VinegaBlog

Special Note: This was a series that I started a while back. I’ve moved it under the blog for consistency’s sake. I’ll be adding to it in the future. Click on VinegaBlog above to get to the main blog.

Everyone who’s been in the game business long enough has had to deal with Bad Tools — buggy, poorly documented, ill-conceived, or just plain useless. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. Instead I’m going to discuss an even more insidious problem: Potentially Good or Well Meaning tools that, for one reason or another, derail, disappoint their parents, and take up with a shiftless drugged-out saxophonist. Of course wayward tools can happen in any discipline, but this series will be devoted to design and in particular level designers and builders as these are the folks most likely to deal with proprietary, home-grown and therefore potentially southbound tools. The reasons that good tools go bad are legion but I’ll be limiting this to the ones that top my own personal list. Even so it’s a loooooong list so I’ll be adding material for some to come. So without further ado:

 WHEN…GOOD…TOOLS…GO…BAD!

#1: If you Build it for Idiots, They Will Come.
Have you ever had to deal with a tool that almost anyone could use, but no one wanted to? One of those designed so that any idiot could use it? One with any real power or functionality throttled out of it or buried so deep that even a badger with an overactive thyroid couldn’t dig it out? Then you’ve probably been a victim of the “any idiot can be a designer” school of tool design.

To begin with let me clear something up. I’m not talking about idiot proofing here. I’m all in favor of you protecting me from smashing my own thumb with the hammer.  What I’m talking about here is a desire to make tools that can be used to take someone with minimal, or even no design experience and allow them to do the things a designer does. Note that I specifically didn’t say, “allow them to become a designer”. Because there’s no guarantee that being able to use the tool will make them a designer.

Part of this is driven by just how difficult it is to find a good level designer. It requires a melding of several skills: the talent to design a fun and challenging level, the ability to build it and make it look and play well, and the knowledge to script it so that it flows, reacts, engages and rewards the player. In addition the advent of 3d environments has raised the bar, requiring skills with tools such as Maya or 3Dmax which are aimed primarily at artists. Even tools specifically aimed at level design frequently bear more than a passing resemblance to those 3D art tools and require many of the same sensibilities. Finding all of these talents in a single person is no trivial task and indeed many teams spread these abilities across two or more people who work as a team. However, there is also a tendency to try and shoehorn these skills into a single person with little or no prior design experience. And to compensate for this they design tools that work well for non-designers, but are an anathema to anyone with real talent.

This usually shows up in the scripting tools as this is the skill set that can be the most time consuming and difficult to pick up. What you usually end up with is a point and click tool that simplifies the scripting process at the cost of power, utility, and efficiency - a sort of one-size-fits-all affair that indeed makes things easier for the uninitiated, but rapidly turns into an albatross around the necks of any experienced or even intermediate level designer.  Please note that I’m not talking about streamlining or automating common tasks. Nor am I denigrating control systems that use a different approach than scripting. What I’m really railing against is the dumbing down of a tool to the point that it becomes an impediment to efficient and advanced design.

In general this sort of tool is not designed by an experienced designer. Sometimes a designer isn’t even involved in the process (scary but true). As a result the hidden costs of using such a tool are rarely realized until it is too late to do anything about it:

· Advanced functionality will have to be developed by the programming team, rather than being scripted by the designers. This will cost programming bandwidth and resources, as well as the usual attendant inefficiencies involved in one group developing for another. This will also result in delays on the design side as the designers wait for the programmers to provide the functionality.
· The best and most proficient designers will actually be slowed down and limited by the tool. In some cases this can delay or limit a team’s ability to react in time-critical situations. In the worst case scenario it can cost you a deadline or a ship date.
· Dealing with the tool leads to frustration. This exacerbates the pressures always present in such projects and contributes to the loss of designers (usually the best ones).
· The limited flexibility of the tools precludes many design solutions and can severely limit the ability of the designers to tune and adapt to changing requirements.

And last but not least: You’ll end up with exactly the people the tool was aimed at — poor, inexperienced or non-designers — designing your game. Now these people aren’t necessarily “idiots” as I flippantly described them above and some of might turn out to be quite good, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Sometimes the compulsion to build such a tool comes from a legitimate concern, such as a desire to reduce the learning curve or make the tools more accessible to new designers or other developers who have to share the tools. But the answer isn’t to develop to the least common denominator.

