My 'rant' on game cost.

[Fallen]

I posted a rather long thread of 'Rants' under the topic 'Game Cost' a day ago or so and I was thinking about it when I got up this morning. I realise I probally came off as very elistist and not willing to listen to other peoples ideas, and probally went off a little more than I should have. I also didnt explain myself very well. Ill try and do that now, please bear with.


First of all I still dont think any one should have to pay for software (though I dont advocate 'warez kiddiez' who have no respect for the designers) but I also come from a very different community of gamers than the people here. I never played Warbirds except for the demo HtH with my brother. Never really played any 'current gen' Flight sim. Only things I had played to any extent were the Aces Over Europe/Pacific Series and Chuck Yeagers Air Combat (loaded that up the other day, what a blast, looks alot like Aces High dont you think ?   j/k) And maybe a demo of somethere here and there. I really liked flight sims but they were never 'real' enough I guess. So I moved on to Doom, then quake, then quake2, halflife, unreal, rainbow 6, ect ect ect. But then I was reading a good friend of mines newsite (voodooextreme, slick dick is the messiah) and he reported on AH, so I thought, hey ill check it out he wouldnt steer me wrong. From where im standing now he didnt either, its a very high quality sim. But there are some....things i cant get past. First is the fact that ive spent the past few years with a 3dfx card or some such graphics accelorator, and ive seen every fancy eye candy trick in the book, and come to like them...no...scratch that....need them. I need my alpha blending and dynamic lighting and mipmapping and vertex blending and MRM and all the other neat advancements the FPS and RPG and RTS genres have made in the past years...and it seems all of the sub genres of those have advanced as well...all genres infact it seems except flight sims...and I ask myself...why is that? Is it becuase they dont turn enough revenue to do that kind or programming? No that cant be it, just use the code thats been devolped for those items listed...is it the lack of talent? Not at all, alot of the most talented programmers in the world work on flight sims, crunching numbers and bugs on an almost galactic proportion (any idea how many bugs a 'true physics' engine usually ends up having?....) Is it the fact that most teams are small tight nit groups of hard core simmers themselves and dont have alot of time to add the 'frills'? I believe that is closer to the truth. That and partially the fact that the hardcore simmers dont expect as much graphically as every one else...the expect content. Maybe im weird but I expect both, and I dont see myself paying 30 dollars a month for a work in progress that looks like a high res d3d version of aces over europe (Hell it even has the same 'flying through clouds' effect. But before you say "well then dont pay and leave us the hell alone banana!" Id like to say how much fun ive had with the beta, and how much I want this game to succeed. Id be totally happy for life if AH exploded and HTC became the next iD software and sims made a giant comeback with HTC far in the forefront. Thatd make my life so many times over, very rarely do you see the conviction and community involvement present with this team. My problem lies herein....how do i help them produce a better game to appeal to a broader group to get them the recognition they deserve....without paying for something im not *currently* satisfied with, and subjigating my own morals...There probally just isnt a way to do that, and the help im offering would probally be turned away while laughing maniacally. Maybe they dont want to be that succesful, or appeal to a broad group of people. I just wish I could lend MY personal hand at helping with whatever (programming, models, graphics, sounds, whatever) and convince the HTC team to go open source within this community thats already established and get the benefit of some other talented individuals. That would increase the speed at which work gets done, and leave alot of space open do develop a more 'attractive' sim, becuase face it, it doesnt hold a candle to Battlezone2 or Quake3 or TreadMarks graphically. Well I guess thats all I have to see, take it as its written, dont read into it, theres no deeper meaning any where, its just what it is.

--Fallen

[Ripsnort]

Fallen:"First of all I still dont think any one should have to pay for software"

I think if you move to Communist China, you shouldn't have any problem with your idealism...after all, big brother will take care of you over there.  I hear that they won't be purchasing WIN2000, but rather start they will start using free-ware, RED FLAG-LINUS, for all "STATE" agencies.

In all seriousness, this country was founded on the free enterprise system.  Supply and demand.  Make something, sell it to a market that a demand exists in, and earn a living.  What is wrong with that?

