Pet peeves in game design [Archive] - Quarter To Three Forums

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Jason McCullough

04-17-2003, 01:06 AM

Bitching about the lack of alt-tab functionality in jedi knight 2 got me thinking. There's a *lot* of crud that's built up in game design over the years that has absolutely no benefit to gameplay, atmosphere, or fun, but continues to be perpetrated from game to game because "that's the way it's always been done," or the developers or lazy, or what have you.

Pause functionality disabled for "gameplay." I don't give a shit what your goal is, there better be pause support *everywhere* in the goddamn game. Clear the screen if you want to keep the player from planning, but forbidding it is just insufferable.
No support of multi-tasking. At a minimum, alt-tab in Jedi Knigth 2 should pause the game and let me check my fucking email. I don't care what you say about increased development time - it's a lie.
Save/reload gameplay central to the design. There's something seriously wrong with a game if you have to wander around, reload, and then choose an entirely different set of memorized spells in Baldur's Gate 2 to have any hope of winning. Most RTS campaigns suffer from the same problem; there always seems to be a least one mission where the only way to win is clearing off the entire map, reloading, and then doing things in the correct order.
Unskippable, or endlessly repeated, non-interactive animation. Was it really necessary in Dark Cloud 2 to make me watch the same five second animation of a train chugging to stop every time I teleport between areas, or the same 10 second animation for opening a treasure chest? Letting me hit a button to skip the same animation over and over isn't much better; either show them once, or make it a menu option.
"Colored overlay" item hunting. Is there a single person on earth who enjoys slowly mousing over the entire map in Baldur's Gate, looking for that *one* barrel that'll light up? I'm not talking about the one pixel wide secret ones; that's fine. What annoys me is when the entire wall is covered in barrels, only one of which actually has something in it.
Containers with useless items. Every time I clicked a container in Neverwinter Nights, I expected it to be worth the distraction. It wasn't. This is endemic to RPGs.
Corpse-stripping item management. Remember in Fallout Tactics, when at the end of EVERY MISSION you had to go to EVERY CORPSE and drag off their inventory? That sure was fun!
Gameplay busywork. In Fallout 2, why doesn't my gun automatically reload every time combat ends? People are obviously going to do it for the slight advantage in the next fight, and it's something any idiot would do in the "real world" portrayed by the game - so why is it in there? Don't give me any bull about flexibility - there's limits.
Inventory management. Fallout's atrocious item management system takes the cake (4 items on the screen, 1 click to see each new item, with bizarre stacking rules), but I don't think we'll see anything that bad again. What's the excuse for the "stupid tetris" style exemplified by Baldur's Gate, though? There's too many slots for it to be a Halo/Deus Ex constrained inventory system - what's the point?
Muling. Click on every monster, get their items, and haul them back to town. I don't give a damn what you say, I better be able to right click on worthless items in an RPG (or MMORPG) and have them magically transmogrify into coins. Better yet, just have them carry coins. Ideally, figure out a fun alternative to the killing monsters for item model. No, I don't think Dungeon Siege fixed this.

All I can think of at the moment. Anyone have more examples of stuff that no one wants, but continues to pop up in games?

Tom McNamara

04-17-2003, 01:27 AM

I think somebody needs a hug.

GMicek

04-17-2003, 01:39 AM

You hit on most of my major complaints as well. But I'll add a couple...

Games that basically tell you to fuck yourself after you beat them. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is a great example. Great, it says "The End" on a black screen, glad *I* stuck to it until the end, even if the developers didn't.

Patches that break previous save games.

Game trailers that play as soon as I finish installing a game. Interplay used to do this, it was bad because sometimes it would cause my system to lock.

Games that let you accidentially save your just as you die.

Forcing games into particular directories. Or when they let you install it anywhere, but then has serious problems when you try and patch.

Not sure if this would fit, but why is it some games take forever to uninstall, while others seem to go away almost immediately?

During installation the installer doesn't tell you how much hard drive space the game needs.

During the intro movie I want to skip the developer, publisher, engine creators, distributor, and sound system, intros but I still want to see the game intro. Skipping the company logo should not cause me to miss the game intro.

