[HN Gopher] The Cabal: Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-... ___________________________________________________________________ The Cabal: Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-Life Author : thisismyswamp Score : 76 points Date : 2021-01-16 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.gamasutra.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.gamasutra.com) | ArtWomb wrote: | Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth | philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly | incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive | narrative vision in Half-Life. | | Contrast this with "What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077" exegesis | from Bloomberg this morning and I'm still not sure anyone can | point to a single reason beyond "we were too ambitious". I wish | this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good | GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. | UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it | scale to teams of hundreds of designers? | | Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout | | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk... | klmadfejno wrote: | >UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does | it scale to teams of hundreds of designers? | | This comment seems to come out of nowhere. Cyberpunk isn't | written in UE4 to the best of my knowledge. But rant time! I | love ue4 blueprints. I think they're the bees knees because | documentation of things is so hard, but blueprints make that so | easy! The ability to grab a bunch of nodes and collapse them | into one node means you can comfortably make your top level | view of things just a series of collapsed nodes with long form | descriptions in full sentences. So your high level stuff is | basically pseudocode. | | Most people don't do this of course. But then most people don't | write good code, and lots of people writing blueprints one sees | in the wild don't even know how to code to begin with. | | Blueprints are, imo, what people really want when they think | they want jupyter notebooks for data science. | ffhhj wrote: | It's interesting to me how the physics bugs such as characters | and object getting stuck inside walls, flying cars, failed | inverse kinematics and so on have been the usual bugs for so | many years now, but there isn't yet a methodology to prevent | gamedevs from falling in those old known pitholes. These are | very difficult to detect by QA and the way to fix them is | tweaking some parameters and geometry here and there. There | should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find whether | future calculations will cause an invalid state on some object | and choose a transformation that won't produce such conflict. | programzeta wrote: | Some devs do focus on it - this blog post goes into detail | about how someone worked through making sure you could walk | everywhere in The Witness: | https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0005 | smogcutter wrote: | > There should be a way to supervise the physics engine, find | whether future calculations will cause an invalid state on | some object and choose a transformation that won't produce | such conflict. | | This is probably just me not really understanding the domain, | but this sounds like a version of the halting problem? | | Even if it's not, isn't that just an extra layer doing what | the collision engine is meant to do in the first place? And | if you can monitor a system to ensure correctness, couldn't | you use a similar mechanism to make the original system | correct to begin with? And if you _can't_ do that, how can | you expect to make the supervisory layer correct? | ffhhj wrote: | Let's say when a cylinder of the car, a wheel, bumps into | the infinitesimally sharp edge of the road, it could | somehow result in a "singularity" that launches the wheel, | the vehicle and its occupants to the sky, and that could be | a perfectly valid result of that algorithm. The algo's task | is not to determine whether that produces some "weird" | animation from the player's perspective. | | For that reason there should be a "user level" | interpretation of the physics engine results, looking ahead | in time and correcting. | vvanders wrote: | As with everything in gamedev it comes down to one thing: | performance. Anything that can be faked, approximated our | outright hacked in the name of perf or memory will be. | | The canonical example for me(which was ironically is in Half- | Life) is that the AI for the grunts is surprisingly simple. | If you throw a grenade they were scripted to shout "grenade" | and navigate to the nearest nav node. | | Tons of people thought there was really complex AI behind | that behavior but it was just a couple of really well | telegraphed "if()" checks. | PeterisP wrote: | "The meetings were only six hours a day" ... ahhh ... (for five | months straight) | jgilias wrote: | > If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need | to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will | happen. | | This! I remember being scared to move around when playing Half- | Life the first time. Flickering lights still make an instant | association with crowbars to me. Great to read a bit more in | detail how they managed to make something so great! | Blikkentrekker wrote: | > _If they walk into a room with other characters, those | characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, | if not calling out their name._ | | If only Gordon returned this courtesy. | | Silent protagonists are such an awful thing. | nitrogen wrote: | You are Gordon. Did you acknowledge the NPCs by