[dolomite]

Thank you for the explanation; that was far more understandable.  

WRT the graphics/depth-of-play issue, what is different between flight sims and games such as Quake, Doom, etc. is the critical nature of frame rate. In such games, frame rates of 10-15 are very acceptable, without undue loss of play fidelity. In flight sims, such a low frame rate may well make the game intolerable. Further, games such as Quake don't have as many players, nor do they represent a "world" as large as flight sims do. Putting 16 Quake players in a game is one thing; putting 200 fliers in the air is quite another. What remains is a choice: good looking game or good playing game?

In this case it is a balance. There are many ways the game may/will improve, but every choice leads to another choice, trade-off, whatever. The Internet is making strides in its ability to carry data faster, but there still are limits. I was very big into DoA (another flight sim) in which I only flew 2D, because 3D just chopped up play so badly for me. By comparison AH is light years ahead, even at this stage of beta.

The question is whether AH is sufficiently visually attractive to immerse you in the "world". If that is the case, the world has to then carry the gameplay, which means it must have a substance, a reason to be there. Does AH have that, and to a sufficient degree? Opinions will differ, but the choice will be made with the wallet.

In the final analysis, in our society a product is worth what the market will bear. We will soon see if HTC has made the right choice. I like what they have done so far, so for me they have and I will continue to support them when it goes pay. No one will fault you for choosing not to play, but at this stage of the game I believe HTC has to be far too far down the road to change their minds about making money on this project. Their investors (assuming they have some) may take umbrage at an abrupt change of plans.    

[This message has been edited by dolomite (edited 01-10-2000).]

[Westy]

A huge error folks make in comparing off line sims only with online sims is that a box sim
only has to show what one suer, YOU, see.
 When the game runs it does not report back to the host all your data and recieve from the host all the data that includes positionals on other players, clouds, etc...
 If you took a mission say from EAW and tired to make it massively multiplayer then the only market you could garner would be those folks with 600mhz PIII and either cable modem access or adsl.
 Because not only must your front end now render what you would normally see only by yourself but it must open up all the old AI
driven objects to HOST input that must come accurately and FAST.
 When offline your PC only tracks YOUR input. Which is why AI done wrong can be so damned lethal. Ever notice in "Aces over the Pacific" the AI was NOT blind in clouds while you were??? It does't track the 'candy': clouds, explosions, sun flare, etc, etc..
 It renders them quickly only for you.
  Online is a different beast Fallen. Until people have guge ISP connections and heavy duty fast PC's there are and will need to be sacrifices made. Or until someone figures ways to do it (eg like HTC has with clouds) without a massive frame rate hit or the need for heavy dut CPU there will always be sacrifices needed to be made.
 Rmember. Everything you see online is real. It is 3 dimensional. All others near you see the same thing, albiet m,aybe from a different angle.
 When you shoot someone down. Everyone sees
that plane fal to the earth trailing smoke.  When you hit an airfield and blow somehting up. Well everyone around you see that explosion and smoke too.

 Box sims and on line sims. You are comparing Apples and oranges.

 (And the "Zone" <gack> doesn't qualify for online in my book it sux so bad)

  -Westy

[miko2d]

 Fallen:
 I guess you are not going to become a programmer if you say that software should be free. Do you propose to reintroduce slavery into our society so that we could make some bright and talanted people into a slave programmers. Wait, that software still would not be free - the food, whips and supervisors/guards should be paid for... It seems the Ripsnort is right - the only way is to build Communism where people will be working just for the fun of it. It did not work out anywhere yet, but may be the next time...

