Ready to jump head-first into wild speculation land? Come on, it'll be fun!
It occurred to me today that there's a slim possibility that in the near future Microsoft may actually become the biggest driver of WebGL adoption in the industry. Yes, that's right, "WebGL considered harmful" Microsoft. Sounds crazy (probably is crazy) but I feel the possibility is definitely non-zero. Why? Let's string together a series of massive assumptions, shall we?
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Welcome to the Next Gen™ (Same as the Last Gen, but better lit)
So footage for the next installment in the "Battlefield" series was posted today, and it's got a lot of people excited. For good reason too, it's gorgeous! Totally worth your time to watch the full 17min preview:
Much respect goes out to the engine developers and artists, those are some pretty pixels!
Too bad the gameplay doesn't look like it got a similar overhaul. This is basically the same game we've been playing since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in a new coat of paint.
For starters the enemy AI looks pretty braindead. They can't seem to aim, don't notice people running around 3 feet behind them, tend to stand in open "scope-approved" places, and don't really move around much. Yawn.
But that's okay, because the real point of playing a game like this is to be shuffled from one tightly scripted, minimally interactive set piece to the next. Right? Of course at some point that stops becoming a game, and that's what's got me a little down.
It's very interesting that this preview starts out showing us the ending, then bounces back in time to show how we got there. Flashbacks can be a very effective literary technique, but in the context of a game it carries some unwelcome subtext: "Nothing you do over the next hour matters, because you will always end up right here." And why not? After all, the animators spent a lot of time on that scene, the artists custom built an "upside down car underwater set" just for the occasion, the script writers agonized about the precise placement of all those swear words to convey the appropriate panic with a "mature" feel. There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and money) that went into that 5 minutes of barely interactive cutscene, it would be a tragedy if the players missed it!
And as a result no matter what you do you're going to end up upside down in a car underwater. You'll never be able to outrun that helicopter, you'll never be able to save Soldier 3's leg, never be able to successfully defend the pickup point, and never spare your helicopter support her untimely end. What you can do (the "interactive" part) is fail to live long enough to witness yourself failing to do all these things. Did someone order a side of fatalism with their escapist hobby?
Maybe it's just me, but I was hoping that the next generation of game consoles would let us get away from these kinds of on-rails experiences. And yes, maybe that would mean that some game designers would have to give up on their secret Hollywood aspirations, but I'd have a lot more fun with the end result. I'm not saying games can't have a well-written narrative, but I'd really like to play a more active role in shaping it. By all means, have the helicopter pilot radio in and say "Extraction point is that building, go!" And then let me figure out how to get there. Sure, throw the enemy chopper at me right before I escape. But rather than forcing me into some pre-scripted "hanging off the building" scene, let me ACTUALLY defend the building! Wouldn't be awesome to be ducking around that shell of a structure, desperately trying to get pot-shots off, while the helicopter systematically rips the building to shreds around you? And if I or my teammates die in the process, so be it. It will be far more meaningful to me if I knew I could have saved them, rather than knowing that they're doomed from the start.
And hey, go ahead and keep that whole underwater car thing in there! There's a decent chance I'll be forced off the road anyway while swerving to avoid the hellfire raining down above me. It would be extra cool to know that the developers planned for that and didn't just throw up a "game over" screen when the car hit the water. But let me actually escape sometimes too!
Emergent gameplay is a tricky thing, because by necessity it's not going to be nearly as consistently intense as a carefully curated experience (though our increasing technological capabilities allow it to be more interesting). The times where it all comes together just right, though, are the moments that we as gamers remember forever. Those are the moments that we post to YouTube and rave about in forums. Those are the moments we share with friends the next day with giddy excitement. Rather than "Hey, have you reached the helicopter scene yet?" "Yeah! That was awesome!", which is a great reaction in it's own right, it becomes something personal, but with just enough shared context that everyone can relate:
"Hey, so you know that helicopter scene? So get this, I'm trying to fight it back but right before I fire my RPG the building supports get shot out and the whole floor starts to topple over! My shot goes wide, and I'm trying not to fall while desks and boxes and stuff are sliding past me. Then the chopper swings back around and I think I'm toast, but the RPG that I fired earlier hit that smoke stack off to the side, and it fell down right on top of him right as he began to fire! I had 8 health left! It was incredible! And so then I..."
Much respect goes out to the engine developers and artists, those are some pretty pixels!
Too bad the gameplay doesn't look like it got a similar overhaul. This is basically the same game we've been playing since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in a new coat of paint.
For starters the enemy AI looks pretty braindead. They can't seem to aim, don't notice people running around 3 feet behind them, tend to stand in open "scope-approved" places, and don't really move around much. Yawn.