looking at | them? | Blikkentrekker wrote: | I realize why they do it, but it can never work because the | n.p.c.'s do not react to me in return. I can talk to them, | say things to them, but they will never respond to anything I | say. | | Thus, the end result is that Gordon Freeman is a man whom | many speak to, yet who never speaks back, and no one | considers this to odd to say the least. -- the conversations | thus appear ridiculous. | | It worked better with Chell, because others do not that Chell | does not speak back, and Chell actually canonically refuses | to speak out of stubbornness, so it's amusing to see Wheatley | being obviously uncomfortable from the fact that Chell does | not speak back and is simply blabbering to fill the awkward | silence. | dx87 wrote: | I'd much rather the protagonist be silent in an FPS. It ruins | the immersion for me, unless there are dialogue choices so I | still have some agency. I quit playing Dishonored 2 after a | couple of hours because the protagonist keeps talking as a way | to narrate things for the player, but it's just silly being a | stealth assassin constantly talking to yourself. | Blikkentrekker wrote: | Obviously in a stealth game it makes no sense for the | protagonist to talk. | | But it does not make sense either that a protagonist not | answer when he be spoken to. | | It was quite ridiculous in _StarCraft_ where there was a | player character who had a rank and was an actual character, | his allies discuss strategic plans with him and talk to him, | but he never speaks back, and is only addressed by title, for | he lacks a name. | | In _StarCraft II_ , the game withdrew from the notion of a | "player character" and the player simply took control of | various different actual characters with dialog and a face. | Netcob wrote: | That's a refreshingly good example of "design by ...cabal..." | actually working out pretty well. I think the key element is how | the members actually had to implement their designs. If you just | come up with a lazy compromise, it'll start haunting you | immediately, and not just after the worker bees did their thing. | | I think the "cabal" responsible for USB 3.1.1.1.gen2-420gig- | whatever should have done the same, with each meeting ending in | every member having to explain to their grandma why she can't | connect her monitor to her laptop even though the cable fits | perfectly, and that it's somehow _both_ the wrong cable and the | wrong laptop port. | danbolt wrote: | I've noticed that happening a lot in my time in the games | industry as well. The person making top-down design role isn't | exposed to the friction that their decisions are making down | the hierarchy. I think the worst part is that they're not even | necessarily as invested in the product as someone else, so | they're kind of structurally going along with the inefficient | situation they're in. | wgjordan wrote: | (1999) | jimbob45 wrote: | " Include an expert from every functional area (programming, art, | and so on). Arguing over an issue that no one at the meeting | actually understands is a sure way to waste everyone's time." | | This always sounds good in theory but ends up with unnecessary | individuals falling asleep during meetings. I prefer either a | staggered approach to meetings where the likely unnecessary | people are only invited to the end of the meeting OR are simply | "on-hand" for the meeting in case they need to be pulled in. | | I don't care how critical the input is, if you pull someone into | a three hour meeting and they only contribute five sentences, | they're not going to be happy with you. | danielscrubs wrote: | They where the ones that where going to be responsible for it | so how can they be unnecessary? He even said they started to | say no more and more as the deadline started to loom over them. | Jare wrote: | In most significant decisions in gamedev you want art, design | and engineering (at least - QA, audio, animation and a number | of others as well) to be involved. Some people from one | discipline may be versed enough in another to cover the role, | but the role must still be present, or there will be pain and | work thrown away later on. | | (incidentally, the ability to understand an issue from these | multiple but interrelated angles is what makes experienced | people so valuable in gamedev, and their constant loss to other | less crazy industries so painful) | kaba0 wrote: | It depends on the program domain, but I think it must have been | quite fun designing a game as opposed to the client still | doesn't know what it wants and this API should instead do this. | walrus01 wrote: | In the context of Cabal and video games, I was expecting | something about Destiny 1/2 | throwaway3699 wrote: | I think the Cabal concept is especially interesting in the wider | context of Valve's "self organising" culture. It doesn't seem | that this structure was designed, but was emergent. | PicassoCTs wrote: | This structure is definitely not emergent, if left alone, human | groups form little fiefdoms around local "lords", the hierarchy | and bureaucracy of a feudal system emerges. To have working | anarcho-syndicalism is a constant fight against this mechanism. | | Who decides how much anyone gets paid, and how many virtual | crystal gold smileys someone gets for doing what he currently | does? | | How many golden-smileys do you have to have on your shoulder to | influence that decision? | jokethrowaway wrote: | The Cabal sounds great and I'm looking forward to try it. | | I'll pick the projects carefully though, as it's impossible to | ship more than two products with this methodology. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-16 23:00 UTC)