Developers who think it's funny or clever to put themselves or other silly characters in otherwise serious games (the Red Baron 2 portraits for example)

Games that make it as difficult as possible for you to remap keys.

When changing the resolution or color depth means you have to completely exit out of the game then restart it. or worse yet, when your desktop color depth and resolution must match up with the game's.

A couple minutes of load screens to see the mission briefing, then a couple more minutes of loading to actually start the mission (Stuntman).

Beating a mission means that you have to play it over and over (and over) just to see what you're supposed to do (Stuntman).

Not being able to remap keys or make other changes while in the game, thus requiring me to quit back to the main menu and starting fresh.

When auto-loading a save game means that the game loads the most recent auto save it made, and not the last save I made.

Sports games that let you choose weather conditions, but don't let you randomize them.

When the AI can do things I can't. Soldiers being able to shoot around corners in Medal Of Honor comes to mind.

Andrew Mayer

04-17-2003, 01:41 AM

Jason McCullough

04-17-2003, 03:44 AM

Well, I was trying to stick to "stuff that everyone hates, yet continues to show up in game after game for no apparent reason." I mean, wtf, not automatically reloading your gun in Fallout 2?

Gordon Cameron

04-17-2003, 05:22 AM

Hmm....

Most of these aren't Game Design issues.
A bunch of them are interface issues, others are balance issues.

RPGs are particularly vulnerable to these because what you think of as simply "fixing a screw-up" will actually have a cascading effect on the interface/control panel/game balance side that you just aren't going to recognize.

My short-term advice is for you to start playing simpler games...

Your Power Pill (http://www.levelupdesign.com/gamelog)

Interesting point on RPG's: I think Chris Taylor and his team went a long way to streamline the design of Dungeon Siege. To which some responded: "They streamlined the game away!" The weird thing about RPG's is that for me at least, a fair amount of the "busy-work" (i.e. inventory management) is an intrinsic part of the gameplay. Some of this stuff seems to have evolved in an ad-hoc way over the years, and there's a danger in getting rid of it as you might accidentally slice out the fun bits -- though experimentation should always be encouraged.

One of my pet peeves is cutscenes you can't ESC out of. Especially in front of a mission that you may have to replay a few times. I can't tell you how angry that stupid race in Freelancer made me. Not because I had to replay it, because I had to watch that goddamn cutscene every time before replaying it.

04-17-2003, 05:35 AM

every game should have a configuration file(gfx settings, interface tweaks, etc) and command line options(to skip opening cut scenes, or not load the music, etc). god i love quake. :D

Erik Andersson

04-17-2003, 05:51 AM

No support of multi-tasking. At a minimum, alt-tab in Jedi Knigth 2 should pause the game and let me check my fucking email. I don't care what you say about increased development time - it's a lie.

I'm not sure it's a lie. Getting alt-tab to work properly in a game is actually pretty tricky. I have only done simple games, but I imagine that the it takes a lot of debugging to get it to work properly for complex games. In any any case I see the alt-tab response of a game as a good indicator of how well made it is (in terms of solid programming). The ability to change resolution and colordepth in game is basically a subset of this problem by the way.

The alt-tab problem is also related to another annoying thing which is having to change resolution multiple times in the game. This is especially annoying if you have to change resolution to save/load and similar. Exactly how annoying it is depends on how fast your monitor is at changing resolution of course (mine takes forever).

Jim Preston

04-17-2003, 06:07 AM

I agree with just about everything Jason and GMicek said. Some of my peeves:

* Third-person action/adventure games that try to do novel things with the camera and controls. These problems have already been solved and new games like Wolverine shouldn't have to address them again.

* Jumping puzzles. There is no excuse for them in PC/console games. They should only appear on the GBA.

* Not being able to save anywhere, anytime on a console game. It may not be realistic to save every state in the game's world, but the reason for limited saves is so the developers don't have to be bothered with making credible AI or clever situations. Instead they can artificially increase play time by having you start all the way over when you accidentally fall down that bottomless pit. At the very least, do the Halo thing and save after every major encounter.

