Comments on: Master Control Program Is Watching You

By: elmuerte

elmuerte — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:22:07 +0000

Yes, Valve (and quite some before Valve) have been doing these things before Epic. But now, UE3 licensees will get the same ability to analyze their maps during play sessions.

This is not a thing of being the first, or something. It’s about providing developers more and more powerful tools for game development.

By: Sucram

Sucram — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:02:47 +0000

I can see a future with a Google approach to design. 40 variants of a level being put out with trees in subtly different positions, statistics determining which variant gets used.

By: markcocjin

markcocjin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:33:49 +0000

And did you notice how the Unreal Engine has this tool that makes your regular characters ultra-masculine? That’s awesome man. I wish they had the Epic art team design Left 4 Dead’s Bill, Francis, Louis and Zoey. Right now, those characters look plain and boring. And I want the soundtrack to play ear cracking Metal.

Now that’s a real man’s game.

By: unique_identifier

unique_identifier — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:29:02 +0000

@ lumpi : since they mentioned distributing the lighting calculations across multiple computers to speed them up, i’m guessing no.

By: lumpi

lumpi — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:45:52 +0000

Global Illumination. YES. Are they talking full, real time GI?

By: asdf

asdf — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:59:03 +0000

IMO, in the the article header picture, the guy on the left looks better than the guy on the right, and the guy in the middle just looks horrible. New is crap :<

By: Erlam

Erlam — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:18:42 +0000

I remember seeing a heatmap for one of TF2’s levels (the first cart map) and noticing the very last point, just before you cross the corner, was bright red. There was no other red on the map.

HINT. HINT. HINT.

Anyway, I actually like the look of this, as it seems much easier to use than UT2k4’s… somewhat annoying texturing and model usage system.

By: Jambe

Jambe — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:16:45 +0000

If Epic would develop fluid UIs for their PC releases in lieu of the clunky, poorly-ported console crud they’ve thrown at us lately, they’d be golden in my eyes. CliffyB’s intolerable console fetishism wouldn’t bother me if he at least realized that some PC gamers, do, in fact, have something of a soft spot for the Unreal series.

The MCP is interesting. It’ll certainly improve the playtesting process — with all that traffic information available, I’d think a competent map creator could avoid a lot of potential problems (hallways that are too narrow, unintended vantage points that are perennially abused, etc).

By: qrter

qrter — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:16:37 +0000

Surely it is now possible to make an anti-Deathmatch map, where nobody dies.

By: cHeal

cHeal — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:20:42 +0000

Arf, Matt that is a great idea actually. My only worry for the advent of these kind of tools is that it takes something which requires genuinely talent and intuition and turns it into a business flow chart. Presumably the cream will still rise to the top though.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:33:53 +0000

What might be very cool is to design procedurally generated map variants that are morphed directly based on statistical feedback. Someone cleverer than I should figure something like that out :P

By: Lu-Tze

Lu-Tze — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:27:19 +0000

The cool thing about MCP is that you can track pretty much anything. You could, for example, cause every footstep a player takes whilst holding a flag to generate a small heatspot. Soon you find out what routes are common when capturing flags, and think about ways to cause it to branch more. Hell, by the same method you can just overlay pure movement, and see which bits of the level no-one ever uses and why that might be. And do you want to track kills or deaths? Tracking the location someone kills from to within a foot or so lets you highlight specific camp spots that are netting people an unusually high number of kills.

Positional tracking like this, if you leave it plugged into the game when it goes live, can even start automatically generating exploits for you. If an exact XYZ location starts getting a huge number of kills from it, or there’s a particular bomb placement that starts getting used a hell of a lot, or Engineers are building Sentries that get obscene numbers of kills in particular positions, tools that grep huge amounts of data like this can let you know that these things exist, and direct you to fix it.

That said, players tend to be extremely angsty about everything except for absolute exploiting getting fixed in maps. Restructuring a map after it’s been played for a few million hours because it highlights a major design flaw isn’t well received, even if it balances it better.