviewers, and is the art team conversant protect yourself. It’s no substitute for hard to ensure that New Pencil had access with it? In the case of THE SIMS, we were being able to help the partnership address to its experts who had the inside track on able to answer yes to all of the preceding review-related challenges, but it may help how the pipeline really worked. Maxis questions about the review process due to you avoid eating too many revisions. had clear expectations as to how modifi- the amount of preproduction work that Having a clear progression of stages for cations were to be made to assets and at Maxis had done, its own existing produc- the assets was also crucial. It helped focus which point in the pipeline each asset tion pipeline, and the close-knit nature of the feedback from Maxis on the aspects of should be modified. New Pencil also had its team leadership. If the answer that you the asset at issue and made sure that the

34 january 2002 | game developer likelihood of large revisions was greater in duce. Don’t confuse this issue with the costs. It’s important that everyone, espe- the early part of development, when technical complexity dealt with in the pre- cially your client or management, know changes were less expensive. The process ceding pipeline discussion. Rather, this is that this is a test, and that the estimates will that resulted worked to achieve in-game the cost of having to undertake the revi- likely change as a result of how the test integration as early as possible, giving sions necessary while the artists internalize works out. It’s a good way to blow the bugs Maxis lead time to support New Pencil the aesthetic they must match. out of the system and get everyone on both should the assets not perform as anticipat- The questions that need to be posed sides of the art fence accustomed to work- ed. The process was divided into the fol- regarding the style matching have more to ing together, without committing the entire lowing stages: do with one’s own capabilities than what project to deadlines and cost expectations Design evaluation. The asset is shown as one needs from the client or the art direc- that just aren’t realistic. a high-resolution render in 3DS Max, with tor: Do you feel that you understand this Early on, New Pencil and Maxis took no texture and only enough model detail aesthetic? Are the reference materials both the time to learn to work together by to communicate the general direction of broad enough to support a consistent look beginning with more modest goals and work (Figure 1). The key elements of the across all assets and deep enough to com- then evaluating the realities of production asset as described in the asset specification municate clear individual asset identities? that emerged. As a result of these early les- document are referred to, but may not be Are the various skill sets that the project’s sons, the negotiated price for content did completely modeled. aesthetic demands present in a balanced rise by some 30 percent, but because the First model. The first model is shown as fashion across the art team? Is the requisite standard of quality had been set and the an in-game screenshot with little or no tex- familiarity with software present in enough relationship forged in a climate of good ture (Figure 2). Color may be used to help art team members to support general pro- communication, these price increases were differentiate the model’s substructure but is ductivity? Is there someone on the team perceived as reasonable and did not have not yet a subject for review. All comments who has a particular understanding of the to be repeated later, which would have from the design evaluation feedback are reviewer’s vision who can share this insight endangered the long-term relationship addressed, if they are relevant to this stage. with the art team? Again, we were able to between the studios. In some cases, the asset may be well devel- answer yes to all of these questions; this oped enough to skip the next step and go was essential to New Pencil’s confidence Style Matching and on to texturing. that the final assets could be produced Cross-Team Consistency Final model. The final model is shown as with roughly the number of submissions another in-game screenshot, where the planned. he name of the game is consistency; if model is complete with respect to geometry So let’s say you’ve asked all these ques- T it doesn’t look like the reference, the (Figure 3). All sprite animation states are tions of yourself and of your client or product won’t hang together. Once you’ve represented, and the animations function in development team and the game. All comments from the first you’ve come up with model submission are addressed, if they are some time estimates and relevant to this stage. In some cases, there costs that you feel pretty will still be model comments, but they will sure about. Next, you be small enough to be addressed in the should gauge your forthcoming first texture stage. assumptions with a test First texture. Materials and lighting are run. Don’t just sign up shown for the first time at this stage for the whole shebang if (Figure 4). All comments from the final you can help it. There model stage are addressed. are going to be hidden Final candidate. Ideally, all comments costs, surprise develop- have been addressed and the asset is ready ments, and plain old to be delivered (Figure 5). reversals of fortune you The last concern for time estimation and may or may not have cost modeling is the aesthetic that you’re anticipated. Choose a trying to match. It’s safe to say that this is representative set of a larger concern for outsourcers than for assets — a few easy internal development teams, due to the ones, a few medium separation between the conceptual artist or ones, not too many hard art director who has the vision that sets ones — and set yourself the bar and the art team executing the a milestone deadline work. Nonetheless, the more elaborate and and a team structure esoteric the style is that has been chosen that reflects your best FIGURE 6. Tight feedback rocks. The submission from New Pencil is for the work, the more it will cost to pro- guess as to time and returned with Maxis’s comments included in the image. www.gdmag.com 35 CONTENT PRODUCTION