* Boss monsters. I certainly enjoyed them in the past, and they still have their place, but, Jesus, I'm tired of obligatory boss monster battle. The Mark of Kri had a really refereshing ending in this regard and I think developers need to challenge themselves to come up with interesting ways to end a level without using the boss battle as a prop all the time.

* Encouraging certain styles of play during the regular part of a game, and then forcing the player to abandon that style later in the level or in the game as a whole. I loved Tenchu 3, but like the first two it would reward players for stealth and avoiding hand-to-hand combat only to force them into hand- to-hand combat with a boss monster at the end of the level. Oh, and if you died? Start the level over from the beginning. Fuck that.

* Gameflow that doesn't rely on constant monster respawning.

* RPGs that don't give you an adequate idea of where you are on the quest or critical path. I hate being forced to put down a game and then returning to it and thinking "what in the hell am I supposed to do again?" Many games do a good job with auto journals, but not enough of them IMO.

Bub, Andrew

04-17-2003, 06:43 AM

Football games that make me listen to snippets of awful Andrew W.K. music.

mudpuppy

04-17-2003, 09:34 AM

Strategy First's ultra-maddening sledgehammer intro that plays at 500,000 dB when you start one of their games (the original Europa Universalis was particularly bad). And that's with the sound turned down. Not only is it earth-shakingly loud, waking everybody in the fucking house if I happen to play at night, it's shitty techno crap noise to boot.

Sorry. I get angry just thinking about it. I try to avoid Strategy First titles now solely because of this issue. 3DO is another offender.

Kyle Wilson

04-17-2003, 01:05 PM

Save points right before big cutscenes/scripted sequences. (This means you, Splinter Cell guys.) But of course you should be able to save any time anyway, so this shouldn't even be a possible failing.

And 3D jumping puzzles. What the hell is up with that? Everyone knows they're as much fun as oral surgery, but they still seem to crop up in every first-person game.

Lee Johnson

04-17-2003, 01:56 PM

Strategy First's ultra-maddening sledgehammer intro that plays at 500,000 dB when you start one of their games (the original Europa Universalis was particularly bad).
That intro has changed in the recent SF titles I've bought; it's not that obnoxious anymore.

Jason McCullough

04-17-2003, 01:57 PM

I'm not sure it's a lie. Getting alt-tab to work properly in a game is actually pretty tricky.

Well, "lie" is strong, but how hard is it? Pause game. Release focus. I think it's just a corner-cutting move.

Xaroc

04-17-2003, 01:57 PM

Maze levels to extend time played.

-- Xaroc

milo

04-17-2003, 02:03 PM

When auto-loading a save game means that the game loads the most recent auto save it made, and not the last save I made.
Wait, why is this one bad? It seems natural enough to me (in fact, I just implemented this feature last week). Or did you only mean that it was bad if your manual save game file is more recent than the auto save game file?

I love threads like this.

--milo
http://www.starshatter.com

Mike Cathcart

04-17-2003, 02:31 PM

Unskippable, or endlessly repeated, non-interactive animation. Was it really necessary in Dark Cloud 2 to make me watch the same five second animation of a train chugging to stop every time I teleport between areas, or the same 10 second animation for opening a treasure chest? Letting me hit a button to skip the same animation over and over isn't much better; either show them once, or make it a menu option.

This should be punishable by death. We're giving retards the death penalty now, right? Time to get the ones that thought unskippable cutscens were a good idea.

* Not being able to save anywhere, anytime on a console game. It may not be realistic to save every state in the game's world, but the reason for limited saves is so the developers don't have to be bothered with making credible AI or clever situations. Instead they can artificially increase play time by having you start all the way over when you accidentally fall down that bottomless pit. At the very least, do the Halo thing and save after every major encounter.

* Boss monsters. I certainly enjoyed them in the past, and they still have their place, but, Jesus, I'm tired of obligatory boss monster battle. The Mark of Kri had a really refereshing ending in this regard and I think developers need to challenge themselves to come up with interesting ways to end a level without using the boss battle as a prop all the time.