So here’s a plea to all of the folks that make the decisions that result in such tools: Save us all a lot of trouble and create tools that do not limit the power or flexibility of your design team. Then create utilities layered on top of those tools, that simplify or make the tools more accessible to new designers or non-designers who might have to use them. Trust me, the last thing you want is a cornfield full of idiots…

Next: Deeply Nested Interfaces are for the Birds…

© 2005 Daniel C. Carver

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I got into MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games to those allergic to acronyms). Unfortunately real life intruded and I set that aside for a while. Fast forward past the K-T extinction event, the rise of the mammals, the parade of various rock pounding hominids, plagues, wars, famines, and the odd musical review, until sometime last week, when in a fit of Darwinian curiosity, I decided to see what MMOGs had evolved into. I headed off to the local game store and scarfed up two of the more recent offerings (more recent than what I’ve played anyway): Everquest II and Guild Wars.

Now you’d think that it would take more than just a few days of play to churn out a review of one of these, well, massive puppies, and you’d be right. But in this particular instance I’m only going to review a small portion of each game. Specifically, that part where the CD or DVD hits your hard drive: THE INSTALLATION.

Now normally the installation is (or at least should be) where you spend only a small fraction of your time, compared to the time you spend playing. It is an important part of the game, because it’s one of the earliest experiences with the product, and more importantly it’s the last thing standing between you and getting your hot little hands on some virtual ordinance and splashing the pixilated landscape with various orc, alien, or ninja bits and gobbets. Ideally this should be as short and simple as possible, and include a glimpse of what’s in store, via tasty screen shots that almost keep your attention diverted from the slug-like movement of the progress bar. And herein lies our story, for these two products embody opposite poles of that experience; one inspiring visions of enraged velociraptors dancing in my head and the other, the proverbial sugar plums (or maybe it was Bettie Page, but I digress…).

EVERQUEST II
The game box promises unparalleled character customization, unprecedented voiceover, and state of the art 3D graphics. The graphics are of some concern because I want to install it on a laptop — a fairly high-end laptop, but a laptop nonetheless. I consult the system requirements and after several eye-watering moments (they’re printed in the same font-size used to carve entire books on a grain of rice), I determine that I need 64 megs of video memory. No problem, I think, I’m using an NVidia GeForce4 Go with — huzzah! — 64 megs. BRIEF NOTE TO SELF: The words “no problem” should generally raise hackles, strike terror, and sound every air-raid siren within 10 kilometers. END NOTE. I decide to get the DVD version and stave off any repetitive stress injury associated with inserting innumerable installation CDs.

Back home I fire up the laptop, slap in the #1 installation DVD and steel myself for a long install (it’s on two DVDs after all). I’m not disappointed. It seems to go on forever and the little progress bar is doing a good imitation of real-time plate tectonics, but it’s expected these days so I persevere. And then, with the install almost complete, the first velociraptor rears up from the darkness and leers in my general direction — I get a message that my graphics card has insufficient memory to run the game. I’m irked; doubly irked, no less.

First, because the video memory check was placed at the end of the installation process. Good design practice dictates that you put such a check at the start of the process and save the player the time and trouble of installing and uninstalling the software. This is even more egregious when it follows a long install.

Second, because I had checked the video memory requirements before purchasing. Frustrated, I pick up the box and, after finding the strongest pair of reading glasses known to man, re-read the system requirements: “64 megabytes of texture memory” — the key phrase being “texture memory”. Somehow I had missed those two fateful words (probably because I was going cross-eyed reading print dwarfed by your average gnat). This meant that 64 megabytes weren’t going to cut it, because some of that memory would be used for things other than textures. This strikes me as somewhat deceptive and at the very least misleading. Most folks probably won’t realize that 64 megs of texture is different then having a 64 meg video card (and to be perfectly frank they shouldn’t have to). In addition, each generation of video cards tends to double the on-board memory. Prior to the 64 meg boards, there were 32 meg boards, and before that it was 16 megs. For most video board manufacturers, the next step up from 64 megs is 128. For all practical purposes, the video requirements should have been 128 megabytes, not the misleading 64 megabytes of “texture memory”.

Luckily (sort of), I have another machine with 128 megs of video memory. So I uninstall Everquest II from the laptop and set about reinstalling it on the other computer. Even with a faster DVD and hard drive, the install still seems to span millennia. At least this time I’m rewarded with a sign-up screen. I fill in all the appropriate blanks, run the gauntlet of multiple enticements to upgrade my account and spend more money (NOTE TO SONY ONLINE MARKETERS: after the first install fiasco, and a long second install, I’m in no mood to succumb to an impulse purchase).

