Game Developer - August_2002.pdf

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AUGUST 2002
G A M E
D E V E L O P E R
M A G A Z I N E
GAME PLAN
Growing up, Not Growing Old
“
600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
t:
415.947.6000
f:
415.947.6090
Publisher
Jennifer Pahlka
jpahlka@cmp.com
S
o, what do you think of the
show?” This question is the
most basic opening gambit
of tradeshow banter. After a
couple of days (or some-
times only hours) spent fighting the sen-
sory assault of game industry events,
sometimes its pure simplicity holds your
only hope of stringing together an intelli-
gible thought to communicate to another
person. Whether engaged in this
exchange myself or merely observing
another conversation, I lost count of the
number of times this year at GDC and
E3 that people’s response to this question
was to gaze wistfully off into the distance
and say something to the effect of, “It all
seems so . . .
grown up.”
No one seemed quite sure whether that
was a good thing or a bad thing, but
there is a measure of truth to the senti-
ment. The tangible business aspects of
industry events such as E3 have come
more clearly into the fore, making wel-
come inroads against the seedy sideshow
angle. I didn’t bring my tape measure or
calipers to E3 this year, so I lack empiri-
cal data, but even the smarmy booth
babe presence seemed to be on the
decline. There was less noise for the sake
of noise, less latex for the sake of latex.
Not none, but less.
It makes sense; there’s more real busi-
ness to do every year as the industry
grows. But what I also see is the game
industry beginning to feel truly comfort-
able in its own skin. We’re no longer the
brooding stepchildren of other entertain-
ment or technology sectors but confident
that our unique offerings can hold their
own in the mainstream, and do so on our
terms, not as an adjunct to another indus-
try chafing at our continued presence.
And while there are still a small token
handful of Hollywood-wannabes out
there embarrassing themselves on our
behalf, many in the industry feel within
striking distance of finding the path to
Hollywood-level success without ending
up in a gutter on the Sunset Strip.
✎
L E T T E R
F R O M
T H E
E D I TO R
EDITORIAL
Editor-In-Chief
Jennifer Olsen
jolsen@cmp.com
Managing Editor
Everard Strong
estrong@cmp.com
Production Editor
Olga Zundel
ozundel@cmp.com
Product Review Editor
Daniel Huebner
dan@gamasutra.com
Art Director
Elizabeth von Büdingen
evonbudingen@cmp.com
Editor-At-Large
Chris Hecker
checker@d6.com
Contributing Editors
Jonathan Blow
jon@bolt-action.com
Hayden Duvall
hayden@confounding-factor.com
Noah Falstein
noah@theinspiracy.com
Advisory Board
Hal Barwood
LucasArts
Ellen Guon Beeman
Beemania
Andy Gavin
Naughty Dog
Joby Otero
Luxoflux
Dave Pottinger
Ensemble Studios
George Sanger
Big Fat Inc.
Harvey Smith
Ion Storm
Paul Steed
WildTangent
We’re moving beyond the days of the
developer with the rock-star complex
striking off to run his own studio, only
to find out that running a business is
more than putting a R
OBOTRON
machine
in the breakroom and giving employees
free soda. Development professionals
eyeing their future don’t want to be road-
ies on tour with a rock star, they want a
solidly run company that stands a good
chance of succeeding and producing
quality products. With publishers’ toler-
ance of risk nearing all-time lows, a con-
sistent track record of sensible business
dealings is any development studio’s best
asset right now.
But as our success and growth outlook
lead to more attention on the serious busi-
ness of game development, are we losing
part of our identity by showing a more
grown-up face? When game development
transitioned from solo programmers
working a project to teams of program-
mers, artists, and designers, some develop-
ers couldn’t adapt and left the industry for
good, taking their talent and experience
with them. Does “growing up” mean
alienating another segment of rare talent
who were first drawn to game develop-
ment because of the eccentric, laid-back,
and decidedly unpretentious environment?
The trick will be to continue to focus
on what has brought the industry success
in the first place: offering consumers a
kind of entertainment experience they
can’t get from any other medium. As long
as we continue to nurture and develop the
unique interactive essence of games while
continuing to improve on the overall pro-
duction values, quality of entertainment,
and variety of our offerings, we may yet
be able to retain the identity that got us
this far.
