SteveStreeting.com

Ok, soapbox time. I’m going to alienate a lot of people and say that ubiquitous voice acting in many games, particularly roleplaying games, is a bad thing. The reason is that it’s constraining the ability of script writers, particularly in conversations.

It’s obvious really - recording voice is more expensive than text, both in terms of the time required to produce it,  and the space it consumes on the final media. Therefore, it’s a scarce resource. You simply cannot afford to have a ton of conversation that only 5% of the player base will ever hear.

I think about the games that I hold as some of the best in terms of script writing and particularly flexible, engaging and truly variable dialogue, and they’re all in the past, because they are all text-based. Planescape Torment sits on the ultimate podium here - a game simply bursting with rich, well-written dialog with a very large number of variations. Also Fallout (the original) - where you really could affect the world around you, and have genuinely different conversations depending on what you did, and the kind of character you were. It’s watching the videos of the latest one that I can clearly see how far conversational systems have fallen from those heights.

Fast-forward to the current generation and current ’standards’ say that we can’t expect the player to actually read anything, because today’s gamers expect everything to be narrated to them, as if they’re a 3-year old wanting a bed-time story. Sure, in games like Mass Effect there’s a bunch of supplemental material that you can read if you want, but all the information pertaining to the actual game experience is stubbornly all voice acted. As such, although they clearly do try to make it individual and variable, the constraints of time and space mean that the dialog options can’t hold the merest glimmer of a candle to the best roleplaying games I was playing 10-15 years ago. How many games do we see now where the only conversation options are:

• “No thanks”
• “I’ll do it”
• “Give me more money and I’ll do it”
• “I kill you! I kill you now!”

Is this the best we can do?

Far too many games these days want to be movies so badly that they seem to forget that there are other media forms they could also be looking to for inspiration, such as literature. A good book is arguably much richer and deeper than any film could ever be, simply because it doesn’t have to rely on moment-to-moment live communication through visuals and narration; it is consumed by the mind first and foremost, rather than the eyes and ears, and as such the flow of information is dynamic - I can choose the pace at which I consume and how much I ponder. Guess what - games can be consumed at varying speeds / intensities depending on the player too, so why aren’t we giving people more opportunity to have a deeper experience if they look for it, rather than going for the lowest-common denominator, the whiz-bang Hollywood level?

Planescape Torment was so good precisely because it tapped into the principle that you can deliver good literary material in pieces, as part of an adapting, changing story, in response to the players actions. There was a huge amount of material there if you decided to dig for it, and different players had genuinely different experiences, and not just at a superficial level. The beauty of games is that they can mix different media and make it new - I don’t want to sit there just reading pages and pages of static text, any more than I want to sit there watching a long cutscene (I’ll read a book or watch a film if I want those things), but I can certainly have a wide variety of quality writing delivered to me piecemeal on demand, interactively, depending on on my actions - that’s what a good conversation system should be like, deep and involving with lots of options, that almost certainly can’t all be voice acted economically.

But, of course visual and audio spectacles sell by the bucketload to the kind of people who buy the latest consoles, and far too many of these players wouldn’t know a good book if one hit them in the face. There’s probably no going back to text conversations in games, but I do think we’re the poorer for it in many cases.

Today has been totally bonkers, but I finally got at least a large part of the Ogre 1.6.0 RC1 release done. I finished all the straggling documentation updates, the source releases are up and the prebuilt SDK for VC8 is there too. I have to do the VC7.1 SDK, the Mac OS X SDK and perhaps the VC9 SDK too (since I have a build of that locally now) yet. Florian was having a few odd linker problems with MinGW which didn’t occur on Linux or OS X so that one might take a while longer to resolve, perhaps until RC2.

It’s worth all the effort though, the 1.6 Changelog is positively bursting with goodness, and I’m pretty sure I probably missed some less headline things in there anyway. 1.6 is definitely a worthy release.

As you can see, I even found time to make a new release logo

It’s going on midnight here now though so I’m going to finish up and have a cup of tea before going to bed. Perhaps there might be rest for the wicked after all!

Bruce Byfield wrote an interesting article (discovered via Matt ‘Alfresco’ Asay’s blog, which should be required reading for anyone in this field) about the sometimes unsteady alliance between open source and business that, on the whole, I agreed with - within a given context. I do think, however, that his context was weighted towards the larger players in market that are fusing open source with business opportunities though, and wanted to share some of my experiences and conclusions from the perspective of a more individual player in the business.

