Archive Page 4

02
Sep
09

Unity 3D

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: Technology

One of the things I’ve been screwing around with is Unity 3D. Unity is a heavily data-driven game engine with an integrated level editor.

It’s so heavily data-driven that all the game code is written in script and the native code layer is almost entirely hidden (only in the pro version C++ plug-ins can be created). The engine contains most of the systems you’re likely to need for a game: 3D rendering with shaders, a level editor, a 3D asset pipeline, a physics engine, a rudimentary GUI system, network state synchronisation and RPC.

Unity is the subject of all kinds of hyperbole around the web. Back when I first heard about it, I wondered how much of the praise was down to Mac-heads who were simply delighted that the authoring tools were Mac-only. Since then, they’ve ported the tools to Windows and I’ve discovered that it really is pretty damn nice. It’s extremely quick to learn – I had a playable prototype of the game mechanic that I was trying out on Day 2 of using it.

Unity’s greatest asset is its clean design. It has a beautiful component architecture where you write update methods and event handlers in script, encapsulate them into component objects and then assemble them into game objects via drag ‘n’drop. Exposing tweakable parameters is merely a case of declaring a component member public.

Unity is my first choice for prototyping, but I’m doubtful it’d be flexible enough to ship a full-scale game based on it. The drawbacks are:

  • No script debugger. The editor offers excellent facilities for inspecting and changing object properties in a running game session, but there’s no line-by-line script debugging.
  • No load/save framework. In spite of all the network serialisation stuff, you’re on your own when it comes to writing out a save game. There’s Dot-Net’s object serialisation and I/O though, so it’s not completely low level.
  • The GUI framework looks to be somewhat bare in places. No modal dialogs for example.
  • The physics API is an intelligently chosen 80% solution. It caters to the common uses of physics. If you’re in the weird 20% like Portal or Braid, you’ll probably spend more time fighting Unity than worthwhile.

That said, it’s superb for what it is and it’s been getting more flexible with every release. It’s a taste of the future of game development. Ideally, the only code required for a game should be gameplay-specific. Middleware has been getting steadily more and more comprehensive, and I can see the day when the only folks working on engine-level stuff work at Unity, Autodesk, Epic and Intel.

02
Sep
09

On Holiday

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: Mundane Personal Updates

Yay! Clone Wars is all finished up and I’m on holiday. I’m going to be visiting Italy later on, but until then I’ll be screwing around on personal projects.

I’ve been experimenting with web technologies and it’s a nice contrast to console games. I feel that the immense amount of labour and development time in console games has isolated developers from players. With Flash there’s far simpler technology and a culture of releasing early and releasing often. It’s an inspiration to see the Flash devs getting player feedback weekly rather than annually!

I hope to have some interesting prototypes to show off shortly.

14
May
09

Day Job Announced!

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: Work

swcwrhI can finally say what I’m working on! It’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes.

Or as I prefer to call it, Craig Timpany’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes: Episode 1: Watch Out For Bears. They still let me master submission discs, so who knows, maybe that’ll be the final title*.

Here’s the press release.

Naturally I’ve got to be pretty careful about what I say about projects in public (Hi employers! It’s good to see I’m developing some Google pagerank), so if you read this post aloud, you should read it in the manner of someone who has a gun held to their head.

If there’s one thing I hate about working in console games, it’s the bullshit secrecy around projects. You spend 75% of the time unable to say anything about your job, and the remaining 25% unable to say anything candid. There’s really only one reason for it: if you ration out information, you gain control over media coverage. Journalists will do terrible things for an exclusive. Never believe anything you read in a preview. Only pay attention to reviews.

* Yes, employers, this is an invitation to take me off build duty. I am clearly not to be trusted and should be assigned to more interesting things.

25
Apr
08

Engagement Distance

By Craig Timpany 2 Comments
Categories: Game Design

One of the key considerations in designing a shooter is engagement distance. This is the distance between the player and their opponents during combat.