Game time, at last… What? I have to download some patches first? Well OK, that seems to be de rigeur these days so I resign myself to yet another delay and wander off to watch some paint dry. Two hours later, I’m done, but it’s not. To make matters worse the download crashes as I’m watching it. I check my connections, but everything seems to be up and running. My browser can see the internet, as can Steam and several other apps. I shut down Everquest and restart it. After logging in again the download restarts. I note with some irritation that, instead of picking up where it left off — in the middle of a really large file, it starts loading from the beginning of the self same gargantuan file. In this day and age any download software worth its salt will continue an interrupted download right where it left off rather than starting all over again. Resigned, I wander off again, this time to watch some lichen grow. An hour or so later I’m back again and…it’s crashed…again. So again, I check the connection and, again, everything seems to be OK, except, of course, Everquest II. By this time it’s getting pretty late so I fire it up one last time in the forlorn hope that it will manage to finish the download while I slumber. Velociraptors trip the light fantastic in the shadowy fringes of my dreams.

The next day, after filling my children with a hearty sugar drenched breakfast (they were visibly vibrating) and siccing them on their mom, I return to the install. Not unsurprisingly, it has crashed again. The download status bar tells me that it has downloaded only about a fourth of the patches it needs. I consult the Everquest II website, but find nothing that seems to improve the problem, and they don’t have phone support on weekends so that’s out as well. I check all the Everquest II launcher settings. No joy there either. And there’s no sneaking around the patches, the “Play” button is apparently a no-show until all the patches have downloaded. By now the dancing velociraptors have crept out of the shadows (damned if they weren’t doing some sort of grim minuet) and I’m seized with the sudden desire to share my pain with others. Hence this review.

Shutdown. Restart. Fail. Shutdown. Restart. Fail. By now it’s sheer bloody-mindedness that keeps me going. With some of the really long files it seems to take three or four tries to complete. But I’m a driven man and I’m going to make this software my bitch or die trying. Many hours later, death is beginning to look like an attractive option. Now to be honest, I hadn’t spent all of that time dealing with the install. I had other tasks and small dervish-like children to deal with, but every time I went past the computer I would go through the mantra: Shutdown. Restart. Fail (the velociraptors were line dancing to it).

Finally, early in the evening I wander past and — wonder of wonders — something has changed! The play button is visible! Hallelujah! Now before we get to the next tragic act where I actually push that button, it’s important to note that by my estimation, even without the crashes, it probably would have taken several hours to download the numerous and very large files that were required to patch the software. And that’s with DSL, not a 56k modem (this thing must be a special circle of Hell for the poor bastards stuck with a dial-up connection).

With some degree of trepidation I push the play button. After waiting for several logo screens, the music swells and…the software starts looking for a server. And looking. And looking. And looking. It goes through its entire list of servers twice before giving up and telling me that it can’t log in and I should try again later. Who knows, it’s a busy time of night for MMOGs and maybe they’ve got some servers off-line. Or the velociraptors ate their homework. Whatever. I decide to give them the benefit of the doubt and try again later. As it turns out — much later. Its 3:00am, the midnight of the soul (and my patience), before I return for another bout of masochism. I fire up the game and again it fails to find a server. OK, there’s no way that there are enough people playing this late to clog up ALL of their servers, so something’s going south somewhere. But I’m just too tired to deal with it, so for a second night I stagger off to bed without having even glimpsed the game. I fall asleep counting velociraptors.

Morning again and I’m grimly determined to get the game running. It’s somewhat daunting as the problem could be anywhere along the chain, from the Everquest servers to my ISP to my DSL modem to my router to my computer, to my firewall and finally the software. There’s probably not a lot I can do about their servers or my ISP, so I start with my end, where I can at least randomly twiddle settings and threaten hardware with a claw hammer. I shudder when I contemplate the modem and router, seeing as how they require several spells of warding and the conjuring of a minor daemon to even think about touching them. Luckily I dimly recall reading something about firewall security settings when I was trying to fix the download problem. So it’s back to the Everquest II web site.

To give them their due, they include the info you would need to specifically configure the firewall for Everquest II. But by the looks of it this is not for the faint of heart. I finally track down the specific recommendations for my firewall (normally I run Zone Alarm on my machines, but this particular one came with Norton’s Internet Security Suite installed). Essentially their advice comes down to lowering my firewall security to its lowest setting. I’m not real fond of this solution, but for a quick test I cross my fingers and lower the firewall, praying there’s nothing nasty on the other side, waiting to get in. Huzzah! Almost anticlimactically the game finds a server and at long last, I’M ACTUALLY IN THE GAME. I heave a sigh of exasperated relief, my blood pressure drops, the velociraptors retreat (though their vague forms still haunt the mental mists) and after TWO DAYS I’m finally playing the game…

But here is where we draw the curtain, to be raised again upon a full review of the game. A separate review, because as a reviewer I’m going to set all this aside and review the game on its own merits. But I have to say that if I was just playing it as your average gamer, I would have been a very unhappy camper. For one thing, long before investing two days in the install (even the lines at Disneyland aren’t that long!) I would have returned it to the store, and even if I did stick it out, I’d start the game with a bad impression, raising the bar for my satisfaction and pushing me closer to that “last straw” that inspires me to close my account and seek my virtual double life elsewhere. It’s also likely that your average gamer would have stuck Sony Online with at least one support call (they dodged that bullet with me because, as I’ve wasted way too many cumulative years of my life on hold, it’s always my last resort).