Apologies for the length of this article, I had a lot to say

Read the rest of this entry »

Oo, EW.com has just revealed (picked up via RockBandContent.com) that there are more full albums on the way for Rock Band after the release of Rock Band 2:

Foo Fighters (The Colour and the Shape)
Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magik)
Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
Megadeth (Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying)
Stevie Ray Vaughn (Texas Flood)
No Doubt (’Best Of’ Collection)

I don’t know about anyone else, but the top 2 are instant purchases for me, since both are regulars on my iTunes playlists. These are advertised for Rock band 2, but since DLC is interchangeable between the 2 games I’m betting I can still use them even if RB2 hasn’t made it to our shores by then.

Ho boy, time to prime the wallet again methinks. Until then I’ll have to just exhaust myself playing a Duran Duran drum medley. RB is definitely educational, I never realised that ‘Rio’ was so relentlessly fast & long on the drums, I have newfound respect for the New Romantics era musicians - that is, if it wasn’t all pre-programmed on drum machines…

I’ve copied this message from ogre3d.org just in case there are those that track my blog more often than the main site:

2008 OGRE User Survey

One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.

So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.

Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user - the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.

Thanks for your time!

I’ve had a pretty good response so far, in the last 12 hours or so we’ve had over 250 people completing the survey. However, the more the better! People I speak to at graphics card manufacturers etc regularly tell me that more definite information about the make-up of our user base is important for attracting more support resources to our cause when we need them, so I’d appreciate if you’d help us persuade them

With only a couple of days to go before the feature lock-down of Ogre 1.6, in time for a release candidate next week, I decided to squeeze in one more feature of my own - Alpha to Coverage support. This allows the use of Multi-sample Anti-aliasing (MSAA) on transparent texture edges as well as the more usual polygon edges.

It headlines as a Dx10 feature, but in fact both ATI and NVIDIA have exposed it on GL and on Dx9, the latter via some nasty ‘magic’ state hacks since Dx9’s API doesn’t include it. They weren’t as nasty as I thought though, and since someone raised it in the forum recently, plus the fact that I’d been manually turning it on in the NVIDIA control panel for OgreSpeedTree, I figured I might as well add proper support for it.

In the image (if you click to get the full-size version), you can probably tell that the leaf on the right has alpha to coverage enabled, and the one on the left doesn’t - the right-hand one looks nicer, obviously. It does have an overhead of course, but those with decent cards will appreciate the extra quality I’m sure, and you can enable it on a per-pass basis in your materials to target it where you need it, which is better than enabling it across the board in the control panel like I was doing before. I’ve tested it on Dx9 and OpenGL on my GeForce 9800, and my Radeon HD 2900 (I guess I could update that, but it’s only a test box after all!) and it works nicely.

Yet another reason to upgrade to Ogre 1.6

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.

At the Leipzig Games Convention Sony announced several updates to its venerable SingStar franchise, and whilst the inclusion of Barry Manilow is wince-inducing, the inclusion of several Queen tracks on their compilation issues, and the announcement of a dedicated Queen disc for SingStar can only be a good thing. Not because I particularly like SingStar - we had it on the PS2 and to be honest the novelty wore off pretty fast - somehow picking up the microphone and crooning on your own or in a duet just feels like you should be in a seedy bar, full of beer with your arm around your best mate, desperately hoping the next morning that nobody had a video recording mode on their mobile. In contrast, singing in Rock Band feels a lot less awkward, especially when you have 3 other people shredding / drumming away. Maybe it’s just me.

The reason it’s interesting even though I won’t be buying SingStar is that it means that those who control Queen’s music are loosening their grip a little, and letting master tracks into video games, which hasn’t happened so far - this in turn might mean we’ll see them in Rock Band eventually. Covers of Queen tracks have appeared in several games, such as “Don’t Stop Me Now” in Donkey Konga, “Killer Queen” in Guitar Hero, and “I Was Born To Love You” in Elite Beat Agents, but no master tracks have ever appeared before now, as far as I’m aware.

Here’s hoping anyway, Queen are one of the major classic British rock bands and I’d love to see them in Rock Band, to go with other British favourites such as The Who, David Bowie, The Police and Oasis (I also hope they stop ignoring Supergrass some day, because I’m dying to play Diamond Hoo Ha Man). That is, unless Activision decide to try to sign them to an exclusive deal like they’ve done with Aerosmith and Metallica, although I’d hope the Brits will have more integrity than that. Harmonix of course have stated their opposition to exclusive deals with bands, sticking to their line that music should be able to be enjoyed freely everywhere (this principle also underpinned their support for instrument compatibility, something grubby old Activision opposed for ages until the console manufacturers slapped them). Whether this laudable approach will come back to bite them later as Activision continues to pursue the “business first, music second” angle I don’t know, but they have my respect for it anyway.

