Re: [Plib-devel] Re: KobayashiMaru & plib

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Wolfram Kuss wrote:

> One advice if you want to become a good programmer and see things more
> realistic (which can be frustrating):
> Before you do things, guess how long it will take. Then, after you
> have done it, you can compare. Being able to guess fairly accurately
> how long something will take is an important skill for developers.

It certainly is.

I'm conscious that I always underestimate times for things.  I realised
this after a while - and my managers at work realise it too.  We have
come to know that if you double the amount of time my 'gut feel' tells
me, it'll be reasonably accurate.

Now, when I talk about project schedules and stuff, and I tell them
how long something will take - they say "Is that figure before or
after we've doubled it?"

But Wolfram is dead right - finding the value of your own personal
"effort multiplier" is a vital thing for future programming success.

I'm beginning to realise though that the multiplier I use at work is
not the same as the one I should use for 'homework' activities.

> >> > I have come to the conclusion that all these games are 'the same'.
> 
> Some time ago Steve wrote a great post either here, in plib-users or
> in the ppe-mailing-list about the different needs that different games
> have for cameras. I didn't find it, maybe you will find it in the
> archives.

It might have been on the TuxAQFH or TuxKart lists - I don't remember.
 
> >But show Tux to a person who pays 80DM for a commercial game and
> 
> Huch ;-)
> 
> >is used to graphics like Quake3, he will probably just laugh and
> >say 'yoz gfx sukkz' or so.
> 
> And you really think you can beat many commercial games??

It's almost impossible I think.  Looking at the 7.2 billion dollar turnover
in the games industry and the 7.4 in Hollywood movies, then factoring in
the 10:1 failure rate of movies and the 35:1 failure rate for games, you
may guess that the development cost for a commercial game could be perhaps
a third of a Hollywood movie - that's probably around 3 million dollars?

Competing with that as a single person - not even working full-time and
lacking art and music skills and all the fancy software packages like
Maya and 3D-studio-MAX....I don't think so.

Even if we could compete - the idea of having to write 35 bad games to
get one good one is kinda depressing!

> And Steve didn't say the problem was that terragear is unsuitable. He
> said that to get good frame rates you have to tweak the game design,
> that is, you cant have a universal game engine with todays hardware.

...or ANY hardware EVER.  The problem is that people's expectations
have gone up as the hardware gets better.

Elite was a *great* game in it's time - but now, people wouldn't even
bother to download it - even if it was free.  Monochrome Wireframe
graphics - YUCK!

As fast as CPU's are speeding up, people's expectations are speeding up.

When I started writing TuxAQFH, the Mario-64 style of 3D graphics was
concidered AWESOME - by the time I'd finished writing it, Quake was
considered AWESOME.  You couldn't sell a FPS game without lightmapped
lighting and shadows these days.

Soon, you won't be able to sell one without volumetric fog/smoke, without
skeletal animation, real world physics, VIPM, ROAM, etc, etc.

The best chance we amateur developers have is to try to write something
small enough and lightweight enough so that by the time it's done, it
only looks *one* generation out of date - and people will want it because
despite looking out of date, it's free.

I could manage to write TuxAQFH in 18 months or so (single-handed) because
my hardware is 10x faster than a Nintendo-64 - and I could take horrible
shortcuts. Only build 7 levels instead of 20, only have MOD music, have
no splashes when Tux jumps into the water, etc, etc.

TuxAQFH isn't anywhere near a nice as DonkeyKong (the 'next generation
Mario64' game), but I still have people email me photos of their kids
playing it, send me free stuff (I got two free graphics cards, three
Tux plushies, a book about Penguins, several Tux tee-shirts...), I get
'kudos' (MANY people came to talk to me at SigGraph who would otherwise
have not known who I was). It was fun to write - and (mostly) not a
chore.  It was a nice change from work.

I feel like it was worth that amount of time.

IMHO, the more grandiose your plans, the more pathetic they will look
by the time you ever get them to the point of playability.

* I could write a really simple game with Quake-III quality graphics in
  perhaps a year...and in about a year, the faster graphics on machines
  of that time will mean that although I don't spend as long on optimisation
  as Carmack and crew do, it'll still run fast enough to be playable. The
  game would be only one year out of date - and people would *love* it.
  I could make a contribution - and get some recognition - and have something
  cool to put on my resumee.

* If I tried to make it a complex game - better than Quake III, it would
  take me 5 years to write it and by then people would laugh at it because
  they are all playing QUAKE VIII or so. More to the point, after about 3
  years, I'd realise that what I was writing was crap by the standards people
  measure computer games - and I'd lose interest and abandon the project - 
  having wasted 3 years of my life in the process.

The only way around this depressing scenario is to get a LOT of people
together to write a freeware game.  That would let you work at the
pace of a commercial games company and get the work done.  The problem
is that some of those people need to be artists and others musicians,
level designers, play-testers, etc, etc.  Since ONLY us programmers
are stupid enough to work for nothing, we don't have any vastly
successful large-team games...although we DO have vastly successful
large projects of other kinds (Linux itself, GIMP, G++, Apache, etc).

Tuxkart is ten times (literally) simpler than TuxAQFH, it took less
time to write and is more fun to play.  My next effort will be more
like TuxKart and less like TuxAQFH.  My kid wants Tux-Golf (a 3D
crazy-golf game)...I'm not so sure.

If I can find some good artists (who actually CONTRIBUTE something
rather than just talking about it)...then I may go for something
more sophisticated and try to get a team together to do it...but
I'm guessing that this won't happen.  One approach may be to find
some 3D artists who are already doing free work - and latch onto
that:

   http://major-damage.com

...for example. (This is a group of artists making a non-realtime
3D cartoon in their free time - just for the fun of it). If perhaps
they could be pursuaded to *give* me the artwork - and perhaps make
a few other things we might need for a game - then I would be
interested in getting together a team of maybe 3 or 4 programmers
and trying to make a STATE OF THE ART game of a Mario-64-like
Genre.



> Sigh, I didn't want to invest this much time, but once you start
> writing you don't want to stop midway.

I know what you mean!

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net