Game Developer - January 1999.pdf

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JANUARY 1999

G A M E

D E V E L O P E R

M A G A Z I N E

G A M E

P LA N

600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

415.905.2200

415.905.4962

www.gdmag.com

Publisher

Cynthia A. Blair

cblair@mﬁ.com

EDITORIAL

Editor-in-Chief

Alex Dunne

adunne@sirius.com

Managing Editor

Tor D. Berg

tdberg@sirius.com

Departments Editor

Wesley Hall

whall@sirius.com

Art Director

Laura Pool

lpool@mﬁ.com

Editor-At-Large

Chris Hecker

checker@d6.com

Contributing Editors

Jeff Lander

jeffl@darwin3d.com

Mel Guymon

mel@surreal.com

Omid Rahmat

omid@compuserve.com

Advisory Board

Hal Barwood

LucasArts

Noah Falstein

The Inspiracy

Brian Hook

id Software

Susan Lee-Merrow

Lucas Learning

Mark Miller

Harmonix

Paul Steed

id Software

Dan Teven

Teven Consulting

Rob Wyatt

DreamWorks Interactive

ADVERTISING SALES

Western Regional Sales Manager

Alicia Langer

alanger@mﬁ.com

415.905.2156

Eastern Regional Sales Manager

Kim Love

klove@mﬁ.com

415.905.2175

Sales Associate/Recruitment

Ayrien Houchin

ahouchin@mﬁ.com

415.905.2788

ADVERTISING PRODUCTION

Vice President Production

Andrew A. Mickus

Advertising Production Coordinator

Dave Perrotti

Reprints

Stella Valdez

916.983.6971

MILLER FREEMAN GAME GROUP MARKETING

Group Marketing Manager

Gabe Zichermann

MarComm Manager

Susan McDonald

Marketing Coordinator

Izora Garcia de Lillard

CIRCULATION

Vice President Cirulation

Jerry M. Okabe

Assistant Circulation Director

Mike Poplardo

Circulation Manager

Stephanie Blake

Circulation Assistant

Kausha Jackson-Crain

Newsstand Analyst

Joyce Gorsuch

INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION

Robert J. Abramson and Associates Inc.

President

Libby Abramson

720 Post Road, Scarsdale, New York 10583

914.723.4700

914.723.4722

abramson@prodigy.com

Spielberg Switches

to Panaflex Cameras!

our ﬁrst reaction to that

headline (besides the obvi-

ous, "What the heck is this

doing in

Game Developer

magazine?" ) should be, "Who cares?"

The answer is: nobody — at least,

nobody who’s not deep in the ﬁlm busi-

ness, selling or operating cameras. Yet, if

that headline had been "XYZ Games

Switches to the 123 Engine," you’d be

jumping out of your seat, eager to know

why XYZ dropped the famed ABC

Engine for the 123 Engine. Was it

money? Features? Support?

As developers, we’re analogous to the

people in the ﬁlm business mentioned

above. That is, we actually have some

excuse for caring about the intricacies of

game development, and it’s real news to

us when a developer chooses one tech-

nology over another. We want and need

to know the gory details. Unfortunately,

the sad state of our industry today is

that we’re just as likely to see an engine-

oriented headline in our popular press

as in our technical trade press.

I believe this press focus on game

engines alienates most players.

Moreover, this engine-mania is distract-

ing us from our real job of bringing our

industry out of the garage and develop-

ing it into a mature artistic medium. It’s

easy to see why the press focuses on

game engines in interviews, articles, and

reviews. Writing about technology is

easy, especially when that technology is

conveniently wrapped up in a spiffy

engine name by the developers, some-

times even before the actual game has a

name. It’s much easier to write about

the engine than it is to write about the

actual important features of games, such

as game design, playability, and experi-

ence. The vocabulary is already present

for in-depth discussions of game tech-

nology with our light maps, polygons-

per-second, MIP-mapping, and what

have you. Contrast this with the current

state of the art in vocabulary for game

design and playability: "Uh, was it fun?"