actually begun production, it takes a bit of ular group reviews, the asset library rein- adding capacity on the part of the line that time for the understanding of the visual forces this behavior by getting artists to may be under pressure. The assembly line style to percolate through the art team. In assist each other in the integration of their is broken up between modelers and textur- the period where the team is working to various library contributions. ers/lighters, with approximately one floater internalize that vision, an aesthetic check- Template files, like asset library files, for every two craft-dedicated artists. list is a key tool in making this period as are another powerful way to help keep The art director who leads the whole short as possible. This checklist enumer- everyone’s work in the same vein. Perhaps team serves as a liaison between the Maxis ates techniques to be employed and ele- the most useful template file to New art director and the New Pencil art team, ments to be checked for in pursuing the Pencil was a standardized lighting set, making sure that work done at New Pencil aesthetic at hand. It’s a supplement to the introduced after THE SIMS: LIVIN’ LARGE is being held to internal standards of quali- reference package that incorporates the and first used in developing a small set of ty as well as the detailed direction from most common feedback points that the downloadable objects. The lighting set is a Maxis. In order to make sure this art team receives. The sidebar “The Aesthetic 3DS Max file containing a fast spoof of director isn’t spread too thin, we usually Checklist” shows the aesthetic checklist radiosity, which all artists would merge designate a lead texturer and a lead model- developed for the sprite content for THE into their workflow very early in creation. er. These are primarily service roles for SIMS. The set is not only a great time-saver with solving technical problems and providing Putting assets in-game very early allows regard to the labor required to make an critique in advance of the art director’s feedback to be done visually, by marking object seem lifelike and volumetric as per review. In addition to these resources, up the screenshots and sending them via the checklist, it also goes a long way keeping up with THE SIMS requires a proj- FTP so that the feedback can be stored on toward establishing a uniform appearance ect manager to track the progress of each a server and remain accessible to the whole through subtle ambient lighting (Figure 7). asset and help make projections about team. Working with annotated game After a few additional tweaks, this set future bottlenecks or overloads. Figure 8 screenshots (see Figure 6 for an example) became a standard part of asset creation shows how all these parties interact to instead of only e-mail comments did won- both at New Pencil and at Maxis. maximize efficiency. ders for centralizing art direction. Keeping things moving forward is a pri- In addition, group reviews and the Asset Staging mary goal. New Pencil works to make sure development of the checklist was crucial in that all artists understand their weekly allowing New Pencil to improve consis- orking on THE SIMS franchise workload, and the art director or project tently its ability to implement art direction W means being faced with a very large manager communicates the priority of feedback across relevant assets, thus help- number of objects to produce. Most each object within that work list. The ing to ensure that feedback provided for recently, that figure was 100 animated artists are directed to focus their attention earlier assets was incorporated into later object sprite sets be delivered within a 10- on the highest-priority asset that has out- assets that shared those aesthetics. week timeframe. Such a high volume of standing feedback issues. Should an asset Another vital tool to assure consistency work cannot be done effectively with a of higher priority come back from evalua- across assets is the asset library. Develop- completely flat team. We employ a modi- tion, the artist is expected to set aside the ing an asset library is a goal that should be fied assembly-line process that allows some asset currently being worked on and pursued immediately upon production. As artists to specialize in their strongest skills address the requested changes on the high- materials or model elements are developed and others with broader abilities to float, priority item quickly. This technique keeps to approval, reusable elements that serve as style signifiers should immediately be archived in a file structure that is easily accessible to the entire team. The ability for one artist to reuse the work of another does far more than simply save time in construction; it’s also a powerful way to keep the general look and feel of the proj- ect consistent across numerous artists. In addition, such reuse compensates for the inevitable inequities in skill sets among team members, allowing artists to comple- ment each other’s capabilities while work- ing on separate items. It’s critical to get the team looking at each other’s artwork. Often, an asset doesn’t seem quite right, and it takes a few FIGURE 7. The lighting set at work. The difference between the images using default ambience (left) sets of eyes to determine why. Besides reg- and the ambient light provided by the lighting set (right) is dramatic.