ADVERTISING SALES
Director of Sales/Associate Publisher
Michele Sweeney
e:
msweeney@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6217
Senior Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe
Afton Thatcher
e:
athatcher@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6224
Account Manager, Northern California & Southeast
Susan Kirby
e:
skirby@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6226
Account Manager, Recruitment
Raelene Maiben
e:
rmaiben@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6225
Account Manager, Western Region & Asia
Craig Perreault
e:
cperreault@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6223
Account Representative
Aaron Murawski
e:
amurawski@cmp.com
t:
415.947.6227
ADVERTISING PRODUCTION
Vice President, Manufacturing
Bill Amstutz
Advertising Production Coordinator
Kevin Chanel
Reprints
Cindy Zauss
t:
909.698.1780
GAMA NETWORK MARKETING
Director of Marketing
Greg Kerwin
Senior MarCom Manager
Jennifer McLean
Marketing Coordinator
Scott Lyon
CIRCULATION
Group Circulation Director
Catherine Flynn
Circulation Manager
Ron Escobar
Circulation Assistant
Ian Hay
Newsstand Analyst
Pam Santoro
Game Developer
is BPA approved
SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES
For information, order questions, and address changes
t:
800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928
f:
847.647.5972
e:
gamedeveloper@halldata.com
INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION
Mario Salinas
t:
650.513.4234
f:
650.513.4482
e:
msalinas@cmp.com
CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT
President & CEO
Gary Marshall
Executive Vice President & CFO
John Day
Chief Operating Officer
Steve Weitzner
Chief Information Officer
Mike Mikos
President, Technology Solutions Group
Robert Faletra
President, Business Technology Group
Adam K. Marder
President, Healthcare Group
Vicki Masseria
President, Electronics Group
Jeff Patterson
President, Specialized Technologies Group
Regina Starr Ridley
Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing
Bill Howard
Senior Vice President, HR & Communications
Leah Landro
Vice President & General Counsel
Sandra Grayson
Vice President, Creative Technologies
Philip Chapnick
Jennifer Olsen
Editor-In-Chief
WWW.GAMANETWORK.COM
4
S AY S Y O U
Safety First
cripting has become quite common-
place in game development, and the
questions of which language to use
plague every project design. In “Creating
a C++ Scripting System” (June 2002),
Emil Dotchevski makes many references
to the safety of the scripting language
and finding ways to prevent users from
crashing the game by invalid memory
access (bogus pointers).
While I agree this is a big issue for
scripts, there are much more significant
safety issues (such as access to critical sys-
tem functions) you must consider when
using any compiled language that will be
loaded by the system. In fairness, the titles
listed in Mr. Dotchevski’s credits are con-
sole titles and scripting is far more con-
trolled. For PC titles, we aren’t so lucky.
We look bad when a newly down-
loaded mod crashes our game, but we
look like total idiots when that mod
crashes the system by modifying the reg-
istry, fills our hard drives with bogus
files, modifies our work, or uploads our
information to a remote server without
our consent.
Script safety needs extreme scrutiny.
Unfortunately, safety issues of this nature
are all too frequently an afterthought, or
not a thought at all, when considering our
scripting language. C++ certainly is viable
as a scripting language, but the way it is
packaged and loaded requires a good deal
of care.
A F O R U M F O R Y O U R P O I N T O F V I E W. G I V E U S Y O U R F E E D B A C K . . .
C
S
With the widespread availability of
graphics hardware possessing per-pixel
lighting capabilities, the days of apply-
ing only one kind of texture to each
surface are numbered.
to commercialize timeline-based anima-
tion mixing. It was a core feature of XSI
1.0 way back in May 2000, predating
similar functionality found in Maya, Max,
and Lightwave.
Michael Sheasby
Softimage
ture shown in Figure 2 would perform
particularly badly in a per-pixel lighting
engine due to its pre-lit appearance. The
texture shown in Figure 6 would proba-
bly look all right when used with a bump
map, but it would be better if the shad-
ows were removed and the specular high-
lights flattened out.
With the widespread availability of
graphics hardware possessing per-pixel
lighting capabilities, the days of applying
only one kind of texture to each surface
are numbered. Artists will have to learn
to separate the surface shading informa-
tion that used to be combined in a single
texture and adapt to the process of creat-
ing a base texture containing only flat
color information, a bump map contain-
ing depth information, a gloss map con-
taining reflectance information, and the
list continues.
Eric Lengyel
Terathon Software
Smoothing Over Bumps
was both pleased and disappointed
when I read Hayden Duvall’s Artist’s
View column “From Source to Texture”
in the June 2002 issue. As a 3D graphics
engine programmer, I have a real appreci-
ation for Hayden’s advice that artists
retain versions of their work at the high-
est possible level of detail. In the past, I
have seen situations in which a develop-
ment team has kicked themselves for not
saving a higher-resolution or higher-
color-depth version of some textures cre-
ated a year earlier.
