Defining Life

May 30, 2014 Leave a comment

I’ve had this conversation a couple of times recently, because it poses an interesting question: can we create a definition for ‘alive’ that encompasses not only known biological life, but also any theoretical lifeforms we can imagine? This might include alternative biochemistry, artificial life (nanites?), and even digital lifeforms.

Obviously there is an inherent problem in this discussion; we are assuming everyone shares a similar definition of life. However, even a skin-deep probing can reveal divisive philosophical questions. Are computer viruses alive? How about self-replicating structures of dust particles in a plasma? Is the Earth alive? We can’t truly resolve this problem without first clearly setting a boundary for what things are alive and what things aren’t alive. For example, scientists seem to have resolutely decided that biological viruses are not alive. Similarly, its clear to our human sensibilities that a car engine is not alive, even if it is highly advanced and has all sorts of sensors and regulatory mechanisms.

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to skip over this roadblock and dive in. Wikipedia gives these criteria for calling something ‘alive’:

  1. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state.
  2. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells.
  3. Metabolism: Converting chemicals and energy to maintain internal organization.
  4. Growth: A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
  5. Adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment.
  6. Response to stimuli: A response is often expressed by motion; for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
  7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.

There are some good ones in there, but a few need to go. Let’s throw out Organization (this can almost be seen as tautological — things made of cells are alive because they are made of cells — and exclusive of otherwise potential candidates for life), Growth (one can imagine an organism which is artificially constructed, but then maintains itself perfectly, or a mechanical organism that starts life by being constructed externally, and slowly grows smaller as it sacrifices components to stay operational), and Reproduction (again, imagine a constructed organism that cannot reproduce). This leaves Homeostasis, Metabolism, and Adaptation/Response to stimuli.

However, its clear that Metabolism is important: an organism must take something from its environment and consume it to maintain an internal state. Metabolism and Homeostasis are where biological viruses fail the ‘life test’. While some advanced viruses meet the Adaptation and Response to Stimuli (arguably the same thing, just at different scales), no virus can use resources from its environment to perform internal upkeep. It requires the hijacked machinery of a cell to do that.

Unless you say that living things are part of a virus’s ‘environment’. Then you could argue that in some sense of the word, viruses are alive, because they use resources present in the environment to perform internal upkeep. This raises an important question about context. Indeed, all definitions of life seem to hinge on context. For example, a computer virus’s environment is the computer system. Resources would be computing time and memory, perhaps.

Is a computer virus alive? Advanced viruses can modify their own state (metamorphic code), respond to stimuli (anti-virus, user activity, etc), and metabolize resources from their environment. They also reproduce, although we cut that criterion so the point is moot. If a computer virus meets the requirements for life (albeit unconventionally), then do we have to accept it as a lifeform?

Moreover, there are things we wouldn’t normally call a single entity that fulfill the requirements for life. These are often termed “living systems”. The Earth is a prime example. It has systems that regulate its interior, it absorbs sunlight and that helps fuel the regulatory cycles on the surface. It’s debatable whether the Earth responds to stimuli. Sure, there are feedback loops, but the Earth doesn’t really respond accordingly to changes (say, changes in solar luminosity or meteoric impacts) in order to maintain homeostasis. Quite the opposite, in fact. For example: a decrease in solar radiation produces more ice, lowering albedo, thus lowering albedo further.

So maybe the Earth isn’t alive, but we have to consider nonetheless that systems can be alive. In fact, its questionable whether humans are single organisms. Several pounds of our weight are gut bacteria, independent organisms which share no DNA with us, but on which we rely for survival. We are a system. Call it a colony, call it symbiosis; the entity that is a human is in fact a collection of trillions of ‘independent’ organisms, and yet that entity is also singularly ‘alive’.

Can we trust our initial, gut reaction that tells us what is alive and what isn’t? Moreover, what use is there in classifying life in the first place? We treat cars that are definitely not alive as if they are precious animals with a will of their own, and then squash bugs without a second thought. Is it important to define life at all, rigorous criteria or not?

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Sim State

June 12, 2013 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. This idea really started when I watched Day[9] play the new Sim City, and then picked up Sim City 4 again. I wanted to create a game which brought the ideas of micromanaging infrastructure and government into a larger scale. The player would be able to control education, government type, military, trade, etc. Eventually it grew into a sort of “third-world country simulator”, since that seemed like the most interesting route to people I pitched the general concept to.

The basic premise is that you are the leader of a small country, recently put in power by a violent revolution. This country is located in a faux South or Central America, but there is also the possibility for having multiple templates: African, Southeast Asian, etc. The player can only really see the small land area he controls, plus some of the bordering sovereignties. There is no global map (and this isn’t a game about conquest), but there are references to current global institutions (or fictitious characterizations thereof) like the UN and US, or WHO, etc.

