Sapphire Scars Untimely Demise

[sparhawk]

I just browsed Doom3world and there I found this sad news:

 

http://sapphirescar.marsmodule.com/forums/...opic.php?t=1652

 

Well, the link is to the SS forum, but I found it on D3world first, in case you are wondering.

 

Saphire Scar announced that they will stop production on their mod, which means that yet another one of the big mods is down.

[Arumakani]

Maybe you can recruit a few of the team members?

[Dram]

I'm speechless...

[greebo]

How long have they been working on this?

[Dram]

About as long as us afaik

[sparhawk]

Yes. They started pretty much the same time as we did. All the more pitty to see this work going for waste.

[oDDity]

I don't think they'd done much though, and they always seemed to be on the ropes, so it's not a surprise.

[gleeful]

Not a lot of single-player mods have seen completion in the last 3 or 4 years.

[oDDity]

It's just becoming far too much work.

The more advanced games get, the worse this problem will get.

It's oft stated that 10 years ago, one guy could make a whole game by himself.

[gleeful]

It's just becoming far too much work.

The more advanced games get, the worse this problem will get.

It's oft stated that 10 years ago, one guy could make a whole game by himself.

 

I know. I often think that the next generation of 3D-engines could well be the last one for which it will be feasible to do large scale mods. Sad.

[New Horizon]

I know. I often think that the next generation of 3D-engines could well be the last one for which it will be feasible to do large scale mods. Sad.

 

Quite true. People would need to start taking out loans and quit their jobs for most modern mods.

[demagogue]

Keep the faith, team.

 

Of course the beauty of the Darkmod is it will be more than one campaign ... you're laying a foundation so one guy *can* make his own map or even campaign. And of course this team has showed every indication so far of being more dedicated. But all that work to get the assets, I can see how it's a long road...

And it's disheartening to see these big TCs go down. But keep the faith, nonetheless.

 

I wonder in the future if there isn't a movement for artists to start putting up public domain assets for all the big genres -- scifi, medieval, contemporary, urban, forest, etc. -- as they are inspired, so it builds a large repository of high-quality public domain assets over time ... in expectation that big TC projects will coattail on their work (since it seems like the largest time/effort drain of everything) so they can focus on the gameplay aspects. Is that wishful thinking, or even practical?

 

Looks like spar's call for help sort of fell on deaf ears so far in that thread (it's still early in the thread, though) ... like they aren't even finished burying the dead, but I hope that some of them join the team here. I'd imagine some of them would like to think they can work on something that sees completion. Let's hope so.

[Gildoran]

Back when textures were just tilable images, this would have made more sense... but the tricky thing about doing it now is different engines require different inputs for textures... I've heard that assets designed for D3 may require a lot of work to convert them to run on other engines and vice versa... so that can make it kind of hard to make a general purpose texture pack if it has to be targeted towards one specific engine.

[New Horizon]

Back when textures were just tilable images, this would have made more sense... but the tricky thing about doing it now is different engines require different inputs for textures... I've heard that assets designed for D3 may require a lot of work to convert them to run on other engines and vice versa... so that can make it kind of hard to make a general purpose texture pack if it has to be targeted towards one specific engine.

 

Haha, it's never to late for us to switch backwards to the Quake 3 engine source code.

 

Kidding of course.

[Subjective Effect]

I'm really not surprised. They never really seemed to do that much. The team was very different to this one, with loads of changes all the time. It was like the project to continue SS3 in the SS2 engine (TSP) - that was doomed from the start too, and you could tell.

[sparhawk]

The major thing that I noticed was, that they seemd to switch their leads quite often. Since this usually caused also a change in direction, this is obviously not a good thing for motivation.

[Schatten]

I know. I often think that the next generation of 3D-engines could well be the last one for which it will be feasible to do large scale mods. Sad.

 

Yeah, AAA titles became so insanely complex that even the original teams often can't put in all they want. Bugs pile up, too - I had hardly a recent game run perfectly on first install. The public demands ultra-realistic graphics, a soundtrack played by the Royal Symphony Orchestra... I'm saying nothing new, but there needs to be a priority shift in games.

 

I think the industry underestimates the advertisive value of a living mod comunity, or more likely, the execs don't care or see it as a way of loosing money. Games (generally) aren't designed as a Lego kit for enthusiastic fans. Schedules are tight, everyone wants the game out the month before last christmas. Kudos to all companies that keep an eye on releasing a public construction kit with the game.

 

Anyways, if you compare something like Radiant with the ol' Wolfenstein 3D block editor you can see why large scale mods spread thin. Props get more complicated too, as Gildoran said. That's not surprising - on the one side you have 50 to 100 professionals working full day on a million-dollar budget, on the other side you have 20 freaks with sparse spare time and a budget of 0 hammering out a total conversion.

 

As for Sapphire Scar, it's sad that it took that turn. Maybe somebody dedicated will pick up the Dark Mod when it's done and use it to create something "Shock-ish" - it's only natural imo, since the two tributed games took the same route.