I wish the article had talked more
about designing textures to be used with
modern per-pixel lighting engines. In sev-
eral places, the article mentions the addi-
tion of lighting and shadows to texture
maps, but I think artists need to get used
to not doing this because modern graph-
ics hardware now enables this informa-
tion to be calculated in real time. Hayden
says that “in-game lighting can often
have a flattening effect” on textures, but
the opposite statement is true when
bump maps are used. For a bump-
mapped object to be rendered correctly,
its texture should contain absolutely no
lighting or shadowing information —
you actually want it to be flat. The tex-
I
Cliff Owen
Goblin Software
CORRECTION
Jennifer Olsen's July 2002 “Game Plan” col-
umn (“So It’s Come to This”) incorrectly refer-
enced H.R. 4652 as the Protect Children from
Video Game Sex and Violence Act. The cor-
rect bill number is H.R. 4645. H.R. 4652 is the
Consumer Protection for On-Line Games Act,
which was introduced in Congress the same
day. We regret the error.
XSI Animation Mixer
Not That Recent
S
ing Animation Blending”(May 2002)
was clear, informative, and timely. I want-
ed to comment on the reference to XSI’s
animation mixer, described as “most
recent and perhaps the most powerful”
among a list of similar technologies. It is
far from the most recent. In fact, we were
the first of the systems listed in the article
teve Theodore’s article “Understand-
C
E-mail us your feedback to
editors@gdmag.com, or write us at
Game Developer,
600 Harrison St.,
San Francisco, CA 94107
6
august 2002
|
g a m e
d e v e l o p e r
I N D U S T R Y WAT C H
Interplay unravels.
Despite posting
its first quarterly profit in nearly two
years, Interplay’s financial self-destruc-
tion shows no sign of abating. The com-
pany was able to post net income of $1.5
million for the first quarter of 2002, a
sizeable improvement from the $8.4 mil-
lion loss in the same period one year ago.
The positive results may not be
enough to rescue the debt-ridden compa-
ny, however. Interplay’s most recent fil-
ing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission reports $54 million in debts
and just $61,000 in cash on hand. Even
with the $47 million the company
brought in through the sale of Shiny to
Infogrames, Interplay admits that it
needs to raise substantial amounts of
new financing to stay afloat. In an effort
to raise capital, Interplay recently sold
the rights to many of its game properties
— including M
ESSIAH
, MDK, K
INGPIN
,
S
ACRIFICE
, and E
ARTHWORM
J
IM
— to
Titus Interactive.
Nintendo reaches record profits,
Yamauchi takes a bow.
A weak yen
couple with strong Gamecube sales
equaled record profit for Nintendo in its
fiscal year 2001. The company posted a
net profit of 106.4 billion yen ($858 mil-
lion), over 10 percent higher than
Nintendo’s profits last year. While the
company cited Gamecube and Game Boy
Advance sales as its growth leaders, the
yen paints a big part of Nintendo’s finan-
cial picture, and a strengthening Yen has
prompted Nintendo to warn that fiscal
2002 likely won’t reach the lofty heights
the company enjoyed this year.
The strong financial results offered a
perfect opportunity for Nintendo’s chair-
man and president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
Yamauchi to announce that he is step-
ping down after leading the company for
more than five decades. Yamauchi’s
retirement was long expected, and the
news did not affect Nintendo’s share
price. He will be kept on as an advisor
but will not be part of the company’s
management team. Satoru Iwata, the
company’s chief of corporate planning,
has been appointed Yamauchi’s successor.
THE BUZZ ABOUT THE GAME BIZ
|
daniel huebner
J
MAX PAYNE.
A man with a $34 million price tag on his head.
Prior to joining Nintendo in 2000, Iwata
was president of HAL Laboratory, where
he coordinated software development
and production of several Nintendo
games, including the K
IRBY
series.
Microsoft will build new data centers in
Seattle and Tukwila, Wash., Tokyo, and
London to support the service.
No Payne, no gain.
M
AX
P
AYNE
is
moving from Remedy Entertainment to
Take-Two for $34 million in cash and
stock. The deal includes all intellectual
property rights associated with the
brand, including trademarks, copyrights,
characters, perpetual license to utilize
proprietary technologies (including the
M
AX
P
AYNE
game engine), and rights to
license fees from ancillary M
AX
P
AYNE
brand extensions such as cinema, televi-
sion, and literary productions. A M
AX
P
AYNE
sequel is in the works from Take-
Two’s Rockstar Games in conjunction
with original M
AX
P
AYNE
developer
Remedy Entertainment.
q
Secure no more, Xbox heads
online.
