[HN Gopher] The Cabal: Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-...
___________________________________________________________________
The Cabal: Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-Life
Author : thisismyswamp
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-01-16 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamasutra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamasutra.com)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth
| philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly
| incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive
| narrative vision in Half-Life.
|
| Contrast this with "What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077" exegesis
| from Bloomberg this morning and I'm still not sure anyone can
| point to a single reason beyond "we were too ambitious". I wish
| this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good
| GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role.
| UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it
| scale to teams of hundreds of designers?
|
| Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk...
| klmadfejno wrote:
| >UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does
| it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?
|
| This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't
| written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I
| love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because
| documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so
| easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them
| into one node means you can comfortably make your top level
| view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form
| descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is
| basically pseudocode.
|
| Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't
| write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees
| in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with.
|
| Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think
| they want jupyter notebooks for data science.
| ffhhj wrote:
| It's interesting to me how the physics bugs such as characters
| and object getting stuck inside walls, flying cars, failed
| inverse kinematics and so on have been the usual bugs for so
| many years now, but there isn't yet a methodology to prevent
| gamedevs from falling in those old known pitholes. These are
| very difficult to detect by QA and the way to fix them is
| tweaking some parameters and geometry here and there. There
| should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether
| future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object
| and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict.
| programzeta wrote:
| Some devs do focus on it - this blog post goes into detail
| about how someone worked through making sure you could walk
| everywhere in The Witness:
| https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005
| smogcutter wrote:
| > There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find
| whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on
| some object and choose a transformation that won't produce
| such conflict.
|
| This is probably just me not really understanding the domain,
| but this sounds like a version of the halting problem?
|
| Even if it's not, isn't that just an extra layer doing what
| the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And
| if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn't
| you use a similar mechanism to make the original system
| correct to begin with? And if you _can't_ do that, how can
| you expect to make the supervisory layer correct?
| ffhhj wrote:
| Let's say when a cylinder of the car, a wheel, bumps into
| the infinitesimally sharp edge of the road, it could
| somehow result in a "singularity" that launches the wheel,
| the vehicle and its occupants to the sky, and that could be
| a perfectly valid result of that algorithm. The algo's task
| is not to determine whether that produces some "weird"
| animation from the player's perspective.
|
| For that reason there should be a "user level"
| interpretation of the physics engine results, looking ahead
| in time and correcting.
| vvanders wrote:
| As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing:
| performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our
| outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be.
|
| The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half-
| Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple.
| If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade"
| and navigate to the nearest nav node.
|
| Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind
| that behavior but it was just a couple of really well
| telegraphed "if()" checks.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "The meetings were only six hours a day" ... ahhh ... (for five
| months straight)
| jgilias wrote:
| > If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need
| to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will
| happen.
|
| This! I remember being scared to move around when playing Half-
| Life the first time. Flickering lights still make an instant
| association with crowbars to me. Great to read a bit more in
| detail how they managed to make something so great!
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _If they walk into a room with other characters, those
| characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them,
| if not calling out their name._
|
| If only Gordon returned this courtesy.
|
| Silent protagonists are such an awful thing.
| nitrogen wrote:
| You are Gordon. Did you acknowledge the NPCs by looking at
| them?
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I realize why they do it, but it can never work because the
| n.p.c.'s do not react to me in return. I can talk to them,
| say things to them, but they will never respond to anything I
| say.
|
| Thus, the end result is that Gordon Freeman is a man whom
| many speak to, yet who never speaks back, and no one
| considers this to odd to say the least. -- the conversations
| thus appear ridiculous.
|
| It worked better with Chell, because others do not that Chell
| does not speak back, and Chell actually canonically refuses
| to speak out of stubbornness, so it's amusing to see Wheatley
| being obviously uncomfortable from the fact that Chell does
| not speak back and is simply blabbering to fill the awkward
| silence.