[sparhawk]

As for Sapphire Scar, it's sad that it took that turn. Maybe somebody dedicated will pick up the Dark Mod when it's done and use it to create something "Shock-ish" - it's only natural imo, since the two tributed games took the same route.

 

That's exactly the problem in the mod comunnity. I often see mods announced where the "lead" just stubbornly wants to do his own thing. That's just an ego trip. If you create a solid codebase, then many mods can benefit from it. I know several games where the TDM codebase can be put to very good use. The way to go would be to create one good mod and then branch off from it. If the branching happens already at the start, the talent is spread to thin. I know that it's hard to work on a mod and you should select one that satisfies you. But if you have a solid base, it's more easy to do the thing you want afterwards, instead of everybody going his own route.

[Domarius]

The free tools you get to make games with, also increase in complexity. By that I mean - you'll be able to acheive more, with less effort.

 

It's not as if making mods won't ever be possible after a certain point. It'll balance out. This is only a phase.

[Komag]

I agree, things will remain possible.

 

It's not like no one can make independent low budget movies just because the typical Hollywood fare goes for 50 million nowadays. But back in 1915 people might have thought "crap, making films is getting too expensive for the little guy anymore, pretty soon only the big studios will be able to afford to do anything"

 

But what do we have today - affordable high quality cameras, microphones, etc, allowing a couple guys to pull off pretty high quality stuff, and you can edit it all quite professionally on a decent PC as well. I think it's a fair analogy.

[obscurus]

The thing you have to remember is that next gen game engines will make much more use of procedural content generation. This will mean that games 1. take less time to make and 2. will have richer and more detailed content than ever before.

 

Tools like SpeedTree allow a mapper to proceduraly generate an entire forest of fairly realistic, unique animated trees (used to good effect in Oblivion). There are a number of game engines that include a range of tools to generate all kinds of content automatically, and all the mapper has to do is refine and tweak things, rather than worry about lots of little details everywhere.

 

The upshot of all this? Two or Three years from now, game engines will be tools that very small dev teams (maybe even single individuals) can use to create an entire game using procedural content generation. The mod scene will flourish once again...

Edited September 15, 2006 by obscurus

[OrbWeaver]

Tools like SpeedTree allow a mapper to proceduraly generate an entire forest of fairly realistic, unique animated trees (used to good effect in Oblivion).

 

I think it was on Slashdot I read a post debunking this, and saying that in fact Oblivion does not have unique forests but uses a single pre-calculated forest that used SpeedTree (or similar) to create, but remains the same for each player. I have no idea which is correct, however.

 

With regard to procedural content itself, I do not believe it will be the saviour of gaming that many people anticipate. The same artistic skill will be required to make YOUR particular procedural map look interesting and unique, otherwise it will just look like "yet another SpeedTree forest" with no individuality or creativity to speak of.

[Komag]

They are both the same. Obscurus said a mapper can use SpeedTree to make a great forest filled with variety, like they did in Oblivion. Which is the same as the post you read, that SpeedTree was used by the designers, and now the forest it generated is there in the game, the same for all players. No one ever said the forests get generated on the fly (they don't)

[oDDity]

I hate generic, cloned worlds like oblivion, auto-generated with scripts. I really hope that is not the way things are going.

It will always require huge amounts of work to make a unique gameworld with distinct artistic direction.

[obscurus]

I hate generic, cloned worlds like oblivion, auto-generated with scripts. I really hope that is not the way things are going.

It will always require huge amounts of work to make a unique gameworld with distinct artistic direction.

 

 

In terms of natural landscape generation, no it won't. I'm only referring to the forests in Oblivion, which uses the SpeedTreeRT middleware http://www.speedtree.com/ to generate thousands of completely unique, animated trees at run time, which is far less time consuming than modelling and animating thousands of different tree models by hand. Obviously, some things cannot be generated procedurally in any convincing way, such as buildings and artificial structures, which will need to be modelled by hand for the most part. But hand modelled objects can be textured procedurally very effectively - you can apply all kinds of weathering and grime algorithms to generate grime maps for models, and there are a number of tools out there that greatly automate character modelling, so that you can start off with a basic humanoid prototype and apply all kinds of procedural deformations to generate thousands of unique characters.

 

The obvious downside to all this is that games will become less distinct from each other unless the game designers really put their efforts into tweaking the procedurally generated content with their own stamp.

 

But then regardless of how you do it, the more detailed and realistic games become, the less visually distinct they will become, and the more the authors will have to focus on gameplay dynamics, plot and story development to distinguish their games.

 

Compare Crysis and Haze ( http://hazegame.uk.ubi.com/ ) - two completely different game engines, two different games that look almost identical in a number of screenshots. They both have a high level of visual detail and realism, and the more of that you have, the harder it is to make your game look distinct from any other from a few screenshots.

 

Personally, I think this is great, becasue once the eye candy has reached a point where it can't get much more realistic than it is, the only way game designers can distinguish their products will be through gameplay and story, meaning these elements will be likely a lot better than they have been of late. It is the stories and gameplay that makes a game great, not so much the quality of the graphics, though that certainly helps.

Edited September 18, 2006 by obscurus