I really wish my college would use Unity or even UDK for teaching game development, Torque seems like an absolute joke. Of course, they haven’t tried out the new Torque 3D engine yet… they’re still on the archaic “Torque Game Engine” which is probably part of the problem.

Anyway, just felt like bitching there for a second about my Torque woes… its been a total nightmare trying to get this assignment done before the end of the 7th week of class (which is next week).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpD0btOZx8

Here’s another good one…. its funny though, not so much about talent but more so about acting and performing parodies… lol

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpBGRA6HHtY

While I was playing and getting the shit scared out of me, I came across this awesome reference to one of my favorite bands: Fear Factory.

I love you Bethesda Softworks, from one metal head to another… I love you man/woman/corporation/studio.

I’m looking for any pointers, contributors, or experts to make improvements or recommendations to the code. So please check it out. If you’re interested in contributing, please send me an email at cale@caledunlap.com so I can add your Google account to the members list.

And if you haven’t already, check out http://www.venomgamelabs.com!

Now for your entertainment for the evening:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRgYtp3HfvY

A second note, that actually just caught my attention was the fact that Eric Smith (one of the former programmers, and original creators of the Firearms Half-Life mod) created a website http://www.firearmsgame.com. It is a simple, short, and sweet website that basically sums up all of the rumors flying around about the Firearms: Source versus Firearms 2 fiasco. On that site, he talks about siding with FA2 because they “rescued” the mod. Now, my opinion is that he is correct. The FA2 team, which I was a member of for quite some time, did indeed rescue Firearms. The reason I say this is because I know first-hand, as do many others, what the original Firearms team (myself included) intended to do with the mod after the release of Half-Life 2. The intention was to leave it alone, for good, let it die. I wasn’t happy about doing this, but at the time I no longer had the time to keep plugging away at it. So I also had to let it fall by the way-side. Then a few years later, I had found out that a new Firearms mod was starting for the Source Engine–Firearms 2. Naturally I wanted in on it, I loved working on the first version. So I joined up and started working for a while, then got busy with real-life slapping me in the face and had to go on hiatus for a while.

Once I returned to working on FA2 I found out that Firearms: Source had started up and had been spreading a lot of nasty rumors about how the entire Firearms 2 team are a bunch of theives, etc. Which to me, was a complete lie. Nobody stole anything. We simply went through slightly drastic measures to revive the interest in the game. Keep in mind, this happened well before Firearms: Source even existed. So now this mod, coming out of nowhere, claims they’re the “official sequel” to Firearms because the original creators condoned it. Well, last I checked, the “original” creators left it to die and now just want a peice of the pie once they’ve discovered Firearms 2′s existence. In fact, the REAL creator of Firearms was Eric Smith, and it is his words of approval that are reassuring to us over at the Firearms 2 team.

Now, here’s the kicker, and this has nothing to do with Eric’s talent as a programmer, and his status as the original creator of Firearms. My problem with his statements is that he’s claiming to OWN the “intellectual property” of Firearms. He also claims he can prove this–he has “documentation” supporting this claim. Now, yes its widely accepted that he’s the creator, but when he tries to play the “ip infringement card” on people who want to take the game public and market it, it appears as if he is simply trying to ride the coat-tails of the Firearms name. When he infact, did NOTHING to the new contributions of the game. He has been asked by various members of the community to provide these documents, but they are never produced.

I have a problem with that. If you’re going to make such a bold statement such as “I OWN <xyz> intellectual property” then you better be able to back it up and not simply threaten law suit on someone who supposedly “infringes” upon it. So, I challenge you, Eric Smith, to prove this to everyone. Prove that you actually OWN the Firearms property, and show me the laws that state that Firearms 2, or even Firearms: Source, cannot continue without your consent. I’ve looked for trademarks and copyrights in the US patent and copyright office for anything containing your name. Do you know what I’ve found? Nothing. Yes, nothing. So where is your documentation? Why don’t you just send it over to me in an email. When you send it, I’ll provide it to the nay-sayers and you can indeed claim your place as the “owner of Firearms”.

Back when I worked on Firearms (for Half-Life 1), I remember having a short email conversation with someone at Valve. I don’t remember who it was though. I want to say it was Robin Walker, but I might be wrong. At that time, the news about Steam was that “No mods will be put on Steam.” I was trying to get Firearms up on Steam so it would get some more exposure. At the time, it was still a fairly popular mod so I didn’t figure it would be too big of a deal.

So I’m jealous now that other mods, like Age of Chivalry and Insurgency get to be placed on Steam and exposed to millions of people world-wide with very little effort on the mod-team’s part. Its great because it gives the games more exposure yes, but this could be a double edged sword here. I mean now it brings more of a “glam” incentive to creating mods when the whole purpose to write them was to build a portfolio, gain experience, and then ultimately apply for a job. Game development studios could face a lot more “riff-raff” than before because now there’s just a serious “glam” factor with making games and mods.

