This came up in the internal chat thread at work. I wish I took the graphics courses in university so I could actually understand what’s being said here. All I know about 3d lighting is what I’ve learned at work and the crash course a friend gave me when he was writing a simple engine for a summer job.
Btw, Starcraft uses Ogg Vorbis and Theora audio/video codecs, hopefully the next <audio> and <video> tags formats for html5 ;D
0 for 3 so far this afternoon in StarCraft 2 due to a string of Terrans doing 1 base Marine rushes combined with my lackluster early-game.
Also, trying to find out how tumblr and twitter integrate.
Packing up for PAX today. I also did my first shoutcast for RA3; I was always thinking about doing so for Company of Heroes, but setting up all the software and hardware to get it right seemed like such a hassle, so I kept putting it off. Despite some odd initial issues, the WeGame client is surprisingly good; easy to use, unobtrusive and free. Not as flexible as the FRAPS and Audacity method, but far more convenient.
It’s a shame that now that I’ve just started to do some shoutcasting, I have to take off for at least a week and a half. Then again, is heading to PAX really a /bad/ thing?
Had Gnome Do bork on me today. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong (even did a re-install from Synaptic). But it seems a purge of all my old settings and plug-ins seemed to fix it.
$ killall gnome-do$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-do ~/.config/gnome-do$ gnome-do
The EndWar beta is over (and has been for a couple weeks now). My RTS odyssey has continued nonetheless. I’ve been faithfully watching a lot of professional Starcraft; my weekly GOMTV sessions augmented by some great YouTube-hosted english commentated pro matches. The highlight of which has definitely been the OSL final with one of my favorite players taking the championship, JulyZerg. In addition, the CoH gamereplays.org section is starting to reach critical mass in their videocasting, with some significant numbers of new and recent matches getting the videocast treatment.
The more matches I watch, Starcraft or Company of Heroes, the more I think I’m starting to understand how to play RTS’s in general. Which is why i’m a bit confused by how EndWar works. Since the beta’s over and since I’m not revealing unit specifics or anything, I think this is not NDA-breaking to talk about. But EndWar’s unit balance revolves around what is basically a Rock-Paper-Scissors system, with tanks, light vehicles and gunships/helicopters taking the roles respectively. I think this is a mixed blessing.
First of all, Rock-Paper-Scissors, or RPS, is a well-understood system. This confers a bit of an advantage as a game designer, as it simplifies the learning process on behalf of the player. Once you establish which units generally inhabit which role, you have to do very little to teach most players which unit to use at which point in time. It’s also a bit of a crutch. I don’t mean to belittle EndWar, since there is some genuinely innovative stuff in the game. But it seems somewhat, for lack of a better word, non-mindblowing, for a game which seems so intriguing to rest atop such a familiar foundation. To be fair to EndWar again, this may be somewhat related to one of the above mentioned innovations: This is a console RTS. Simplicity and ease of use have to be one of your core goals if you plan on assaulting the seemingly impossible goal of marrying “console” and “RTS”. But does that necessarily mean simplicity in game design? The problems with console RTS, in my opinion, revolve around control scheme and precision of control, neither of which are particularly related to game balance per se.
A game like Starcraft, or even Company of Heroes now in its newly well-balanced form, don’t use this approach. This may take a bit of explaining. Imagine you’re playing EndWar. What would your ideal army be? Assuming you don’t know what your opponent is fielding (if you do, it’s a simple case of building massive numbers of the appropriate counter unit as per the RPS system), you have 2 choices:
Assuming both you and your opponent choose option 1, the game will be decided by your individual skill and finesse in handling the units in tactical battle: In other words, your micro. The problem is that if you keep army cohesion (which you should at the risk of being out-flanked and having one third of your army decimated), this micro will consist of units not trying to shoot each other, but the group they’re specifically weak against. It would be like a three-way gunfight where none of the fighters are shooting back at the person who’s shooting at them. It feels strange. I’m not disputing that you can’t build a game around it, but it feels less like a tactical war game in my opinion. And my analogy degrades somewhat since EndWar includes infantry units, which don’t really fall into any of the three roles. But games like Starcraft and Company of Heroes involve terrain, environment and formations more in the determination of who wins individual battles. Whereas a game like EndWar would find terrain/formations to be important only in battles between like-groups (tanks versus tanks according to the RPS model), a game like Starcraft would have formation and terrain be important factors in all match-ups, even such that it would swing victory in the favor of those who would normally lose, if all things equal. A medic/marine ball in Starcraft, normally decimated by lurkers, can suddenly and swiftly turn the tide with a well-placed comsat scan. And the Zerg player in turn can counter by a swift retreat and by fortifying another position outside of comsat range. A well-rounded Terran force of siege tanks and vultures is on equal if not superior footing with masses of dragoons, but flanking or the addition of a small number of game-turning units (dark templar, reavers, arbiters) turns the tables back. In all of these cases, it is not the presence of a counter unit to a specific role within the routed army that causes defeat, but rather knowledge of the map or the addition of small numbers of “enabling” units, that somehow augment the fighting capabilities of the large majority.
I’m generalizing a lot here, since Starcraft and CoH aren’t quite so easily summarized. Plus, I’m sure I’ve overlooked something. There’s also still the fact that hydralisk spam is so much fun when I’m playing Zerg. That’s gotta count for something.
In order of most anticipated:
Oh man, that list turned out longer than I had thought.
