Category: Audio&Games

I needed to visualize the power of our devices from tablets to desktops to understand a bit what is going on in terms of processing power. Today we have a large amount of choices, much more than before. If we look at how games run things are more complicated than ever: some games will run with nothing, others are better with a quad core CPU, others really love a big amount of video memory… Between programmer skills tools and architecture, things can go from 60 fps at all time to terrible stuttering and bad experience.

But what about the differences in raw power, just to understand what’s going on under the hood? Well I tried to make this chart and boy, it’s not easy. Nobody’s using the same criteria so I had to rely on GFlops which are not that accurate on what a processor can do But that’ll do for my little experiment.

 
Ta-da

Wow. I didn’t expect that tablets, notebooks and desktops would be separated by orders of magnitude. I thought tablets were really close to notebooks but it’s nowhere near, especially knowing that tablets numbers are for CPU/GPU where for notebooks and desktops it’s only the GPU part.

3D games can totally run smoothly on tablets but you can’t expect good AI or complex behaviors with complex 3D at under 100 Gflops. Therefore, games on these devices will stay simple for a long time (they can’t bump processing power as fast with fanless and battery-oriented designs compared to graphic cards).

In the notebook world things are a little crazier: the Intel HD3000 -a steaming pile of shit according to computer enthusiasts- is making a killing in sales despite being way under AMD’s power solutions (yes, at the same thermal envelope). To give an idea, the AMD A10 is roughly at the level of a X360. That’s already a lot of processing power.

But then look at the desktop: the GTX 560 Ti is the second most used graphic card on Steam -the first one is the HD3000- and it’s vastly superior crunching numbers, over 10 times more than what the best seller is doing! It’s not difficult to understand why game developers have problems to scale game engines if between two machines you have 10 times more power. And if we add dual, quad core or more CPUs, the amount of power you can get for under $1000 becomes ludicrous.

I included the biggest GPUs available today -$500 cards- to see how far we went and well numbers show it: it’s insane. And it’s single chip, some graphic cards have two of these monsters (2×4300!!)

What does it say for apps? There’s a tremendous, unused amount of processing power available today. Technology is way more advanced than what programmers can do. They are barely starting to use multiple cores, can you believe that? Code parallelization is a bitch so coders never rushed to it.

Why is that important? Because like Chris Hecker said, we never have enough of power. The more, the better. Better behaviors, better experience, more can’t be bad. The problem is the market goes toward the underpowered, can-last-14-hours-on-battery chips.

What’s the problem with that? Well although some would say it gets rid of bad programmers who can’t use brute force power to make their apps faster, it also pushes good programmers to optimize a lot. It’s great and all but at the same time, you want good programmers to build things, make the app better add a killer feature not make it run perfectly and smoothly, that should be a given.

So trends to come? 2D is going to stay strong. Unity will get even stronger. And I hope that we will find bridges between tablets and graphic beasts so that we can use them remotely to beef up our underpowered new mobile devices overlords when needed.

R.O.B, asking himself where his Virtual Boy’s at.

Fantastic Ian Bogost’s article on the Wii U. I like the fact that Ian demystifies Nintendo’s history and shows that as all companies do, they’ve been ferocious and merciless as they’ve also been innovative, genuine and honest with things like this Wii U kind of saying “sorry, we don’t know where gaming goes but here a new box to play with”.

Other game companies did the exact same: MS made console development a reality for anyone,  they did the Kinect experiment, Sony totally understood developers and an entire generation of gamers with the Playstation, Apple discovered the App Store magnet and touch devices etc and they all did some terrible shit too from greedy corporation-ish stuff to totally missing the boat. I like seeing this human side in massive corporations. Nobody’s perfect, even entities.

Developers argue and defend their worshipped brand -as usual- but the point to me in this Wii U case is more about whether or not Nintendo is getting better at what they were bad at: third-party support, online distribution. Better but still shitty. Whatever happens with this new console, things will probably benefit Nintendo and only Nintendo like the past 30 years.

A comment caught my eye:

Atari crap may have caused the downfall of consoles but not computer games. The glut of crap crushed the game industry but not people who loved to make games. The mainstream may have become disenchanted with consoles, but computer games defined the core. Nintendo was vital to re-establishing the industry and the mainstream, but without them, computer games would have continued to spread.