But that's okay, because the real point of playing a game like this is to be shuffled from one tightly scripted, minimally interactive set piece to the next. Right? Of course at some point that stops becoming a game, and that's what's got me a little down.
It's very interesting that this preview starts out showing us the ending, then bounces back in time to show how we got there. Flashbacks can be a very effective literary technique, but in the context of a game it carries some unwelcome subtext: "Nothing you do over the next hour matters, because you will always end up right here." And why not? After all, the animators spent a lot of time on that scene, the artists custom built an "upside down car underwater set" just for the occasion, the script writers agonized about the precise placement of all those swear words to convey the appropriate panic with a "mature" feel. There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (and money) that went into that 5 minutes of barely interactive cutscene, it would be a tragedy if the players missed it!
And as a result no matter what you do you're going to end up upside down in a car underwater. You'll never be able to outrun that helicopter, you'll never be able to save Soldier 3's leg, never be able to successfully defend the pickup point, and never spare your helicopter support her untimely end. What you can do (the "interactive" part) is fail to live long enough to witness yourself failing to do all these things. Did someone order a side of fatalism with their escapist hobby?
Maybe it's just me, but I was hoping that the next generation of game consoles would let us get away from these kinds of on-rails experiences. And yes, maybe that would mean that some game designers would have to give up on their secret Hollywood aspirations, but I'd have a lot more fun with the end result. I'm not saying games can't have a well-written narrative, but I'd really like to play a more active role in shaping it. By all means, have the helicopter pilot radio in and say "Extraction point is that building, go!" And then let me figure out how to get there. Sure, throw the enemy chopper at me right before I escape. But rather than forcing me into some pre-scripted "hanging off the building" scene, let me ACTUALLY defend the building! Wouldn't be awesome to be ducking around that shell of a structure, desperately trying to get pot-shots off, while the helicopter systematically rips the building to shreds around you? And if I or my teammates die in the process, so be it. It will be far more meaningful to me if I knew I could have saved them, rather than knowing that they're doomed from the start.
And hey, go ahead and keep that whole underwater car thing in there! There's a decent chance I'll be forced off the road anyway while swerving to avoid the hellfire raining down above me. It would be extra cool to know that the developers planned for that and didn't just throw up a "game over" screen when the car hit the water. But let me actually escape sometimes too!
Emergent gameplay is a tricky thing, because by necessity it's not going to be nearly as consistently intense as a carefully curated experience (though our increasing technological capabilities allow it to be more interesting). The times where it all comes together just right, though, are the moments that we as gamers remember forever. Those are the moments that we post to YouTube and rave about in forums. Those are the moments we share with friends the next day with giddy excitement. Rather than "Hey, have you reached the helicopter scene yet?" "Yeah! That was awesome!", which is a great reaction in it's own right, it becomes something personal, but with just enough shared context that everyone can relate:
"Hey, so you know that helicopter scene? So get this, I'm trying to fight it back but right before I fire my RPG the building supports get shot out and the whole floor starts to topple over! My shot goes wide, and I'm trying not to fall while desks and boxes and stuff are sliding past me. Then the chopper swings back around and I think I'm toast, but the RPG that I fired earlier hit that smoke stack off to the side, and it fell down right on top of him right as he began to fire! I had 8 health left! It was incredible! And so then I..."
Friday, March 8, 2013
Sources of Motivation
I, like many other developers I'm sure, seem to go through mini "burn out" cycles every N months and hit slumps where I don't seem to be making progress on any of my personal projects and thus have a really hard time sitting down at a keyboard and punching out some code.
(I can usually keep myself productive at work, but that's because "keeping a roof over my family's head, food on their plates, and clothes on their back" is a mighty powerful motivator! It's far easier to let the hobby stuff slide, though, even when that's usually the more interesting work.)
Though I'm not in one of those slumps right now (unless you consider "my child takes up a lot of what was previously free time" a slump) I got thinking the other day about how I always get incredibly motivated to create something great after hearing about other people's success stories. I have been lifted out of my funks before simply by reading a single article or listening to a single talk. And that got me thinking that if it works for me then why not share some of my favorite sources of inspiration and motivation with the good readers of my blog? Maybe it'll help one or two of you get motivated as well!
Thus, without further ado I give you: Toji's "Recommended reading and/or viewing list for programmers that need to be motivated to code good and do other things good too."
// TODO: Work on better article name generation skills
 |
| Image swiped from Kotaku 'cause I think it's pretty! |
Though I'm not in one of those slumps right now (unless you consider "my child takes up a lot of what was previously free time" a slump) I got thinking the other day about how I always get incredibly motivated to create something great after hearing about other people's success stories. I have been lifted out of my funks before simply by reading a single article or listening to a single talk. And that got me thinking that if it works for me then why not share some of my favorite sources of inspiration and motivation with the good readers of my blog? Maybe it'll help one or two of you get motivated as well!