Ugh. I’ve liked the Prince Of Persia series (although I only mostly only experienced the latest lot as a spectator, my wife played them more), but I have some misgivings about the gameplay trailer for the latest one.

My gripes:

1. Firstly, all that jumping & grabbing. It really doesn’t seem very fluid, more of a vertical shuffling game than the graceful acrobatic series of moves I’ve come to expect of PoP.
2. That magic-using woman giving you a ‘leg up’ in mid-air seems to be a rather lame excuse for a double-jump system. From what people are saying it even sounds like her assistance is automatic,  saving you implicitly from death-by-plummetting (or rather, from the abrupt deceleration that comes at the end), which if correct would seem to completely undermine the peril that goes with doing aerial somersaults.
3. QTE-style combat moves that were getting repetitive even in the short trailer
4. That horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer style banter. The American accent and jovial flippancy just grates on my nerves even in the demo. I know they have to be commercial, which means appealing to American generation X-ers, but it’s just completely at odds with the setting. I know they can’t give him a realistic accent and still hit their target demographic, any more than they can call it ‘Prince of the Islamic Republic of Iran’ and expect to it to sell to the white bread masses, but it just sounds so wrong. It may even exceed Assassin’s Creed’s ability to make the main protagonist sound like an annoying tit whenever he opens his mouth (Altair clearly should have been doing movie trailer voice-overs).

I might be being too harsh on the back of an early gameplay trailer, but I definitely have my misgivings. The graphical style is nice though.

We’re on the final home straight for Ogre 1.6 (aka Shoggoth), which should hit RC1 next week. One of the final features I wanted to squeeze in was support for Parallel-split Shadow Maps (PSSM), which uses multiple shadow maps per light in a hierarchical fashion to improve the quality while keeping the size down, particularly in outdoor scenes using global directional light. If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed, you will have seen this technique in action already.

For example, the screenshot on the right there is using 3 shadow maps for the single directional light, the closest one being 1024×1024, and the other two being 512×512 - together they are 38% of the size of a single 2048×2048 shadow map and yet provide greater detail. The 3 shadow textures are displayed for debug purposes on the right - notice that all 3 are using LiSPSM projection to bias the texture precision toward the camera which also helps. If you look really closely on the full resolution shot, you can see the transition from the highest resolution shadow map to the second shadow map about halfway up the screen, it changes near the top of the closest tree shadow. It’s quite hard to see though, which is kinda the point

One of the challenges with supporting PSSM is that Ogre had previously assumed that there is a 1:1 mapping between lights and shadow maps, which clearly had to be overcome - this limitation also prevented easy use of dual parabaloid and full cubic shadow maps for point lights of course. It was one of those things that had been languishing on my TODO for a while, begging me to find some time for it, and that’s where it still was until Pang Lih-Hern (aka lf3thn4d) from Malaysia came along and did it for me What a star! His initial patch allowed multiple shadow textures per light in a very sensible way, and he then implemented a PSSM facility on top of that, via our pluggable ShadowCameraSetup system (which he also extended in the patch to be aware of shadow map iteration). I adapted the PSSM code from his demo to be a little more flexible (it now handles any number of splits, and a more flexible split configuration) , so that setting it up goes something like this (simple projected shadows here, depth shadowmaps are also possible of course but let’s not overcomplicate it):


float shadowFarDistance = 3000;
mSceneMgr->setShadowTechnique(SHADOWTYPE_TEXTURE_ADDITIVE_INTEGRATED);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureCountPerLightType(Light::LT_DIRECTIONAL, 3);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureCount(3);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(0, 1024, 1024, PF_X8R8G8B8);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(1, 512, 512, PF_X8R8G8B8);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(2, 512, 512, PF_X8R8G8B8);
PSSMShadowCameraSetup* pssm = new PSSMShadowCameraSetup();
pssm->calculateSplitPoints(3, mCamera->getNearClipDistance(), shadowFarDistance);
pssm->setSplitPadding(mCamera->getNearClipDistance());
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(0, 2);
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(1, 1);
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(2, 0.5);
mSceneMgr->setShadowCameraSetup(ShadowCameraSetupPtr(pssm));
mSceneMgr->setShadowFarDistance(shadowFarDistance);


Notice that I used Integrated Shadows, this is a requirement of PSSM since only shaders with integrated shadow support can decide on the fly which shadowmap to sample from.

My sincere thanks to lf3thn4d for helping us get this feature in to Ogre 1.6 (and to all those who send us patches in fact). If you want to see it and OgreSpeedTree in motion, there is a video available; that’s the low-quality streamed version but you can also download the higher resolution version if you want.