Winning the game means pulling your country out of poverty and onto the world stage. This requires many parts, including building infrastructure, establishing governmental rule, and appeasing the international community. However, the win condition is gaining control over every province in your nation. Control just means being the dominant power faction. Routes to control include stamping out resistance (militarily) and appeasing interest groups. Thus a large part of the game is balancing political control; keep the military leaders on your side, stop workers from striking, and stay elected. The last one may mean establishing a dictatorship, rigging elections, or spending a lot of resources maintaining public image.

At the start of the game, your country is poor and unequipped. There are two forms of currency: money, and international repute. International repute can be spent on relief or treaties; perhaps getting a foreign oil company to leave your country. On the other hand, if you drive out the oil company by force, some factions in your own country may approve, while the international community may impose sanctions. Similarly, if their are pirate along the coast, you could demand tribute or try to exterminate them at a potentially great cost. If the world catches wind that you are allowing pirates to operate, however, you will lose repute.

The other form of currency is money. A little macro-economics comes into play here, since you have to manage your currency (printing money), and real “world dollars”. Rapid inflation can be bad for your industries, but it attracts tourists (but only to good parts – nobody is going to visit the region controlled by drug cartels). Real dollars come from exports, mainly. One way to get a boost in the beginning of the game is to exploit your natural resources: cut down rain forests, strip mine mountains, etc. However, you have to establish a more mature manufacturing industry at some point, otherwise you will exhaust your resources and fall back down into poverty.

In terms of infrastructure the player has to build, the main forms are education and industry. Industry includes transportation networks and resource collection, as well as processing. Industry also means municipal improvements, since nice cities attract high-tech corporations and commercial companies. Another route to improving the quality of your workforce, reducing crime, and eliminating overpopulation is education. Building schools takes a lot of resources for little immediate payoff, but it will start to improve your country greatly. It is also a great way for dictators to indoctrinate the population.

Late-game opportunities may include hosting Olympic Games or researching nuclear technology.

As you can see, there is a lot of room for expansions; this is more of a framework for a game, rather than a fleshed out game idea. I know there are games like this, such as Tropico. I think this would be more political and deep than Tropico, but obviously I would aim to offer a different experience overall were I to build this.

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Zombies, Pixels, and Cubes (Oh my!)

February 17, 2013 Leave a comment

It’s no secret that many games these days have incurred that oh-so virulent infection. Like the T-virus, it has spread to every sector of the market, turning developers in shambling shells of their former selves. I speak, of course, of zombies. Just last year we saw WarZ, ZombiU, BlOps 2, and Amy. The year before that saw Yakuza: Dead Souls, Rise of Nightmares, Dead Island, and the rather well-named Zombies. That list excludes low-profile games and those which aren’t, in my opinion, terrible. Is this trend developer laziness, or perhaps a corporate influence? I wouldn’t be surprised if teams were pushed towards zombie games because, statistically, they make more money.

While it is reasonable when large-budget games are zombie-based, the same rationality falls short of protecting indie games. Zombie games are a prop-up, a cop-out for a developer who can’t come up with a better framework. Sure, it saves you the effort of establishing a complete universe (which is extremely tricky). That effort can go back into making other parts of the game better. But is the tradeoff worth it? To me, zombies don’t allow for a lot of avenues in terms of creative gameplay and storytelling. Are zombies a fall-back for those who need an extra kick in their games? Just search “zombie” in the Steam Store and sort by release date. Decide for yourself.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I want to talk about retro graphics. Let’s take a stroll down the Steam Greenlight aisle, shall we? In the first few pages we see:

  • MANOS: The Hands of Fate
  • Dead Colony
  • Deprivation
  • Hammerwatch
  • Potatoman Seeks the Troof
  • Dungeonmans
  • Topia Online
  • 16 Bit Arena
  • Spuds Quest
  • Legend of Dungeon

Keep in mind, these are those that are easily distinguishable by their image tile – many more lurk out there behind well-illustrated thumbnails.

What is the cause of this tsunami in indie game market that is retro graphics? Pixel graphics have the added bonus of nostalgic appeal for a certain generation. Art assets may be cheaper to produce. But, at least to me, pixel graphics convey a sense of harsh, delineated gameplay, where fun is equated with difficulty. My mind drifts to games like Megaman, where the reward for beating one level is to play the same level over again, with a different color tileset. I think the benefits of pixel graphics fall by the wayside when the decision is made. Pixel graphics, like zombies, are a knee-jerk reflex for the mediocre game developer. Often these developers are different, but I guarantee that there is more than one pixellated zombie game out there produced in the last five years.

Which brings me to cubes. Thanks, Minecraft. I both enjoy and loathe your trend-setting magnificence. It’s time for another stroll through Greenlight. Bonus points for games that have the word “Cube” in them.