You stay out of my console games :P

I'll also add in long animations for attacks that you can't cancel out of. The Two Towers game is a great example of this one. All three main characters have several attacks that take seconds for them to execute. Legolas can't just swing a sword, he has to do some cute little twirl before hitting the orc. You end up using a small subset of your attacks, which is too bad because some of them were cool. Meanwhile the other three enemies are swinging away and he gets beat to the ground before he's even close to finishing the attack. Man that game was frustrating at times.

AlexxKay

04-17-2003, 05:33 PM

My big peeve:

Navigation "obstacles" that wouldn't even slow down a normal human with bad coordination and weak knees, much less an Avatar / Dragonslayer / Messiah / SpaceMarine / whatever-the-heck-I'm-supposed to be. 2-ft high rail fences. 6-inch deep babbling brooks. Decorative flower beds. Feh.

If there's somewhere you don't want the player to go, I'm cool with that, but give me a really high stone wall, or something else that might possibly block a normal human being.

GMicek

04-17-2003, 05:53 PM

When auto-loading a save game means that the game loads the most recent auto save it made, and not the last save I made.
Wait, why is this one bad? It seems natural enough to me (in fact, I just implemented this feature last week). Or did you only mean that it was bad if your manual save game file is more recent than the auto save game file?

Exactly. I like when games auto load the most recent save, whether it was one I did myself, or an auto-save the game did.

Case

04-17-2003, 05:55 PM

I don't mind jumping puzzles if they're just that -- figuring out
where to go via a set of jumps.

I do mind jumping puzzles that:

- are timed and/or
- you can't save just before the puzzle and/or
- you can't see where you're jumping due to UI issues
or deliberate intent on the part of the designer.

I was having a great time with Indiana Jones and the Emperor's tomb, until I hit the jumping puzzle near the end. The only reason I didn't jump up and down on the CD is that it might have some resale value on half.com.

Loyd Case

voltaic

04-17-2003, 08:29 PM

Notoriously dumb AI. Examples from the otherwise good game Devastation.

1) Occasionally I will order one of my fellows to give me his weapons because I need the ammo or what have you. Then the whole group is moving along, enemies. OK cool, firefight! So now Chester McDumbass is out there performing "combat moves" like advancing, dodging, etc on the enemy WITH NO FUCKING WEAPONS.

2) I order my guys to "attack" as opposed to following me, holding a spot, etc. Pretty basic. So there are these laser fences that if you pass through them they kill you. So then I get my own version of Jackass the Movie (the Game!) when the members of my team run, like lemmings in a contrived Disney film, RIGHT THROUGH THE FUCKING GATE OF DEATH.

Great job devs. Don't tell me QA didn't find this shit.

MattKeil

04-17-2003, 11:19 PM

I have one top-level A-1 above-all-else hatred when it comes to game design that I don't think has been mentioned yet: Escort missions.

Does anyone actually enjoy these things? The novelty of babysitting some defenseless idiot wore off after about the third mission in Wing Commander, thanks. Seriously, either get your AI up to self-defense snuff or piss off with your lame level objective.

Worst offender in this category in recent memory would have to be Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Nearly EVERY mission in that game requires you to babysit something or other. The first mission makes you guard your "wingman" (you're in tanks, so it's probably something else, but whatever) or else the game is just flatly over. Why is the game over if one tank out of several thousand gets blown up? "Only she knew the way to the target," Mace Windu laments as the "Try again" screen loads. What the hell kind of weak ass excuse is that? When the Allies hit the beaches at Normandy, did only one guy know the way to Berlin? Come on, people.

Later in the game, you're charged with guarding one of the proto-Star Destroyer things. If it gets blown up, "all hope is lost," and apparently the other fifty thousand or so troops that have landed in the interim just pack up and go home.

On a base level, escorting is not inherently repulsive, but it is used far too often as a cheap way out of coming up with compelling mission objectives. I can't think of one I enjoyed off the top of my head, unless you count the temple dungeons in Wind Waker. Which I don't, really, since your companions in those can't die.

