11/17/2004
I never thought of it that way...
If you read Games.Slashdot then you probably already know about this, but there is a very cool article/interview with Chris Butcher of Bungie Studios. He talks about the AI programming/design he did on the recently released Halo 2.
In this article he talks about how Halo 2 was designed to be a "simulation engine", unlike Quake and Unreal. (His explanation is those games are more of a "graphical engine" where the focus of the game is what the camera, i.e. the player, sees/goes/does.)
This was mind-blowing for me to read, I had never thought about it like that. But I think its a pretty true statement, Quake and Unreal's engine are pretty graphics oriented. By making Halo 2 more "simulation oriented" this allows the designers and map makers to make a more immersive experience.
Go read the article/interview, it explains it much better than I can. With all of the thought I've been giving lately to writing code that is more "data-centric" I can't believe I never thought about this in a game setting before. Or maybe before I was thinking about a different data set, like the game's world data, as opposed to the "game data".
At any rate, this is some good stuff. Now it makes me want to go and look at the crap I've written lately and see if I was looking at the right angle when I wrote it...
In this article he talks about how Halo 2 was designed to be a "simulation engine", unlike Quake and Unreal. (His explanation is those games are more of a "graphical engine" where the focus of the game is what the camera, i.e. the player, sees/goes/does.)
This was mind-blowing for me to read, I had never thought about it like that. But I think its a pretty true statement, Quake and Unreal's engine are pretty graphics oriented. By making Halo 2 more "simulation oriented" this allows the designers and map makers to make a more immersive experience.
Go read the article/interview, it explains it much better than I can. With all of the thought I've been giving lately to writing code that is more "data-centric" I can't believe I never thought about this in a game setting before. Or maybe before I was thinking about a different data set, like the game's world data, as opposed to the "game data".
At any rate, this is some good stuff. Now it makes me want to go and look at the crap I've written lately and see if I was looking at the right angle when I wrote it...
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