LOL :D

Spirit I didn't need to try hard with DX. Truly great game though. 

 

http://www.doomworld.com/21years/index.php 

So last night I replayed Doom's e1m1 on up through e1m5, stopping at 6 when I realized the time. Ultraviolence of course.

The action is obviously so much easier on keyboard + mouse, since it was balanced for keyboard only, but it is still very fun. It seems every fight just about has some form of mini-objective to it, be it an item in the midst of the monsters, or an explosive barrel a few monsters into the pack, tempting you to concentrate your fire on specific individuals to reach the barrel. It managed to give me a lot of grinning moments, where things just Worked Out and made me feel like a badass without giving me too much power. Granted, finding almost all of the secrets resulted in a pretty continual stream of health, armor, and ammo.

I really liked how each level had at least one "unnecessary" area. There was always more to the level than reaching the exit, and it changed up the level in one form or another. E1M1, finding the blue armor early dropped down the walls in the level, exposing you to long range gunfights. E1M2 had the side maze which got darker and strobier as you went into it, terminating in two different secret areas, one of which allowed you to snipe the penultimate battle. E1M3 opens with that great view of the slime pit which just screams "Surely they did something wit that", and they did, but it isn't part of the golden path. E1M3 also has a yellow keycard inside of a secret, and a yellow door inside of another secret... I love that, I love that the game world is more than "Show the player things, make sure they see all the things."

I just really enjoyed how everything connected, one battle would guide you into another, items encouraged you along a path, investigating a side area or peering out a window would give you a new goal. The game isn't just finding the exit necessarily.

Also, that AI. It is such a nice amount of minimal, I actually got startled by a pinky. I knew one was still alive, I caught a glimpse earlier because of how they roam about, not always bee-lining. So I pursued into the area, killed it, and turned around to one staring me in the face just about to bite. Turns out two were still alive, but I never saw them at the same time.

Makes me want to play more of it tonight, honestly. And that was all extremely rambling. 

This just in: Doom is a good game.

No but seriously, Doom is still awesome and everyone should play it like once a year.

Plus some of the new Doom mods/engines are pretty damn amazing as well. 

I keep meaning to look at what the Doom community has been up to.

Interesting about the extra areas.

Big business games don't do normally side routes or secret levels because they're not cost effective.

Terms like cost effective don't have any place in game design, yet, there they are. 

To play the other side of that, time not spent creating areas that 99% of players won't see is more time spent polishing areas that they will.

As levels moved beyond drawing a few line segments and assigning a texture, it got more and more expensive to add extra areas. 

Even id was hit by this ... Quake doesn't have a ton of nonsense areas. Most of the real estate exists for a reason. 

The format change has a lot to do with it. It's a lot more work for both the designer and the engine to produce all that 'true 3d' rather than the 1.5D that Doom used.

And the id1 levels did have plenty of areas that '99% of people' ((which I hear a lot and seems to lack the second half of the sentence - 99% of people who buy into the product during first week of sales)) there was an entire secret level in each episode, for example, and various other mapping doodles scattered about that had no real functionality.

When you think about it, most secrets are the same thing, but justified by that secret counter going up. Modern day, those cool areas would be replaced by a cupboard that you need a code to open or some crap :> 

Development time is inherently development costs, so yeah, these things are literally more expensive. I do recall some interview with Romero where he spoke of how Quake is different in terms of ambushes and such simply because it takes more work to build one than in Doom. In Doom you can draw 3 lines off of the hallway, draw another inside of that, Make Sector twice, declare the thinner one a door, tie it to a linedef in the hall, put monsters in it. When you know the editor, that is such an incredibly quick thing. You also don't have to worry about the Z placement of anything, just keep monsters and items away from the walls.

Granted, negative brushes like in UnrealEd would be okay here - place, subtract, add a barrier, tie it to a trigger volume... and in theory one could do a "snap to floor, adjust by bbox" logic in an editor so you could more easily toss items and monsters in... But in my experience tool dev is always scoped to "Does it work well enough to complete a release?"

I will say that Quake does have a lot of "nonsense" areas compared with contemporary games though, multiple paths to get things done, or water routes underneath the level. We all get a chuckle at videos like "If Quake Were Made Today", but those are obviously simplistic. No, if Quake were made today the player would be too heavy to swim, making water a decorative surface - and thus a barrier. No taking the side routes through e1m2, that is just to look nice. (e1m4 would be cut completely). I know the main routes are more polished, but I do find there to be a rate of diminishing returns on polish.