~MJK

mlatin

04-17-2003, 11:29 PM

Muling. Click on every monster, get their items, and haul them back to town. I don't give a damn what you say, I better be able to right click on worthless items in an RPG (or MMORPG) and have them magically transmogrify into coins. Better yet, just have them carry coins. Ideally, figure out a fun alternative to the killing monsters for item model. No, I don't think Dungeon Siege fixed this.

Asheron's Call 2 "fixed" this one: you can turn useless shit you loot off corpses into gold with a drag & click.

( I just had wished that the game itself, to me, was "fun". )

Asheron's Call 1 did something a little different: they added player-enhanced weapons. You take the crap you loot, transmogrify it, bunch the junk up until you have enough to enhance a weapon or armor or whatever. You can still gather loot for monetary needs.. which you still need to go to town and sell, but at least they did something kinda neat with all that junk loot critters drop.

- mlatin - AC1 'fanboi' -

Kevin Perry

04-18-2003, 12:06 AM

No support of multi-tasking. At a minimum, alt-tab in Jedi Knigth 2 should pause the game and let me check my fucking email. I don't care what you say about increased development time - it's a lie.

I'm a hard man to offend. Yet there's clearly no point in addressing your question here, since you've already told me that my answer is a lie.

Unskippable, or endlessly repeated, non-interactive animation. Was it really necessary in Dark Cloud 2 to make me watch the same five second animation of a train chugging to stop every time I teleport between areas, or the same 10 second animation for opening a treasure chest? Letting me hit a button to skip the same animation over and over isn't much better; either show them once, or make it a menu option.

95% of the time I agree with you, of course. The other 5% of the time this is done to disguise loading time, in which case it's not possible to skip it.

Kevin Perry

04-18-2003, 12:20 AM

* Third-person action/adventure games that try to do novel things with the camera and controls. These problems have already been solved and new games like Wolverine shouldn't have to address them again.

Let me hear an amen, brother, although I'll reserve a tiny correction: they haven't been 'solved', but their remaining issues accepted.

* Not being able to save anywhere, anytime on a console game. It may not be realistic to save every state in the game's world, but the reason for limited saves is so the developers don't have to be bothered with making credible AI or clever situations. Instead they can artificially increase play time by having you start all the way over when you accidentally fall down that bottomless pit. At the very least, do the Halo thing and save after every major encounter.

Here the music stops suddenly. Can you save anywhere in the middle of any big play in Madden on the PS2? Is that due to bad AI or stupid situations? Or is it a technical limitation we accept to not perfectly capture the exact position, current animation, current frame of animation for all 22 guys (more, given the officials, etc.), plus their current AI states, plus the current accumulated stats (God knows how many stats you have on these guys), all shoved down the SLOWEST pipe on the PS2?

I've shipped a few console games that didn't allow in-mission saves, and it was NOT due to some cranky desire to 'extend gameplay' by forcing the replay of tricky areas.

* Encouraging certain styles of play during the regular part of a game, and then forcing the player to abandon that style later in the level or in the game as a whole. I loved Tenchu 3, but like the first two it would reward players for stealth and avoiding hand-to-hand combat only to force them into hand- to-hand combat with a boss monster at the end of the level. Oh, and if you died? Start the level over from the beginning. Fuck that.

Music starts up again. This is a MAJOR issue with game design today, and not just an interface issue like many of the others. You solve it with a skill tree, a ramping histogram, and a few other Excel-based tricks. Good game design is no less about proper structure than good screenwriting is.

Kevin Perry

04-18-2003, 12:25 AM

I have one top-level A-1 above-all-else hatred when it comes to game design that I don't think has been mentioned yet: Escort missions.

On a base level, escorting is not inherently repulsive, but it is used far too often as a cheap way out of coming up with compelling mission objectives. I can't think of one I enjoyed off the top of my head, unless you count the temple dungeons in Wind Waker. Which I don't, really, since your companions in those can't die.

Exactly. The key evil here is an escort mission that contans a failure state if the object you're meant to protect dies, especially of the general situational awareness level of the game means you're constantly wondering why the hell you just lost.

Anything else means I'm losing the game because of choices the AI made. Not fun.

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 01:10 AM

No support of multi-tasking. At a minimum, alt-tab in Jedi Knigth 2 should pause the game and let me check my fucking email. I don't care what you say about increased development time - it's a lie.