Once upon a time (2001), I wrote an arena shooter called Mojotron as a hobby project. It was somewhat similar to Geometry Wars, except that Geometry Wars hadn’t been written yet (I was inspired by Llamatron instead). After I finished it, I worked on a sequel that would take that fast-paced combat and place it into a top-down maze exploration game. Like a combination of Gauntlet and Geometry Wars.

I took the Mojotron combat model, added scrolling and hooked up a random level generator that would produce networks of rooms (DungeonMaker, very cool).

Suddenly the game became noticeably less fun.

Continue reading ‘Engagement Distance’

18
Sep
07

Drinking in China

By Craig Timpany 1 Comment
Categories: China

In China, most drink beer. There’s good reason for this. Many parts of China are life-threateningly hot; so much so that cold beer is an integral part of your life-support equipment. That and spirits drinking is a knotty, complex area of Western culture that is stubbornly resisting assimilation into Chinese culture.

Case in point, an exchange with a waitress at a spirits-themed bar in Yangshuo:

“I’ll have a rum and coke.”

“Rum?”, she asks uncertainly.

“Yeah, rum.”

Waitress hurries off and scans a shelf of spirits bottles. Her finger passes Bacardi, Coruba and Captain Morgan.

“We don’t have ‘rum’”, she says anxiously.

“Uhhh huh… Well, I’ll have a bacardi and coke.”

“OK!”

Later on I’d order a Black Russian and receive a Martini glass filled with something milky-white coloured. At first I thought it was straight Kahlua, but on closer inspection I saw it was floating on top of about half a shot’s worth of Coke. Looks like somebody accidentally reversed the proportions in their bartending manual.

I feel curmudgeonly to be bitching about this. The fact that I could order in English at all is a tribute to the vast effort they must have put in scaling my side of the language chasm. They’ve obviously worked a lot harder than I have. I tried to learn some Mandarin phrases, but whenever I went to use them, the situation’s confusion and trouble just deepened.

18
Sep
07

GTA Beijing

By Craig Timpany 1 Comment
Categories: China and Game Design

tractorthing.jpg

After one of many close calls during our tour buses’overtaking manoeuvres, one of the other tourists joked that it was just like playing Grand Theft Auto. He has a point.

  • No apparent speed limit.
  • Right of way isn’t enforced.
  • Nobody indicates.
  • Police only get involved if they witness an actual collision.
  • Even if the police do bust you, a donation can set you on your way again.

Seems to me like Asia is the natural setting for GTA. Why do Rockstar keep setting Grand Theft Auto in New York, Miami and LA lookalikes?

Think of the possibilities:

  • Denser, more chaotic traffic, to keep things interesting. Perhaps it’d be best suited if it were a final level of the game?
  • More varied interesting vehicles. I kept seeing tuktuks, rickshaws, huge tricycles with a big carrying tray between the back wheels (pickup tricycle? ute trike?), motorbikes converted into minibuses, tractors converted into minibuses, and so on. I even saw one guy cycling through the hutongs on a ute trike with its tray removed and a charcoal grill welded in its place. He was a mobile shish kebab stand!
  • Pedestrians whose courage and stoicisim is matched only by their keen senses and finely tuned reaction times. Not to mention their sophisticated flocking behavour which allows them to make impromptu pedestrian crossings, much like a column of army ants will form a bridge out of their comrades.

hk-small.jpg

18
Sep
07

Rail in China

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: China

Beijing Railway Station is intense. It feels like an airport with all the gigantic architecture, but the thing is when a train arrives, it turns mosh-pit. In China, rail is serious business. They even X-Ray your baggage.

The departure boards probably had around 50 trains listed, and over how many platforms I have no idea. I do know that when we went to the departure lounge-like waiting room on the way to the platform, it was waiting room #13.

Back when I was leafing through the tour notes, a sleeper train didn’t seem like a bad idea at all. After all, my only notion of sleeper trains had come from 1950′s films.