So let’s recap:
1) The video memory check was poorly placed at the end of a long, glacial install.
2) The requirements were printed a in a font that required an electron microscope to read and was easily misread. I’ve checked every game box that I have here at home and the requirements of every single one are printed in a larger font than that used on Everquest II.
3) The listed video requirements were confusing if not misleading.
4) The size of the patches required were huge, taking an inordinate amount of time to download. Why weren’t these on the distribution disks? Were they really so important as to justify delaying game play for several hours?
5) The download code could not continue from a partial download, requiring long files to be completely re-downloaded from the start.
6) It took two freakin’ days to install the game and get it running!

I won’t count the fact that the downloads repeatedly failed because I don’t know for certain whether the cause was on my side or theirs. Neither will I count the game’s initial failure to work through the firewall, as that’s too common with online games. I am a bit leery that the support documents advise lowering security settings for some firewalls (which compromises far more than just the ports). It’s really easy to forget and leave the firewall lowered. Interestingly enough, I later installed the original Everquest (for comparison’s sake) and it installed and ran just fine with the normal firewall settings. They also suggest, in their router support document, that if you experience a problem connecting to a game or patch server, you should reset your router to its default settings. Network savvy users will know whether this is OK or not, but anyone else could get into a world of trouble with this advice. In particular this can really screw up a wireless router, especially if you’re using encryption (shame on you if you aren’t). At the very least there should be a better warning about the possible loss of settings critical to their network. A quick perusal of the Guild Wars and World of Warcraft websites indicates that neither of these games advocate the wholesale lowering of firewall security settings or the resetting of routers to default settings. Both give information on setting the proper ports for their use.

I give the Everquest II install:
1 STAR (out of a possible 10)
and that only because I was eventually able to get the thing running.

Lets hope the actual game fares much better.

GUILD WARS
Lest this dismay the folks at ArenaNet, let me state up front that this is going to be short and sweet, but in this case that’s a good thing, because ultimately a review of your install process should be short and sweet.

Following the travails listed above, it’s with some wariness that, late the following night, I start the Guild Wars install. The velociraptors hover over my shoulder as I slip in the first CD. Like the first part of the Everquest install, loading the game onto my hard drive seems to take forever. But as stated above, that’s pretty much to be expected. It does seem somewhat shorter, but still long enough for me to walk away from the computer while it does its thing, stopping back only long enough to load in another CD before wandering off again.

The install finished without incident (the velociraptors were clearly disgruntled) and I set about filling in all the appropriate sign-up info and running a slightly shorter marketing gauntlet. Now for the moment of truth, and sure enough the game reports that patches need to be downloaded. I groan. The velociraptors smile and start tapping their big disemboweling claws in 3/4 time. I wander away, anticipating another file marathon. A short time later I stop back by to check the progress and lo and behold, the download is complete and I’m in the game! The velociraptors are clearly beside themselves with disappointment and, as I sit down to create my first character, they flounce off in a huff (don’t ask me how velociraptors flounce, there are some things you just don’t want in your head). It’s late so I don’t get much game time in, but I’m just happy to be actually playing it the same evening I install it. So it’s off to bed and dreams of Bettie…er…sugar plums dancing in my head.

And that’s the way it should be. No muss. No fuss. No waltzing velociraptors. Just get it on to my hard drive, take my name and number, and let me get down to monster mashing.

I give the Guild Wars install:
9 STARs (a 10 would require a radically cool install)
It did exactly what an install should do: It didn’t break. It didn’t take very long. It didn’t get in my way. And it didn’t make me think twice about it.

So that was my experience. I’d like to hear about yours. Has anyone else encountered the same painful install? Is it common in the current MMOG universe to have huge patches? Whose install is good? Whose is bad? Leave your comments below and let us all know.

I’ll end this with a plea to game publishers and developers everywhere: Keep your installs as short and simple as possible. Do your requirement checks up front and don’t make me wait hours (or days) to play your game. Oh, and please don’t feed the velocirapters — those claws are really hell on the brain tissue.

© 2005 Daniel C. Carver