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Thatcher's rants and musings 2004

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"Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath" is finally winding up, after three years in development. Three years is a long time; I'm pretty damn glad to see the end of it. Towards the end of QA I finally actually played the thing as it's meant to be played (without cheats or missing content or broken code). I think it's a good game.

At the very beginning of the project, cbloom advocated that we have tons of character dialog, since that has always been one of Oddworld's strengths. That was a good call. The dialog came out really well; the NPC characters are funny and have lots of personality, and give a nice feeling of having lives of their own as they wander around chit-chatting with each other.

The storyline is relatively coherent, the FPS stuff is playable and not too twitchy, and the 3rd person melee stuff is fun. I wish the FPS gameplay was less central, but hey, it works.

I'm pretty happy with the visuals. The lightmapping worked out reasonably well. I wish I had done something better with chart boundaries; it's one of those problems that doesn't appear to have a good general solution. But we had talked about some kind of optimization pass to adjust the chart UV's a bit. Charles' cube-map/normal-map character lighting works nicely.

PSM mostly worked out right; we didn't end up with real resolution problems. The one glaring problem with the PSM shadows is double-shadowing in dark areas, and shadow bleedthrough on the backs of receivers. We had a sweet shader solution to this, where we used the lightmap color to control the PSM darkening. Unfortunately, it was deemed more important for the characters to have dynamic shadows on shadowed ground, than to get rid of those other problems. In other words, the double-darkening was considered a feature, not a bug. So, enjoy the double-darkening, and please ignore the bleedthrough.

The water came out nice for the most part. The particle and atmospheric effects are often great. The depth-of-field and glare looks good. Overall though, the art team deserves tons of credit for making the engine look good.

Anyway, I hope you like the game, we worked hard on it.

Vacation!

I'm on vacation, and it is great. I'm suffering from bone-deep tiredness and a glassy stare. I've been taking a drool-y coma-like nap at least once a day. I plan to continue that regimen until I feel halfway alive again.

Today I discovered that NYC seems to lack a technical bookstore. Atman knew of a couple places ("Book Scientific", and the bookstore at the McGraw Hill headquarters in midtown), which I visited, but both of them are out of business. I assume killed by Amazon et al. There are some gigantic bookstores around; maybe one of them has a good computer section. The B&N near my apt is gigantic but absolutely terrible for computer books. It's depressing to say this, but if I squint a little, NYC looks like a very large, but not especially unique, shopping mall.

My opinions on this ea_spouse thing, in case you care:

The game industry does indeed overuse "crunch time". EA seems to have taken it up a few notches, deep into the zone of the ridiculous, compared to most companies. ea_spouse has done a giant service to us all by shedding light on the situation and forcing a public discussion.

I don't know if the industry should have a union. Union or no, we really need a concrete, specific set of "recommended labor practices" that cover things like crunch time. Game projects drag on for years, so there need to be limits. My recommendations would be something like:

• a MAXIMUM of two weeks "crunch time" per calendar quarter.

• "crunch time" defined as a MAXIMUM of 72 hours/week.

• the rest of the time, hours are limited to a MAXIMUM of 48 hours/week. Any week that exceeds 48 hours is a "crunch week" and counts against the 2 per quarter.

• crunch time hours beyond 48/hr/week compensated at double pay (so management has a good reason to try to avoid it)

(Those hour limits are set a bit high; the real average should be more like 40-45 hours/week normally, and 60 hours/week during crunch. But realistically there needs to be some flexibility depending on the work.)

There are plenty of companies where management means well, and pays lip service to the fact that too much overtime is counterproductive. But when push comes to shove, crunch time is too easy to rationalize, too devoid of short-term consequences.

The same thing applies to employees. You can get into a mode where it's easier to just go to work, than to deal with your life. At that point, you need some externally imposed limits on work.

Another totally crazy thing is well-intentioned companies that try to make work as self-contained as possible. For example, there are companies that have built movie screening rooms on-site, and invite families in from time to time, so that employees can get some recreation and family face time without leaving the building. Insane! When the work hours are over, kick the employees out the door! Don't fill the workplace with distractions, and then keep employees on-site for extra hours in order to make sure the work gets done!

• both very cute

• both like to cuddle

• both relatively quiet compared to their peers, but make a terrific racket on special occasions

• both get into the garbage

• both have had "biting incidents"

• both adopted by us at around 1 year of age

• neither one talks a lot

• both jealous of the other

• both like Hazel's food, neither really likes dog food

The fact is, God has a disappointingly poor track record of striking down hypocrites. Bush and company are very bad, but God is very high above. What little comfort I can get from religion at this moment comes from the lyrics of The Rich Kids on LSD song, Tell Me The Truth:

    If He's up there like I think He is,
    There's a hell that's hotter than piss!
    For all the money hungry godly liars
    Their reward... a lake of fire.

I went to see the movie Primer last night. Today, Julie asked me how it was. I thought for a minute, then told her, "Terrible."

