Ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped
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Chaos Theory was one of the first games to use DirectX 9.0c/Shader Model 3.0. A couple months later, Battlefield 2 was released. A few months after that, F.E.A.R. and Age of Empires 3. By the end of that year, X3: Reunion. All of these games had incredible graphical fidelity for their time, and the remarkable thing was that for the most part, they weren't just glorified tech demos.
From 2004 to 2007, it really felt like a renaissance in graphics. Far Cry and the UE3 demo in 2004 served to kick it off. During 2007-2009, things sort of solidified in a sense, locking us in to this weird post-modern level of graphical fidelity that's stayed more or less evolutionary ever since.
Hopefully there will be another golden age. Perhaps VR will lead the charge this time, rather than the GPU.
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Also, Amon Tobin's score for Chaos Theory was excellent. IMHO, it played a huge role in making the game what it was. Even today, you rarely see scores so eccentric, let alone in AAA titles.
HL2 was also massive benchmark in graphics. But probably the most impactful thing that happened in that period was the release of new generation of consoles (X360/PS3). You might also note that almost all early UE3 games were released console-first.
In addition to graphics, HL2 was more or less the game that ushered in truly modern physics. Even today, some AAA games don't have physics systems as good. Likewise for facial animation.
There was also Doom 3 that year, though arguably it lacked the same level of fidelity. However, it was really ahead of its time in the years leading up to release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj3dPyk7hPI (Doom 3 at MacWorld 2001)
That said, Farcry and FEAR were probably the most impressive games from an AI and gameplay standpoint. The physics in Farcry were waaaay better than in HL2.
As far as Far Cry, I'd say it was the one game in 2004 that pretty much had it all in terms of raw technology. Heavy use of complex shader materials, dynamic lighting and shadows, foliage, terrain, water, physics, vehicles.
Though, I would also argue that, despite Far Cry's physics being more robust in a technical sense, the physics in HL2 definitely felt superior when it came to actual gameplay. Probably the result of careful polish more than anything.
http://cinematicmod.com/images/cm_11/environments/cm_11_18.j...
Wait, why the hell is Alyx dressed like that? Was there anything wrong with pants? It's so incredibly out of place...
http://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20061009/can-you-have-strok...
Stress sucks and it ruins so much.
This is very alarming for a previously "smart" person.
I ended up retreating to a small town in the mountains and it took about 3 years for my brain to heal.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-perchance-reveals-brai...
This image did not help at all: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAqwcQdUkAAsz_G.jpg
I wouldn't mind doing that, but that sounds like you'd need a decent amount of cash to do.
And yet it still continues to be a problem.
I'm starting to think we only have ourselves to blame. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Why do we continue to let companies treat employees so poorly? Hell, why do we continue to start our own companies where we treat ourselves so poorly? If we can't have a little respect for ourselves, how are we going to expect some middle-manager at a gigantocorp to care?
No more long hours. Stop it! I don't care how exciting your startup is. The work will be there tomorrow. No, you aren't trying to beat someone to market. Hire more people. If you can't afford more people, then you can't afford the project. Because you're going to pay, one way or another.
I used to do it, too. I used to work 60, 80 hours a week, especially when I first started freelancing. I'd get burnt out and started goofing off during the normal busy hours. Then I'd feel like I had to make up for it, so I worked more.
I had to just stop doing it. I was lying to people. I was saying "on yeah, the work is done", and then staying up until 3am to finish it so they could have it the next day. I was lying to myself, "you can make up for this, and then everything will be back to normal."
I finally just stopped lying. I finally just told people, "no, that's not done". I took my lumps. And it wasn't that bad. I didn't lose any clients. They didn't even express disappointment. It was just, "oh, okay, let us know when it's ready."
By forcing myself to work NOT work OUTSIDE of a normal schedule, I also grew a much more healthy respect for the normal schedule. I don't goof off during the regular busy hours anymore. Work time is for work, because I don't want leisure time to be for work. I set the schedule, regardless of who thinks they set the schedule. If people say, "we need it sooner than that" I just tell them, "sorry, I can't." It's when you stay up the late hours and make miracles happen that they start expecting it.
FWIW, IME the work ethic in Canada is very, very similar to what it is in the US. There's certainly an accent on the notion of "going the extra mile" by sacrificing a weekend here and there for the sake of a project that's in danger of not meeting an arbitrary, crazy deadline.
