Needle
03-22-2005, 05:12 AM
It's old but I just found it and thought it's quite interessting. From programmer Joey Liaw over at planet anachronox (http://www.forumplanet.com/planetanachronox/topic.asp?fid=2221&tid=1545628):
Just in terms of manpower, to give some perspective.
Anachronox cost $7M to make.
Eidos probably didn't even break even on the game. I blame their management/adveritising team as much as our own mismanagement/scheduling problems for that.
But, even if all 400 fans got together to make something, can each person contribute $17500 worth of time and effort? Not trying to be a downer, but putting things in perspective.
Also, personally I think Anox 2, if it ever did come about, would simply be something we did as a mod hobby in one of the more recent (and amazingly modifiable and well-supported) engines. The technology is to the point where nobody should really have to write a single line of graphics/physics/ai code anymore, just concentrate on making the damn game.
Anox 2 would be story-driven, in any case.
There's been talk flitting about every 6 months or so, when somebody emails a member of the dev team and says "hey make anox 2 dammit i love ur game ur so uber" and the rest of us tell each other, yah, it would be cool, but I like my job now at epic/id/unemployment and too bad we're all spread out all over the country gee we had a great time at ion huh see you guys at e3 ok cheers yeah anox2 would be cool yeah it would ok peace out.
As far as I know, Tom still owns the rights to the game. He's still got the second half of the game sitting on the table. Our cinematographer, writer, and myself love the project like a little baby, but we've moved on and put Anox behind us. But, the three of us still keep in touch (in fact we're getting together next weekend for mario tennis/halo2 marathon) but we've got so many other obligations, it's nothing much more than a distant pipe dream right now.
My personal impossible wish is to make an automatic content exporter to see anox rendered in half life 2 and maybe get leedot to update some of the old textures and fix the stupid scripting bugs by having an ai convert the gameflow code into C. I need to put that $120000 college education to use somehow, right?
But, I doubt I'd find the time to work on something like that, while still getting enough money to be able to live/eat in the bay area, and still grow at the same time. Knowwadimean?
Anyways I've rambled enough. See you guys around, and thanks for the amazing continued support. My advice to all of you who want to write mods for Anox is, you would probably learn more/grow more as game developers by making content with the latest and greatest engines, and if you want to base the content on an Anox theme or rip out Anox content, that's great too.
Think about it this way. As a programmer, you ought to be keeping up with what's new (only the patch stuff I added later is written in C++ for example, and god forbid anybody write another full game in C). And check out the latest examples of scripting languages / ai programming / physics interaction / shader languages / network code etc. etc. Game development, at least in senior positions, I think is the ultimate test and job for a game programmer, because you have to draw upon all disciplines of computer science and put them together into a real-time application with 99.9999% uptime. I think maybe people in the military/space programs also have a similar level of interesting cross-disciplinary actions (although half the time they are writing multiplayer game simulators anyways). I mean, who wants to write SQL for a database team in a fund management corporation. Christ.
As an artist, you would get more practice and marketable skills by using the latest tools required by modern games. Anox uses one or two-pass 128x128 textures for the main characters, nowadays you need to make 4 or 5 textures at much higher resolution to make anything look competitive. And doing bumpmaps is a new skill that is extremely important for artists to know how to do well right now but you'd learn nothing about it working with the Anox/q2 engine. Plus, you should go out and make some highpoly characters in some good toolset. If you love the Anox content, you could for example get better as an artist by remaking/retexturing Boots as a 100K-poly model in 3DS and import it into Doom3. Making art is becoming harder and harder nowadays that the engines/graphics are becoming so powerful some stuff can't even be made by hand anymore (for example, they digitized real people's heads for HL2).
As a sound engineer, well, you've got DirectMusic to play with nowadays, which is a cool concept but not many people have really been getting good at it. And of course, the technology isn't really going to improve much in your department besides slightly higher fidelity, we've already reached the point where our ears can't take much more, now it's up to you to make the quality samples and record dialog, but it doesn't really matter much for you what engine is being used.
And as a game designer, well, those never go out of style, right? We're still a long ways off from fully-ai-grown game universes, but as a game designer you ought to be concentrating on content, and the technology/infrastructure supporting it be damned. Every single engine out there right now on the market supports everything anybody would want to do. It's all content anyways.