I saw that. The 8/16bit console era was exploding but so was the PC. It’s the start of darlings like ID or Epic who was in the 90s making over $100,000 selling and shipping games on floppy discs. There was money outside the console market and the best were doing fine, both in the US and Europe: Japan is the exception, not the norm. Looking at Japan as the future for games elsewhere is wrong: FPS never worked there and F2P doesn’t do so well here. Consoles became big in the West but PCs stayed and are getting stronger everyday.

Unfortunately, their childish game themes entrenched a cultural meme, that games should not be taken seriously. Whereas, computer games continued to produce a variety of mature content. I think Nintendo was good for the industry, but not for game culture.

Pretty much the opposite for Sony! It’s funny how culturally the childish visuals never took over older generations, it always grabs the youth though. The problem is we have more and more old people, the average gamer is now like 33 year old. But consoles and app stores are terribly narrowing what subjects we can explore in games because of censorship. Even Steam doesn’t allow Adults Only games. It’s weird!

And this is where the paradox lies: we used to make games for adults when money was really coming from kids and now we make child-looking, teenager-ish games when money really is coming from much older and mature crowds.

KillScreen article. It’s on its way to get fully funded. Awesome sauce.

 
Welcome aboard for a sweet ass trip to experimentation.

I was watching some Wii U footage and saw Namco’s Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

It’s the same animation routines that you can find in the first game which came out in 1994 on Playstation. 18 years ago.

That is some serious economies of scale right here.

That is also why no one of my age outside the industry cares about consoles today.

Notice that the instrumentation takes up the entire spectrum of sound at the beginning, but then right as the vocals enter at 18 seconds in, they part. The strings become higher, the bass gets a bit lower, and everything that was in between the two drops out. It’s a virtual parting of the waters to make room for the voices in their proper register. Just to show it’s not a fluke, it does the same thing at 0:43.

I can’t think of a single game that really nails this concept, which surprises me.

There. It’s not surprising if you understand how game audio works and worked on different platforms. To do what the author wants in a game means having individual control of each instrument in the music.

Technically, no problem. In a game though with constraints of I/O, RAM and CPU usage and things more important than music, it’s impossible to dynamically mix individual streams of audio. We’re talking about let’s say 8/16 minimum individual streams fading in/out, just for one track. It’s overkill. Sound is already taking so much space on install.

That’s why to introduce this much beloved dynamic in a technically much lighter way, we need MIDI. Like it or not, it solves all the issues at once if you’re willing to sacrifice some sound quality. The created dynamic is worth it.

We don’t solve that through discussions between composers and designers about emotional goals in a game and its music, we solve that early on by trying, iterating music over a custom audio system allowing the depth wanted while staying in line with the rest of the game development. It’s a fucking huge task that’s been solved in the past here and there but never spread. 3D graphics took the priority.

Looking forward to another article wondering why we don’t do game audio like we do audio for films on a website for professional game developers that I’ve been reading for ten years.

Devs: so this Windows 8 app store thing, I don’t know…

MS: look people, we tried to learn from our industry successes and we’re offering you another channel to broadcast your games and apps, what is so wrong about that?

Devs: well we always loved the openness of Windows and want to take advantage of it.

MS: that’s cute and all but that’s also bullshit. How many of you developed great things that took advantage of Windows’ freedom in the past ten years? How many valued the freedom?

Devs: …

MS: that’s right, pretty much no one. Meanwhile how many run for/found success on XBLA and Apple app store?

Devs: …

MS: exactly. How could you blame us for taking reality in account? You guys rushed for complicated approvals, expensive console dev certifications and liberticidal walled gardens. The better you guys are, the more you want to be trapped in closed systems. Blame yourself for opening the Pandora box…

Devs: but you’re supposed to be wise because you’re a giant.

MS: I’m just a company with shareholders and my goal is to make money, like all tech companies and even non-tech companies. Sorry.

Devs: but we’re making games which is art which doesn’t really need to make money.

MS: make up your mind and explain why you would do anything to be on Steam, then.

Devs: to reach more people.

MS: You don’t need Steam to reach people on the internet. Come on now.

Devs: Yeah but you fucked it up with GFWL and PC OEMs never have been able to make great, simple gaming machines.

MS: I’ll give you that but today through the rise of laptops and tablets things are more unified than ever. We offer all the tools you want to develop easily and another channel to distribute your games and apps, we finally understood why design and performances are important and you still can install whatever you want, what the hell do you want?

Devs: We don’t know what we want but we know that we don’t want you to do it!

 

That’s pretty much the vibe today in the game industry. So mature.

It’s a great blog post but here’s where I think “being indie” doesn’t really make sense.