  • Block Story
  • Slip
  • Logicubiks
  • Cell Emergence
  • Brain Cube Reloaded
  • King Voxel
  • Cubes and Zombies
  • Ace of Spades
  • Cube Park
  • Cube World

Ugh. *shiver*. I should do another post on how to not make your game look totally unappealing on Steam Greenlight. You would think choosing a good name and thumbnail would be at the top of everybody’s list. Apparently not.

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PlanetSide 2: First Impressions

December 8, 2012 Leave a comment

I made a post a while ago about an MMOFPS/RTS. Turns out, this dream has come true, and it is PlanetSide 2 (it’s free-to-play. go download it right now!)

In the first two hours of play, I was zipping around in a dropship with a squad, capping points like crazy. I was rolling across vast plains in a tank convoy, or running along the ground with dozens of others as aircraft zipped overhead. I infiltrated an enemy compound and disabled a generator. I defended one of our larger complexes from a full-on siege. This game is amazing.

Actually a pretty typical thing to see.

It’s a little hard to get into, as you are just dropped into the action. You have to figure out what the vehicles do, the difference between classes, how the maps are laid out, what you are doing, etc. Basically, you have to figure out how the game works. But after you join an outfit (which are basically clans), the fun blossoms. You run and fight along side your teammates in giant, mile-wide maps. The 24/7 combat goes back and forth across a ravaged landscape. As you cower behind a rock and take potshots at the other factions, aircraft scream over head, blowing each other up. More than once I’ve had a smoking aircraft crash and break apart into a fireball meters from me.

The basic objective is to capture facilities, which are fairly far apart from each other. At the top-most level, the game is a back-and-forth struggle across a territory. The territory is broken in hex-shaped regions, which are linked to the nearest facility. Your platoon (under which there are squads) chooses where to focus their efforts, and then a blitzkrieg spearheads into fortified enemy territory and tears a hole in their defensive line. Overall, the best strategy is to keep a strong front line; if a facility gets isolated in otherwise enemy territory, it is usually much harder to defend.

Each facility has one or more capture points. In order to gain control of a facility, you need to hold all the capture points for a certain amount of time. One in control, facilities can have weapon-change stations, ground vehicle factories, or aircraft factories, depending on the size of the facility (larger facilities have more capture points). You get resources for kills (or assists) and captures. Resources allow you to buy equipment or vehicles. Different facilities give different resource bonuses to the owners.

The actual combat is OK. You can choose between a few classes: sniper, light assault (who gets a jetpack), medic (who can heal and revive people), engineer (who can build stuff) , and heavy assault (who gets a rocket launcher). At a equipment station, you can upgrade to mech-form, for a cost. Death bears little penalty, with only a short respawn and no deductions otherwise. In addition, medics can bring you back to life (for no cost). Each of the three factions gets different bonuses for each class, as well as different vehicles. The ground vehicles are a little annoying to control, and have a strange FOV. Aircraft are extremely hard to control, and I still haven’t figured out the best setup for them. But really the best part of the game is moving with a group of players; you feel like an insignificant part of the combat, not the star.

Really, that is the key part of this game. You understand that you are just one cog in the machine, that the battle doesn’t hinge on you. You also start to realize the scope of the battle raging around you. On the overhead map, you can see which territories are contested. You realize that at each one of those spots, there is a battle as massive and intense as the one you are in. Then you realize that there are two other maps on this server. At any point in time, someone is having a last-stand defense, someone is storming a citadel, someone is cruising over head in an aircraft and shelling ground forces, like an AC-130.

The only problem is that the game is fairly intensive graphically, and has some occasional issues with lag. Also, it is widely believed to have some sort of memory leak. But despite the shaky performance and occasionally flaky servers, this game is still a shining gem in today’s game industry.

9/10

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A Solution for Difficulty Curves and Power Creep

November 6, 2012 Leave a comment

Most games portray you as a hero of some sort. A common trope is for the hero to be either inexperienced at the beginning of the game, or lack his equipment. This gives a reason for why the hero does not just plow right up to the main baddie and kill him at the beginning. In any case, a lot of games suffer from a strangely shaped difficulty curve. The game starts out fairly easy as the player learns the ropes, then the enemies get harder. Finally, you max out your stats and the game begins to get easier again.

Granted, the best games suffer from this less, but a lot of games have trouble with this type of power creep. Spore is a prime example of a ridiculously easy endgame (the space stage was essentially a sandbox). Some developers solve this by making enemies more powerful as the player progresses. This can work in games where, for instance, the enemy starts to realize just how much of a threat you are. In open-world games like Skyrim, though, this makes little sense.

Yahtzee, of Zero Punctuation, mentioned in one of his Extra Punctuation an inkling of an idea for a game that is designed with this problem in mind. I have taken the liberty of gripping the nebulous concept by the horns and fleshing it out.

The game is based around the power suit you wear. It is a magnificent piece of High Technology. Unfortunately, this means that nobody is quite sure how it works. The machining of the piece is much too fine to replicate, in any case, which means any replacement parts have to come from other pieces of High Technology, which are few and far between.