36 january 2002 | game developer the most advanced assets on the front The Aesthetic Checklist burner, speeding their process through the system and helping to achieve a spread of This checklist is a recap of all the elements been reused on another of different assets across different stages of approval. that are often reiterated in feedback and that proportions, has it been checked for This process helps avoid bottlenecks by distortion? making sure that there are always models comprise the basic bar of quality against coming off the line for texturers/lighters to which an asset will be measured, regardless • Are the colors mapping well to the run- work on, and helps New Pencil keep to a of aesthetic subtheme. The idea here is to time file? regular weekly output level. call out all elements that need to be checked • Is dithering being used properly to defeat Priorities are determined using a variety before an asset is submitted. The main pur- banding? of criteria: New Pencil tries to interleave pose is to reduce revisions and to keep the • Has the palette been polished where difficult items with easy ones in order to burden on Maxis’s review team low. necessary? avoid a hard patch of slowdowns due to • Has the entire team been given the oppor- too many difficult assets. (In addition, Modeling tunity to provide feedback? because invoicing was done by blocks of • Have all artists been given the opportunity assets finished, making sure there were to ask questions regarding the object’s Lighting enough easy objects in every block helped construction? • Have all artists been given the opportunity New Pencil stay on time and thus ensured • Are all the relevant template dimensions to ask questions regarding the object’s regular payments. Any internal develop- ment team can also appreciate the benefits built to tolerances? lighting? of regular output. Even if it’s not tied to • If animations are already implemented in • Is the lighting set current and installed payments, it’s in the best interest of every the game, has the model been checked properly? team to be seen as reliable and consistent.) against them? • Is a keylight being used to properly develop Prioritizing to stay within a regular band • Do all edges have the right amount of real- box lighting for cubic forms, dihedral of productivity also makes it easier to beat world finish, such as flanges on the ends angles, and planar objects? deadlines every now and then by getting of openings, grilles, chamfers, and so on? • Are keylight highlights being effectively the team used to a baseline average work • Is there enough subtle low-level detail to used to set off shadows and shiny sur- pace, rather than an irregular one. make good use of lighting? faces? Asset library needs are another criterion • Has the model been previewed at game • Are surfaces that overhang other geometry for setting an asset’s priority. Often, the resolution to check the visibility of all being properly shadowed? development of one asset will set the look model detail? • Are interior spaces slightly darker than and feel of all the others. A good example • Does the object display properly in the exterior surfaces? of this was the development of the castle- game? • If any part of the object lights up, is it effec- style objects for THE SIMS: LIVIN’ LARGE. • Does the model conform to all called-out tively casting light back onto itself where Heavy, dark wood, velvet, stone, and iron features of the spec? relevant? were the dominant elements in the Castle • Has the entire team been given the oppor- • Is the pattern of cast light representative of furniture and architectural items that New tunity to provide feedback? the illuminated object’s apertures (grilles, Pencil created. By frontloading a small set shades, and so on)? of items that used all of these archetypical Textures • If any part of the object lights up, is there a materials, the Castle library elements were satisfying level of contrast between lit and quickly laid down, speeding the develop- • Have all artists been given the opportunity unlit states? ment of the rest of the set while allowing to ask questions regarding the object’s them to be interleaved effectively with materials? • Is the shape of the object well revealed by other assets as priorities required. • Do the materials look realistic and similar the lighting set? Lastly, work on some items must wait to spec examples (woodgrain visible and • Are lighting gradients being used to relieve until the end of the project. Due to the com- natural; metal shiny, brushed, or patinaed large, flat expanses? plexity of the code that underlies some of as appropriate; colored metals rich and • Are subtle gradients being used across the items, Maxis was often unable to pro- non-plasticky; chrome well developed in standing elements to help give a feeling of vide us with the game files needed in order reflections; and so on)? verticality? to proceed on certain assets at the beginning • Are materials and/or textures being appro- • Are lighting levels being corrected for of production. However, because Maxis had priately reused when items are intended as dominance in sprites that display together done a good job detailing the rest of the an associated or matched set? but export separately? asset list, New Pencil was able to remain • Are there evident repeats in the texture? • Has the entire team been given the oppor- productive with the objects on its plate and • Where a texture from one geometry has tunity to provide feedback? give Maxis the time it needed to develop the remaining objects correctly. In later con- www.gdmag.com 37 CONTENT PRODUCTION

tracts, as the relationship between the stu- dios has become more mature, Maxis has chosen to wait to detail some 20 percent of MAXIS the assets until the majority of the work could be seen together, thus choosing items that would best finish out the set. Deliverable postings Art direction coordination Support file requests Project Tracking and Team Management Project Manager Priority setting Art Director ll the good plans in the world won’t Project updates A help you to manage large numbers of Priority assignment Individual review and critique assets if you don’t have some sort of track- Deliverable collection Team review leadership ing system. New Pencil’s system is a simple but effective Microsoft Access database. The project database allows the project manager to list assets individually, define a series of states that the assets can pass Modeler Lead Texturer/Lighter through on their way to final, track which (floater) Lead (floater) artist is assigned to these assets, and time- stamp the asset for when it was submitted Technical art support Technical art support and when feedback was returned or when Stylistic coordination Stylistic coordination it was finalized. Furthermore, the system Asset library support Asset library support allows the generation of particular reports, Texturer/Lighter Modeler such as project overviews by state or artist, or reports of assets that are blocked and what is blocking them. While these reports Texturer/Lighter Modeler are invaluable, it’s important to make sure that the system is easy to use and not over- ly detailed. Too many reports are a sign that you may be confusing the asset data- base with the project itself; ideally, you’ll FIGURE 8. A schematic of the production pipeline that exists between Maxis and New Pencil. be spending as little time on it as possible, so don’t burn too many hours setting it up. builds confidence and acclimates the team Get feedback from the artists as to the The project manager who manages the to problem solving and avoiding panic. usefulness of the reference material at tracking system is also the person who Some simple but solid personnel manage- hand and make clear action items to sup- serves as the exclusive technical liaison with ment techniques will be needed to stay on plement the reference in places where Maxis. The project manager notifies Maxis the plan that you’ve worked hard to create artists clearly are not getting the concept. of files that are needed, of evaluations post- and make sure that the work is of the high- Where possible, give artists the opportuni- ed, and of requests for technical support. est caliber. First and foremost, the team ty to choose assets to work on for them- Likewise, the project manager also notifies needs to understand the task set before selves instead of just being assigned their the New Pencil art team of arriving feed- them and be motivated to achieve it. Make workloads. A sense of ownership will do back, priority assignments, predictions of sure that everyone gets a chance to review wonders in helping the artist bring his or bottlenecks or chokes, and any technical all of the art materials. While you don’t her own vision to the work in service of changes that have arrived from Maxis. want to bury artists working on one asset the existing aesthetic. Keeping a single contact for these kinds of group with the minutiae of references that All-nighters and seven-day weeks are a matters ensures that Maxis always knows doesn’t relate to their assignments, it’s fool’s game. Nothing superb ever gets whom to contact in case of some snafu or important that everyone understand the done by overtired people whose lives have concern; on projects like THE SIMS expan- broad context that relates to all the work. been turned upside down. Sure, the game sion packs, time is of the essence. One of Make time for questions from all team business requires the occasional supreme the most important things an art team can members, both individually and in a group effort, but the smart manager does every- do is adopt the no-surprises rule when deal- setting, and make sure that questions are thing he or she can to avoid such excess- ing with its clients or individual team mem- answered fully. Some of the most important es. Put your artists first. If they feel you bers. While being the bearer of bad news is technical challenges will be spotted not by are behind them, they’ll be more than never pleasant, providing a heads up early the management but by the people on the capable of providing the exceptional enough for a solution to be formulated ground who actually have to take the hill. work that you’ve guaranteed. q

