Stealth allows a player to choose the time and circumstances of an attack

Written by fuying on May 12, 2009 14:18
Whether the context is PvP or PvE, that's an enormous intrinsic advantageStealth may also allow a player to "bypass content", e.g., to avoid battles that other players have to engage in, and therefore to farm resources and level fasterAnyway, the upshot of this is that people really, really don't like rogues nowAt least they have some hope of running away if they see visible level 60sInvisible enemies prowling around are a different matterA programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a worldAs with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.  

These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environmentsThus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?

Our story now migrates to *objects*They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies

Maybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yetIf you have a hurry using of WOW Gold, you may come here and Buy Warhammer GoldThe importance you will acknowledge when you have no Cheap WOW GoldIf Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-basedThe craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming, even if it is only sometimes realizedBy and large, software object-oriented design has been a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocksChallenges emerge, however, when one scales interactions from small numbers of objects to large sets of objectsThrow in parallel threads of computation and all hell breaks looseWhy the concern with large numbers of objects? Well, that is arguably where gameplay simulation is heading

This is where Tim's slides enters our stageThey worry a particularly difficult and central problem: how to have large numbers of objects interacting across many threads of computationMany of the complaints about rogues strike me as focused on red herrings, like "stunlock"The real issue is stealth itself.

These are pretty fundamental problems, but they also explain why stealth powers are often popular and desired in gamesOnce this particular design genie is out of the bottle, a MMOG developer really has only two choices: make stealth effective or nerf it into irrelevanceIf it's in the game, it has to allow you to have the tactical advantage of choosing your battles and it has to allow you to bypass some contentYou can't finesse thisIf there are too many easy ways for other players to see through stealth, it's uselessIf there are too many game environments where stealth doesn't allow bypassing or evading content, it's uselessIf it's made useful in these terms, some players are always going to bitterly object to it