Someone wrote a gamers manifesto. Yes. That’s it. I love this guy, he’s so right. Modern games sucks. We’re in the middle of transition from on e world to another, but game producers tries to cheat us that they’re developing great products. They lie.
10 years ago our technology was so low that we were not able to create photorealistic graphics nor good physic. So we made a silent agreement with game authors that we will imagine as much as possible and we will not whine about some dumb issues like lack of jump ability that blocks our super-mega-hero from jumping on a chair so he must go through hell and fire to find another way to exit the level.
Currently, CPU, RAM, hard drives creators made a good piece of work but whole Gaming Industry fucked on their part. We’re still a few steps from the old years and the only thing that made a real progress are graphic engines. Nothing more. Our gaming engines sucks , and when I’m sayin that, I mean that – it sucks a lot.
The most recent, billions worth, engines for DOOM III or Half Life 2 are a jokes. Gaming world fails to even invent the way to model envoirment so it behaves naturally, we also failed to invent a way so player can feel that he can do whatever he’s character should be able to do, like jumping, crawling, making small steps, running, turning head around. Yes, I know that we have only one mouse device and 104 keys, but it gives us thousands of combinations!
Physic part of envoirment sucks in the same way. It looks so stupid when you exclusivly can move a coca-cola can but you can’t touch table, chair, mirror, wall, window, doors, carpet, lamp, clock, and every other object in the room. Can you say that game authors play with us fair?
We are years from creating something valuable and I strongly believe that OpenSource is a solution for most of our problems. OS gives us incremenetal progress without loosing any line of code once some project is abandoned. With a progress on people’s knowledge about OpenSource we’re gaining code from schools/colleges which are working on some parts of eg. physic engines as a student projects, we’re gaining free engines like Crystal Space, Irrlicht or Yake (based on Ogre) which removes the need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to make a game but you don’t have billion dollars to pay for the engine, we’re gaining free models, levels, physic stuff and others.
Yes, we’re far behind property industry, our engines are lacking some things, but we’re getting nearer every day. I think that if you start writing your game today, once, your engine will be there before you finish.
More complicated part is a physic engine. We’re still very primitive here with not much more than bouncing based on two vectors and ability to execute a function onColide event. Similar thing is with A.I. I’d love to see more progress on this with tech High Schools involved in the future- simply, ODE is not enough.
2 replies on “Gamers manifesto”
After reading the manifesto and before reading your post I thought: “Well, most of these problems could be solved by FLOSS”. Now I see, that it’s not only my thought. We are away from the “selling” and “commercial success” and games are created by people, who play them, not by marketing guys and graphic guys. Looking at all those titles released every year (though I don’t play, but sometimes see them somewhere) I got a feeling that games development stopped some 7 or so years ago. That all good games have been made, when I was young and nobody produces good games anymore. A little example: one of my favourite games were the Warcraft series. When I first saw Warcraft II I felt like struck by lightning. I loved this games from the first… sight/touch of omuse/whatev. When I heard Warcraft III was going to be released I felt excited. When I got it – I played for less than half week and then get rid of it. Warcraft II is definitely the best of the series, despite it lacks some cool features that can be found in Warcraft I. Another example is Polanie. Polanie was a nice humouristic game and Polanie II is some graphical shit, without that nice feeling.
So does the future belongs to BZflag, Battle of Wesnoth, Cube and alikes? I wish that could be true!
Powtarzam to samo od mniej więcej 3-4 lat. Wszystkie gry, jakie teraz wychodzą opierają się praktycznie o ten sam scenariusz (może dwa) z niewielkimi modyfikacjami. Za to nadrabiają grafiką. Tylko co mi po grafice, jak grę mogę ukończyć w przeciągu 2 weekendów nie zarywając nawet nocy?
Jeśli porównamy możliwości obecnych komputerów i gry jakie są na nie tworzone z komputerami i grami na komputery 8- czy 16-bitowe to sytuacja wygląda tragicznie. Wtedy, ze względu na brak technik programowania, możliwości sprzętowych itd. twórcy gier nadrabiali fabułą. Kładło się nacisk na to, żeby gracz nie znudził się po kilku wieczorach. I nie nudził się. A wśród kolegów liczyło się do którego levelu się doszło czy ile razy się daną grę przeszło.
Nie wiem, może już za stary jestem, ale przyznam, że z większą chęcią sięgam po grę mającą 5-6 lat i więcej (mimo, że grafika nie powala) niż po tytuł z zeszłego roku czy sprzed 2 lat.
PS: Temat mnie zainteresował na tyle, że na swoim weblogu wypowiem się trochę szerzej.