I'm a hard man to offend. Yet there's clearly no point in addressing your question here, since you've already told me that my answer is a lie.

Sorry, I said I overstated it; you just have no idea how tired I am of seeing the standard "we don't support task switching" in the readme for game after game. Come on, I want to hear this one: why wouldn't Jedi Knight 2 support task-switching? Didn't Quake 3?

Good point on the asheron's call solution to useless item muling. And god almighty, don't get me started on the escort missions in Tie Fighter.

Luke M

04-18-2003, 02:06 AM

Jim Preston

04-18-2003, 05:50 AM

* Not being able to save anywhere, anytime on a console game. It may not be realistic to save every state in the game's world, but the reason for limited saves is so the developers don't have to be bothered with making credible AI or clever situations. Instead they can artificially increase play time by having you start all the way over when you accidentally fall down that bottomless pit. At the very least, do the Halo thing and save after every major encounter.

Here the music stops suddenly. Can you save anywhere in the middle of any big play in Madden on the PS2? Is that due to bad AI or stupid situations? Or is it a technical limitation we accept to not perfectly capture the exact position, current animation, current frame of animation for all 22 guys (more, given the officials, etc.), plus their current AI states, plus the current accumulated stats (God knows how many stats you have on these guys), all shoved down the SLOWEST pipe on the PS2?

I've shipped a few console games that didn't allow in-mission saves, and it was NOT due to some cranky desire to 'extend gameplay' by forcing the replay of tricky areas.

You're right; you can't save in the middle of a play on Madden on the PS2. But then again, why would anyone want to? It will take a few more seconds until the play is over, and then you can save. Granted, it is much, much easier to save in a sports game because there are fewer states and parms to remember, but my point was really aimed towards user convenience.

It really turns me off on a game when I play 20 minutes into a mission, die, and then are forced to replay that 20 minutes. I rarely have huge chunks of time where I can sit down and just play. Often I will have 30 minutes before I have to go to work, so I want to be able to save anywhere, anytime. Playing through a 20 minute mission, dying, and then replaying through mission again and having to abandon it simply because I have to go to work is infuriating. At least with games like Halo and Splinter Cell they auto-save after every few encounters. While not perfect, this is vastly preferable to having to restart the entire mission.

Xaroc

04-18-2003, 07:48 AM

Kevin Perry

04-18-2003, 08:48 AM

Sorry, I said I overstated it; you just have no idea how tired I am of seeing the standard "we don't support task switching" in the readme for game after game. Come on, I want to hear this one: why wouldn't Jedi Knight 2 support task-switching? Didn't Quake 3?

The number one, often unstated, reason for not allowing alt-TAB in a game is to reduce the amount of cheating, or at least the ease of cheating. Allowing the user to alt-TAB out makes it much, much easier to run any number of cheats, all the way from the simple (multiple instances of a game) to the more complex (running packet sniffers and memory readers, etc.). This obviously isn't perfect, since cheating is still rampant, but it makes it much less rampant that it would be otherwise.

There are also non-trivial technical issues, many of which are beyond the reasonable control of the developer. I remember a PC game I did years ago in which we tried to support alt-TAB. But AOL's IM, then in its infancy, caused big problems-- if the user had IM and was playing the game, an incoming message would make a messy grab for the system focus and wreck our game, rather unpredictably. Asking AOL to clean up their code seemed, shall we say, a low-probability solution :) Which would you rather see in the readme: we do not support alt-TAB, or please shut down all other Windows resources while you play the game?

Kevin Perry

04-18-2003, 09:00 AM

You're right; you can't save in the middle of a play on Madden on the PS2. But then again, why would anyone want to? It will take a few more seconds until the play is over, and then you can save. Granted, it is much, much easier to save in a sports game because there are fewer states and parms to remember, but my point was really aimed towards user convenience.

And you can't save in an FPS with four friendly AIs and you taking on 11 enemy AIs in dense terrain that's being affected by the battle. But then again, why would anyone want to? It will take only a few more seconds to get to a safe place to save.