Thus, without further ado I give you: Toji's "Recommended reading and/or viewing list for programmers that need to be motivated to code good and do other things good too."
// TODO: Work on better article name generation skills
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Recommended reading - Debugging a Resource Leak in WebKit
My colleague at Google, Ken Russell, has just posted a very in-depth recounting of how he tracked down a fairly tricky WebGL bug in Chrome's WebKit port after I had identified that creation of Web Workers was causing WebGL resources (and a lot of other resources too!) to leak. It's a very technical read that involves lots of C++, gdb, and stack traces but if that's the kind of thing you're into it's a pretty interesting tale. Take a look!
Graphics Prose - Debugging a Resource Leak in WebKit
Graphics Prose - Debugging a Resource Leak in WebKit
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Get WebGL working on the Android Chrome Beta
[UPDATE: This whole process just got a lot easier! With the newest update you can now visit about:flags (or chrome://flags, take your pick) and click the link that says "Enable WebGL". Then restart the browser and you're done! Best of all? No root required!]
Today a new Chrome Beta was released to the Google Play store. While the current stable Chrome release is based on the relatively old and crusty Chrome 18, the beta is based on the Chrome 25 code base. It's a big step forward in a lot of aspects, but there's one very specific capability that was added that's of interest to readers of this blog: WebGL support!
Today a new Chrome Beta was released to the Google Play store. While the current stable Chrome release is based on the relatively old and crusty Chrome 18, the beta is based on the Chrome 25 code base. It's a big step forward in a lot of aspects, but there's one very specific capability that was added that's of interest to readers of this blog: WebGL support!
Now don't get too excited, because it's not turned on out of the box and not everyone will be able to enable it, but if you're interested in doing some early testing of your WebGL app(s) it's now possible with a little bit of tinkering.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
glMatrix 2.0 Released!
Hey, did you hear that it's a 2013 now? New years usually inspire resolutions, and one of mine is simple: Finish more of the projects that I start! To get off on the right foot in that regard, lets start off the year with a brand shiny new glMatrix 2.0!
So what's new in version 2?
- The entire API has been reworked with an eye towards consistency and speed. This means that while it looks similar to the previous revision the new library is NOT backwards compatible with glMatrix 1.3.7. That's an unfortunate casualty of progress, but a necessary one to make sure the library isn't held back by mistakes made early on.
- A much expanded suite of unit tests. We don't have full test coverage yet, but the new tests should at least help to ensure that we catch obvious regressions before they make it into the wild, and it can be expanded to cover new bugs as we find them
- A new library structure and build process that integrates the new tests and will eventually make new releases a one-click operation.
- More optimizations!
- New functions at the request of the community!
- A higher version number!
This new version has been in the works for a little while, and there's still some more updates that I'm planning on around the documentation and landing page, but I'm pretty happy with where the code is at, and the new version should allow the library to evolve more smoothly as feature requests and bug fixes roll in moving forward.
Of course, the new release isn't something that I can take credit for alone. There's plenty of thanks to go around to everyone that's contributed code, ideas, or even just opinions to get the library where it is now. In particular, thank you to:
- Nicholas Kinsey
- Samuel Williams
- gero3
- jagenjo
- Juriy
- Kevin Reid
- Sam Howie
- Won Chun
- Ben Vanik
- Warren Hunt (who really needs some sort of linkable page!)
And of course, glMatrix's co-author, who has been an invaluable source of support, feedback, and code: Colin MacKenzie IV (Otherwise known as sinisterchipmunk, which is the most awesome username ever!)
Happy new year, everyone, and happy coding!
Sunday, December 2, 2012
I will not be playing your game today
I've always considered myself to be a gamer. I've been fascinated with video games since I was very young and the NES was hot stuff. I would never think to describe myself as a "casual" gamer: I can still headshot you from half way across the map in Team Fortress 2 with ease. I've beaten multiple Final Fantasies, and will fervently argue that VI is the best in the series. I still chuckle if I ever hear someone say "Would you kindly...". I've always wanted to build games, which is why I started teaching myself graphics development in Junior High. Gaming has long been an important part of my life, and is a big part of why I'm in the career I am today. In every sense of the word I am a Gamer with a capitol 'G'!
Except, um... I've been playing a lot more Angry Birds and Cut the Rope lately than Dishonored or Borderlands. Actually, that's pretty much all I've been playing. I feel vaguely guilty about that: it's hard to claim that you're a "hardcore" gamer with a straight face when most of your gaming time is spent slicing fruit instead of shooting aliens. But, at least I've a good excuse! His name is James:
Yes, I've added "Daddy" to my resume. And, for those of you who have kids I don't need to explain that, especially at this age (2 Months) it's a full-time job.
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