Biggest Gaming Event in History: Halo 3 has arrived

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
my sense is that art, beyond the aspects that directly effect the interface (which DO impact gameplay, see SMAC - the graphics engine, IIUC, was ok, it was the color palate and art assets that made it hard to see stuff, and made the game less playable for some of us - and yeah, im sorry to bring up an ancient example) is important to immersion.

lotm, please, please stop. Snoopy is completely retarded on this point, and you aren't helping him.

Immersion != gameplay. Immersion helps improve the overall package, but just as Civ would have exactly the same mechanics even if it still had the Civ2 graphics, so would Halo 3 have exactly the same mechanics even if it still had Halo graphics.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


lotm, please, please stop. Snoopy is completely retarded on this point, and you aren't helping him.

Immersion != gameplay. Immersion helps improve the overall package, but just as Civ would have exactly the same mechanics even if it still had the Civ2 graphics, so would Halo 3 have exactly the same mechanics even if it still had Halo graphics.

Im not necessarily supporting snoopy on his point, whatever it is. I did not say that immersion equals gameplay.

I think bad art can detract from gameplay, and I give SMAC as an example.

I think art can add to immersion, and for any game that relies on immersion, art is important, and I think not an afterthought. How that impacts the actual role of artists in the game design process, I would ask at a place with lots of industry pros, and thats not here. But I think some of the artist bashing here is uncalled for. As is some of the bashing in general.

[Asher]

Methinks LOTM needs to discover what gameplay is before continuing.

A gamer would know this.

quartertothree is a bad infliuence.

I'm not bashing artists in general, just the self-important ones like Snoopy who clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

If you want to ask industry pros about it, check out Beyond3D. There's a fantastic thread there about hilarious first-hand experiences in professional game design, and a lot of those gems come at the expense of artists...

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
I think bad art can detract from gameplay, and I give SMAC as an example.

Bad art can't do anything to gameplay because gameplay is completely unrelated to art. It's solely a function of mechanics.

I think art can add to immersion, and for any game that relies on immersion, art is important, and I think not an afterthought.

Dude, this has nothing whatsoever to do with our argument. You're pulling a GePap. It's a little surreal, actually.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Asher

Methinks LOTM needs to discover what gameplay is before continuing.

A gamer would know this.

Im sorry, I still value a dying marginal genre, so my view of gameplay may be jaundiced by that.

But glad to hear Im not a "gamer".

quartertothree is a bad infliuence.

Fine, dont go there.

[Asher]

I'm not joking when I say that place puts quartertothree to shame. I've been posting there since 2001 and I've a lot of exposure to real development processes.

For example, here is a console developer on framerate issues from the other day:

Game development isn't an exact science and it's a very fluid process. Despite the way you see it presented sometimes there are no "X polygons ay Y fps" magic numbers.

People on the technical side usally make educated guesses based on tests they've run, and artwork gets built, sometimes the artwork is over spec, sometimes it's on spec and the engineer was just too optimistic, and sometimes the design evolves to require more stuff on screen. More often than not it's a combination of all three.

Engineers are commonly overly optimistic early in consol lifespans, because they're vision of the hardware is incomplete.

My experience is that frame rate just doesn't get the day to day love during development that it used to. Some of this is team size and budgets and the pressre to get features in, with the assumption the performance issues can be addressed later. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes the pressure to ship means performance issues persist.

I've spent many a month before E3 (that was) trying to get games to run in the memory footprint of the console in question (rather than the devkit), and at a reasonable framerate.

Sometimes as a developer you don't realise the performance impact of a feature when you put it in, this is especially true if the game is very data driven. A feature can be invisibl on profiles right up to the point where an a artist checks in a piece of content for it that the engineer hadn't envisioned.

It's never a hardware issue alone, you could perfectly reasonably write a 60fps highres PS1 game, if you made the right set of compromises, and made the framerate and resolution a priority in development. Similarly you can make any piece of hardware look like it sucks if you don't play to it's strengths.

The site does get very technical, but so is the business.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Originally posted by lord of the mark
I think bad art can detract from gameplay, and I give SMAC as an example.

Bad art can't do anything to gameplay because gameplay is completely unrelated to art. It's solely a function of mechanics.

In SMAC, the mechanics involved selecting a unit, moving it, attacking with it, etc. As in every garden variety TBS. The art made it difficult (for some of us) to tell at a glance what unit was what, and what terrain was what. That slowed down the rate at which we played, and given limited energy and attention we were willing to devote to something that is supposed to be FUN, affected how we played the game.

I though gameplay was how you played the game. If the Gamer Gods have determined that gameplay is strictly a matter of code and mechanics, and not how a playe actually plays the game, well, is there anyway I can leave that religion?

I think art can add to immersion, and for any game that relies on immersion, art is important, and I think not an afterthought.