| dx87 wrote:
| I'd much rather the protagonist be silent in an FPS. It ruins
| the immersion for me, unless there are dialogue choices so I
| still have some agency. I quit playing Dishonored 2 after a
| couple of hours because the protagonist keeps talking as a way
| to narrate things for the player, but it's just silly being a
| stealth assassin constantly talking to yourself.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Obviously in a stealth game it makes no sense for the
| protagonist to talk.
|
| But it does not make sense either that a protagonist not
| answer when he be spoken to.
|
| It was quite ridiculous in _StarCraft_ where there was a
| player character who had a rank and was an actual character,
| his allies discuss strategic plans with him and talk to him,
| but he never speaks back, and is only addressed by title, for
| he lacks a name.
|
| In _StarCraft II_ , the game withdrew from the notion of a
| "player character" and the player simply took control of
| various different actual characters with dialog and a face.
| Netcob wrote:
| That's a refreshingly good example of "design by ...cabal..."
| actually working out pretty well. I think the key element is how
| the members actually had to implement their designs. If you just
| come up with a lazy compromise, it'll start haunting you
| immediately, and not just after the worker bees did their thing.
|
| I think the "cabal" responsible for USB 3.1.1.1.gen2-420gig-
| whatever should have done the same, with each meeting ending in
| every member having to explain to their grandma why she can't
| connect her monitor to her laptop even though the cable fits
| perfectly, and that it's somehow _both_ the wrong cable and the
| wrong laptop port.
| danbolt wrote:
| I've noticed that happening a lot in my time in the games
| industry as well. The person making top-down design role isn't
| exposed to the friction that their decisions are making down
| the hierarchy. I think the worst part is that they're not even
| necessarily as invested in the product as someone else, so
| they're kind of structurally going along with the inefficient
| situation they're in.
| wgjordan wrote:
| (1999)
| jimbob45 wrote:
| " Include an expert from every functional area (programming, art,
| and so on). Arguing over an issue that no one at the meeting
| actually understands is a sure way to waste everyone's time."
|
| This always sounds good in theory but ends up with unnecessary
| individuals falling asleep during meetings. I prefer either a
| staggered approach to meetings where the likely unnecessary
| people are only invited to the end of the meeting OR are simply
| "on-hand" for the meeting in case they need to be pulled in.
|
| I don't care how critical the input is, if you pull someone into
| a three hour meeting and they only contribute five sentences,
| they're not going to be happy with you.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| They where the ones that where going to be responsible for it
| so how can they be unnecessary? He even said they started to
| say no more and more as the deadline started to loom over them.
| Jare wrote:
| In most significant decisions in gamedev you want art, design
| and engineering (at least - QA, audio, animation and a number
| of others as well) to be involved. Some people from one
| discipline may be versed enough in another to cover the role,
| but the role must still be present, or there will be pain and
| work thrown away later on.
|
| (incidentally, the ability to understand an issue from these
| multiple but interrelated angles is what makes experienced
| people so valuable in gamedev, and their constant loss to other
| less crazy industries so painful)
| kaba0 wrote:
| It depends on the program domain, but I think it must have been
| quite fun designing a game as opposed to the client still
| doesn't know what it wants and this API should instead do this.
| walrus01 wrote:
| In the context of Cabal and video games, I was expecting
| something about Destiny 1/2
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I think the Cabal concept is especially interesting in the wider
| context of Valve's "self organising" culture. It doesn't seem
| that this structure was designed, but was emergent.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| This structure is definitely not emergent, if left alone, human
| groups form little fiefdoms around local "lords", the hierarchy
| and bureaucracy of a feudal system emerges. To have working
| anarcho-syndicalism is a constant fight against this mechanism.
|
| Who decides how much anyone gets paid, and how many virtual
| crystal gold smileys someone gets for doing what he currently
| does?
|
| How many golden-smileys do you have to have on your shoulder to
| influence that decision?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The Cabal sounds great and I'm looking forward to try it.
|
| I'll pick the projects carefully though, as it's impossible to
| ship more than two products with this methodology.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-16 23:00 UTC)