At the start of the game you escape from the main fortress of the Bad Guys with some sort of Valuable Item (perhaps information). You raid the armory and steal the suit before plunging yourself deep into the wilderness around the citadel. You spend the game running from a cadre of pursuers, trying to make your way to the border. At every encounter with an enemy, it is up to you to protect your suit as much. Each blow is physically simulated and, depending on where you place armor, where the hit was, how hard it was, etc. a component on your suit has the potential of breaking. Parts also wear down over time.

The most critical part of the game is deciding how to keep your suit in working order. Some systems are critical, like the pneumatics that let you move (damage to arm parts may impair aiming speed, damage to legs may reduce speed or jump height, etc), and some are dispensable, like weapons. If a critical system receives a hit and becomes in critical danger of breaking down, you have to stop and either fix it with any spare parts you find, or scrap a non-critical system on your suit to get the essential parts.

This meta-game with the suit solves the problem of power creep. You are at maximum power at the beginning, but enemies are also at the greatest density. Slogging through the wilderness and fighting enemies wears your suit down, so by the end you are barely limping along. As time goes on, you have to choose which weapon or system to scrap for parts. This means that you get a sample of all abilities at the beginning, and can keep the ones that best suit your play style. One of Bioshock’s biggest problems was that there was no incentive to try new plasmids. I’m sure the majority of players just improved the starting set, because buying new powers was too much of a liability.

I like the idea of having the game being mostly free-world. You can choose the best path through the different types of terrain to avoid encounters. Cold environments, wet environments, and sandy environments all have different types of wear and tear on the suit. Roads are easy to traverse (meaning less food consumption and lower likelihood of suit failure) but are more likely to find troops on them. Towns and other population centers are more likely to hold supplies (food and maintenance items are critical for survival) and spare parts, but the citizens will raise the alarm if they see you, and there are likely to be troops in towns.

The catch is that any alarms you raise will alert the search parties to your general presence and means a higher chance of encountering troops. Same goes for any military engagements in which an enemy scout or survivor escapes. The game is part stealth (avoiding conflict), part tactics(managing the suit, choosing your world route), part combat (winning conflicts you get into). At the end, instead of a boss fight, you have a final battle at the border of the kingdom as the search parties converge on your position and a friendly militia comes down from the other side of the border to help you across.

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The Future of the Source Engine

July 13, 2012 Leave a comment

Valve’s Source and GoldenSource engines and Epic’s Unreal engines have had a long, acrimonious feud. Both Golden Source and the Unreal Engine debuted in 1998 in Half Life and Unreal, respectively. Both were considered revolutionary games at the time. Unreal blew technical and graphical expectations out of the water. Half Life left a legacy as one of the most influential games in the FPS genre.

Unreal Engine screenshot Unreal Engine screenshot
i2Zan0DmFkTfy Golden Source screenshot

Fast forward 6 years. Valve, in the meantime, has released Team Fortress Classic and Counterstrike, both extremely revolutionary games. The Unreal and Unreal 2 engines (the latter was released 2 years prior) had become extremely popular platforms for game developers, mostly because of the engines’ notable modularity and room for modification.

In 2004, Valve debuts the Source engine with Half Life 2, a ground breaking game that completely demolishes competition and sets a long-lasting legacy in terms of story, gameplay, and graphics. For comparison, Unreal Tournament 2004 was published the same year.

Unreal Engine 2 screenshot Source screenshot

In another 7 years, Unreal Engine 3 has been released and games like Gears of War and Batman: Arkham City have been developed using it. Valve has just published their first widely supported game, Portal 2. The Source engine has been evolved over the years, and many graphical upgrades have been applied along with compatibility with major game consoles.

Batman: AC screenshot
screenshot-2

However, it becomes readily apparent that the visual styles of these two engines have diverged in the years since 1998. The Unreal line of engines have supported games like Bioshock and Mass Effect, but have also bourn the brunt of AAA games. Such games are known for their muted brown-grey color pallete, uninteresting story, and factory-made gameplay. Unreal Engine games are commonly criticized for having character models that look “plastic” (a result of game developers setting specular too high on materials), awkward character animations, and overuse of lens flares and bloom.

Games on the Source engine, on the other hand, consistently revolutionize some aspect of gaming. For example, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead are widely known for innovative gameplay. Unfortunately, Valve has lagged behind in terms of pushing the graphical frontier. Half Life 2 was smashingly good for its time, much in the same way that Halo stunned the gaming world back in 2001. However, every Source game since its debut has looked more and more aged.

Even worse, developers are driven away from using the Source engine due to a set of tools that have barely evolved since they were developed in 1998. Hammer, the level creation program, and Face Poser, the character animation blender, are unwieldy and unfinished; Source SDK tools are notorious for their bugs and frequent crashes.

