Achron - Time Travel RTS

[Stark]

Honestly, memory management has been a solved problem for a long time. Automatic garbage collection for the win.

No doubt; this is however unrelated to the persistence of the problem. And I know how ironic this is, since 'memory leak' is pretty much the catchcry of the OMG WTF Beta Test report.

This type of thing would be next to imposible to bolt onto an existing game engine, and would be vastly easier to get right when developed from the word go to include it.

This is basicly undo functionality with history, and it requires the entire design to accommodate it or you get a really nasty, crappy mess.

Since it's also recursive (ie it appears you can timewarp inside another timewarp, or intercept the results of a timewarp before it reaches 'now') there is serious scope for it to have problems. If it worked and has a good UI (ie, not just an RTS window but an actual TIMESCOPE (tm) interface to help the player visualise the different timezones and movements between them) it'd be great, but ambition doesn't always lead to success.

[Darth Yoshi]

It's an interesting concept, but implementation is usually what kills games. I'll wait and see how the finished product is before deciding.

[Xon]

Of course, you and I know all that is either entirely wrong or half true at best, but that is the kind of bullshit I see all around the Internet whenever garbage collection is brought up - the bias, especially among game people it seems, is pretty strong.

Object-oriented programming used to be a dirty phrase with game developers. Now days, everything uses it and they use freaking interpreted scripting languages everywhere.

Honestly, Embedding Mono is practically made for this type of thing. High performance, garbage collected maanged langauge(s) for scripting with near native performance. Or Microsoft's .NET framework if you don't care about consoles or porting. Hell, both Mono & .NET support digital file signing which is quite desirable to ensure the integrity of the executable code.

But like Object-oriented programming, it will easily be another 5-10 years before using just-in-time compiled languages becomes common in games for scripting or actual game code.

Game developers seem to like making things difficult for themselves.

Game studios are famous for death marches before releases. The software industry has know that is a bad thing for a while now, yet you keep on hearing about it.

[Darth Yoshi]

Death marches? As in, last minute cram sessions?

[Stark]

'Death march' is a project management term (also, a joke and an extremely amusing book). Anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for any length of time can read about 'death marches' and find it amusing.

[Genii Lodus]

In fairness near native performance still implies a performance deficit. Given that most graphically high-end games, at least on consoles, are struggling to keep a stable frame rate in C++ that they would have had an ever harder time with performance in a managed language.

There have been a couple of XBLA games that have been developed using XNA - Schizoid for one. Strangely enough N+ was originally written in C# and then ported for performance reasons - I'm not sure how that ended up needing the extra horsepower.

I'm sure the next generation of consoles will have the horsepower necessary to allow more games written in managed languages but I still think that'll be confined to downloadable or 'casual' titles with the new shiny wonder games on consoles and pretty much everything on handhelds staying in native code for performance reasons.

The games industry is getting better at managing production - largely because there are now proper production processes in place. There are quite a few companies that make a point of advertising they are crunch free zones. It did start off as a bunch of amateurs after all.

[Xon]

'Death march' is a project management term (also, a joke and an extremely amusing book). Anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for any length of time can read about 'death marches' and find it amusing.

Amen. Luckly I've avoided any real death march software development projects so far in my Software development career, but I'm young and ther is plenty of time for me to get stuck in such a nasty mess.

In fairness near native performance still implies a performance deficit. Given that most graphically high-end games, at least on consoles, are struggling to keep a stable frame rate in C++ that they would have had an ever harder time with performance in a managed language.

Reading comprehension, is quite important.

If you are using an interpreted scripting language, performance is something you have given away for some reason (valid or not). .NET code is near native with all the scripty goodness should you wish.

The games industry is getting better at managing production - largely because there are now proper production processes in place. There are quite a few companies that make a point of advertising they are crunch free zones. It did start off as a bunch of amateurs after all.

Hah. As if there is any fucking difference. Software development is so bloody new, no one knows what the good practices actually are. They just know what the utter failures are.

[Genii Lodus]

In fairness near native performance still implies a performance deficit. Given that most graphically high-end games, at least on consoles, are struggling to keep a stable frame rate in C++ that they would have had an ever harder time with performance in a managed language.

Reading comprehension, is quite important.

If you are using an interpreted scripting language, performance is something you have given away for some reason (valid or not). .NET code is near native with all the scripty goodness should you wish.

I was replying more to the earlier stuff about why games developers don't use languages with GC to write the proper game code. Using compiled .NET code rather than endless lua scripts would be much better and I have no idea why the former isn't more popular. I think Supreme Commander is a great example of where the rampant use of lua for everything ended up imposing a vast performance penalty - especially for the AI (which shipped with lots of bugs related to lua's implicit variable declaration).

