Game Developer - FebMar_1995.pdf

(590 KB) Pobierz
February/march 1995
G A M E
D E V E L O P E R
M A G A Z I N E
G A M E
The No
Go Logo
P L A N
G A ME
G A ME
Editor
Larry O’Brien
76702.706@compuserve.com
gdmag@mfi.com
Senior Editor
Nicole Freeman
Production Editors
Barbara Hanscome
73611.633@compuserve.com
here may never be a game with a
“Windows ’95 Compatible” logo,
not even from Microsoft.
Microsoft, by arrogant fiat, has
decided that the seemingly literal
phrase, with it’s seemingly
straightforward purpose, should
be held hostage to the whims of
some Redmondian marketing genius.
Windows ’95, the new operating system
from Microsoft, will roll out later this year
and, largely due to the bundling agree-
ments Microsoft has with clone makers,
will quickly gain its greatest marketshare
in the home computer market.
To run under Windows ’95, your
program will have to do one of two things:
run as a Windows program, with the
input, output, and multitasking methods
dictated by the Win32 API, or run in a
virtualized DOS box.
It’s likely that much of the hard-won
knowledge of how to get the most perfor-
mance from machines running DOS may
no longer work on machines running
Windows ’95. We all know how few
games run in the DOS boxes of Windows
3.1, the Windows ’95 DOS box will be
like that (except different in unknown
ways). The only answer seems to be the
off-putting boot disk.
Your alternative is to create a true
Windows application. There are some
advantages, the greatest of which is device
independence. Lifting the burden of pro-
gramming for every video and sound
chipset in the known world should free up
time for...well...learning the confines of
the Windows API.
But let’s say that you’ve
PeekMessaged
and
PostMessaged
your way around the
event queue; your program is WinGed and
WinTooned, and you’re the happiest little
WinCamper in the whole wide Win-
World. Can you put that logo on your
game? Not even close.
First, can you send your saved game
T
over your home’s Ethernet backbone (that
is, is it mail-enabled)? Second, can you
embed an Excel spreadsheet of your
inventory in the middle of your character
sheet (that is, does it support OLE 2.0)?
Do you have a tabbed dialog that walks
you through the game (that is, do you
have Wizards)? Finally, does it work on a
different operating system, with a different
base architecture including a different
tasking model (that is, Windows NT)?
In other words, to be “compatible”
with Windows ’95, your game has to be a
mail-enabled, en-Wizarded OLE Server
application that runs under NT. All criti-
cism to date about this policy has come
from shrinkwrap application vendors, who
have pointed out that this is burdensome
even for office products. Honestly,
though, I can understand the argument
that “compatible” when applied to an
office application may mean a certain set
of services above and beyond display ser-
vices. With entertainment products, the
very products most needy of some kind of
validation, this argument is without merit.
I suggest two courses of action. First,
complain to Bill Gates himself, asking for
a reconsideration of the policy or suggest-
ing an alternative “Ready to Run Under
Microsoft Windows ’95” validation appro-
priate for digital entertainment products.
Mail directed to billg@microsoft.com will
not get through without being screened,
but it will be read by someone and, per-
haps, even by Gates himself. Second, cre-
ate a utility—a character editor or some
such—that has all the necessary compo-
nents. The functionality or appropriate-
ness isn’t important, this is just a silly way
to get around the silly restrictions. With
such a utility, your game isn’t overly bur-
dened, your box gets the logo, and your
users, if you have a dynamite game, are
oblivious to this tempest in a teakettle.
