Yet some more GDC Goodness!

But thats kinda the point - it’s not produced by a whole studio of people, so it’s almost certainly not going to be of as high a quality. But by pretending that they’re just as good graphically you reduce the credability of the project of a whole. This makes people less receptive when you come to talk about whats really important about the game.

ROFL :slight_smile:

OK, so, back to the point … on the one hand, I know the problem extremely well: you’re promoting a server technology to the games industry, and server technologies do not have graphics, so if the graphics look good it means nothing, but if they look bad … well, this is the games industry, and everyone judges you by rolling demos and screenshots. I have cried over this unfairness many times ;), and feel for Chris et al. (NB for any who don’t know my background - I’ve been there and been through this problem many times over with partners, investors, and customers. It’s really harsh!)

On the other hand (and this is what I was getting at), this is AFAICS going to be Sun’s big representation at GDC this year. Yet, it’s going to go up there and make Java games look crummy, simply because everyone judges by rolling demo and graphics. It’s not fair, but it comes up as a number one problem for java games developers every single month on this java-gaming.org site alone - again and again we’re lamenting the problem of people seeing poor graphics games and judging java by them.

Of course, I’m not saying Shawn et al did a bad job at all. If you judge it as a game done by a couple of guys, it’s fine.

However, the graphics are terrible by today’s standards, and they’re the best of the ones you’ve shown - the other games have graphics that I’ve not seen in games since 1999. Look at the entrants into the IGF, and you’ll see that the base standard for that alone is substantially above this game, and that’s what people are fed as “the back-room-developer games”, i.e. what they think of when “a couple of people” do a game together. (no, this isn’t fair - but thats how it is :frowning: ). I get unsolicited applications for game programmers on my desk with portfolio games that look substantially better (again, not fair - these are for games with no substantial gameplay, usually no more complexity than tetris - but there is a world of difference in the looks).

Worse, if you were at GDC last year, Sun had the Agency 9 demo with better-than-UT2003/Quake3 graphics on the stand. That stuff is a heck of a lot better looking than the screenshots above.

Aren’t you worried the effect this is going to have?

I think thats a fair statement based on your opinion. However, I also think you do the attendees of GDC down. From the photos of the people who attend you might assume they’re a bunch of overgrown teenagers with a passion for hair dye but from the collection of people I’ve met who’ve attended and the people I know who do games dev for a living they’re all perfectly capable of making solid technical decisions.

That means they’ll look at the tech demo and go meh at the graphics (its pretty, but its not ground breaking - its not meant to be). Like any body attending a conference they’ll find out what the technology is being advertised, realise its server side and ask more. To say that they’d just see graphics, not up to Quake 4 (or whatever), not interested would make them very shallow indeed. I’d think they’d start asking some pretty pertinent questions about Dark Star which I hope there are good answers for.

Infact, one friend who works for a games developer (who I might finally get to meet next week) said (after I pointed him at this thread). “What does he think? They show us something shiny and we all just stare transfixed :)”

Your point I hope is that while this demo will sell DarkStar to people looking for server technologies does it not present maybe a bad picture of client side Java. Not that the game is bad but will the message be to non-server oriented people:

“Heres a game we’re showcasing the power of Java with, look how average the graphics are”

Kev

PS. “Average” obviously compared to the top names at GDC (not one of my limited creations)

I’m afraid I share Adam’s reservations. Read this article The Bane Of Being Very good and Adam’s points may become more clear. In fact this very article is about to make me quit the directorship of the company I work for now and throw away £1m of share options because I am fed up of mediocrity. It matters to some people. Especially the games industry, where just being good isn’t good enough.

Cas :slight_smile:

:o

I’d recommend talking to a therapist before making that decision…

Cas, you might not be conscious of the life quality your current job probably provides you. This counts a lot. Maybe try to negociate some sort of partial work time.

Bugger that. I am available for contract work again if anyone wants me.

I ain’t cheap :wink:

Cas :slight_smile:

Sure but how many hours a week would you have to work for contracts compared to a permanent job?

Well this is becoming quite off topic!

I think “quality” is far to subjectiove a judgement.

Is the animation in Trobal; trouble as complex as that done by bigger studios? No. Is the qaulity as good? IMHO yes or even better then some…

To me, facny/expensive doesn’t necessarly equate to quality. TT bit off a style they could do well ona budget and then did it very well. To me, thats quality.

Methinks you’ll find that the animation in TT is as good as any in the industry today… look closely! All the cleverer for the polygon budget they had.

Cas :slight_smile:

Two issues here:

  1. A large number of important people at GDC either know little about tech or simply don’t bother to look under the hood. The former are non-programmers, the latter are ex programmers who know that these days its so easy to get good artists that if you have crap art that says bad things about your ability to put a team together, and both groups use it (graphical quality) as a pre-filter for any conversation they have.

I’m not saying thats fair, just that I know a lot do that. To me it seems more of a justification after the fact :).

  1. Image, in a marketing sense, is not shaped by the few out of 10,000 who stop to ask questions. Its shaped by the many who glance in on their way past. It’s also shaped by the journalists, who generally are not in a wise enough position to ask questions.

EDIT: that was too brief to be clear; what I mean is that image is shaped by the masses and the opinion-formers. The decent, smart games programmer is neither. To be honest, if they were, then the whole java game dev situation wouldn’t be such a problem :).

i.e. I wasn’t referring to “professional games programmers” in my previous post. GDC is only something like max of 1/3 programmers by attendance, IIRC. You also have swathes of marketing, business dev, production, film companies, artists, etc.

Adam is, once again, precisely on target. If you want to play with the big boys you have to at least appear serious.

Cas :slight_smile:

Well the demos don’t exactly compare to this which is a shame:

Neither this screenshot represents the state of the art since this game doesn’t use the most expensive algorithms for shadows and hdr.

It wouldn’t be difficult to make a java3d game that uses dynamic soft shadows, hdr, pixel and vertex shaders in everything with very high-poly models right? Then just throw a game with minimal gameplay with a 5Ghz, 100Gb ram with a dual radeon x9000 super uber pc system and see how interested people will come like flies.

The other shame is that this game will not be available for the Mac (at least not for a while), and I doubt it will run on Linux. But the point is clear… Java needs a showy title like this before it will get the sort of attention it needs.

oh, im drooling with those oblivion previews as i drooled with morrowind’s ones, but that’s the point, i’ll have to uprgrade my system in order to play it at “medium” quality

Java is suposed to compete with other languages in any market and not just the medium market?

This stuff is good but i think we need a Java Quake 4 to show people that Java games can sell anywhere.

yeh but i suspect by the time quake 4 gets ported to java (if ever) quake 6, doom 5 will already be out, playing catchup always won’t work, we need to really beat the competition.

I wasn’t talking about a port but a game that uses the latest cg tech comparable to any other state of the art game. This limits gameplay like hell because almost all the game cycles are going to be used to render dynamic soft shadows and crap like that but im afraid this is what needs to be done to convince some influent people.

or they could just use the E3 trick that a lot of game dev’s used at the last E3, just show some pre-rendered fmv and claim its real time using java ;D, if it really is about graphics.