A graduate student at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
discovered a way to foil the Xbox’s secu-
rity system, in theory making it possible
to run non-Xbox applications on the con-
sole. In a paper posted on the MIT web
site, Andrew Huang, a Ph.D. student,
describes a “secret boot block” in the
Xbox’s media processor (built by Nvidia)
which contains the console’s encryption
algorithm and security key. The boot
block was decrypted using a custom “tap
board,” which intercepted data traveling
between the central processor and the
media chip over the Hyper Transport bus.
Separate from any security concerns,
Microsoft has announced its online strat-
egy for the Xbox. Directly opposite to
the hands-off online plans laid out by
Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft plans to
invest much of its $2 billion Xbox devel-
opment budget for the next five years
into a proprietary subscription-based
online service called Xbox Live. The
Xbox Live service will debut in Europe,
North America, and Japan this fall at the
tentative price of $49.95 per year and
will let people play online and download
content to the Xbox hard drive. Micro-
soft expects to have over 50 online
games available for the Xbox by the end
of 2003, including S
TAR
W
ARS
G
ALAXIES
,
H
ALO
, and P
ROJECT
G
OTHAM
R
ACING
.
UPCOMING EVENTS
CALENDAR
GDC EUROPE
E
ARL
’
S
C
OURT
London, U.K.
August 27–29, 2002
Cost: £350–£450
www.gdc-europe.com
ECTS
E
ARL
’
S
C
OURT
London, U.K.
August 29–31, 2002
Cost: Advance registration free via
web site; £25 on-site registration
www.ects.com
august 2002
|
g a m e
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8
PRODUCT REVIEWS
THE SKINNY ON NEW TOOLS
X
X
Intel’s VTune 6
Performance Analyzer
by andi smithers
ntel’s VTune has a long-standing
reputation as one of the better
tools for application analysis —
at least for applications headed
for Intel-based systems. I hadn’t
touched it since version 3.5, and I was
more than curious to see what new im-
provements were implemented in the new
version 6. I wasn’t disappointed either.
I had actually used the Xbox version
of VTune only a few months earlier, and
the install process had been more than a
little painful, so I was a bit nervous.
However, apart from a few redundant
reboots and a small problem recognizing
the installed version of Flash, everything
went smoothly.
I created a quick wizard project,
turned on call graphing, and off it ran.
After 20 seconds, the project stopped,
reran, and then did it again. Was this a
bug? On reading the tutorial further, I
discovered that the first pass was a cali-
bration pass, the second pass was the
actual samples, and the final pass was
call graphing. Simple enough, but why
did it all only take 20 seconds? It seems
that is the default execution time; this
might not work well if that time is spent
loading, though fortunately you can
modify activities and increase this time.
Even without call graphing you’ll need
the calibration pass, so I manually
aborted that after a minute or two, and
then left the main sampling pass for a
few minutes. There is also a simple
option for the project to run an applica-
tion with sampling paused and then
have the user manually resume, so you
can add your own hooks in your code
to generate resume/pause messages using
I
Intel’s VTune Performance Analyzer in action.
a vtuneperformance.dll. This came in
very handy for isolating samples to spe-
cific areas (for example, if the frame
rate drops, call a resume function to
start logging samples).
I made numerous attempts with sam-
pling, trying to get a good representa-
tion, and it didn’t take long for me to
remove the call graphing. I think this is
a feature to turn on only in trouble
spots, as it’s very intrusive in execution
timing and slows down a game to the
point where it’s not really useful unless
you know what you’re looking for — or
if you’re smart and have set up some
prerecorded joystick presses that can
walk through a game perfectly every
time (I’m not that smart).
The results I got without the call
graph were great starting points. I
recorded about five minutes of samples
and counter events. After sampling, the
data is displayed in graph form repre-
senting everything from CPU percent
time, privileged CPU percent, page miss-
es, thread queuing, and more. Intel has
supplied a lot of mechanisms to view
this data, including graphing as splines,
blocks, solid, or wire form, and it’s all
very customizable. I chose a spline form,
though I recommend playing with the
display a bit as it does impact how you
A N D I S M I T H E R S
|
Andi is lead engineer at The Collective and currently resides in
Newport Beach, Calif. You can reach him at andis@collectivestudios.com.
august 2002
|
g a m e
d e v e l o p e r
10

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