It seems amazing and a little sad how so many smart people can collectively be so deluded and piss away their health and, ultimately, years of life down the drain in order to make the boss happy/earn that promotion, etc..
There's nothing like being on a conference call with a bunch of smart folks, some of whom are having trouble keeping a short meeting agenda in their heads for 30 minutes due to being profoundly burned out.
Tech, however, and games in particular, do have that kind of overwork culture; but they have it everywhere in the world. Reasons include high potential reward, constant change, unpredictability of results, and relatively young workforce. Nothing to do with unions, Puritanism or the like, really. And that culture is indeed destructive for many people, but we only get to hear from the survivors (among which I count myself)
Not saying there aren't places here where you can software develop yourself to burnout death, but that really becomes a personal choice at that point. 80+ hour weeks are for the crazy ones. Sometimes it's the beautiful passionate crazies, and something amazing happens. I don't want to play down the results[0], but it's a gamble you play with your own health, life and well-being, it's a choice and one's own responsibility. You can't stop them, but you can make sure they may not hurt themselves too much.
[0] Actually, most examples I know of this are from areas completely outside software/computers, superheroes giving themselves for social/societal causes--but I wouldn't exclude "our" line of work per se.
"Ultimately, we work crazy hours and weekends just to ensure we make something many people get to enjoy, so thanks for taking the time to express concern."
[1] http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/06/04/guerrilla-games-tease...
Being in the industry myself now, what amazes me most is almost every one of these great forces of nature was actually the result of one leader burning themselves right to the ground in order to get it done. In some cases, it's a small handful of people, but even then there's usually one that takes the whole thing on their shoulders even above the rest.
It helps further the old saying "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."
Inquisitive minds wanting more information should be directed to StarForce.RE.Tools.ReadNFO-RELOADED - http://www.glop.org/files/rld-sfrt.rar (sorry for the hotlink!) - for a detailed technical analysis published concerning the StarForce 3 protection. A fine piece of work, if I may say, though I shall not identify the authors.
StarForce 3 was really quite intrusive, including secretly-installed ring0-access device-drivers. Flaky and damaging to the security of your system and very widely complained about.
I would not say such a monstrosity is an achievement UbiSoft should be proud of: indeed, they actually apologised, although I would not say they were genuinely sorry in any sense.
I would like to thank the developers working on the actual game, of course. I feel sorry for them that the publisher had such strong opinions about that.
Probably won't happen though...
I developed weird memory issues, in particular about people's names. I could remember details about people -- where I knew them from, what they did, but their names went completely. This included some people who were close to me, so there was a scary feeling of the memory loss being strange and almost like dementia.
I have rarely had to learn so much in such a short amount of time, and for awhile it was literally as if each new thing I learned was pushing something else out of memory, as if my brain was full and I could only learn new things by erasing something else.
Thankfully, the project ended, I got some sleep, and a few months later I felt normal again.
I've never been able to replicate that experience in another game.
Someone tried to clone it but never took off: http://www.projectstealthgame.com/
Best wishes to OP for the game and (at least) giving me fond memories.
The only thing is that, like quite a few games today, it was best in beta. I distinctly remember that in the final version, they tweaked the lighting model across all levels to be far higher contrast, and that pretty much killed it for myself and everyone I knew who played it.
Yeah, you couldn't cheat anymore by turning up your gamma, but that came at the price of destroying those priceless moments where you thought you saw something in the shadows, but you weren't sure.
One of my favorite bits of SC:CT is the "are you a ninja?" dialogue.
One of the developers for Splinter Cell, in his spare time, helped out with the project and probably benefitted tremendously from all the multiplayer testing and balancing we did.
At some point he asked all the team members for our real names and put us in some of the communications documents/emails in the actual game. It's really odd to see my name pop up in GameFAQs walkthroughs and such, and perhaps a bit depressing to know that it's what 'my name' is most famous for. But mostly fun.
I never played the SC multiplayer, but Thievery:UT has been some of the most fun I've ever had multiplayer, more than all the UT, Quake, Age Of Empires, and whatnot.
It bothers me on one aspect because the article is only tangentially about the game, so this talk about the game is really all off-topic and distracting from the bigger issue of healthful work-life balance. But even worse than that is the aspect that it is because of this single-minded attitude on the consumer side that employers like Ubisoft put this sort of pressure on their employees.