 On the technical issues. You have no idea what you are talking about. The difference between creating enclosed-space 3-D environment like FPS and open-space 3-D environment like Flight Sims is huge. The games that tried to implement both in one game, like Descent II, actually had to create two engines - one for indoor and one for outdoor.
 The main differences are following:
- In enclosed environments like rooms you have a limited number of polygons. Quake3  has a limit of about 10000 polygons per frame. If you had that number of polygons in a flight sim you would complain that there is nothing out there! The number of polygons required for a flight sim of comparable quality is several orders of magnitude higher (I am talking thousands times more). You can't draw the world one room at a time - you can actually see all of it. That number of polygons is impossible to implement on current hardware. So the flight sims use special techniques to determine which polygons to draw. No other games use those techniques yet.
 - Depth of field. In a room you have distances from zero to few hundred yards to map into your Z-buffer. 32 bits or even i6 bits are sufficient for that. In a flight sim you have distances from 0 to dozens of miles to implement. You do not want the needles on the dials to pop behind the dashboard and you do not want the far-away tanks/trees to pop up behind the terrain.
 - Amount of texture required to cover all those polygons is much greater.

 All that makes flight sim programming very different then FPS programming. Probably as much as dental medicine is different from heart transplantation. Wouldn't we all like to go to a doctor and get a new heart for a few hundred dollars like we do a crown or a tooth implant...
 Some day we will have all that fancy stuff - multitexturing, lightmaps, etc. in flight sims. Once the hardware and software evolve to support it.

Regards,
miko--

[hitech]

 

I need my alpha blending and dynamic lighting and mipmapping and vertex blending and MRM and all the other neat advancements .
.

 We have all of the above except mip mapping.

One thing on the tech end that most people don't see about flight sims when the compared to first person shooter is the difference in scale. AH currently has a world that is 512x512 miles accross with a 40x40 mile visiblity. Compare this to any other non flight sim game and you can start to see some of the challenges when it comes doing lots of fancy stuff.

You seem to like id's marketing model. Do you realy belive any of id's products would be here if they were not economicly drivin?

Id's model is that they make there money by selling there software. Anything they can do to promot more software sale's is what they do. By opening some of there source, letting people create other worlds,letting people modify server stuff is all in THERE best interest because it sell's more software.But try taking all there source code, doing some modifications to it , and then try selling it, do you think ID wouldn't do somthing about that?

We on the other hand give our client software out for free. We don't make any money on the software sale but wrather we make our money by providing a service. Just like Id we do anything we can to bring more people to OUR serivce. This will include setting up totaly free user hosted small arena's (4 - 8 players) , It will include releaseing a terrain editor for people to make other worlds.

What it comes down to is ID and HTC have different marketing stratagies.

And as to your idea that all software should be free,I view this as a very strong,niev insult to my profession. Iv'e been in love with programing for over 25 years.Spent money getting an education to be better at it. Have spent untold ours learning , reaserching, and figuring out how to be better at it. The game you are currently playing is both a joy for me to produce but also is very hard work. And AH would not exist today if it wern't for the econmics. I'd still be playing with flight sim code because that's somthing I realy enjoy. But it would be done on a hobby only basis,(just like you play with quake levels) and would never be a production quality piece of software.

And why is it you belive software is different from all other things. What it comes down to is that software is just like any other enginering field. Engineers Realy don't produce any thing they just put ideas on paper.You could make that exact same argument about any type of work. Carpenters realy don't produce anything they just move pieces of wood around. Well under your ideal every thing should be free.

If you realy belive everything should be free, it is pointless for me to try convince you other wise, because it would be one of your life's dogmas/axioms.


HiTech

[fats]

--- Dolomite: ---
what is different between flight sims and games such as Quake, Doom, etc. is the critical nature of frame rate. In such games, frame rates of 10-15 are very acceptable, without undue loss of play fidelity.
--- end ---

That is totally untrue. Have you actually _played_ QW, TF, Q2 or Q3 seriously on-line? If you hold the above opinion you haven't. FPS and ping are everything in those games.

It's funny to see AW/WB/AH people put down people playing Quake or the games them selves. The Quake-games have just as much community as on-line sims have. People invest just as much time and effort into them. None of these things are unique to the on-line sim crowd.


--- Dolomite: ---
Quake don't have as many players, nor do they represent a "world" as large as flight sims do. Putting 16 Quake players in a game is one thing; putting 200 fliers in the air is quite another.
--- end ---

Actually they are pretty much the same. That 200 players figure is deceptive and so is the 'large' map you see when you hit F1 ( WB ) or Esc ( AH ).