We can’t just blame the press, of

course, because we developers aid and

abet them in their laziness by talking up

a storm about our engines and technol-

ogy. We answer their endless questions

about technology instead of getting

them back on track to talking about the

actual game we’re developing. Worst of

all, we put out self-congratulatory press

releases that focus speciﬁcally on our

technology and don’t even mention our

games. Again, I believe we do this

because it’s easy to talk about technolo-

gy, whereas we lack the vocabulary to

discuss game design effectively.

Now, I know technology is intimately

related to game design — especially at

this early point in our industry’s maturi-

ty — and I don’t think we should com-

pletely avoid "talking tech" for our hard-

core fans. However, when the ﬁrst

question out of the interviewer’s mouth

is "What engine does the game use?" we

have a problem.

I love game technology as much as

the next developer, but I realize that the

game press is going to follow our lead

when it comes to discussing our games.

We can steer interviewers away from the

easy techno-centric questions and back

to how the game will play and what

experiences the player will have while

playing. We

are

differentiating on non-

technology features, right?

The idea that we need to develop a

vocabulary for game design is not mine.

Doug Church from Looking Glass

Technologies has lectured on the topic

at the CGDC (now the GDC), and I

believe the concept is mentioned as far

back as Chris Crawford’s

The Art of

Computer Game Design.

I’d like

Game

Developer

to provide a forum for creating

this vocabulary, and if you’ve got ideas

on the topic, or if your company’s game

designers have their own language that

they use to communicate, we’re inter-

ested in hearing about it.

Chris Hecker, Editor-At-Large

Miller

& Media publication

Freeman

A United News

Chairman-Miller Freeman Inc.

| Marshall W. Freeman

President/COO

| Donald A. Pazour

Senior Vice President/CFO

| Warren “Andy” Ambrose

Senior Vice Presidents

| H. Ted Bahr, Darrell Denny

Galen A. Poss, Wini D. Ragus, Regina Starr

Ridley, Andrew A. Mickus, Jerry M. Okabe

Vice President/SD Show Group

| KoAnn Vikören

Senior Vice President/Systems and Software

Division

| Regina Ridley

BPA International Membership

Applied for March 1998

G A M E

D E V E L O P E R

JANUARY 1999

www.gdmag.com

S AY S

YO U

pipeline stalls.

• Use simple instructions.

• Follow the branch prediction algorithm.

• Schedule floating-point code to improve throughput.

Your desire to analyze the micro-op flow of Pentium II code may be

valid, but it’s unfair to blame VTune for not letting you do it. VTune

relies on the event counters that are built into the processors for this

level of analysis, and the Pentium II doesn’t count anything but micro-

ops retired. If there are undocumented counters in the Pentium II, then

be upset with the Pentium II, not the profiler.

VTune 3.0 Debated

n the October 1998 issue of

Game Developer,

Dan Teven’s

review calls Intel’s VTune 3.0 “a mandatory upgrade” from

version 2.5. I say it’s lame and inexcusable. Here’s why:

VTune 2.5 is an excellent tool for optimizing Pentium MMX

assembly code. It ﬂags your pipeline stalls and explains the

quirky details that derail instruction pairing. In blended CPU

mode, it also warns you of lethal Pentium II glitches — code

that runs perfectly well on a Pentium MMX, but brings a

Pentium II to its knees. Other than ﬂagging these elementary

ﬂaws, VTune 2.5 has little to say about how your code actually

performs on a Pentium II. All it can show is whether or not the

instruction decoder is choking on micro-ops.

With VTune 3.0, Intel had an opportunity to build a tool

that would enable programmers to analyze the micro-op

pipeline ﬂow of Pentium II code. Instead, they lavished their

efforts on redesigning their Gratuitous User Interface into

something resembling a web browser. Question for Intel: I’ve

already got a clumsy web browser and a monolithic IDE hog-

ging too much screen space; am I supposed to buy a second

monitor just for you?

To make matters worse, Intel chose to drop the blended CPU

mode from VTune 3.0, which limits its analysis to just one

CPU at a time. This forces you to switch back and forth

between modes to make sure that an optimization for one CPU

doesn’t clobber another. VTune’s worst offense, however, is

the misleading way it assigns sampling percentages to assem-

bly language instructions that have absolutely nothing to do

with the event that is being monitored. What we really want

to know is which micro-op, generated by what instruction,

triggered the event in question. Intel, however, would prefer

not to discuss micro-ops with developers — they’ve actually

censored the original Pentium Pro micro-op documentation,

and refuse to update the Pentium II docs to ﬁll in the gaps.