Dude, this has nothing whatsoever to do with our argument. You're pulling a GePap. It's a little surreal, actually.

Given the heated rhetoric on both sides of this discussion, I dont think its clear from the wording of the posts exactly WHAT is being debated. There are substantive things Snoopy said about consoles and PCs (many of which I would not agree with) there is a general attack on Snoopy, there is his statement about his creds, there are discussions of the meanings of Snoopys creds based in part on the role of artists, the relationship of art to gameplay, and the role of art in games more broadly.

I am logically addressing some of those individual questions. I am NOT the one who is engaging in overwrought rhetoric, mixing different lines of argument, or engaging in insult.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher
I'm not joking when I say that place puts quartertothree to shame. I've been posting there since 2001 and I've a lot of exposure to real development processes.

For example, here is a console developer on framerate issues from the other day:

Game development isn't an exact science and it's a very fluid process. Despite the way you see it presented sometimes there are no "X polygons ay Y fps" magic numbers.

People on the technical side usally make educated guesses based on tests they've run, and artwork gets built, sometimes the artwork is over spec, sometimes it's on spec and the engineer was just too optimistic, and sometimes the design evolves to require more stuff on screen. More often than not it's a combination of all three.

Engineers are commonly overly optimistic early in consol lifespans, because they're vision of the hardware is incomplete.

My experience is that frame rate just doesn't get the day to day love during development that it used to. Some of this is team size and budgets and the pressre to get features in, with the assumption the performance issues can be addressed later. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes the pressure to ship means performance issues persist.

I've spent many a month before E3 (that was) trying to get games to run in the memory footprint of the console in question (rather than the devkit), and at a reasonable framerate.

Sometimes as a developer you don't realise the performance impact of a feature when you put it in, this is especially true if the game is very data driven. A feature can be invisibl on profiles right up to the point where an a artist checks in a piece of content for it that the engineer hadn't envisioned.

It's never a hardware issue alone, you could perfectly reasonably write a 60fps highres PS1 game, if you made the right set of compromises, and made the framerate and resolution a priority in development. Similarly you can make any piece of hardware look like it sucks if you don't play to it's strengths.

The site does get very technical, but so is the business.

Ive seen discussions just as technical on issues like framerate,development processses, etc on qto3. I dont always remember them well, but thats due to my own technical limitations, not to any shallowness at qto3.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher
I'm not joking when I say that place puts quartertothree to shame. I've been posting there since 2001 and I've a lot of exposure to real development processes.

You mean Beyond 3d?

I checked it out. Its quite busy. I even searched for your posts. Not too many lately. You seem to prefer posting here, for some reason.

[Asher]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
You mean Beyond 3d?

I checked it out. Its quite busy. I even searched for your posts. Not too many lately. You seem to prefer posting here, for some reason.

I don't post a whole lot because I mainly listen. The site's very interesting and informative, and since I'm not a game developer in the industry myself, my opinions are less relevant.

[Asher]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
In SMAC, the mechanics involved selecting a unit, moving it, attacking with it, etc. As in every garden variety TBS. The art made it difficult (for some of us) to tell at a glance what unit was what, and what terrain was what.

I agree that most artists are crap, and this is reflected in games.

The game would've been much easier to understand with alphanumeric unit identifiers.

This also has zero impact on gameplay, as luck would have it.

Given the heated rhetoric on both sides of this discussion, I dont think its clear from the wording of the posts exactly WHAT is being debated. There are substantive things Snoopy said about consoles and PCs (many of which I would not agree with) there is a general attack on Snoopy, there is his statement about his creds, there are discussions of the meanings of Snoopys creds based in part on the role of artists, the relationship of art to gameplay, and the role of art in games more broadly.

I am logically addressing some of those individual questions. I am NOT the one who is engaging in overwrought rhetoric, mixing different lines of argument, or engaging in insult.

Snoopy's opening barrage was insulting, not to mention completely ridiculous. He's quite literally asking for it.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher

I don't post a whole lot because I mainly listen. The site's very interesting and informative, and since I'm not a game developer in the industry myself, my opinions are less relevant.

well you really ought to find someplace where folks are your peers to argue with. We clearly are not.

[Asher]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
well you really ought to find someplace where folks are your peers to argue with. We clearly are not.

Some of you are.

Others are mere pretenders to the throne.

[Kuciwalker]

That's nonsense, lotm. You don't argue exclusively people with the same knowledge and skills sets as yourself; that's obviously pointless.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
That's nonsense, lotm. You don't argue exclusively people with the same knowledge and skills sets as yourself; that's obviously pointless.

I didnt say exclusively.

Id just like to see Asher arguing his more contentious points in a place where people with more knowledge than I have would critique them.

I think his disagreements with Tom Chick would be best argued on Qto3, but he doesnt seem to want to post there.