Conversely, the Unreal toolset is streamlined and easy to jump into. This appeal has drawn more and more amateurs and professional developers alike. The editor allows you to pop right into the game to see changes, whereas the Source engine still requires maps to be compiled (which can take minutes) in order for the most recent revision to be played. Unreal’s deformable meshes dwarf the Source engine’s awkward displacement system.

However, I have a feeling that a couple of factors are going to come together and boost both engines out of the recent stigma they have incurred. The biggest factor is that at some point the AAA game industry is going to collapse. The other critical event is Half Life 3.

Yes! Do I know something you don’t? Have I heard a rumor lurking the Internet about this mysterious game? No. But I do know history. And that is more useful than all the forum threads in the universe.

Half Life was released in 1998. Half Life 2 was released in 2004. Episode 2 was released in 2007. Half Life 2 took 6 years to develop, despite being on a side burner for some of that time. By extrapolation, Half Life 3 should be nearing release in the next 2 years. However, circumstances are different.

The Source engine was developed FOR Half Life 2. Graphics were updated. But the toolset remained the same. In the time between HL2 and now, Valve has been exploring other genres. Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, and Left 4 Dead 2 all took a portion of the company’s resources. In addition, that last few years have been spent intensively on developing Dota 2 (which, by the way, was the cause of the free release of Alien Swarm). The second Counterstrike was contracted out. So Half Life 3 has been a side project, no doubt going through constant revisions and new directions.

However, unless Valve is going to release Day of Defeat 2 or Ricochet 2 (yeah right) in 2013, production on Half Life 3 is going to kick into high gear. There is one fact that drives me to believe even more heavily in this theory.

Since 2011, and probably even earlier, Valve has been pumping a huge amount of effort into redesigning their entire suite of development tools. It had become readily apparent to everyone at the company that the outdated tools were making it impossible to develop games efficiently.

“Oh yeah, we’re spending a tremendous amount of time on tools right now. So, our current tools are… very painful, so we probably are spending more time on tools development now than anything else and when we’re ready to ship those I think everybody’s life will get a lot better. Just way too hard to develop content right now, both for ourselves and for third-parties so we’re going to make enormously easier and simplify that process a lot.”
-Gabe Newell

Because both TF2 and Portal 2 have been supported continuously since their release, they have been the first to see the effects of this new tool development. Valve seems to have used these games as testing grounds, not only for their Free to Play business model and Steam Workshop concept, but also for new kinds of development tools. First, the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker changed the way that maps were made. In the same way that Python streamlines the programming process, the Puzzle Maker cuts out the tedious technical parts of making a level.

The second tool released was the Source Filmmaker. Although it doesn’t directly influence the way maps are made, its obviously been the subject of a lot of thought and development. The new ways of thinking about animation and time introduced by the SFM are probably indicative of the morphing paradigms in the tool development section at Valve.

Don’t think that Valve is going to be trampled by any of its competitors. Despite Unreal Engine’s public edge over the Source engine, especially with the recent UE4 reveal, the AAA game industry is sick, and no other publisher has a grip on the PC game market quite like Valve does. And although 90% of PC gamers pirate games, PC game sales are hardly smarting. In fact, the PC game market is hugely profitable, racking up $19 billion in 2011. This is just a few billion shy of the collective profits of the entire console market. Yet the next best thing to Steam is, laughably, EA’s wheezing digital content delivery system Origin.

Numbers Source

Anyways, here’s hoping for Half Life 3 and a shiny new set of developer tools!

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Kami

February 23, 2012 Leave a comment

My brother and I have had this long standing idea between us. It is sort of a nebulous concept we talk about sometime. Its an amalgamation of games and ideas, a number of concepts which might be cool is put together in the correct fashion and executed well. We call it Kami, which is the Japanese word for “life force”.

At the most basic level, Kami is a MMORPG. The best way to describe it is to compare it to Pokemon. The key difference is that (other than being a MMORPG) you don’t order around animals; you are the animals. Your character is a spirit which can inhabit various animals. Instead of leveling up certain animals (although you can store the wild animals while you aren’t using them, which can improve usage by taming), you level up your control of an animal type. While on a hunt you could possess any of the surrounding unpossessed animals (the one you currently control becomes feral). You can also learn to reside within multiple animals, allowing you to trade off between animal types in battle and have a set of other animals support you. It also introduced the possibility of hybrids, such as a spine-thrower atop a flying animal. If your animal dies, you choose another animal to jump to, or if none are available you can resurrect at the nearest nature shrine.

Kami also has a second half though. A large aspect of the game is based in clans and guilds. Like in EVE Online, clans can own property and build up power. On the fringes of the world map you can battle a clan for control of land plots (a plot might be 15-30 acres). When in control of a plot, clans can exploit any resources and build a varietly of buildings. Some sort of fortifiation is generally wanted, however, because if a vicious clan challenges you, you better be ready to defend. Attackers enter your land from the main road. Your plot becomes instanced, meaning nobody can leave or enter during the battle and the entire plot reverts back to normal if you defend successfully (minus one time traps, etc.) to deter greifing. Each plot has finite resources, however, meaning that the most money lies on the edge of explored space. To make sure more area was always available, new regions made with guided procedural generation would be added regularly through updates. Previously impassable terrain would be removed through natural or NPC activity such as building a bridge over a river, clearing a rockslide, or revealing a new cave.