The Pentium II is theoretically capable of executing three

micro-ops per CPU cycle — essentially 50 percent more through-

put than the Pentium MMX. This level of performance can only

be achieved, however, by careful analysis of micro-op scheduling

and execution port utilization in critical inner loops (not to men-

tion cache misses and branch mispredictions). Rather than assist-

ing developers in this effort, Intel has maintained a wall of misin-

formation that obscures what’s really happening inside your

code. VTune 3.0 does nothing to breach this wall.

Lee Powell

Machine Code Systems

via e-mail

Financing Creativity

read Alex Dunne’s September editoral on the “Sundance

Festival” for video games with some interest. The problem:

It’s not particularly difficult to get companies such as MGM

Interactive, Activision, Interplay, or Sony to look at game

demos, designs, and prototypes. What’s difficult is getting

money for anything remotely creative, and this is where we’ve

failed miserably. Whether we ask for $500,000 or $100,000 in

funding, the answer is always no. Fortunately, magazines such

Next Generation

and game players themselves seem to dis-

agree with their views on the subject, but that hasn’t brought

us any closer to discovery.

I suspect that the reason we have had such trouble is that

game suits are a scared bunch. The dirtiest secret of this indus-

try is that 34 out of 35 games lose money, and that only 1 in

140 hit it big. These odds make Las Vegas slot machines look

like an attractive investment. Dodging all risks, suits follow a

strategy similar to the music industry’s, and chase last year’s

hits: year after year after year. Ask yourself which is a sounder

investment: one 20 million dollar D

OOM

clone championed by

a bunch of disgruntled id employees, or 80 $250,000 “art ﬂick”

games by 80 different unknowns and semi-unknowns?

Me? I’m a ﬁrm believer that the video game market is

becoming as efficient as the stock market — it’s increasingly

difficult to get something for nothing. The game suits simply

cannot

a priori

pick the hits, and they should give up trying to

do so, diversify their development portfolios, and wait for the

hits to emerge rather than try to predict them. Such a strategy

couldn’t work any less well than what we’re currently seeing.

Scott LeGrand

via e-mail

CORRECTIONS FOR NOVEMBER:

The following equations appeared incorrectly in Andrew

Flavell’s “Run Time MIP-Map Filtering” in the November

issue of

Game Developer.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

dUOverZdY

−

UOverZ

dOneOverZdY e

−

dOverZdY

−

VOverZ

dOneOverZdY f

−

max(

)

T E V E N R E S P O N D S :

I should have noticed that Intel dropped the

blended CPU analysis mode, and I hope they bring it back. I haven’t

changed my opinion, however. The improvements in VTune 3.0 are

an order of magnitude more important than this small loss.

The VTune 3.0 CD contains the Pentium Pro family documentation,

including the Intel Architecture Optimizations Manual and the three-

volume IA Software Developer’s Manual. These references talk quite

a bit about micro-ops. They also contain Intel’s recommendations for

writing “blended code,” which I will pass along:

• Important code entry points, such as a mispredicted label or an

interrupt function, should be aligned on 16-byte boundaries.

• Avoid partial stalls.

• Schedule to remove address generation interlock and other

G A M E

D E V E L O P E R

JANUARY 1999

Eq. 12

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http://www.gdmag.com

New Products:

The new Miles Sound

System 5.0, Rhinoceros does NURBS,

and Roger Wilco comes in loud and

clear.

p. 9

Industry Watch:

Wars and profits,

plus Mark Miller’s report from Project

Bar-B-Que

pp. 10-13

Product Reviews:

Okino’s PolyTrans

News from the World of Game Development

and MultiGen’s Creator

pp. 14-18

New Products

by Wesley Hall

The New Miles 5.0 is Out

RAD GAME TOOLS

has once again done

a major feature-upgrade on the vener-

able Miles Sound System, the all-

inclusive audio tool for developers.

