Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7.
H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank, between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used, but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle. I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.
> used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship).
Even the 3D plane effect in F-Zero and Mario Kart requires an hblank interrupt routine that changes the scale and scroll registers for the tile map. Without such trickery Mode 7 technically only does 2D rotozooming. That said, in colloquial use "Mode 7" tends to refer (somewhat inaccurately) to that 3D plane effect.
I believe he's right, though - I've heard that Mode 7, and specifically the fact that it could simulate a 3D perspective with that effect, was a selling point of the SNES over the Genesis/Megadrive to developers (that, and its higher number of colors). I admittedly haven't played around with Mode 7 much myself.
Oh, I meant I found it amusing that something as obscure as Mode 7 could be referred to "colloquially." I'm in no position to hold an opinion on the intricacies of SNES graphics modes.
I've worked at two game studios over the years and came away with one takeaway: there won't be a third unless it's my own. There are few more dysfunctional engineering environments on the planet, leading to continual burnout.
There is a long line of coders who grew up playing games that want to do that into adulthood, leading to a perverse supply/demand ratio that allows studios to treat their employees like crap under the auspices of "that's how the industry works". I wouldn't buy into it.
When I was coming out of high school, I was trying to decide whether or not I should go to Digipen or a "real" university. Being a video game designer had been the only career dream I'd ever known, so Digipen had a lot working in its favor.
Fortunately, my dad made sure that I contacted a local game designer before I committed to Digipen.
He told me the most important thing I could do if I wanted to succeed was not become a programmer, but to study English instead. He said programmers were considered a dime-a-dozen by most studios, were often treated terribly, and truthfully, weren't exactly the most pleasant of people to begin with. By developing a background in English and creative writing, I would immediately give myself a leg up over most of my competition and my career prospects as a game developer would be significantly better off for it.
This left me with a conundrum: what did I want to do more? Write stories and be treated well or write code and be treated like dirt?
Neither. I wanted to write code and be treated well (crazy, I know).
I still write stories on my own, and I'm in the process of developing my own game, but every time I read one of these stories, I feel much better about my choice to skip professional game development as a career path.
The most successful game developer I know was half way through a masters degree in English when he dropped out to dedicate himself to being a game addict. But he went on to co-found a couple of game companies and now works at Blizzard. Another testimonial for studying English!
Not only that, but even if you weren't chronically underpaid and mistreated, working on games isn't all that much more fun than working on other stuff. It's still work, and having a good manager, good tools, and good comrades matter a lot more than the ___domain you're working in.
Also, there's burnout. I spent around a year working on a turn-based strategy game, and I now hate turn-based strategy games with a passion.
Indeed. I'd say that in terms of sane basic development and operational processes most game studios are about 2 to 3 decades behind the curve relative to the software industry. The continual death march is the norm, for example. This hasn't changed much despite the massive increases in revenue over the years. I suspect it won't change until we see some significant turnover in the industry.
Alongside gaming, this is also particularly visible in the Hollywood FX/motion-graphics/design studios in Los Angeles. They eagerly eat their own young as long as the talent is there. And a with plethora of excellent art colleges right down the street continually pumping out very capable and ready-to-work talent, it's a vicious cycle. But, to be fair, the kids are living out their dreams through their art. So, from their perspective, it's worth it (until they want to start a family).
Not everywhere, just everywhere where supply of people wanting to work in a particular industry far outstrips demand. The entertainment industries always had this (music, film, television, computer games) as well as politics (where you have a lot of unpaid interns) and also girls wanting to become flight attendants (Ryanair makes you pay for the training etc.)
In industries where skills are in demand, employers have the treat these skills carefully or lose them to someone else. This includes fast growing industries (Linux, web, mobile) and skills that are both hard and really unsexy to obtain.
It's a question of degree. Video game development does have a very different supply/demand environment going for it than other kinds of software development. Where I am (both geographically and in my career) I'm treated pretty darn well.
You clearly have never experienced Symbian or Nokia development efforts. Both places where complete blood-baths, at least from my perspective as an outsider working pretty closely with teams inside of both companies.
Once again, it comes back to the meaning of the word "union" in the US versus Europe. Labor unions in Europe usually have less focus on enforcing a monopoly on labor and more focus on having good, safe conditions for sustainable work, arranging courses and sharing experiences, etc.
For example, pretty much all Norwegian IT workers are organized either through Tekna (union for Masters degree holders in technical subjects) or NITO (union for engineers and technical personnel). Being organized in such a community is a huge bonus when it comes to bargaining power and decreasing the leverage employers have due to ignorance or lack of information on salaries, etc. This comes in addition to all the advantages you get for having easy access to like-minded professionals.