38 january 2002 | game developer POSTMORTEM marek spanel and ondrej spanel

Bohemia Interactive Studios’

he story of OPERATION whole story in the space given for this FLASHPOINT’s development is article, so let’s just jump directly to the quite unusual in the game final moments. industry these days. For one It was 8 P.M. on Friday, May 25, 2001. thing, the team didn’t start Our publisher’s representative, who had Tout as professionals; originally only the been in Prague for the last few days to lead programmer was allowed to work on make sure everything was going O.K. as the game full-time. Switching publishers we were finalizing the gold master, left three times, starting a new company, Prague feeling confident that things were growing the team from one to 12 full- going well — the disc was almost ready time members, and moving offices five and could be sent to final testing and then times during the game’s development to manufacturing after some weekend GAME DATA were just some of the hurdles we had to testing. clear. Only the team’s vision and obses- Meanwhile, our lead programmer (to PUBLISHER: sion for the game remained consistent make matters even more exciting, he was FULL-TIME DEVELOPERS: 10 from the very first playable version until then working at his temporary home in PART-TIME CONTRACTORS: 3 the end. It’s not possible to describe France for couple of weeks) was trying to ESTIMATED BUDGET: $600,000 LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT: Over 4 years RELEASE DATE: June 22 (worldwide except North America), August 29 (North America), 2001 DEVELOPMENT HARDWARE: Various PC systems from 266MHz Pentium IIs to 1GHz Pentium 4s and 1.2GHz Athlons with 20GB hard drives and Voodoo 2 or GeForce 2 graphics cards DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE: Windows 98/2000, Linux servers, Visual C++ 6, SourceSafe, Adobe Photoshop 5.0, 3DS Max, Microsoft Office, TextAloud (for voice prototyping) PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE: Oxygen (3D low- polygon modeling and texturing tool), Visitor (landscape editor), and some other pro- prietary data conversion and packing tools NOTABLE TECHNOLOGIES: DirectX, Vorbis Ogg, Vicon 8 motion capture system PROJECT SIZE: 10,000+ files, 250,000 lines of C++ (some assembly), 5,000 textures, 800 3D models, 100,000 words (localized into six other languages), more than 60 single-player and multiplayer missions

40 january 2002 | game developer MAREK SPANEL | Marek worked on home-grown games even ONDREJ SPANEL | Ondrej coded his first games in the late 1980s. as a child back in the late 1980s, with his brother Ondrej. In 1992, he After graduating from Charles University in Prague in 1995 with a started working at a game distribution company, and in 1998 he started degree in computer science, he started work as the lead programmer to work full time on his first PC game, eventually released as OPERATION for research and development of a PC game that was completed in FLASHPOINT. In 1999, he co-founded Bohemia Interactive Studios, the 2001 under the title OPERATION FLASHPOINT. company that undertook development of OPERATION FLASHPOINT.

resolve some serious graphical anomalies with the hardware transformation and lighting (HW T&L) rendering. If he were to fail, HW T&L would not be included in the final release. If he solved it, some data organization changes would be necessary to suit the needs of the HW T&L. He spent nearly the whole day resolving some random crashes that appeared in the game during the last day, going back and forth over e-mail with an Nvidia support engineer. The crash was fixed by late afternoon, and by 10 P.M. it looked like the HW T&L problems were at an acceptable level. Around midnight, the tools that would perform the data format change were ready. On the other front, the team had received the final localized strings for the game.