s
Larry O’Brien, Editor
Nicole Claro
76702.1141@compuserve.com
Editorial Assistant
Diane Anderson
diane_anderson@mfi.com
Contributing Editors
Alex Dunne
75010.2665@compuserve.com
Chris Hecker
checker@microsoft.com
David Sieks
dsieks@arnarb.harvard.edu
Wayne Sikes
70733.1562@compuserve.com
Editor-at-Large
Alexander Antoniades
sander@mfi.com
Cover Photography
Charles Ingram Photography
Publisher
Veronica Costanza
Regina Starr Ridley
Group Director
Advertising Sales Staff
West/Southwest
Yvonne Labat (415) 905-2353
ylabat@mfi.com
New England/Midwest
Kristin Morgan (212) 626-2498
kmorgan@mfi.com
Susan McDonald
Art Director/Marketing
Christopher H. Clarke
Advertising Production Coordinator
Denise Temple
Marketing Manager
Andrew A. Mickus
Vice President/Circulation
Jerry M. Okabe
Group Circulation Director
Gina Oh
Director of Production
Circulation Manager
Circulation Assistant
Newsstand Manager
Reprints
Kathy Henry
Phil Payton
Pam Santoro
Stella Valdez (415) 655-4269
MillerFreeman
A MEMBER OF THE UNITED NEWSPAPERS GROUP
Graham J.S. Wilson
President/CEO
Marshall W. Freeman
Executive Vice President/COO
Thomas L. Kemp
Chairman of the Board
Senior Vice Presidents
H. Vern Packer, Donald A.
Pazour, Wini D. Ragus
Vice President/CFO
Warren (Andy) Ambrose
Vice President/Administration
Vice President/Production
Vice President/Circulation
Charles H. Benz
Andrew A. Mickus
Jerry Okabe
Regina
Vice President/Software Development Division
Starr Ridley
2
GAME DEVELOPER • FEBRUARY 1995
C R O S S F I R E
The Golden
Era of Siliwood
Alex Dunne
As the artistic lines
separating Hollywood
and Silicon Valley
increasingly blur, two
major entertainment
industries—film and
computer and video
games—find they
might not make such
strange bedfellows.
N
inety years after it first burst
onto the scene, the cinema is
undergoing a renaissance.
More than just a rebirth,
actually, it’s really a fusion
with computer and video
games that’s resulting in
some cool entertainment: a
new breed of interactive, “live-action”
games featuring Hollywood movie
stars. Such games, like Hell, Under a
Killing Moon, and Wing Commander
III, are coming out with more frequen-
cy, and they’re boosting the acting
careers of some people in Tinseltown.
Before we look at live-action
games, let’s first take a quick look into
the past. The evolution of the Ameri-
can film industry might be a good
model to explore in attempting to
extrapolate the future of these games
and their impact.
First invented by Thomas Edison
in the late 19th century, motion pic-
tures were a new form of entertainment
that appealed to the masses, relied on
state-of-the-art technology, and made
stars out of performers like Charlie
Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Mary
Pickford. As film technology evolved,
so grew the impact of the industry on
the nation. The first movies shown in
nickelodeons were 10 minutes long,
black-and-white, and silent. However,
as the medium evolved, sound and
color were added, and movies got
beefed out to two hours in length. (I
won’t even talk about today’s cutting-
edge advancements like THX sur-
round-sound and IMAX screens.)
In terms of their economic impact,
look where American movies are today.
Hollywood is the undisputed entertain-
ment mecca of the world. Take the fact
that the French refused to drop eco-
nomic barriers to the American film
industry during the Uruguay round of
the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) talks a couple of years
ago. Why? Because they feared that a
flood of American movies into France
would strangle the relatively small
French film industry.
America is good at delivering
entertainment to the world, hence its
value to our country as a viable com-
modity. As we enter the 21st century
and face increasing technological com-
petition from abroad, American enter-
tainment is going to be a lucrative
export for the country. I predict that a
significant component of that enter-
tainment export will consist of live-
action games that star American actors
and actresses. Like the early cinema,
however, live-action games have some
technical hurdles to clear before they
attain widespread popularity: better
player navigation and better player
interaction.
Enter the Dragon
Live-action games have roots that can
be traced back to that (in)famous
arcade game Dragon’s Lair. I remem-
ber it well—as a vidiot in the early
1980s, I dropped way too many quar-
ters into that game at the local pizza
parlor (it was one of the first games
that demanded 50 cents, which really
chapped my hide). Looking back, the
game wasn’t as exciting as other arcade
games of its day, yet one element made
it unique: rather than being composed
GAME DEVELOPER • FEBRUARY 1995
5
C R O S S F I R E
of sprites and tiles, it was an animated
cartoon you played off a laser disc.
The game was based on a series of
short cartoon scenes spliced together in
real time and controlled by the player’s
actions at key junctures in the game.
Using liberal amounts of fast-twitch
muscle tissue and a good memory, the
plot of Dragon’s Lair came together,
and the player eventually rescued the
princess from the dragon. Now that the
industry is seeing the convergence of
fast video transfer rates, CD-ROM
storage, and the ubiquity of personal
computers in homes, the consumer
market is ripe for live-action games that
follow the Dragon’s Lair paradigm and
feature familiar actors and actresses.
Siliwood is starting to capitalize on this
market.
development is being threatened by
increasingly educated and efficient
third-world countries, the marriage of
entertainment and technology will defi-
nitely give the resulting products the
21st-century spin they’ll need.