I'm fine with cost effective concerns in game design, I just wish they would find another method than golden path hallways with nicely polished details that are effectively depictions of more interesting places than what I am currently playing. I like experiencing things in a manner other than having it being placed before me on a plate.

And from this, I get the increase in pseudo-sandboxes, procedural systems, and XP unlock systems. It allows a slow trickle of content, it is more controllable, and it allows for reuse of content. Which really adds up monetarily when you think of the cost behind a new monster or a new room for any major release.

I get it. I just... don't like it, and thus I go and play more Quake and Doom and other such games, because ultimately, they are doing a better job of amusing me as a gamer. 

"I like experiencing things in a manner other than having it being placed before me on a plate. "

As games get more realistic, more details are necessary. That's the cycle. You can't call your game realistic if the world is devoid of the details that your brain expects to find.

Something abstract - like Quake levels - can be whatever you like. The brain doesn't have expectations other than the basic laws of physics apply. 

No taking the side routes through e1m2, that is just to look nice. (e1m4 would be cut completely).

This is a profoundly depressing thought. 

One interesting thing I've observed regarding this when working with idTech5:
The designers have to explicitly define the areas the player can walk to so that the megatexture can be optimized and areas that are far away receives less resolution than up close areas. The consequence of this is that it's often cheaper (for the disc size) to open up the sides of the walkable corridor and have a huge-ass vista there instead of just walls. So having grand open halls and outdoors areas, but just being able to walk around in a narrow corridor in the middle is the best thing for the game tech-wise.
The illusion of openness, but in reality highly linear. 

 

Fortunately, we're seeing more titles play with non-realistic approaches to world rendering, so there may be room for more tools that support a faster brain:screen transition for level design. Straining for realism is a good technical goal, but it certainly isn't a defining trait intrinsic to FPS design. 

I think maybe the solution is not to lower the detail but to update the level design tools. Instead of level designers laying in every mesh by hand, we need tools to lay in ... I dunno, proxies that are filled in at compile time or something.

"Add a closet here", and you drop in some sort of room prefab that you can tweak settings on. In the editor, it's just a box. In the game, it's a randomized closet generated procedurally from prefabs.

I dunno ... something like that! Something to speed up level design iteration would allow for opening up side areas more. 

I'm always in favor of more tool development, especially as someone who hasn't made any tools =D

But yeah, materials for surfaces so you graybox an area, defining it with tags for materials, and then sub tag an area so it inherits the earlier ones and adds a few more. Say a bathroom/pool area tile bit that has some dirty grout, with cracks that widen to vines growing out, and then some of the tiles are broken with holes showing utility pipes behind it. But for the mapper this is a few brushes and tags.

...for the static artist this is a whole lot of work... Granted you can do a degree of procedural creation for foliage, piping, brickwork, things of that nature.

An aside within that: I loved the illogical never-going-to-see-much-like-it-in-real-life places like Ziggurat Vertigo. Take me to strange new places, not normal places plus aliens/zombies. 

I completely agree - toolsets have by and large only evolved in a linear fashion, while asset fidelity and complexity has increased exponentially. Hell, the Rage SDK is a pretty version of Radiant.

I think there will be some amount of concession to fidelity, and that's OK. There are several artistically valid ways of representing a world and characters that don't involve subsurface scattering.

I was present for a Q/A at Quakecon for the launch of ET:QW, and there was an obligatory question about modding tools. The answer was essentially "Yes, the tools are available, just remember that uncompressed megatextures will weigh in at about 30 to 40 gigabytes". This is a huge leap in demands for enthusiasts, compared to drawing a box on a screen and hitting a button. 

I seem to remember some dev video for the Snowdrop engine (for The Division) where the designer can specify a very primitive shape for the building and then the editor/engine will populate all the walls with windows / fire escapes / details etc and create doors and shop fronts at the bottom of the shape. It was very cool and I believe all the details are set with scripts so it is user controllable. 

You had me at "'ello guys", no need to butter me up.

Except for to prevent chafing. But still. 

Daz - Yes! That's a good example. Assassins Creed does this as well for quickly building streets in Paris. There are possibilities here for the future... 

Best story in a game?
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey comes to mind. 

My brain is SCREAMING at me to try something like this for Quake but the reality gnome who lives in my head is reminding me that this will lead to leaks that the level designer has zero chance of finding or fixing since they won't be working with the compile version of the map in the editor ... *grumble* 

you could always just port Quake to UE4 or whatever and not worry about leaks this way 

That would be fun ... you totally could too. Just import the models, animate them via blueprints ... hmm ...