www.gdmag.com 41 POSTMORTEM

However, the file containing the core deliver the gold master to our publisher server in the U.K. Around midnight Sunday strings of the game that had been delivered via FTP by that evening. Nobody expected night, the disc was finally ready to go. by our publisher appeared to be untested that it would actually take until Sunday Three weeks later, hundreds of thou- and unusable. After spending a couple of morning. After a long, sleepless night of sands of copies of the game were available hours dealing with it, most of the team playing through the game and fixing any in stores worldwide. In the meantime, the had to go home to have some sleep. Still, problems that appeared, everything looked development team was playing the game, the team leader stayed behind at the office, fine, and most of the team could finally go terrified of finding a disastrous bug. Fortu- trying to use the new HW T&L data for- to sleep again. nately, no such critical bug appeared. Con- mat, going over each step by phone or With some relief, we finally started the sidering the amount of work we’d done on e-mail with the lead programmer (while game upload on Sunday around 9H But the game in those last couple of days and also trying to implement new localized were we done? Not yet. Suddenly, a seag- hours, the risk of finding some major string tables and fix some problems in the ull stopped flying in some of the in-game problems was pretty high. On Friday, June campaign and missions). At 3 A.M.it cutscenes. The team leader called to wake 22, the game was released, and it immedi- looked like all the data had been con- up the lead programmer in France: “The ately became the top-selling PC game in verted — and both the lead programmer seagull is not flying. What should I do?” many countries. The team knew that their and the team leader could go have some We had to stop the upload until the lead mission was successfully completed. The sleep. programmer delivered necessary code fix. passion and hard work of every single Saturday morning, our publisher real- After the project leader received the updat- member of the development and publish- ized that the gold master hadn’t actually ed files from the lead programmer, he ing teams started to pay off. been delivered. Tensions rose even further, started to rebuild the game in Visual and nerves began to unravel. Only two Studio. It was Sunday around noon, and What Went Right days remained before mass production the game had finally gone to the publisher was scheduled to begin. Everyone on the for final testing. The team. Probably the most posi- team had been working since early The publisher’s test staff started playing 1.tive thing we encountered during Saturday morning, but at times a success- the game Sunday afternoon. Everything development of this game was the people ful end to these last-minute crises seemed went smoothly at first, but later they dis- working on it. Almost all of the people to be so far away. By around 5 P.M.on covered one serious scripting bug in one of who joined the team really helped to Saturday, most of the important issues in the campaign missions that made it improve the game and remained fully dedi- the code had been resolved, and the lead unplayable. Late in the evening, they called cated to it from the first day until the final programmer decided to take another look the team leader about the bug, and he had moments. While we were understaffed at the HW T&L implementation. Luckily, to drive to the office after sleeping just a almost all the time, we are happy to say within a few hours, he suddenly discov- couple of hours over the past three days to that while the team was growing steadily, ered the root of all of the HW T&L prob- fix the bug as quickly as possible and then it was very stable — almost all the people lems and fixed them. The plan was to upload the fixed version to the publisher’s who participated in the development of

OPERATION FLASHPOINT enables the player to use any vehicles, including Daytime and weather changes dynamically in the game so the are looks gunships and planes. pretty different in various daytime and weather conditions.

42 january 2002 | game developer OPERATION FLASHPOINT are still working at lowing this game for years already, and Open architecture. Since we our studios now that the game is finished. they still carry a great deal of enthusiasm 3.know that plenty of players enjoy Another advantage was that the team was for it. Some of the first great fan sites not just playing games but also providing very cooperative. Some roles on the team started out more than two years before the their own content for them, we wanted to were not demarcated very strictly. Still, game was released, and we managed to enable this extensibility as much as possi- between the programmers, designers, and keep people’s excitement going with regu- ble. Therefore, the game included exactly artists, everyone could comment on any lar updates about the improvements we the same mission editor that we had used part of the game, and everyone’s opinions were making to the game throughout its to design our missions. In addition, much were taken seriously. development. We take it as a good sign of the game’s functionality is data-driven While this often made communication that most of the sites are still online and instead of being hard-coded. This includes more difficult, it definitely helped the design updated regularly. About halfway through not only the mission files and world maps and development process and enriched the development, we invited some people from but also the capabilities and properties of game in many areas. One of the most the community to participate in the design units. The units are stored in a very pow- powerful tools we used for internal com- of the game directly, via external forums erful hierarchical configuration tree with munication was our intranet news server, and newsgroups. Their skills in both mili- inheritance capability, yet they are relative- which proved to be an invaluable tool tary and gaming areas were invaluable, ly easy to edit. By using these configura- during the whole design process. The game and we constantly used their feedback to tion files, it is possible to add completely was mostly designed on the fly, and the improve the game. new units and worlds to the game or add newsgroups made the design process not Since the release of the public demo ver- modified versions of existing ones, which only convenient, but really quite enjoyable. sion (around three months prior to the is what many players are doing to create release of the final game), the community their own content, thus lengthening the The community. OPERATION following has become much bigger. The product’s lifespan. We wanted to use con- 2.FLASHPOINT’s public following is only downside to the increase in the com- figuration files to shorten coding time as incredible. We ourselves are surprised by munity base is that the community has well, because we figured that the fine-tun- the number of people creating fan sites, become much less focused and less mature, ing of most values could be done by developing new content for the game, or as the average age of those visiting the web designers or testers instead of program- just keeping in touch with the community sites has descended notably. mers. But this didn’t work as we expected, by reading news and forums. Currently But the community still looks really vital mostly because only the programmers there are hundreds of different sites dedi- and the most-visited fan site has counted really knew meaning of the values. cated to FLASHPOINT, and dozens of them millions of page views already. Recently, Our scripting language also featured are of a truly professional quality with fans have been creating many custom- highly in the game’s development and news updated almost hourly. made tools and enhancements to the game extensibility. We started to build the mis- Another great thing about the communi- in addition to the various web sites and sion editor as a visual tool, but we soon ty is that some of the people have been fol- services. recognized its limitations in certain areas.