In WB for example you can see the 32 closest planes at the most, and I belive AH has a similar limit. So what you really have is 32 dynamically allocated arenas with their total number of players capped to - say 200 players - the arena limit. In Quake2 you can have 64 players in a map for example and see all of them at once.

The larger map? You can't see all of it anyway in either game: Quake or AH. The poly through output of AH's engine is hardly much higher than that of Q3's engine, so both end up with similar sized data set - or the world as you say it.


//fats

[dolomite]

Fats-

As to the frame rate issue, I should qualify that remark by saying that is my opinion of what works for me.

The world size question? I stand by my remarks. The Quake world is much smaller by far, and even if I can't "see" the other fliers in the air, their impact on the world must be tracked on my FE. Factories destroyed across the map will be recorded as destroyed on my FE. Sure, there are many rooms to a Quake level, but most of what you see is static (comparatively speaking).

I won't and didn't comment on the poly count, as I don't have the background to do so. I have played Quake online, however, and will stand by my remarks. (Yes, I know what an LPB is  ) I might also add that I never put down the game, only tried to illustrate some differences. You were a bit defensive in your response- sorry I struck your nerve.  

[bod]

Fallen:

A typical Fluid Dynamics code (engineering code used to calculate lift, drag, and flow in general) cost about (typical) US$ 20,000.00 for one single license to be used on one single computer for one single year. You CAN get it at a fraction of that cost if you study/work on a university, but then you can't use that software for ANY commersial stuff.

I have spent the last 5 months doing research to try to find some new fancy equations (transient turbulence) to be used in such software. I will be finished in August this year, but there exist by no means any guarantie that that i will succed developing any equations or that any eventual equations will be usefull for practical purposes. During that year i will have used approximately 1/3 million US$ in laboratory equipment and man-hours for myself and technicians.

Bottom line is that someone have to pay for it (software in general) in the end or there will either be a LOT of starving people around or we will go back to the 70s in terms of technology. Just about everything you can buy today would either be impossible to make or would cost at least 3-4 times the cost if it was not for software (in a broad sence).

HiTech et.al have choosen flight sim development as a living, not as a hobby. For mee and you this means that we will get a quality product made and maintained by proffesionals. It is just a question of how much you value your spare time. I prefer to spend spear money and time on quality instead of some inconsistent and sloppy open-source thing, unless of cource i am participating in the open source coding, but that is a totally different thing altogether.


Bod

[Wardog]

Fallen..

Ill keep this real short..

Go back & play Quake please....

[Fallen]

Ok originally I was going to reply to every one but I didnt really write this for everyone, just for Hitech and company really.


HT: I havent noticed any dynamic lighting, I figured the sun was static , but the coding told the plane to change gamma at certian angles. You should turn up the effects a bit (maybe slightly unrealistic, but itd be nice to have a pretty orange glow engulf the wings of a dark grey 190 when it fires those cannons.) I also believe the Tribes 2 engine is capable of 400x400 mile Terrian, but isnt using it becuase of time constraints of being one guy in some jump armor, no one wants to walk 30 minutes to a fight. A voxel engine (such a delta force) could also most likely handle an area about that large and detailed, with a much better viewing limit. As for ID i used them primarly becuase they have the best selling games and they are the most well known, also they were a small group of driven programmers such as yourselves, and basically overnight blew up bigger than bikini island. Thats what i meant by it, just being really big really fast. Also i believe iD has released the source for every game its done but commander keen and quake3. Dooms was released 2 years ago, quake and quake 2 just recently. Halflifes source code is availible for non profit MODs and such, the full thing is available, with tech support, for something like 150 dollars. And i dont believe any one would take your code and sell it, i mean that would be an instant lawsuit, and how could you cover it up that they used it? No one would chance that. People might with the q3 engine or other FPS cuase they all look/perform pretty much the same, and the market is sataurated with them, hence why they dont distribute it. I was never told/informed/read anything about you having small free arenas for people to try it out, that changes alot in this case, and the terrian editor too, but...wouldnt that kind of be pointless since the terrian they make wouldnt be run on the servers thier playing on?