I think it really depends on where you live. Nordic countries (just moved to DK) seem heavily unionized, while it's much less prevalent in the French IT sector, for instance.
"As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the Dominion Storm demo was a fake."
How many times in the history of computing has a team seen a faked demo, believed it, and cloned it, unwittingly becoming the first ones to do it for real? The fact that there are several such stories is really quite amazing.
One famous example is the Apple team getting a demo of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC. The Apple engineers mistakenly believed that the Xerox interface had a bunch of things it did not, in particular being able to drag overlapping windows on top of each other. The Xerox engineers were supposedly amazed when they saw the results. This isn't quite the same thing - Xerox wasn't staging a fake demo, the Apple guys just mis-remembered or mis-understood what they were looking at. But they still put an insane amount of effort into getting this working, much to everybody's surprise, because they thought that someone else had already done it, so it must have been possible.
Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. You can probably find this story somewhere on the folklore website.
It's not overlapping windows, but a similar concept. From folklore.org (awesome site, by the way; it made me a fan of that Apple):
Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get
them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows.
Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw
and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and
repaint portions of windows brought to the front.
Ah, I love folklore.org. I devoured every article on the site in about a week. Really makes you wonder what Apple would be like today if Burrell and Andy had had more power to override Jobs (see the "Diagnostic Port" story).
It wasn't overlapping windows, it was the ability to repaint a partially-obscured window without user interaction, plus some confusion because the Xerox Star did not have overlapping windows.
I've heard that during Noam Shazeer's Google interview, he was asked how to implement a spelling corrector. He described a scheme for statistically verifying queries against logs of what other users have typed. The interviewer (Paul Buchheit IIRC) quickly realized that his solution was better than what Google was using at the time. Noam was hired and asked to implement his interview question in production, and the resulting algorithms form the basis of the spell corrector that's used on Google today (though I hear the code was completely rewritten a few years ago).
Always better to ask unsolved problems with than solved problems in an interview. I wish Google still interviewed this way, instead of toy textbook homework problems.
Based on a press-release for the capabilities of a new graphics card that would have blown his project out of the water, an engineer spent a long time thinking about what they must be doing to get that sort of performance. He figured they were using a FIFO somewhere in the circuitry, and had enough space to implement a 1-deep FIFO for a certain operation, figuring that it wasn't enough. Turns out, his improved chip beat the benchmarks that were in the original press release because they had implemented a FIFO for a different operation that had less impact on performance.
Not directly related but there is the story of George Dantzig, a graduate student at Berkeley.
Arriving late to a class he quickly jotted down two equations left on the board, thinking they were homework. Several days later he hands the solutions to his professor. When his professor finally marks the problems he realises that George just proved two statistical theorems which had been unsolved up to that point.
There was a recent screenshot of Uncharted (a modern PS3 game franchise) highlighting the differences between the E3 build and the final shipping build.
Blizzard is often revered as one of those few studios, like Valve, that operate on "when it's done" time - game releases happen when they're ready, not when some publishing house requires it. As a result they have been monumentally successful.
It is interesting to hear that this was not always the case. As graphics have gotten better, storage has gotten cheaper, and budgets have gone way up, studios can't just pump-and-dump franchise cash-ins and casuals quite like they used to (with the exception of smartphone titles). ION Storm did Blizzard a great favor by wounding their pride and motivating them to create one of the greatest games ever - and to continue that brilliance until the present day.
It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what actually goes on internally.
Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects? Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so.
It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its magic, and it's not even quite sure why.
The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before (C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through Blizzard's fingers.
Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by tremendous successes with WoW.
But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat the next time someone eats their lunch.
To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.
That's exactly what I mean by slip through their fingers. It would be like Valve not picking CS. With Blizzard's considerable resources and, as they claim, freedom, they should have gone after hiring Icefrog and getting DOTA. If it's not in their DNA to make such a play work, well I think that factors into the larger point of them living in another age.
I want to also clarify that a lot of this rant is in the context of them trying to build out stuff like the UMS maps store for SC2 (or even putting in development time on their version of DOTA). To me, these are a fool's errand; pursuing them demonstrates that Blizzard doesn't understand _why_ UMS was so successful on their platform 15 years ago, and how the landscape has changed such that it no longer makes sense.
UMS was still successful 9 years ago, when the original DotA (not Allstars) first appeared. And it wasn't until 2005-6 that Allstars really took off, so that's only 6-7 years ago that there was still a vibrant UMS scene for WC3.
SC2 could've had a successful modding scene as well; Blizzard just doesn't understand what modders want or how to build tools for them. SC2's editor and the Galaxy scripting language were both underwhelming in their own right and significantly less powerful than the community-developed tools available for WC3. As a result, the competent WC3 modders abandoned Blizzard en masse.