[Skgoa]

Hah. As if there is any fucking difference. Software development is so bloody new, no one knows what the good practices actually are. They just know what the utter failures are.

ever heard of design patterns etc.? we are getting there, the industry is much more professional than it used to be.

[NecronLord]

I will almost certainly buy this if I can run it. Fuck stability (within reason) and balance - as a casual and occasional game player, it basically needs an amusing single player and multiplayer that's good for a few goes now and then. And this looks like it will have that.

One question would be how you score a decisive victory. You'd presumably have to trick the enemy into using up all their chrono energy, somehow.

If only it had daleks screaming 'exterminate' all over it.

[bilateralrope]

Victory would probably consist you wiping them out in the present, then you have to wait a few minutes until tit becomes impossible to create a timewave before the player was wiped out. Anything else runs the risk of a timewave that restores the dead player.

Which means that the cleanup period between your victory being assured, and the computer recognising it, will consist of a few minutes where you have nothing to do but wait and hope you don't disconnect.

[Stark]

It would seem absolutely trival to win -possibly quite early, if they don't resolve the sploits - simply by dropping a few timewarps in chokepoints and other essential locations and thus dominating the map. Apparently you build time tokens or whatever, so decap attacks are always going to be effective.

Really, it stuns me how people think this is going to be as far-out and interesting as the article suggests. It'll get feature-chopped in development, it'll be nerfed to hell in beta, and the first patch will remove anything RTS idiots are too stupid to use. There are PLENTY of games that sounded dynamic and interesting early in development or in concept, and ended up being Starcraft with Boats or whatever.

NL, unless the game is very carefully set up, every game will play out exactly the same. That's bad even for casual (even if it's released as described).

[Darth Onasi]

This all reminds me of that one FPS that promised dynamic time travel with you being able to affect any previous timeline in the game at will or some such. The feature ended up being nothing but some scripted events in a game so bland I don't even remember it's name.

[Stark]

I remember Radiant AI, I remember amazingly complex melee combat, I remember 'universal manipulation' physical problem-solving, realtime resource markets, enemy morale, A-life, and piles of other features that started as absolutely core to a game's concept and design but in the end turned out to be broken or nonexistent. Remember Black and White?

[Adrian Laguna]

Remember Black and White?

I have Black & White, bought it back when I would impulsively buy new games (now I buy used and do research beforehand). Haven't played it in years, maybe I should try again, I have a graphics card now that I didn't have then, so it should run pretty smooth. Anyway, the point is that I saw it at the store and it looked interesting, so I went in knowing only what I garnered from the box. It was about what I expected, though villager management was a bit off, and creature training was far less intuitive than I would have liked. It was the latter reason why I didn't play it much.

I was wondering what sort of things they promised back when the game was in development, since I missed out on all that?

[Covenant]

Remember Black and White?

I have Black & White, bought it back when I would impulsively buy new games (now I buy used and do research beforehand). Haven't played it in years, maybe I should try again, I have a graphics card now that I didn't have then, so it should run pretty smooth. Anyway, the point is that I saw it at the store and it looked interesting, so I went in knowing only what I garnered from the box. It was about what I expected, though villager management was a bit off, and creature training was far less intuitive than I would have liked. It was the latter reason why I didn't play it much.

I was wondering what sort of things they promised back when the game was in development, since I missed out on all that?

They promised that it would shit gold, when in fact it was just shit in a box. The problem with these huge, over-arching gameplay additions is that they're using a doodad to replace game design instead of spending that time on game design and actually doing it.

The one doodad I can think of that actually worked (though nowhere near to the level of what the developers claim) is the Left 4 Dead procedural basic enemy generation mechanic. You can plug-and-play a map in L4D and it'll generate relatively acceptable enemy distributions, on the general theory that monsters don't really need any special placement anyway, so this makes it faster and lets the AI be more dynamic with adapting to the players. However, I can't vouch for their "Director" actually doing anything. But by letting the AI shotgun units across the map, you save time in development and make it so it's never the same. That's a worthwhile design decision whereas the complex creature behavior in Black and White boiled down to beating the shit out of something whenever it did something you didn't like, in order to reduce the probability of that action to zero. I only beat my creature so badly it would no longer defecate. Yeah.

Things like the Radiant AI were fun to play with, but completely inessential. I don't care if the NPCs want to eat food every day at 12:00 noon, and stealing their food makes them go buy more. If I only see this faceless NPC once, and our meeting consists of me stabbing him in the balls, his complex AI scripts are pointless to me and only offer the capacity for frustration on times if I need to find X and Y'o clock on Blergsday.

[Solauren]

So, basically it's letting people load up saved games for just themselves?

Aka: How I play Civilizations now-a-days.