The OPERATION FLASHPOINT demo enabled millions of players around the world The built-in visual mission editor opens endless gaming options with to taste the game around three months prior to its commercial release. easily created missions.

www.gdmag.com 43 POSTMORTEM

Seeing this, we added an expression evalu- Creative freedom. From the freedom we enjoyed instead of some more ator for trigger activation, which was sur- 4.very beginning of the project, we money was more than worth it. prisingly powerful, and a full scripting lan- tried to create the game that we really The result of this creative freedom is a guage soon followed. When the game was wanted to play. We didn’t look too much game that is really distinct. Our design- released, we knew immediately that script- toward other games for inspiration, and we on-the-fly approach (or “design by play- ing was a really good choice, as many virtually ignored games that might be con- ing,” as we prefer to think of it) made the user-made mission used scripts to imple- sidered our competition. We also gave little game very enjoyable and a different expe- ment specific new functionality. Looking regard to whether the market would like rience from any other. Most design deci- back, we can say scripting proved to be the game or not. Our relationships with sions were first discussed (mostly in much more powerful than we expected. publishers were never too strong (actually, newsgroups as mentioned earlier) and We only wish we had added it sooner in we changed publishers several times), and then tried out in the game. No matter the development cycle, so that some of the all important decisions were made by the how nice a design idea might have seemed functionality that we hard-coded into the core development team, keeping us rela- at first, only the elements that worked well game could have been scripted instead, tively independent throughout the game’s in the game ended up being included. including some AI behavior. development. In fact, changing publishers At a later stage of develop- so many times wasn’t strictly a Long development cycle. The ment (after the European negative thing. Even 5.unusually long time that release, in fact), we though it led to some FLASHPOINT was in devel- extended the game’s abil- financial uncer- opment was very bene- ity to support add-on tainties, the ficial. In terms of game- content. Single files creative play, the game is very stored in specific fold- mature, which would ers could add, for not have been possible in a instance, new models, shorter development cycle, espe- units, or islands. cially because this was our first Besides some official major game. Two or three years into add-ons that we have development, the game started to be really introduced since the enjoyable. In fact, it was polished enough game’s release, there is then to suit our original plans for the already a massive release version. But due to various things number of user- (mainly on the publishing side), the game made add-ons, all wasn’t released at that point, which gave available for free us more time to polish and improve it. We on the were able to incorporate various features Internet. that we originally hadn’t planned to devel- op, either because they were too difficult or required excessive CPU or memory resources. We were also able to incorporate feed- back from various external testers — our friends as well as colleagues at well- known gaming companies who evaluated the game throughout its development. We refocused and redesigned the game a cou- ple of times, always opting to keep every- thing that worked well and change the things we felt could work better.

What Went Wrong Development cycle much longer 1.than expected. Ironic as it is, we have to start What Went Wrong exactly where we left off with What Went Right. Despite some of the usefulness the extra

january 2002 | game developer development time offered us, in the end th cycle was probably too long, and in opti- mal conditions would have been at least 20 percent shorter. It may have been possi- ble to shorten the cycle, but we experi- enced various external events or internal missteps that prevented us from accom- plishing that. First of all, some technologies in the game were a bit outdated after more than four years. We didn’t know at the outset that the game would be still in develop- ment after so long, and we hadn’t left time at the end to rework parts of the engine. Some of the criticism of OPERATION FLASHPOINT addresses the amount of detail in the textures and some models — and we have to admit that these could have been better. Furthermore, the excessively long devel- opment cycle led to and heavy Bohemia Interactive’s in-house motion capture facility has proven very beneficial in creation of life- exhaustion, particularly for the people like human movement animations. who had been working on the game since very beginning (the lead programmer, lead artist Jan Hovora, and the team leader). In some cases, we weren’t able to sustain some of the features we’d implemented two or more years prior. They just disap- peared somehow in the process of rework- ing parts of the code, and we didn’t even notice. Newcomers to the development and testing process never knew such fea- tures had ever existed. The main problem wasn’t that the devel- opment cycle was too long per se, but that the development was so much longer than we’d expected. Next time, we will work much more diligently to better estimate our development time — and we will probably try to aim higher with the detail of our artwork, even if it seems insanely detailed for present and predicted hard- ware capabilities.

Documentation. Lack of docu- 2.mentation is a common affliction among game developers, but some aspects of this problem were so severe in our case that they are worth mentioning. While we’d never believed too much in designing the game on paper, the real problem was that we never even had docu- mentation of the things that we’d finished. This situation led to incredible problems in the final stages of development. Many tasks The combination of infantry combat with full simulation of vehicles is a crucial part of the design of could only be done by one person on the OPERATION FLASHPOINT.

www.gdmag.com 45 POSTMORTEM

A Soviet AKSU rifle shown in Bohemia Interactive’s proprietary modeling The Head of a tank crew in Oxygen. You can see face of Petr Pechar, one of tool, Oxygen, with direct real-time previewing using the game’s engine. the artists on OPERATION FLASHPOINT, under the helmet. whole team. In other cases, hours were ject’s status because it covered just small the final code, which caused some unex- spent trying to investigate how something fraction of all the problems we had tried pected compatibility problems that we had originally been meant to work. We rec- to fix. Even when the publisher dedicated weren’t able to control. The mixing of var- ognized these problems and tried to a pretty big testing team to the game, it ious SafeDisc versions and a serious com- improve them, but apart from a few sometimes seemed something of a waste of patibility problem with Windows 2000 instances, our effort wasn’t really successful. time for everyone involved in it. that was present in the first European As the development team grew, the In the end, we had to largely ignore the batch of CDs could have been avoided. missing documentation was becoming a publisher’s QA reports, because they con- In addition, we weren’t able to finalize more serious problem. But the final project tained too much useless information and the English language in the game because deadlines were getting closer as well, so it very few real bugs. We tried to focus on we didn’t have a native English writer on was nearly impossible to find the time to very limited external testing managed the team. We also didn’t oversee the voice address the problem. directly in the very late stages of develop- recording and voice actor selection, which ment to ameliorate this problem — but led to some results that were unsatisfactory Quality assurance. We experi- this approach could hardly replace real, to us. 3.enced various problems in commu- full-time testing of the game. nication and cooperation with our pub- We admit the situation was very diffi- Multiplayer API. From the very lisher. Generally, their focus and assistance cult for the QA team as well — in no 5.beginning we were aware that our in some areas of the production of the small part because of the lack of docu- game had huge multiplayer potential, espe- game (design suggestions, voice-overs, trans- mentation on our side — but we still cially if it were implemented as a massively lation, scriptwriting) were really helpful. But believe this process could have been han- multiplayer online game. But we knew we in other areas, we experienced some events dled much better. One of the mistakes we would be unable to deliver such experi- and circumstances that slowed down and made was assuming that the publisher’s ence. Instead of aiming for such an complicated the game’s development QA would be sufficient, so we didn’t unrealistically high goal, we decided to rather than moving things forward. build a strong testing team in-house. We implement mission-based multiplayer that One of the most unsatisfactory areas definitely will find a solution for any shared as much code as possible with sin- was the way the QA procedures were future projects, because the way it was gle-player game. Even this effort proved managed and designed to work by the done for OPERATION FLASHPOINT wasn’t to be extremely difficult. OPERATION publisher. We never succeeded in achieving satisfactory. FLASHPOINT was always developed prima- a common bug database, and the publisher rily as single-player game with a strong enjoyed an illusory feeling that its QA Some content was not under story, but for a very long time we were database really covered the project. The 4.our full control. One very con- thinking about multiplayer functionality, truth was that such a database (even with- cerning thing was that our final CD was and we tried to design the game code in out any direct access for the development still manipulated by the publisher. The such a way that it would help us incorpo- team) hardly said anything about the pro- publisher applied SafeDisc protection to rate multiplayer later.

46 january 2002 | game developer For implementation, we wanted to avoid low-level network coding and instead use a high-level API. As we were already using Direct3D for graphics and DirectSound for audio, and both suited our needs quite well, we decided to use DirectPlay as our network API. DirectPlay offered high-level handling of all network communication, including Voice Over Net capabilities. Unfortunately, our experience with this API was extremely bad. Often when trying to get some high-level functionality work- ing, we realized it contained bugs that ren- dered it almost unusable. We had to implement our custom code for things we thought DirectPlay would provide, but that was sometimes very hard, as we did not have the low-level control that we needed. We also encountered many performance problems, some very strange, such as significant (particularly server-side) slowdown even with no traffic over the network. This along with the lack of docu- mentation and a lack of stability resulted in many problems that were hard to debug. Another drawback that we didn’t recog- nize beforehand is that DirectPlay is Windows-only, but many dedicated servers for games currently being played online run on Linux. Overall, selecting DirectPlay as our network API was one of the most unfortunate decisions in the whole game’s development. Future Dreaming

ost start-up game developers dream M of developing a number-one title. We weren’t any different. With OPERATION OPERATION FLASHPOINT’s mission was to deliver the tension of full-scale conventional military conflict. FLASHPOINT, this dream has come true for us. The game achieved the number-one We’re still playing the game and we still us to start one. We consider the success of position in sales charts of various countries like it. After such a long time, it’s hard to OPERATION FLASHPOINT as the pole posi- and regions, including the U.S., Germany, believe that OPERATION FLASHPOINT tion for our next race. We plan to use all the United Kingdom, Benelux, remains the favorite choice of games for the experience and resources that we have Scandinavia, and Australia. More than most of the development team. We’re still gained during the last couple of years to 500,000 copies sold worldwide in just working on new content for FLASHPOINT push gaming even further in the future. q three months, proving to us that our last out of pure enthusiasm. In the end, we four years of effort were worth something. don’t feel ourselves to be anything more We always stayed focused on the game, than proud members of a big and healthy SPECIAL ON GAMASUTRA.COM and we didn’t have too much regard for FLASHPOINT fan community that has arisen Step back in time and check out two of those who believe that the success of any around the world. Bohemia Interactive's early demos of game is mainly a question of marketing, We know that someday we will have to OPERATION FLASHPOINT from 1996–1997. Visit securing a big license, or working on a leave FLASHPOINT to its own destiny. But www.gamasutra.com in mid-December to sequel. We always believed that it’s the currently, we still feel too involved in the download. game itself that makes the difference game. We are already looking forward to between success and failure. future projects, but it will take months for