I really wanted to love it. The premise is right up my alley: some engineers spending their nights and weekends in a garage, building some curious experimental contraption (that turns out to be a time machine). The nerdy dialog is right on pitch, no dilithium crystal BS or gratuitous glasses and pocket protectors. The acting is not amazing, but certainly good enough. The movie is raw and low budget but manages to look cool, and the props really look like genuine handmade prototypes of electromechanical thingamajigs. For the first half of the movie, while the guys are building their device, I was totally on board, even though it's a bit confusing and takes too long to get to the point.

Unfortunately, the second half of the movie features a spectacular failure of storytelling craft. I'm pretty sure some significant things happen to the characters in the second half of the movie, but I would be hard pressed to say what they are. There are lots of interesting and curious tidbits, that completely fail to support any kind of coherent narrative. Seemingly significant characters and themes appear and disappear from scene to scene, with no explanation.

I'm left feeling very frustrated. I want the filmmakers to go back in time to before the film was released, reedit the script until it resembles a story, shoot a couple new scenes if necessary, record some new voiceover that explains what the hell is going on, and release a great movie.

Miscellaneous Sunday Night At The Movies Opinions From The Past Year Or So

Collateral is a really good movie. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is fantastic, the best movie I've seen this year. Garden State is very sappy, but still good. Sky Captain is mediocre at best. Team America is mediocre but with a couple really funny scenes, plus it's all puppets. Farenheit 9-11, as a movie, is decent, but not nearly as good as Roger And Me or Bowling For Columbine. Starsky And Hutch == funny. Troy is OK for a big budget bronze breastplate epic. Return Of The King is great of course. Kill Bill didn't do it for me; haven't seen the second one yet. I really enjoyed Club Dread.

more tuffy

http://www.openlettertothepresident.org/

gotoAndPlay, a site dedicated to Flash games, asked me some questions about gameswf, and published the interview here: http://www.gotoandplay.it/spotLight/gameSwf/

Some adventures in font design.

• Hooray for daycare!

• Re summer soccer: we won the VFA trophy! I spent the last three games playing goalie, my least favorite but probably most suitable position, after our regular keeper left the island for the summer. The MV Times wrote this article about the final game, including pictures of me desperately needing a haircut. Scroll down past the soccer news for the results of this years Ladies Skillet Toss from the MV Agricultural Fair.

  I felt good about the last game. VFA played well, but our defense was very tough; I don't think VFA managed any true shots on goal (they hit one off the post late in the game though).

  I was largely responsible for the first (own) goal, due to general goalkeeping cluelessness, but managed to make a dramatic diving save to win the game in the PK shootout. Being the goalie in a shootout is really the best possible situation; the onus is all on the shooter, so if you manage to make a save it's all gravy.

• Please vote for John Kerry for president. If for no other reason than it's in my personal self-interest. My mortgage shifts over to adjustable-rate in a few years, and I can't afford the fiscal disaster that GW is steadfastly heading us into. Also, every time Cheney opens his mouth to calmly deliver some paranoid self-serving deception, my blood pressure spikes, which is not good for my health.

  I don't agree with the cynics that the US electoral system is fundamentally broken. It is true that the winner-take-all nature of it leads to a lot of distortions and frustrations, and in the end presents us with only two viable candidates who necessarily have a lot of similarities and compromises, but still fight like dogs over the same bone. In our system, it's hard to be too radical in any direction and still garner the 50+% percent of the vote you need to win. So there's all this weird jockeying where each side triangulates their stands on various issues to get just over 50% of the vote. To simplify things, if you imagine an ideological scale from 1 to 100, the candidates tend to come in at around 40 and 60, or else they end up being outflanked.

  Which brings up the puzzle of how the current administration has managed to be so far right (and so patently incompetent to boot) that they actually have a chance to be reelected... Well, of course the answer is that they got in office in the first place by appearing to be about equally moderate and insipid as Gore, and the election essentially ended in a coin toss. Once in office, they have benefited from some of the distortions in the system, like the fact that the incumbent, especially during wartime, has a big advantage. But I think they will lose this time around; as Clinton puts it, they are just too far to the right of the American people.

Celestia is a really fun virtual planetarium / virtual universe program. It's amazing how easy it is to get lost in space! There are a lot of stars out there, and once you get a few dozen light years away from the sun, they all kinda look the same!

Hooray for summer soccer! There's a good summer rec league on the Vineyard. I'm playing for the Coop de Ville team (it's a restaurant down on the Oak Bluffs harbor). The league has this nifty website where you can read about my latest own-goals and yellow cards...

Oh yeah, I've been picking up some playing tips here: http://finesoccer.com

A while ago I mentioned seeing Tim Laursen's funny/demented movies on the Martha's Vineyard public-access channel. It turns out he plays in a local band, and they are pretty rockin. Sort of a Pixies-vs-Getupkids sound. Behold their web site, complete with mp3's: Unbusted.

The major news: arrival of new baby Hazel -- tons of photos here

More thoughts and stuff later...

rants index: current | 2007 archive | 2006 archive | 2005 archive | 2004 archive | 2003 archive | 2002 archive