I recently had a brush with Sili-
wood. This past summer I was fortunate
to be invited to the making of a new live-
action game, The Daedalus Encounter,
developed by Mechadeus. Starring Tia
Carrere (of
Wayne’s World
fame), the pro-
ject’s live footage was shot in a warehouse
soundstage near San Francisco’s multi-
media gulch area before it was brought
back to the Mechadeus developers for
integration with the interface and the
game’s logic. It was an interesting film
set that relied on the same film tech-
niques as
Star Wars
and
Superman.
The
two leads acted out sequences against
invisible enemies and traded lines against
a blue screen backdrop. Behind the
bright lights, cameras, and film crew was
a monitor that showed the performers
superimposed into rendered scenery. It
was quite different than other game
development shops I’ve had a chance to
see, needless to say.
Unfortunately, as with Dragon’s
Lair a decade ago, many of these live-
action adventure and role-playing
games suffer from a stifling story line
that forces players to pursue a limited
course of action through the game
world. If you screw up at a particular
juncture (zigged when you should have
zagged, and subsequently got shot by a
bullet, for instance), you’re forced to
back up to the beginning of the scene
where you died, listen to the same dia-
logue again, and correct your mistake
(“I
have
to zag this time—I can’t bear to
hear that scene’s dialogue one more
time!”).
Improving Playability
Just as leaps like sound and color helped
movies catch on with the public, tech-
nological advancements in live-action
games will help them mature and gain
popularity. For instance, the repetitive
nature of these games will be overcome
by sophisticated, highly developed plots
containing dozens, hundreds, or thou-
sands of unique solutions.
I know that using a flexible story
line was a priority for Mechadeus
because the game’s story board was
posted on a wall and looked like the
flow chart from hell: lines from a start-
ing point that connected to a number of
different hubs, which in turn connected
to more, like a geometric function. The
paths between hubs crossed everywhere,
and eventually funneled back down to a
series of end points—the finishing
scenes. This large road map of the
game’s plot, we were told, allowed play-
ers to accomplish tasks in no set order
and allowed more flexibility in game
play. In addition, a player’s “attitude”
affected how the story unfolded, so that
a Doom-style, shoot-everything strate-
gy revealed a different side to the game
than an “I’m O.K., you’re O.K., let’s be
friends” style of play.
Another (probably years away) step
forward for live-action games will be
the inclusion of sophisticated artificial
intelligence, allowing interaction with
nonplayer characters (NPCs) that is less
scripted and more spontaneous. It
would require some fairly intense
graphics and sound manipulation to
make NPCs say something intelligent
What’s Siliwood?
Siliwood is the combination of Silicon
Valley technical sophistication and the
glitzy star power of Hollywood, evi-
denced in the newest crop of multime-
dia games. Siliwood is just a buzzword,
but the promise that these two indus-
tries hold for creating a new entertain-
ment industry is real. At a time when
America’s competitive edge in software
The Daedalus Encounter stars Tia Carrere and Christian Bocher. “Using name talent will
enrich the game and its consumer appeal,” says John Evershed, Mechadeus’s executive
producer.
6
GAME DEVELOPER • FEBRUARY 1995
C R O S S F I R E
ones will begin their rise to fame in the
game industry and then cross over to
television or movie spots. In the mean-
time, the faces that have already
appeared in games lend credence to
these games as an acting vehicle:
Jonathan Frakes, Morgan Fairchild, Joe
Piscopo, Mark Hamill, Malcolm
McDowell, Dennis Hopper, Grace
Jones, and Margot Kidder. (And that’s
just what I could dig up in two minutes
from scanning some ads.)
As Siliwood comes into its own,
the line between games and movies will
rapidly fade. Ads in game magazines
already look like blockbuster movie ads,
and we’ve begun to see stars’ mug shots
alongside blurbs detailing the mini-
mum system requirements. Interactive
game drama is here, so forget the the-
ater and renting movies—fire up the
Intel nickelodeon.
s
John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill, two veterans of George Lucas’s films, star in Origins’s
Wing Commander III.
in the right voice and with the right
facial expressions! Perhaps someday in
the future, game AI will get good
enough to produce game solutions that
even the developers hadn’t anticipated.
Finally, it’s interesting to consider
that these games might be the launch-
ing point for future acting careers. We
might see the rise of some cyber Chap-
lins and Pickfords. Maybe some lucky
Alex Dunne is contributing editor for
Game Developer
magazine.
8
GAME DEVELOPER • FEBRUARY 1995

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin