Freedom to play off the rails · 7 days ago by Michael Dales
I’ve recently been enjoying playing through the new Halo 3: ODST game from Bungie. It’s a classic tale of humans against bad aliens (with the surprise twist that, shock horror, some aliens might not be bad – you see the subtle complexities of the story here?) all set in the fictional future Kenyan city of New Mombasa. Although it’s had mixed reviews, ODST has provided me with a glimpse of how I think all games should go, and something that’s been missing from the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre until now: wide open maps that you get to pick how to attack, or indeed avoid attacking, as you choose, not as the game designers chose for you.
Take Half Life 2 for instance. A game with a great heritage, great plot, full of neat ideas; but totally ruined for me by essentially placing you on rails a lot of the time so there is THE ONE TRUE PATH you will take, sometimes literally the only narrow corridor. You end up in a city and it looks nicely warren like, but in fact there is just one path you can pick through it. Despite your vast array of weaponry, even the simplest of wooden doors are beyond your ability to open. For me this ruined parts of the game, destroying particularly the suspension of disbelief (or my ability to pretend that I’m Gordon Freeman as Russell Davies might have suggested at Playful). I can’t attack the problem as I would (mostly hiding out the way I guess :) so I’m suddenly battling a game engine, not following the plot.
This is of course typical for a lot of FPSs. The Halo series of games, which I really enjoyed, are similarly on rails, but that rail is very wide – the environments in the game lead to several ways to tackle an obstacle or enemy. Occasionally you even get to pick the order in which you solve the challenges set for you by the game’s designers. You get the illusion of freedom enough that most the time you don’t feel like your being shuffled down a path. In Half Life 2 you have no such thoughts for a lot of the game, particularly the city based parts.
I was very pleased to discover that Halo 3: ODST then actually has an open city map which you can explore. ODST has two parts to it – there are a series of Halo 3 style set levels, where you are indeed on a wide rail, going though a sequence of set challenges – nice, but nothing new. But stringing together these set pieces is what they call the hub – an open city map, with entry points to the set pieces that you need to complete in order to achieve the overall game mission.
There are many possible routes through the city, lots of troops on patrol, or guarding particular bits, and they aren’t entirely predictable. Because you’ve got a series of waypoints that you can (for the most part) achieve in any order, and because in ODST you’re a lot more susceptible to damage, it means you stop to think – what’s the best way from here to there? Oh, this way is full of enemies, I’ll go round the block the other way perhaps (or if you’re more gung ho, there’s not enough enemies here, I’ll go round the other way to see if there’s any more!). Perhaps I’ll find my way onto the bridge to sneak over the enemies.
With a quick look on the map view you can re-evaluate and re-route as you go along. There’s also an optional subgame which means finding certain data points scattered around the city, encouraging you to explore the underground car-parks and dark alleys more.
It’s not perfect – ODST is perhaps a little short, and the city a little template like at times, but it’s a fantastic step forward for FPSs – other genres like role playing games such as Fable II and Oblivion have been doing this for years.
Saying more with less in user interfaces · 10 days ago by Michael Dales
Getting network diagnostics right is a real pain. At Camvine we make a networked digitial signage player that people should just be able to plug in to their network and a screen, go the website, register the box, and they’re done. Easy.
Except, in the real world it’s harder – computer networks are complicated things, so even though we’ve taken every effort to make sure the website and the player hardware are as easy to use as we can, the magic ingredient of having a network “just work” is not always what happens.
So the network is shonky, it’s not our fault, but we need to find a way to express this to the user – otherwise they just think our system is broken. Better still, we want to try and inform them of what’s wrong if we can figure that out – that way we reduce their time trying to fix their network so they can get on and achieve things using our product.
Whilst pondering how we should solve this (a fix due in an upcoming release of our CODApod player software), I came across this really neat solution from Microsoft on the XBox 360:
This is quite a simple view, most users will never see, but if they do need to work out their network issues it’ll tell them quickly at a glance where the problem is: is it plugged in to the router? can we talk to the Internet? are the Xbox Live servers up? It’s not rocket science, but compared to a lot of network diagnostic pages you see, this is sheer bliss in its simplicity.
Solving the underlying problem may then be harder (say, a router misconfiguration) but at least you’re directed to the solution quickly and without fuss in that simple diagram – a great achievement for a user interface.
One and One makes Eight · 12 days ago by Michael Dales
Having fun in Royden Park doing multiple exposures. Need to work on making it come out sharper, but it’s a fun result :)
Comment [1]
What I do... · 28 days ago by Michael Dales
Taken for the CamCreative photo challenge, to take a photo that sums up what you do.
Matt in Indigo · 28 days ago by Michael Dales
Matt Wood of Mekentosj, taken in Indigo, one of the better Cambridge coffee shops, during this month’s CambMacDev.
Comment [2]
Colourful punts · 38 days ago by Michael Dales
Taken in Oxford, where they have these colourful plastic punts.
Make your own CGI movie on the web · 39 days ago by Michael Dales
Yesterday I watched this very funny (and full of rather strong language) short about the relationship between graphic designers and clients (thanks to Andy Field):
It’s all quite funny and I suspect very sadly true (I know I’ve tried the future work thing before, oops!), but what’s really amazing is that the video is made just using a website, xtranormal. You simply select a style, enter a script, specify a few simple expressions and camera angles, and you can produce fairly professional looking CGI animations.
It’s really amazing – and they’ve achieved what I think is the key to any good technology, you don’t need to be at all technical or skilled in the arts to produce good content – you just need an idea and you can get on an execute it.
The quality of the example content is variable as you’d expect, but some of the things people have produced is very funny. Like all good machinima, a lot takes advantage of the medium rather than just ignoring it, like the adventures of Pete and Barb, which had us in stitches:
Cameramen · 41 days ago by Michael Dales
How many cameras does the respectable gentleman require these days?
Quentin and John getting ready to shoot on Camvine’s day out last week. You can see more pictures from our day out on smugmug.
Kookaburra · 41 days ago by Michael Dales
Eagle Owl · 42 days ago by Michael Dales