Constructing buildings on your plot would not be a trivial matter. Materials would first need to be accrued, either by harvesting resources on site or by importing. In the case of materials like stone, large quantities can be expensive and hard to transport. After you have the necessary materials, you need to select both a building site (there are numerous of these “sockets” in every plot, each allowing a different selection of building types) and a building type. From the initial barebones hub, you can add on modules; a barracks probably needs a kitchen and feral pen, while a lodge needs a bar, kitchen, and fireplaces. Once, you know what basic building type you want, you still need it built. You can either hire or assemble a custom construction crew (usually a specialized hybrid of animals). These are controlled by NPCs and build the building over a number of days. They work continuously, and depending on the hired team they may deduct continuously, up front, or after its done. Castles would take a long time and be very expensive. However, it would resist most normal attacks; only climbers, fliers, or siege animals could get past stone walls.

They regular map and game would be like any MMORPG, with quests and towns, etc. You can still make money through business ventures as well as through item sales. Shops could be bought up for instance, and would run continuously and then deliver your profits on login. You wouldn’t be able to found towns, but you could take up residence. General player consensus could drive world-wide events, such as if the majority of residents in a town wanted to declare war against a neighboring town. New quests would be available and the game world would reflect the ongoing war. The world would be essentially player-driven. Not everything would be available, though. Players who want to get into intense politics are encouraged to journey out and join a clan.

Animals would be both specialized and general. While there would be different types of attack classes (e.g. versatile melee, spine-thrower, agile, tank, flying, pack), there would also be pack animals, explorers, messengers, and shopkeepers (tentacled, perhaps?). Construction workers would have very specialized forms, like a quarry beast with a giant saw-blade tail and arms capable of lifting solid stone blocks. Beaver-style animals could be lumberjacks, and a tunneling worm/thing could be a miner. Some animals might work as a pack, sort of like the Tines in aFuTD. Such animals could fulfill roles requiring dexterity, like certain roles in construction or the making of tools.

The game is always changing; it just a fun thing to think about. Right now it appears to be a greatly player-driven MMORPG that’s a cross between EVE Online and Pokemon, with intense politics and economics but also crazy interesting animals/creatures.

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OpenGL and Geometry Generation

February 12, 2012 2 Comments

Today I was thinking about 3D rendering (in part because of the recent work I’ve been doing with ray tracing). I worked out all the math for drawing a polygon based on a list of vertices and a camera. I was considering coding it up, but then I realized that I was very unfamiliar in working with Windows (because I sure as hell wasn’t going to do this in Java). So I spent the greater portion of the afternoon reading a tutorial on Windows programming and using OpenGL, at which point I abandoned my original. I was just going to finally figure out how to use OpenGL.

I had worked with GLUT before when working on a Parallel Computing lab. However, I only used pixel control in that case; I was rendering subsections of a Mandelbrot set. However, that was easier because all the requisite libraries were already installed in the major lab at school (which has workstations with Gentoo installed). Working at home, I have been confounded. I just can’t get the linker to use all the requisite libraries.

The whole thing that got me thinking about 3D engines was my working on a HL2 level. Often I will import brushwork (pieces of the level) from the game’s campaign levels; it saves time and adds a nice level of detail to the environment. However, I was thinking about common elements such as stairs, doors, windows, and grates. It’s a multi-step process to cut a hole in a brush, unless you use carve (but nobody uses carve because it doesn’t give you control over how the geometry cuts). Doors are tedious to cut out and then line up with the texture. Non-solid stairs are the most painful to make, however. You have to arrange the steps and make sure the sidings match up, and for each new type of turn you have to rework the geometry. The whole idea of hand-making all the geometry in a level is ridiculous. I haven’t seen a single FPS level editor than lets you define procedures for geometry generation.

A screenshot of the Hammer UI

A screenshot of the Hammer UI


I feel like it would be relatively simple to define a generation process for buildings, for example. Each building is spaced a certain distance in from the sidewalk. There are maybe two or three justifications for things like planters and doors. Then windows are spaced evenly apart, with buffer spaces on either side of the building. You could attach balconies or planters on to every windows, awnings above doors, and even outdoor area layouts for cafes. After meticulously defining a couple of building styles, you could almost instantly generate entire blocks. Then come the nested procedures. A street, for example, would have periodic drains and manholes, distributions of building types based on the neighborhood type, and junctions to more streets. Signs, traffic lights, road markings, and crosswalks would all be placed correctly at street corners. Coul-de-sacs could fill up empty space. Interiors could be set as well for buildings. Floor plans could be modular. Rooms with distributions of room types and different layout permutations would combine into floors. A building type could have a sequence of floor types defined, such as bottom level stores and top level apartments. Central structures like stairwells would only need to be made once.