The 5.0 version of the Miles Sound

System has a ton of new features, but

the big ones are MPEG Layer-3 sup-

port, a high-level 3D audio API, and a

new digital sub-system. The Miles 5.0

MP3 support includes the abilities to

decompress data from your sound

mixer, to stream massive MP3 sound

files off of your hard drive or CD-

ROM, and to play MP3 compressed

instruments in DLS files. With Miles’s

3D audio API, your game will support

all of the commom 3D technologies,

such as DirectSound3D software and

hardware, Aureal’s A3D, Creative’s

EAX, and Intel’s RSX. You can switch

between any of the technologies at

runtime, or load multiple technolo-

gies at once. Further, future 3D

providers can be dropped into your

game without source code changes

because the 3D technologies are

abstracted from Miles’s API. The API

also allows you to perform 3D sample

sub-block looping. The new digital

subsystem allows Miles to use its own

mixer even when running under

DirectSound, and also includes MMX

optimizations that have been added

to the digital mixer subsystem.

The Miles Sound System SDK is

available for DOS, Windows 3.x,

Win32s, Windows 95, and Windows

NT. The Miles Sound System SDK is

licensed on a per-product or per-site

basis with no royalties. Single product

licenses start at $3,000.

RAD Game Tools Inc.

Kirkland, Wash.

(425) 893-4300

http://www.radgametools.com

95/98/NT. No special graphics soft-

ware is required, although Rhino is

compatible with a wide variety of 2D

and 3D file formats. It retails for $795.

Robert McNeel & Associates

Seattle, Wash.

(206) 545-7000

http://www.rhino3d.com

Online Radio Chatter

RESOUNDING TECHNOLOGY INC.

just

debuted Roger Wilco, a stand-alone

application that allows online game

players to talk to each other while

playing their favorite multiplayer

games such as Q

UAKE

II, D

IABLO

, and

TAR

RAFT

Roger Wilco is a companion tech-

nology that enables players to actual-

ly talk to each other instead of typing

messages. In its initial release, Roger

Wilco supports up to four players

without requiring a dedicated server.

It will support ten in the near future.

Players can now communicate with-

out interupting game play. When

other players speak, their transmis-

sions are mixed with the game audio.

Unlike Internet phone programs,

Roger Wilco is designed specifically

for running alongside multiplayer

online games without requiring an

additional soundcard.

Roger Wilco works with most

Windows 95/98 games that use

DirectSound. It requires a microphone

and a soundcard capable of full-

duplex audio. It also requires a

Pentium 166 or better processor, 2MB

disk space and at least a 28.8K

modem. Roger Wilco is currently in

beta test. A free "technology preview"

is immediately available for download

from Resounding’s web site.

Resounding Technology Inc.

Cambridge, Mass.

(512) 248-9344

http://www.resounding.com

Rhino NURBS

ROBERT MCNEEL & ASSOCIATES

just

unleashed Rhinoceros (Rhino), the first

full-power NURBS (non-uniform ratio-

nal B-spline) modeler for Windows.

Rhino is a conceptual design and

modeling tool that allows you to cre-

ate objects that are smooth NURBS

surfaces rather than line segments or

polgon meshes. In the past, this tech-

nology was only available on high-

end workstations. Organic effects are

now much more accessible. You can

play in a free-form world as you

create and edit curves, surfaces, solids,

meshes, and (of course) 3D models.

Rhino also integrates solids (surfaces

joined together at their edges) and

surface modeling so that solids can be

exploded into surfaces, edited, and

then joined together again. Spline-

based models created in Rhino can be

used in most rendering and anima-

tion products, including 3D Studio

MAX, Softimage, and LightWave 3D.

Rhino runs on a system with a

Pentium processor, 32MB RAM, and

15MB disk space under Windows

Ocean Quigley modeled this rhino

using Rhinoceros, and then rendered

it in 3D Studio MAX.

h t t p : / / w w w. g d m a g . c o m

JANUARY 1999

G A M E

D E V E L O P E R

BIT BLASTS - INDUSTRY WATCH

Industry Watch

by Alex Dunne

THANKS TO SOME RECENT RULINGS

the litigation between Creative Labs and

Aureal Semiconductor, this case is going

to trial. First, the court rejected Aureal’s

motion for summary judgment, reject-

ing Aureal’s limited interpretation of

Creative’s patent on a “Digital Sampling

Instrument Employing Cache-Memory.”

