Sundays are for the silent remembrance of the beauty of Giant Anteaters, sipping tea and compiling lists of interesting gaming reading from across the week without revealing the odd 1996 musical flashback that’s been happening in the last few days. So that’s what I did.
- RPS couldn’t make it to GDC, which made all the party invitations really annoying. Love’s Eskil Steenberg did, making a presentation on the most-awaited experimental MMO on the radar. He’s got an extended version of his presentation on his site, which really is quite the splendid thing. Example quote: “Moore law states that we can draw twice as much content every 1.5 years. So I’m suggesting a “Eskils law of game development” if you will, stating: if you cant double the amount of content per man hour you produce every 1.5 years the way you are working is unsustainable. Today’s we have teams of up to 200 people, if we imagine that the next console generation will be 8 times as powerful, does that mean that we need teams of 1600 people? Even a doubling of the team size is quite unsustainable.”
- Techradar do an Op-Ed on the subject of rights in World of Warcraft. As in, you don’t have any so stop fucking whining about it.
- Not PC, but Simon Parkin writes about the ever-awesome Takeshi Kitano’s flirtations with videogames in the 1980s: “Reportedly Takeshi hated the idea of videogames so much that he wanted to create one so irritating and poorly-designed that it shocked its players into a realisation of the futility of their hobby”. If I ever get to interview Takeshi, I’ll have to ask if he secretly did freelance design work for Cryo adventures.
- About as PC as it gets: Bit-tech shows how to make a custom R2-D2 case. Bless.
- A little more GDC response, with Eric Hardman getting all excited over Paul Barnett’s presentation. And referencing Skinny Puppy. I like seeing Devs come actually fired up away from GDC. Surely, that’s gotta be kinda the point?
- Okay – I’ve pretty much given up the Manics in terms of capital-M mattering. Which is fine. One album is about all I ever expect from a band, and they managed much mroe than that. However, Peeled Apples is the first track from Journal For Plague Lovers, which is where they’ve gone back to those long-left Richey-Edwards lyrics, got Steve Albini to do the producer and… well, it’s quite the surprising thing, despite/becauseof sounding like Temptation by Heaven 17. And then I finally see the video for 96’s existentialist soul-pop Orlando’s debut track Just For A Second, shortly followed by discovering they’ve got their sole-album-plus-B-sides on Spottify. I’m going to be wearing eyeliner again by the end of the week, man.
Really failed.
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On the one hand, I think Steenberg is making a generalization about his own situation by applying it to the industry at large, specifically about the role of the designer.
On the other hand, I think he’s on the right track about procedural generation. To bring up a previous debate, about whether or not a game can be considered “art,” I would argue that currently games are unable to take advantage of their unique position as a medium (player choice) because of simple economics: creating a vast amount of content at a high cost that a player won’t end up seeing because of choices he’s made makes no sense as a games developer. With methods for generating content procedurally, developers can offer real choices to their players and not have to worry as much about cost, allowing games to develop into the art form they ought to be. The tools argument (as a person who knows next to nothing about it) seems to reflect a frustration with this fact–that the tools for procedurally generating things simply don’t exist.
I also think that what James O is talking about is a great idea. While it sounds tacky, it’s basically clip-art for games developers, and it could cut costs tremendously in a world where everyone expects at least String-Bean Guy.
Interesting stuff about the eyes. I found the closing comment on the BBC one a bit funny though. I thought we always knew the visual system could be trained. Years ago they said basketball player Larry Bird had some of the best peripheral vision anyone had seen. Bird said when he was young he used to practice looking straight ahead while concentrating on the periphery.
Australian desert Aborigines were supposed to have some of the best eyesight in the world, persumably because they spent years on end hunting specks on the horizon.
Philip Larkin had a (brief) pop-career?
No freakin’ way!
Re: the sourcing of models, etc – all it takes is a bunch of talented 3d artists to come up with equivalent of istockphoto, ie good products, sensible prices and open submissions.
Ideas include encouraging actual industrial, furniture and interior designers and architects to contribute projects and structures, and have the capability to translate between various design packages fairly painlessly, so an architect’s Autocad file is actually compatible with integrating into game engines. And encouraging a commons ownership system where someone can put up a wireframe, someone else can texture it, they both get rights for their own work and a split of the profits on any sales of the combined models. Someone want to take it to Dragon’s Den?
I think my point is that, based on the gripes further up the thread from 3d artists regarding creating the same stuff again and again in different dev houses, none of the actual companies in this field seem to have really cracked the marketing side of things to make it into the big league.
The problem i mostly see is that no 3D model ever fits perfectly together with a other one unless there produced in the same company/team at the same period, because styles change all the time. And nowhere so fast as in 3d modelling.