Game Programming in Squeak
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at mucow.com
Thu Nov 1 00:45:17 UTC 2001
On Wednesday, October 31, 2001, at 06:57 PM, Jon Hylands wrote:
> I've emphasized this in all of my messages. Pushing pixels takes very
> little cost now, but scene management with today's complex levels and
> high
> polygon counts is the big hit.
>
> OpenGL hardware doesn't help a single iota with scene management.
The last sentence is, of course, quite true -- most hardware support
doesn't doesn't really hurt scene management.
Actually, unlike the inherently brute force processing inherent in pixel
pushing, scene management admits highly complex and logic-deep
algorithms. I disagree that the "big hit" is manifest in scene
management as suggested, or that modern state-of-the-art games are even
close to as processor-intensive as those of past years.
I had this out with John Romero a few years ago, when the technology
mismatch for pixel pushing was not even close to the range today; at a
time I took your position. He was trying to convince me that
first-person shooter medium is destined to come beyond the
processor-deep no-brain no-game doldrums in which it was buried;
pointing out the particular technical changes that had already
occurred. Having seen the insides of these games, I see now that he was
right and I (then) and you (now) are wrong.
Game programming companies, the particular ones you described in earlier
posts in fact, are desperately seeking to evolve from the graphics-deep
technical skill pushers into a content-deep game design plant. They
realize that the time for game mechanics (in the auto mechanic sense) is
the past and game mechanics (in the game design sense) is the future.
Jon's argument ignores reality -- and more significantly the particular
lesson that Alan and crew taught us more than twenty years ago. When
bitblt technology was considered deep dark magic, the idea that it could
be delivered in a full GUI interface from a uber-slow, memory-managed
byte-coded p-machine was ludicrous. But they did it, and on machines
many orders of magnitude slower than a Palm hand-held. The model of
identifying complex hunks of technology as data-driven primitives and
executing them is enormously powerful.
Jon's nihilistic suggestion that Squeak is incapable of doing ubergames
is, IMHO, naive.
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