Although the procedural parameter definitions might take a while longer than making regular geometry, it would be a huge time saver. Not only could full geometries be generated, but intricate, custom-designed battle areas could be laid out faster. Common terrain pieces like walls, fortifications, stairs, railings, gates, and hedges could be created with the use of a single spline. Suddenly a task like designing the maps for my strategy game becomes less daunting. The pipeline for map production is shortened. General map layouts can be quickly sketched out and then directly generated. Beta testing would be infinitely easier, as map adjustments could be made in hours, rather than days.

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Map Design

February 9, 2012 2 Comments

I’ve always been highly interested in creating levels for games. Computer games enchant people with their story, gameplay, and graphics. Some designer created everything I see in it. It would be incredibly fun and rewarding to wield the same power as the game designers.

Ever since I was a little kid, level design has occupied me as much, if not more than, the game itself.
I started out with games that came with easily accessible editors. Strategy games such as the Age of Empires (and Age of Mythology) have drag and drop editors accessible from within the game. Command and Conquer: Generals has an easy-to-use editor, accessible through its root directory. As I grew older I began to experiment with triggers more, crafting a crude story or giving a gratifying gameplay experience.

Most of these maps were for single-player games, with one exception. I would often hang out at my friend’s house and invite he and his siblings to compete in map-making competitions. We would take the turns crafting Super Smash Bros. Brawl maps, with a rather short time limit. The we would play a quick match on it. The best would get saved and played often. I made quite a few enticing designs in those sessions. My levels created unique gameplay situations that weren’t achieved in the default maps.

My attention slowly fixed on a new game. While I had been familiar with Halo: Combat Evolved for a while, it suddenly occurred to me that I could create single-player levels with story as interesting as the game’s campaign. I looked into it and discovered Halo: Custom Edition. I got involved in the community, and tried my hand at non-drag-and-drop map creators. While I didn’t know it at the time, Halo’s utilities are extremely obtuse. I never had much success in creating my own levels, although I experimented with new kinds of enemy formations and scripting on pre-existing custom multiplayer levels, although I met with little success in the latter. I had an entire 5-part campaign planned out, including overhead sketches, concept art, the beginnings of a 3D model (although I was still a newbie at modeling), and enticing characters. Needless to say, it never got off the ground. To this day, I dream about how cool it would have been.

A step up from Brawl, but a step down from Halo, came Halo 3 Forge. Although it was purely multi-player and was not very powerful, Forge let me create a blend of the epic Brawl maps I had forged and the Halo campaign I had brawled with. I would Forge until my friends got tired with me (I am a PC gamer to the heart, and don’t own any consoles). The recent Halo: Reach called me back to that, although the Reach Forge was so much more powerful that I never had the time to truly explore it.

After Halo, I discovered the Orange Box. Boy, did that open up a whole new world to me. I soon after discovered the Source SDK and began to explore the glorious world of Source map-making. To this day I have a campaign planned out for Half-Life 2 that follows a rebel operative as he subverts Combine operations in the American heartland. The only thing that disappointed me about HL2 was the limited capacity for storytelling (no first-person dialogue, cutscenes, or interaction). TF2, on the other hand, tells a great story, despite being purely multi-player. I am in the starting stages of figuring out how to bring a single-player story experience to TF2.

In addition to Source, Steam let me find Crysis. The Sandbox2 editor truly lives up to its name. I spent hours in that editor, sculpting tropical islands and scripting helicopter fights, beach assaults, and stealth insertions. The great thing about Sandbox2 is that it was extremely to pick up, requiring only a few tutorials from someone like Xanthochori. Crysis 2 with Sandbox3 was disappointingly more complex.

To check out some videos of maps I’ve made and other videos (I’m also into video production), see my YouTube channel.

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Epic-scale Strategy Game

February 8, 2012 1 Comment

One idea for a game that has stuck with me for over a year has been that of a massive-scale strategy game. A crude way to describe it would be a cross between World in Conflict(WiC) and Spore (except it wouldn’t be as lackluster as Spore). The idea behind it is that players start out at a low rank, and are promoted based combat proficiency on the battlefield. When I have described this idea to people, they have likened it to America’s Army.

Each round of the game takes place on large battlefields covering a multitude of environments. The game would undoubtedly be set in the future, so the environments could range from undeveloped farm worlds and water worlds to urban centers and various theaters of space. A single player presides over the whole battlefield as a general, setting basic goals and deciding strategy. Each battlefield is in turn broken up into districts, which ranges in size from a WiC map (usually a couple miles across) to four WiC maps. Up to 8 commanders control 0 to 6 squads (they can order more based on reinforcement points) within each district. Each squad consists of 4 to 8 players, with one squad leader.