My preconceptions of a sleeper carriage:

interior_c_final.jpg

Our actual sleeper carriage:

sleepertrain.jpg

Around 60 people to a carriage, triple decker bunks, and just about the only door on the carriage is the one on the heinous squat toilet. It’s a barracks with wheels.

The top bunks are roughly 8 feet in the air. I was in a middle bunk, and an elderly couple had the top bunks. Before I could figure out how to offer to swap bunk assignments, they had scrambled up top with surprising nimbleness. Good on them.

16
Sep
07

Terracotta Warriors

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: China

As impressive as the Terracotta Warriors are (8,000 life-size statues with unique faces, sculpted in 210BC), you do have to wonder about the guy who commissioned them, the first Chinese emperor.

You know, I’m no Qin Shi Huang, but I’d like to think that I would’ve realised that the Terracotta Army was a silly idea at some point during the estimated 38 years it took to complete them. I’d like to think I’d realise it before I’d go and commission a bronze handkerchief for my bronze charioteer to wipe away his (bronze?) sweat with.

bronzehandkerchief-small.jpg

But then again, it’s just that kind of unimaginative thinking that’s stopped me from unifying any Chinas lately.

Or thinking up any awesome stunts like this:

A German art student briefly fooled police by posing as one of China’s terracotta warriors at the heritage site in the ancient capital, Xian. Pablo Wendel, made up like an ancient warrior, jumped into a pit showcasing the 2,200-year-old pottery soldiers and stood motionless for several minutes.

16
Sep
07

Stuff from gift shops I wish I’d bought

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: China

Chairman Mao Alarm Clock

A little mechanical alarm clock with a smiling Mao on the face, surrounded by adoring workers. It even had his salute arm attached to the pendulum, so he waves back and forth (ala an Elvis pendulum clock). As hilarious as it is creepy.

“It’s Mao-o’clock! Time to rise! Rise up, people, rise up!”

Tabby Scarf

“Hey, look at these furs in this stall! I didn’t know you could get marmalade, gingery coloured ferrets or mink.” I paused. “Wait… there’s something familiar about those tails…”

“Craig, those are cat skins.”

I really should’ve got one for my sister, she’d scream with delight.

And the same stall had German Shepard floor rugs too!

16
Sep
07

Culture Shock

By Craig Timpany Leave a Comment
Categories: China

Culture shock. I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Oh no, not me, calm and collected citizen of the world. Hah, yeah right.

Oddly it wasn’t the squat toilets (nasty, but relatives had warned me in advance) or even the lack of English, it was a mall in Beijing.

The place is called Silk Road Market (“One Market! One Dream!”), and it’s a combination of a mall and a market. It’s a large building – six stories high along with four sub-basements – yet the shops inside are open stalls, packed into a grid, spaced little more than an armspan apart from one another. Each stall has a couple of back walls lined with shelves, a small area to stand in, and a shop assistant or two.

Every shop assistant is trying to get your attention through yelling, waving and occasionally grabbing you by the arm. The crowds are shoulder-to-shoulder, and even if you could see where you’re going, there are precious few landmarks in the featureless expanse of stalls.

I’m the kind of guy that gets uncomfortable if a kiwi shop assistant asks “Can I help you?” twice. So for me, getting lost inside that place was kind of like a perfect storm of awful.

As soon as I could get back to the exit, I retreated to a neighbouring sandwich shop, where the crowds had thinned out to merely busy. I got my head back together while I watched the world’s slowest sandwich get made. (Unfamiliar with the strange foreign process of making a sandwich, the guy had to stop and ask his supervisor about several aspects)

Later in the trip we went to visit Buddha Water Cave, which was fantastic. At one point we had to wriggle our way through a very narrow, windy tunnel, headfirst and on our bellies. I found the cave crawl far less claustrophobic than Silk Road Market. At least wedged in a limestone crevice I could hear myself think.

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