In the second ruling, the court rejected

Creative Labs’ motion for a preliminary

injunction against Aureal. Aureal argued

that a preliminary injunction prohibit-

ing the sale of their Vortex chips would

essentially force the company to close,

and the court ruled felt that such action

would be too severe in the event that

Aureal eventually emerged victorious

from the trial. In other words, in this

trial Aureal has much more to lose than

Creative Labs has to gain.

CALENDAR

January 4-8, 1999

MacWorld Expo 99

Moscone Center

San Francisco, CA USA

Cost: $45 expo only, $345 and

up for conference.

http://www.macworldexpo.com

UPCOMING EVENTS

GT INTERACTIVE ACQUIRED ONEZERO

MEDIA,

a two-year-old company which

produces the TV show The Wild Wild

Web and its accompanying web site,

http://www.getwild.com.

GTI was

impressed with OZM’s success in creat-

ing the cross-media franchise, and said

that the purchase of OZM will further its

growth strategy by "providing an estab-

lished platform for e-commerce and for

promoting new entertainment products

and content." OZM will operate as a

wholly owned subsidiary of GTI.

OneZero Media’s web site and accom-

panying television show attracted the

interest of Ron Chaimowitz.

lish S

EIER

’

ETTYSBURG

! and S

EIER

’

LPHA

ENTAURI

ACCLAIM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTED

their 1998 fiscal year results, which

ended August 31, 1998. The company

saw net revenues of $326.6 million

compared with $165.4 million in the

prior year, resulting in a profit of $20.7

million. During the fiscal year, Acclaim

published ten titles that sold over $10

million each, F

ORSAKEN

, T

UROK

INAOSAUR

UNTER

, R

IVEN

, and WWF

ARZONE

, among others.

MICROSOFT MADE AN UNDISCLOSED

minority investment in online game

developer VR-1, the company that

developed F

IGHTER

for the MSN

Gaming Zone. Not too long ago, VR-1

agreed to develop a pair of games exclu-

sively for America Online, and while

the full terms of the deal weren’t dis-

closed, we know that the investment

will not affect VR-1’s ability to work

with other partners, and that Microsoft

won’t take a seat on the VR-1 board.

January 7-10, 1999

1999 CES

Las Vegas Convention Center,

Sands Expo & Convention

Center, Las

Vegas Hilton, Alexis Park Hotel

Las Vegas, NV

Cost: $75

http://www.cesweb.org

MIDWAY PROFITS UP.

Midway report-

ed that for its fiscal quarter ending

September 30, 1998, its revenues were

more than 21 percent higher than last

year, amounting to $89.3 million. Net

income rose to $9.8 million, compared

to last year’s $7.2 million. Mirroring the

pickup in console sales and slowdown

in the arcade business, Midway’s next

generation video game revenues

increased 106 percent and its coin-oper-

ated video game revenues for the quar-

ter decreased over 40 percent over the

previous year, to $19.6 million.

ELECTRONIC ARTS EXTENDED

its pub-

lishing agreement with Sid Meier’s com-

pany, Firaxis. EA said that it will publish

up to two more as yet unannounced

Firaxis games. The original agreement,

announced in 1996, allowed EA to pub-

February 9-12, 1999

Milia 99

Palais des Festivals

Cannes, France

Cost: $655

http://www.reedmidem.

milia.com

WITH THE STAR WARS PREQUEL DUE

OUT

on the silver screen shortly,

Nintendo scored a sizable victory over

rivals Sony and Sega by announcing

that it has exclusive console rights to

LucasArts’ next three games. The five-

year, worldwide agreement includes S

TAR

ARS

: R

OGUE

QUANDRON

(slated for

release by Christmas 1998) plus two

upcoming games based on George

Lucas’ next feature film,

Star Wars:

Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

h t t p : / / w w w. g d m a g . c o m

February 17-20, 1999

TED 9

Monterey Convention Center

Monterey, CA

Cost: $2250

http://www.ted.com

Acclaim’s fourth quarter was highlight-

ed by the success of WWF W

ARZONE

G A M E

D E V E L O P E R

JANUARY 1999

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