www.gdmag.com 47 SOAPBOX jake simpson Interviewing at Game Companies

ob hunting the game industry — that most fun of occu- At this point in the interview, I just point out that everything pations. Recently I’ve run that gauntlet, jumped through I’ve done has been nothing short of inspired, then divert the line that hoop, been into that bag, or whatever idiom you of questioning by pointing out the window and asking if it’s prefer. I tend to think “descended to that particular ring rained frogs recently. of hell” sums it up fairly well. I dunno, have you ever Sometimes you’ll have to admit that something you were hadJ an interview where you didn’t sit there squirming with involved in wasn’t perfect. Try to avoid this if you can. But if you anticipated humiliation? get blindsided you, here’s a good tip. Say something along The whole point of an interview, from the the lines of, “Well, I’m not perfect — if I were I wouldn’t interviewee’s perspective, is to show how have allowed that other person to make that mistake.” brilliant one is, how the company I’ve found that, for some reason, interviewers don’t should be making a huge offer to the have much to say after that. At this point, you can interviewee immediately, and go off on a wild tangent about the color of the indeed, how lucky said company is blinds or how the interviewer would look that the interviewee had nothing great with orange contact lenses. better to do that morning than to be there inspecting it. Said Other Tips I’ve company’s representative Picked Up conducting the interview Along the Way should do so without put- ting any questions to the That You Might interviewee that he or she Find Helpful might not be interested in answering. In fact, said nsure you’ve gone out and got- interviewer shouldn’t E ten a skinful of beer the night really ask any questions before. Nothing says “I am a social apart from, “How big do animal” to interviewers like a faceful you want your office to of last night’s beer. And nothing be?”, “Would you please fill says, “I am totally comfortable talk- in this blank check yourself?”, ing to you” like letting a nice big belch and “The masseur arrives on a out to play. Trust me, it always goes down a treat. At least I Wednesday afternoon; is that good with you?” think it does, judging by past interviewers who’ve cried with Interviewers should not indulge in programming tests, require laughter. I’m assuming it was laughter, anyway, though they proof of any kind of technical ability, and specifically not ask for were definitely crying. references. And if they do, they should not follow up on them. Try not to mention black magic too often, or ask the interview- What kind of company wouldn’t trust you? If I say that I person- er if he or she has a daughter, as this often offends. (It’s usually ally wrote all of the rendering code for the new for safe to ask about a sister, though.) John Carmack as a personal favor, then that should be the end of Be sure to visit Best Buy or Electronics Boutique before going it. Be properly impressed and reach for the checkbook, please. to an interview so that if they ask what you’re currently playing, For some reason, some companies ask you to bring proof of you can drop some of the names of what’s currently on the your abilities: demos, portfolios, examples, and so on. Why this shelves. I mean, it’s not as if you have time play anything, what seems to be an accepted practice is beyond me. Maybe interview- with your busy social schedule. And if they ask about bad ers just need something to do in the evenings, like play your games, be sure to mention one of their company’s titles. That games so they can see your brilliance showing through or rip off way you can really show them how cool you are, and how your undoubtedly fantastic ideas. you’re not afraid of saying what you think. They can’t fail to be by Scot Ritchie Illustration Some companies try to trap you by asking questions such as, impressed. “What’s the worst bit of code/management situation you’ve done/been in?” This is a trap, people. Be prepared. I am. continued on page 63

64 january 2002 | game developer SOAPBOX

Don’t worry at all about lying on your resume. I looked it up Actually, you could probably answer that last one. Just be care- and “resume” is actually Latin for “fiction,” so you’re O.K. there. ful and never mention “vibrant moonbeams.” People will look at Just make sure you don’t lie too obviously. Saying that you were you funny. CEO of Microsoft for three years is probably not going to pan So, to recap: Be yourself, and make sure you impress the inter- out — someone might spot that. On the other hand, that 18- viewer with your wit and sophistication. Some good potty humor month stint you did for shoplifting women’s underwear is some- usually breaks the ice. You can’t fail to win any job you set your thing you definitely want to keep quiet. mind to. A really good get-out-of-awkward-question phrase that I dis- Oh, and you don’t need to thank me. q covered is, “I’m sorry, I’m contractually bound not to discuss that.” It’s right up there with, “I’m sorry, for me to tell you that JAKE SIMPSON | Jake works for Maxis, appearing every day would contravene the Official Secrets Act.” For example: dutifully and cashing the checks as soon as he gets them. Hey, you “You worked on project X?” never know, right? He’s been in the game industry for a few years, “I’m sorry, I’m contractually bound not to discuss that.” working for Midway, Raven, and others that have vanished into the Or, “Who was the 17th president of the United States?” mists of time. Wow, that sounds poetic doesn’t it? If you want to read “I’m sorry, I’m contractually bound not to discuss that.” more of his drivel, check out www.jakeworld.org. He can be contact- Or, “Wow, crappy weather, eh?” ed at [email protected], but please, he’s a sad, sad individ- “I’m sorry, I’m contractually bound not to discuss that.” ual. Treat him with caution, and above all, don’t buy him beer.

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