Blizzard Allstars is also a fantastic idea and exactly the right move from a strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Blizzard has absolutely bungled the execution. They should have had it ready to release with SC2, long before LoL had really caught on or DotA 2 was a thing. Instead it's been more than two years, and there's still no release date for it or HotS.
Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular because they were always on the front page.
This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.
It doesn't matter that you can do neat things when the workflows are hideously overwrought, though[1]. As if Blizzard's insistence on GUI-ifying everything weren't bad enough, they then proceeded to add a ridiculous Data Editor that only partially exposes objects to code and doesn't allow you to do much programmatically. As a result, you end up having to cobble effects together through a combination of kludgy GUI editing and hackish[2] scripts. Examples:
The middle one is a particularly good example because you can't dynamically set the miss chance. Or rather you can, but that change will affect all units, so in practical terms you can't do it that way. Instead you have a single 1% miss buff and layer it on until you hit your target value. The problem there, of course, is that each 1% suffers from diminishing returns, so you end up having to use a logarithmic approximation instead. By contrast, completely dynamic evasion in WC3 was a breeze.
Anyway, even when Andromeda[3] was actively being worked on SC2 modding was barely tolerable. But you're also right about the mechanisms for advertising maps to players: They suck.
--
1. People were making third- and first-person mods in the WC3 days too, by the way.
2. Hackish because, by design, there are many things you simply cannot do with scripting.
Absolutely. Having previously grabbed Counter-Strike (Half-life mod) and Team Fortress (Quake mod), and treating them nicely, most definitely should garner a good reputation.
Has there been any information as to why those were so screwed up, compared to other blizzard titles? Blizzard used to be on my "buy everything they make you can trust it to be good" list but Starcraft II knocked them off that and Diablo 3 made me rather dislike them.
I know the Diablo 3 performance issues weren't picked up in the open beta stresstest - because I played that and the performance was good enough to make be buy the game after being hesitent to buy an online-only ARPG when I live in Australia.
What really shocked me in Diablo3 were some really simple programming mistakes that never should have passed Q&A or even be implemented in the first place.
Like one where you could change your local computer time and affect the auction house online to cancel your account at will and get the money bidden on these items.
They either had to finish the product on a tight schedule and did not focus on core aspects of the game or they had no real talent on the project. But this has probably something to do with the day Vivendi took over and they had to deliver ROI at any cost.
WoW is still a first class game but we will see if they are able to convert enough of their player base to Titan. But it looks like the brand name is starting to lose value.
Do you really consider SC2 a screwup? Remember, SC1 was far from perfect as well when it came out. The only blizzard game that was perfect right from release IMO was warcraft 3. SC2 might not be their best, but it is still a really great game. So I can't really follow that SC2 bashing.
Can't talk about Diablo3 though, that series never interested me.
SC2 wasn't terrible. I think a lot of people were angry (and still are) about the state of custom games, which were a lot of fun for a lot of people. The implementation in pre-Arcade-patch SC2 was so bad that only ~15 maps were ever played. Post-Arcade is better but still misses the mark in several key areas.
I think it shows that (a) the staff is being manipulated by upper management, who doesn't understand what made Blizzard games good in the past or (b) the turnover has been so high in this industry that the designers and developers themselves don't know what made these games great.
Ion Storm rivals Looking Glass Entertainment as one of the bigger disappointments of the 1990s PC gaming scene. Both companies produced an incredible roster of games -- Thief, Deus Ex, and the amazing System Shock series (which managed to frighten so much with so little) -- then vanished after figuratively lighting money on fire.
Can anyone point to companies producing games like this today? Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character? I'd really like to find a few before I give up and buy Halo 4.
What exactly do you mean by sparse and minimal? Thief I can see, but Deus Ex had 11 different skill areas; nanoaugmentations; weapon upgrades; a well written, branching storyline that incorporated every conspiracy theory known to man; multiple ways to complete missions; etc.
It's funny that you mention Halo 4 - I thought the original Halo had some of the best atmosphere of any FPS game ever, especially the Flood levels (people seem to be split on whether they loved or hated them). I thought it did a fantastic job of conveying the sense of a desperate fight for survival, and the final escape was just incredibly thrilling, especially in co-op. Halo 2 and 3 didn't come anywhere close to that. I haven't played ODST or Reach, so I'm curious if anyone agrees with me about Halo 1 and would recommend either of those.
As far recent games - if you want a sparse, minimal, terrifying game, try Amnesia: Dark Descent. It's so minimal that you don't get any weapons. There's also an XBox game called Alan Wake that was superb. Going back a little farther, there's an older Russian horror game called Pathologic that's terrifying, if you can find it and get past the bad translation and voice acting.