Screenshot of World in Conflict

Screenshot of World in Conflict


The basic foot soldier is expected to focus on objectives set by the squad leader. The squad leader is in charge of directing which positions to take and which enemies to focus on. A commander sets goals such as strategic objectives (defined by the game), rally points, and drop zones to secure. They are also in charge of ordering more troops. Their basic strategic goals are determined by the general above them, or perhaps an intermediary presiding over the district.

One major problem that becomes immediately apparent is discipline. How does one keep a player on task? The first solution that comes to mind is to let superior officers give or take promotion points based on the performance of players below them. However, this is easily abusable, both in the giving or taking of too many points and in the complete disregard for dealing with promotion points. The best solution is to have proficiency judged by the game. So what kind of criteria does the game have?

  1. Completion of given objectives

    2. Objectives are judged by the difficulty regarding enemy presence in the area and a number of other minor variables, the most important of which is subordinate proficiency. Failure to complete an objective due to it being impossibly difficult or having an inept team would barely count against a player. Conversely, failure to complete simple objectives would be counted against a player.

  2. Rendition of reasonable objectives

    3. A commander, whether at a high strategic level or as a squad leader, has a responsibility to give orders which make sense. If a commander is extremely incompetent, his commanding officer can choose to temporarily demote him, allowing another to take his place. In addition, sound tactical decisions are encouraged. Deciding to attack a position without much intel, even if the position is strategically important, is a bad choice. If a commander has access to tactical aid, poor placement will result in removal of promotion points.

  3. Combat Proficiency

    4. If the player is a grunt, he is also be promoted based on statistics like accuracy, deaths, and kills. Heroism and initiative may also be rewarded, such as single-handedly taking an objective or destroying a vehicle.

A player who accrues enough promotion points will be promoted to the next rank. There may be multiple ranks per command level to ensure that there will most likely be a command hierarchy even if two decimated squads are merged. Even if a player is promoted, though, it is possible that he will fill a slot lower down in the structure. If there are already enough commanders, someone qualified to be a general may be forced to serve as a grunt. However, if his squad leader is killed then he will instantly fill that slot (unless someone is of a higher rank than him). When a soldier dies, he is placed in a reserve pool. Until a commander orders another squad, he has to wait. Fortunately, battlefields are huge, and most likely, especially at the height of the battle, someone will need a new squad. Nonetheless, a delay time while waiting to be ordered also acts as natural motivation to stay alive. Be warned though, cowardice will be punished highly! Soldiers who pass qualification courses for things like vehicle piloting, administering first aid, and sniping will be able to fill special support slots.

Alongside infantry, commanders will be able to order a range of vehicles, including tanks, transports, and dropships. Other vehicles, like helicopters and ships, will be available as a special unit which must leave after a period of time. Tactical aid not delivered by a player includes artillery (including orbital strikes), airstrikes, and reconnaissance. All tactical aid (i.e. units and abilities not able to be ordered with reinforcement points) is able to be gained through spending tactical aid points, which a commander receives for performing well on the battlefield. Tactical aid points are different from promotion points in that they do not stick from game to game and that they are awarded for quantitative properties, such as objectives completed and enemy units destroyed.

The first person gameplay of the grunts would mirror other mainstream shooters. Each soldier has an array of guns, with the maximum weight decided by the planet’s gravity. Secondary weapons such as grenades and tactical devices (repair kits, radar kits, radios, medkits, etc) are available. A soldier can resort to melee if he runs out of bullets or is restricted by the environment (close quarters, pressurized space environment, presence of volatile props). The game’s varying environments also heavily affects gameplay. For instance, combat in space is an entirely different experience. Players would be able to move almost infinitely far (but would be penalized for abandoning objectives), and combat would be a lot slower. Players would have to worry about keeping their suits intact as well as jetpacks. Vehicles would also play a larger role. Alongside dropships becoming more versatile and critical, spaceships would start playing a role. In some cases the commanders might even be able to control large cruisers with a deadly array of weapons. Space stations would also hold a lot of firepower for whichever side’s soldiers could maintain control of it.

The story of the game would revolve around two distinct sides. Two budding empires emerge from different sectors but end up clashing for control of the core colonies. Whichever side dominates the colonies gains ultimate control over known space, since the colonies are the main centers of knowledge and raw material production. Humans have developed faster-than-light travel, but have not yet perfected material synthesization, so the majority of humans still rely on farm worlds and other such production centers to get metal, food, and leisure products. The FTL will probably be like The Mote in God’s Eye, in which ships can manipulate certain zones of space determined by gravitational fields to jump between stars. These jump points are hard to calculate, and only one exists between each set of stars. FTL communications have not been developed, so the only way to get a message to another system is to send a ship (a jump disables electronics and requires a sentient being to boot the systems back up).

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