"Iv'e been in love with programing for over 25 years. Spent money getting an education to be better at it. Have spent untold hours learning , reaserching, and figuring out how to be better at it. The game you are currently playing is both a joy for me to produce but also is very hard work"

Lets see, change that to 17 years, and take out the part about game that you made, and i mirror that comment, but I still believe it should be free, such as i believe that the music i play should be heard for free, and the art that i create should be viewed for free, and the care and concern that i give out to people should be free. If i can make one person, just one, enjoy themselves, and make at least a second of thier lives true and utter bliss, ive served my purpose and can die a happy man. If thats done through programming a game for people to enjoy, or a song that i write and play, or a picture that i scribble on a napkin in a resturant and give to some kid whos sitting by himself, then so be it, but i refuse to take money for it. Its wrong. I work my hands to the bone at a 9 to 5 dead end job so i can live and eat. Every other moment i have is going into my trying to make others happy. Maybe if im lucky and dont pass out at 1am ill come online and play AH, or if i get a day off (like today) ill visit a message board and listen to skinny puppy and play some more AH, do some stuff for myself for a change.

As a closing note, every thing should not be free, everything comes at some sort of price, by it your early and unwarranted demise, or simply "99 cents at you nearest mcdonalds!" without that price theres nothing to drive you to a goal. That goal isnt always its own reward however, other things some times have to be that reward. For me that reward is my loving girlfriend and my friends, ...and yes this will sound super geekish, buy my computer. This piece of hardware, in its many incarnations over the years (c64, amiga, tandy, 386/sx) has been one of the few things ive always been able to enjoy, i dislike television and most movies, anything but isaac asimov or mau sa taung bores me book wise, so the only form of entertainment i really get, the only break, is playing these neet little computer games that people so graciously program. I have no problem helping people, or rewarding them for that, but when i have to go out of my way to WORK for something that was always free...it just seems like a personal insult...a slap to the face you know? Like some ones saying "You work, your a good person, heres a toy, have fun, wait...not, pay me to use that toy now, now pay for it to be used with other toys, then pay for it to be upgraded to a better toy" AHHHHH its just..wrong. Thats the only way i can put it. Cant make it any simpler or explain it any further than that.

This is definitly the last post on this subject on this board, If any one has any inqueries, or comments, just email:

Fallen@smashedupsanity.com

Also im serious about trying to do some sort of flight sim, itll be a learning experiance for me at the very least, so i can better understand all of this, and have a more substantial and more percise point of view on the whole matter. If any one knows where to point me for flight data or aeronotical physics classes please give me the heads up. Or if someone just flat out wants to help. Feel free to mail me.

[Fallen]

           ::::OFF TOPIC:::::

Gotta argue with bod about physics   Ok. So. Take a rock that weighs X. Drop it. It drops at excatly Y speed, and impacts with Z pounds of force. Throw rock that weighs X at exactly N angle and it goes M feet before relenting to gravity and droping at Y speed and impacting at Z pounds of force. Thats very easy to test, very easy to imput, very easy to code an engine around (i believe, looking glass software did that in the early 90s, to make a physics engine, yes that exact process) Then if make that rock whatever weight you want, and give it an engine to pull it along at whatever speed. Thats very basic yes, but you get the idea, doing wind and drag and lift and everything else is alot harder i understand, but wings and flaps and everything else are just rocks with different attributes when you get down to it. I would be very interested in what you working on, if you could see my above email address and send me something in depth as to educate me more on the whole thing  

[Vermillion]

Fallen

Here might be something more along the lines of what you are looking for, a flightsim written and developed by the community.

The Flight Gear - Flight Simulator http://www.flightgear.org/

------------------
Vermillion
WB's: (verm--), **MOL**, Men of Leisure,
"Real men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires "

[Fallen]

Oh wow, thanks vermillion. This is very much along the lines of what i was thinking.   wonderful!

--Fallen

[Lance]

:::shovels some dirt on the thread:::

Gordo