They're anything but sparse and minimal, but the recent Fallout games (3 and New Vegas) are full of atmosphere and character. Red Dead Redemption has some of the most beautiful and emotionally charged uses of plot + visuals + music I've ever experienced in a game.
I think I wrote that part while thinking about running around in Thief, hearing the guards call me a taffer. Memories... :)
But yeah, I agree--DX was a mishmash of a game. I liked how it experimented with some FPS conventions, though--it was very cutting-edge from a gameplay standpoint.
Agreed on the Flood levels in Halo--those are excellent, and arguably unparalleled in any other Halo game. I'm looking for stuff like that, to be honest! If I can man up I'll give Amnesia a shot, and what I've seen of Pathologic on YT looks very atmospheric.
I think that's actually a good list moving forward: Amnesia, Red Dead Redemption to cleanse the palette, then Pathologic. Maybe I'll finally get to Thief: Deadly Shadows after that.
>Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character?
I'm not certain what type of game you want. The obvious suggestions in terms of well-crafted atmosphere and high-quality narrative might be Portal and the follow-on to the above, Deus Ex: HR and Bioshock.
> Games that are sparse, minimal, and full of atmosphere and character?
I'm sure you're familiar with them but all of Valve's first person shooters fit this mold (maybe not minimal...). The Left 4 Dead series especially has the atmosphere down.
Minimal and full of atmosphere?
I would prefer DayZ then (even if it seems it has had its best days,at least as a mod). Never played another game which can be so intense and get you really frightened..
The first Metroid Prime is one of my favorite games. Great atmosphere, soundtrack, and level design. I should get my Gamecube and run through it during the holidays.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is a standout. All the rough edges just make you love it more... when you're not bleeding to death in an irradiated sci-fantasy anomaly minefield.
My guess is ego impacted by fame, Sweeny/CliffB managed to not be quite as personally famous as Carmack and Romero. While I play video games, and recognized Sweeny/CliffB it took a search to place them as the fathers of Epic. I recognized Carmack/Romero without the need of Google.
Ah, the press event, the time-suck that had to be tolerated in every realm of human undertaking: video games, sports, business, politics, etc
> As every game developer knows, release dates are slippery, but the dates of trade shows are set in stone. If a game studio has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare booth space, purchase long-lead print advertising and arrange press appointments, the development team is going to have to demo something or heads will roll.
It's crazy to think about how much money and resources were wasted, not to mention destructive pressure created, by these contrived schedules of publicity dates. Getting publicity today is not as simple as making a webpage and twitter account, but at least it's not how it was in the OP's day
Speaking of change of plans. Does anybody remember blizzard warcraft 3 pre-release version? See screenshots [1][2]
That was entirely different gameplay, with more RPG and less strategy. I remember how I read about it in some magazine and was greatly excited. When it came out, I liked it even more than I expected, that was one kick-ass game.
And then I found World Editor. Needless to say, I was stunned, I spent all my free time playing with JASS (wc3 scripting language), and that was very probably a deciding factor in me becoming a programmer. Hell, even now, I think I could make a decent map if paired with a good landscape designer/storymaker. I haven't finished many maps and projects in my time but the process of creation/programming was so incredibly enjoyable, that end result didn't even matter.
I wonder if there are any other world editors on HN.
I am just sad that they scrapped the RPG / adventure game they were making with Thrall as the main characer. It seems a lot of his storyline took place behind the scenes somewhere between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. But again, an adventure might have failed spectacularly with no prior experience and the genre in general losing popularity.
There have been videos of leaked Warcraft Adventures game walkthrough published relatively recently, if you are talking about it. I reckon that the guy who published this refused to give/sell his copy of the leaked beta.
Blizzard definitely struggled with what they were trying to accomplish in attempting to create genre-busting character-centric RTS.
WC3's a great game, but the released product seems to be a backtracking from what they were trying to accomplish. DotA strikes me as having gameplay closer to what Blizzard was striving to create.
Mode 7 was the SNES graphics mode that allowed for things like rotating and zooming a background layer - used for things like the track in Mario Kart and F-Zero, or the worldmap in Final Fantasy 6 (while you're in the airship). The Scroll Register was used for scrolling in Mode 7.
H-Blank is the horizontal blanking period (and associated interrupt) - a time period between the drawing of scanlines on the screen (there's also V-blank, between frames). Changes made during H-Blank could make for some interesting effects - it was used for things like the circle that closes around Mario at the end of a level of Super Mario World: The rectangle draw routine is used, but the size of the rectangle is changed between scanlines, creating a circle. I'd imagine this was used for some of the wavy distortion effects in games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound as well.