This might sound brash, but I have little respect for game developers who develop only for the glam of making games. I mean yes, glam does come with the territory, but it should NEVER be the sole motivation factor for amateur game developers trying to make it to the big-time. Me personally, I like writing games because it is challenging, complex, fun, exciting, educational, and it lets the creativity juices run wild; it has little to do with the “glam of writing games.” When a game programmer/developer is motivated by grandeur, he/she starts to think less of the game and their role in the grand scheme of things and more about themselves and how they can just get rich and maintain their position on their “high horse.”

So my advice to any new mod team, indie game studio, or hobbyist game developer: Do it for the love of what you do. Even if you don’t make money or gain status because of it, you’ve learned something. You have the rest of your life to figure out how to capitalize on what you’ve learned. As the old adage says: “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” With a little twist to reflect what I just said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again because you love what you do.”

Well, about a week ago I walked into a GameStop in the mall since my girlfriend decided she was going to head over to Forever 21… needless to say I didn’t want go with. I chatted with the manager for bit, asking him if he had any Wii’s in stock. He said “No, check back next week. Here’s our number.” Thats the third time I’ve been in that store looking for a Wii, I was beginning to beleive that they NEVER had Wii’s and used the empty boxes just to piss people off.

Well, following that short conversation, he attempted to sell me a PS3 and an XBox 360. Honestly, I don’t think I’d play them. If I’m going to pay nearly $400 for a PS3, it better at least make me breakfast the following morning. When I asked him if it did, he replied with “No, its a selfish lover.” Ok, I’m kidding about that part. After some conversation about upcoming games and other random stuff, he interjected with “You know what, I think I have a used Wii in the back if you’re interested. I’ll sell it to you for $230.” I said “I’ll buy it right now if its in good condition.”

Long story short, here’s my Wii number: 7122 4915 1735 0996. Success!

And now for the bad stuff: I’m about to poke holes all over the place here… How can a game that was “three years in development” get released with SO MANY OBVIOUS BUGS?!?! I’m amazed at how this kind of stuff gets in the game. Is it the lack of a QA department, crappy development teams, or just deadline pressure that allowed for so many bugs to find their way into the game? I’d expect a few, yes, games are very complex pieces of software–I understand that. But the fact that so many highly-visible and “obvious to the player” bugs has me concerned. If their front-ends have bugs like this, I wonder what the back-end systems look like, hmm?

Now, the concepts of WH are great, and I love the gameplay. None of the bugs have completely turned me off of the game (yet), or maybe thats just my $50 talking. The bugs that I’ve found (and reported) are not necessarily show-stoppers, but they should have been addressed before release, they’re way too visible.

So far here’s what I’ve found:

1. At first login, or after a patch, the UI displays windows one by one on top of each other in very rapid succession. This breaks focus numerous times while the player is trying to school through the numerous terms pages to agree to the terms. This one is minor, but frustrating and annoying.
2. The cursor’s position doesn’t seem to be correlating to the cursor icon in some menus–namely the server selection menu. I clicked “Phoenix Throne” like 3 times but ended up getting different servers each time. This may have been an attempt to get me to go somewhere else because PT was getting really full. If so, there should have been a message about that, I got frustrated as hell.
3. The AI can walk through a f@&king stone wall when in a foot-chase with you. The wall was only about half-height of the character, but the character walked straight through it and chased me down. I sure can’t walk through it, why should he be able to.
4. On first spawn, I encountered a couple of cases where my character window wasn’t drawing correct colors for the hair, tattoo, and skin. It simply appeared default until I actually changed my equipment.
5. Throwing a weapon (like an axe) won’t render the axe in the air roughly 80% of the time. The character plays the “throw” animation, but the weapon won’t appear to go flying through the air. The target still takes damage, but it looks like they took damage from some phantom force.
6. I don’t know if this happens to anybody else, but this one was a bad one. I was using an item in the world, near heavy agro. I was interrupted by battle during the use process, which took the progress bar away; which was normal. However, I couldn’t draw my weapon, I couldn’t attack, I really couldn’t do anything but run and hope for the best. My character even continued to play the “using” animation (which was reading a book). When I’d move, the legs would stay still so it looked like I was sort of just gliding around. Then when I finally was able to draw my weapon, it drew my weapon and shield but kept the book there too. So my character magically gained another hand to hold a sword, shield, and a book at the same time. This one pissed me off heavily because it was completely not fair to the player. I had to run near some NPCs and let them take care of the mob of 10 following me because I couldn’t attack.
7. The “Social Menu” button doesn’t capture mouse events roughly 50% of the time. It takes some serious effort to bring up the social menu. Sometimes when I scroll over it, the tooltip won’t popup and the button won’t highlight. It takes a couple of tries of mousing over until you see those visual cues before the menu will actually come up when you click.