If there’s no escape from the matrix of Capital -and I agree- and if “indieness” is a gradient then

There’s no need for *more* autonomous or more indie people. We are already on a gradient, people are free. It’s a bias to think people want, lean toward independence and are more or less capable of doing so due to education, geographic location social class, etc. A lot of people have everything greenlighted to be more autonomous but don’t want to be more autonomous. That’s what Tales of tales expresses in this interview, game developers genuinely love to be cozy in a huge team in Montreal and love what they do. They could go their own way but don’t. It doesn’t mean that they don’t try internally to push the medium. Creativity can come from anywhere.

Independence is a value, a state of mind. I’m strongly independent because being an orphan and adopted built that up in me. But some people grew up in strong communities taking care of things and don’t have the same thoughts as adults about independency, it’s not so important for them. Independence is a direction for some and isn’t for others. We are indeed on a gradient.

What counts to me in making games is not the” indieness level” or how to go toward more independence: people who need it, will or already are independent. What is important is that the people in the team share something strong. Like a band. It’s the chemistry between members that will create great, interesting, fun, amazing things. Great “AAA” or “indie” games show that all the time: it’s all about the team.

So at the end where you are or where you go (or not) on the gradient of independence doesn’t matter, output something different. Think about Louis C.K. It doesn’t matter if he’s a TV backed-up artist or if he’s a stand-up comedian or a loner in his apartment or a millionaire. He’s a bit of all of that at the same time.

He changes TV sitcoms with his team, creating a unique show. And that’s what counts.

But you got a lot of criticism for [using wah-wah pedals on horns] that. Why’d you go in that direction?

I don’t know. I don’t see it as going in any direction. I just see it as playing music of today, contemporary music. For me, the first guy who did that was Coleman Hawkins. Coleman always played with the young’uns. He was the guy who hired Thelonious Monk. He worked with Max Roach and Eric Dolphy. He never went back to playing Louis Armstrong music. That’s why I have kind of a problem when I see the New Orleans guys going back playing that old music. For me, that’s almost like Uncle Tomming. I love that music. I listen to it. But those guys did that.

Gary Bartz in Wax Poetic issue 52.

That is how I feel when I see that:

These are 2012 games. Guys. It’s too much out of our times. It’s not a matter of 2D or small budgets, we shouldn’t copy to perfection what games looked, sounded and felt like 25 or 30 years ago. It’s almost like we don’t believe that they can get any better than that. It’s like we’re hooked on a nostalgia binge that just doesn’t feel like going forward with our medium.

There isn’t enough experimentation.

Feature on Edge online.

It’s funny how for so many veterans making games are trying to continue what they loved growing up with them, the power of stories, the passion for making games they want to play.

I started my career thinking like that, but my personal journey being pretty amazing and still unfolding, escapism never worked so much with me (except with absolute brilliance like Monkey Island) especially with other mediums being much better at that.

Now what I’m fascinated with games is basically the failure simulator side and how important it is to fuck things up in a game because it’s totally OK! It’s a game, you can start over. I just love that so much because in real life you’re not allowed to try and fail anymore to the point that people fake things up just so that they look good. Escapism, virtual items, they go too much toward this trend. Not judging, just explaining.

Counter-strike. It’s not even about skills, it’s about the failure of a group of people to communicate and complete tasks, the perfect team that can cover and succeed on a mission despite having the pressure that things can go wrong in a million ways possible (so often in a really comic way) and that you’ll have to be ready for it. I smile like a maniac writing this, remembering emergent situations that are the core fun of this game. It’s fabulous.

It’s the confidence-building simulator, the A-Team simulator part of computer games that I value more than anything else. It’s unique to this medium.

I don’t understand how no ONE on game developer websites is questioning how Nintendo handles development on the Wii U. Have they learned from the terrible third parties’ experiences with WiiWare eShop and the rest? What did Nintendo learn from the Windows/iOS/Android game development easiness and cheapness?

*crickets*

And what developers are talking about? They argue if the price is the good one or if they will buy this console on day one because of Mario or if they’ll wait for Zelda. No developer interested in how it works for third party developers, is it as terrible as on the Wii/DS/3DS? What about tools like Unity or Unreal because today game developers need multi-platform more than ever, right? No one is asking about these stupid NDAs to disappear so we know exactly how it goes with developing on Wii U, why is that still so opaque? Aren’t we mature enough to discuss that?

This is the kind of questions I want to see. Instead, it’s brand whore VS hater fighting over pointless arguments.