It has been a long time since I played a full game. Most of the time in the last year I have been playing those 100k games you download just to have fun 10 minutes. The last game I played was a full-scale RPG. Very nice. Very addictive. Took me a significant part of my spare time. I guess I played it for around 120-200 hours. While playing it, I had the impression it was severly lacking this or that feature. This is a technical discussion. From a user's point of view, it definetly rocked. After finished it, I was so curious I did some black-box-analisys on it. I found it's a total piece of $h!_. Graphics engine: lacking. Just throws polys at the renderer, lets it parse out and all. Very hardcoded, some ugly bugs in evaluating the lighting equation. Indoor engine seems to be pretty limited, some collision errors, prone to quantum effects. Outdoor engine seems to be more robust but still lacks LODding and other things. Content: while the content itself was superb, the way it's managed is a real pain. Future expansions and modding seems rather hard. Programmability: while somewhat flexible (I found everything is driven by scripts), it does not seems really difficult to implement a thing like this. Still lacking. The script editor is a real pain to use, and the script compiler does not seems to understand some syntaxes which are allowed by the grammar. The compiler itself sometime crashes even when compiling scripts which came with the game. Sound system: good, in line with current standards I guess, but having doppler just because you're falling down a rope is a minor defect. So, why do I post this? Looks like to have a successful game you don't need anymore to squeeze your head searching a good solution. Brute-force approach works, provided content is good enough. Now, I have seen much people tryinbg to code something decent out and I wanted to say... have you ever considered some sort of cooperation? Now that I threw the rock, I have to hide my hand (sorry for that). While I sometime started cooperations with other people, I didn't get nothing back (nothing material at least) and by other means, I won't be able to cooperate in producing nothing for the next few months.

what's the name of the game your talking about?

Heh, sounds like Morrowind :D. Though MW doesn't have ropes.

Quote:
Looks like to have a successful game you don't need anymore to squeeze your head searching a good solution. Brute-force approach works, provided content is good enough.

Someone once said to me that there's no point trying to fancy when programming a game :p.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Heh, sounds like Morrowind

Ok, got it.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Someone once said to me that there's no point trying to fancy when programming a game :p.

I also thought that up to some days ago, because I knew how much time for example, ID or EPIC spent in making their PVS systems work. Now, MW internal engine does not have PVS at all.
So, I always tried to make something 'optimizable' so, if it needed it could be 'optimized' in the future - I never really optimized to death nothing in my systems besides some recent exceptions like the light equation evaluators.
It is different. I was thinking about 'don't optimize too much'. Use 'optimize-friendly algos'. Now, this means I could just say 'do-not-optimize-at-all' and 'don't-care-if-it's-near-to-impossible-to-make-faster'. It's a very different approach from everything other I saw in the past.

Morrowind's graphics engine, like you say, could use several significant improvements. By just spitting polys at the card, it's hardly efficient at all. Do you know if it does this even for static geometry? Doesn't use any frustum culling?
Another downside to Morrowind's graphics engine are the shadows. They're total crap as well.. They actually ruin gameplay in some places, where you can know that an NPC is on the other side of a door, because the shadows make artifacts on your side...

But, on the other hand, it's a very entertaining (addictive!) game. I haven't played through the entire game, but I've played enough of it. The story is fairly alright. It also gives a sense of non-linearity, because there are so many other quests/missions you can do. From that point of view, the game is excellent!

The graphics engine might be crap, but the artwork that went into the game is fabulous! There's alot of very nice artwork, both in textures and in 3D models.

The gameplay itself was entertaining, but still subpar. It's just too easy to become a demigod, who's able to kill the entire population of a small town with a single huge fireball. I know of several other people who played it, who just found simple ways to get around large challenges, and also managed to level insanely fast.

Replay value? Nah, I don't think so. Sure, you can do alot of different things with a different character, but the game takes so long time to complete the first time round, I, for one, definitely won't bother trying to do it a second time! (I actually haven't finished the game once, yet [wink])...

All in all, it's an alright game to play, although you need a pretty high-end rig to be able to play it nicely.