I completely agree that having to play a mission over due to lack of in-mission saves is Not Fun. However, the reasons why are not 'developer laziness' or 'developer stupidity', and 'save anywhere' is a very expensive and difficult feature on the PS2. The reasonable midpoint is allowing limited in-mission saves, at predetermined points where it is 'safe' to do so-- as Halo, etc. have already done.

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 12:42 PM

Sorry, I said I overstated it; you just have no idea how tired I am of seeing the standard "we don't support task switching" in the readme for game after game. Come on, I want to hear this one: why wouldn't Jedi Knight 2 support task-switching? Didn't Quake 3?

Nope not without the minimize screen trick.

-- Xaroc

So I should direct my white-hot rage at the big guy?

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 12:49 PM

deanco

04-18-2003, 01:27 PM

Games that ask you, 'are you sure you want to quit' when you click 'exit' at the title screen. In game, I can understand wanting to confirm, but at the title screen? It's just adding a click.

DeanCo--

SpoofyChop

04-18-2003, 01:30 PM

Erik Andersson

04-18-2003, 02:30 PM

Well, "lie" is strong, but how hard is it? Pause game. Release focus. I think it's just a corner-cutting move.

It's not that simple, that's for certain. My experience with games programming hasn't taken me much further than the standard tetris type games, but in these simple games I've tried various things that are often working poorly in real games to see why. The alt-tab was on top of that list and it seemed pretty straightforward.

The first problem is knowing exactly when you lose focus, and the second is to know when you regain it. This is not entirely simple because there are many window messages that are likely candidates and they often don't work like you expect. The third problem is to handle the loss of focus for the mouse and the keyboard which could be a little tricky in Direct Input. The fourth problem is that you lose all graphics resources in Direct3d (like textures and the cursor) and they have to be restored somehow. I suppose there could be other focus-related problems as well, but these are the ones I remember.

Once you have encountered and taken care of the above problems in one game it shouldn't be that difficult to produce something that appears to work in another. But if you want to be sure that the state-restoring functions actually do their job you need to debug them = more work.

BloodKnight

04-18-2003, 03:16 PM

[quote=Jason McCullough]
I'll also add in long animations for attacks that you can't cancel out of. The Two Towers game is a great example of this one. All three main characters have several attacks that take seconds for them to execute. Legolas can't just swing a sword, he has to do some cute little twirl before hitting the orc. You end up using a small subset of your attacks, which is too bad because some of them were cool. Meanwhile the other three enemies are swinging away and he gets beat to the ground before he's even close to finishing the attack. Man that game was frustrating at times.

No offence, but you are not that good if you say that.

The reason why they did long animations is so you don't go button-mashing and beat the game. If you kept button-mashing, you will be an open target, which is a good thing. You had to press the attack only when it is a good idea, and stop pressing and defend if you are going too far.

Two Towers is too short though, but at least they didn't botch up the LOTR franchise like Fellowship of the Ring.

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 04:35 PM

Maybe I should lobby MS to make task-switching a requirement for the Windows logo.

XPav

04-18-2003, 05:20 PM

Maybe I should lobby MS to make task-switching a requirement for the Windows logo.
I seem to recall there being various exceptions to The Rules for games that went full-screen in the last Designed for Windows Logo doc I looked over.

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 06:05 PM

GMicek

04-18-2003, 06:33 PM

Which would you rather see in the readme: we do not support alt-TAB, or please shut down all other Windows resources while you play the game?

Don't they say that anyway most of the time? (close all other apps)

Xaroc

04-18-2003, 06:42 PM

Sorry, I said I overstated it; you just have no idea how tired I am of seeing the standard "we don't support task switching" in the readme for game after game. Come on, I want to hear this one: why wouldn't Jedi Knight 2 support task-switching? Didn't Quake 3?

Nope not without the minimize screen trick.

-- Xaroc

So I should direct my white-hot rage at the big guy?

Or rethink your position as the big guy is pretty technically savvy.

-- Xaroc

Jason McCullough

04-18-2003, 07:14 PM

I dunno; I have all these games installed, and Jedi Knight 2 is the only one that doesn't do it.....