I loved Half-Life 2, but because it's an engine demo. Same for Doom 3. There's no story. I could fit the main dialog on a single sheet paper. I think Miyamoto was like (I'm just paraphrasing here), yeah, with the Gamecube, I don't really care what technology comes in later generations, we already have all the power we need to make the games we want. The rest is just fluff.
Final thoughts on what made Anox so cool, and what you can take from it with you in the future as possible game developers. I think it boils down to the fact that it's a game about humanity, it's a game about you and me, it's a game about the people around us, and the player can relate to it, fall in love with it.
For example, we tried to put in real character development. Not something artificial like, now your rpg character has the uber armor of the universe, but more like stories of people overcoming or coming to terms with their own flaws to become something greater. This human element is what is so essential.
This totally ties in with the facial deformations. I think the fact that we had a really quality lip sync mechanism ahead of its time, in the end makes up a huge chunk of why the cinematics feel so "good". In half-life 2, the beautifully rendered and controlled eyes in people's heads, that move around and stare directly at you, and shift around realistically, that's another example of humanism in a game that's ahead of its time and totally draws you in (this is what makes the first level so gushingly gorgeous, but then you discover there is no story).
Look at Halo 2, the game is beautiful and the vehicle action superb, but you never even see the Master Chief's face. I don't feel anything for that. Cortana, you see her, she's cute, she says quirky lines, ok, better. Now compare the lip sync and eye movements of the prophets, which are amazing, it really draws you in when they talk. Then you see the fleet admiral move his one-piece mouth like a 2 dollar mannequin and his face textured like a mummified zombie, and you're like wtf, mate?
The last point about Anox is the immersion capacity. Wolfenstein (the original shareware that made id amazing) was so popular because it was the first time many people had seen interactive 3d realtime rendering. That 'immersion' into an alternate reality is what we're going for. In Anox, I think the biggest immersion factors came about from all the varied, interesting, funny, and 800 billion pages of NPC dialog and the cleverly placed ambient level sounds (sound is by the way a full 50% of a game or movie, but nobody realizes this). It had nothing to do with how many shader passes we had on the bosses or how many polys we could draw from the level per frame. It's all about content. Half-Life 2 cheats in the immersion arena similarly to Wolfenstein, it's the first time we've seen a lot of things in a game (or at least, done so well), for example the facial deformations and the physics, so that's why people will gush about the game (when they are really gushing about the technology for the game) and eventually somebody will use it to make something meaningful, a story with life and characters you care about and a journey you can take something away from and feel good about. Right? Didn't you have those moments in Anox where you said, "wow, that is so cool that that character achieved that, because that speaks to me." This, to me anyways, is so much more than "well, i killed the boss, so, i guess i won, oh and i rescued the chick, yipee."
Now as a caveat, I don't want you guys to think I am crapping on Halo 2 or HL2. They are what they are. Mario64 is one of the greatest games ever made, and it has no story whatsoever, but it's about the mechanics and puzzles. Same with HL2, it's a great game for what it is, what it is trying to be and nothing more, and Halo 2 is just about the adrenaline. But, I think for fans of Anox who would be on this board and reading this, what we want is something more.
So there it is. My four cents, considering the length of this post. I think I wrote too much because I forgot even what the main point of this post was. Oh yeah, it was to procrastinate studying for finals.
Sorry to those of you who have emailed me and I never got back to you. Partially I'm inundated by spam all the time, and partially I'm barely keeping up with school as I took a ridiculous courseload this quarter. Anyways, I'd be happy to answer people's questions on being a game developer, or being in college, or why I went back, etc. when I get the time to read and post more here, but until then, best of luck to all. The team thanks you for all the love. Most of us still agree that working on Anox was the best experience in the industry we've ever had, and all the great feedback from the community (that's YOU) was definitely a big part of it.
--joey
http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
At least Tom Hall still owns the rights. I wonder how he kept them out of range from eidos' greedy claws.
Just in terms of manpower, to give some perspective.
Anachronox cost $7M to make.
Eidos probably didn't even break even on the game. I blame their management/adveritising team as much as our own mismanagement/scheduling problems for that.
But, even if all 400 fans got together to make something, can each person contribute $17500 worth of time and effort? Not trying to be a downer, but putting things in perspective.
Also, personally I think Anox 2, if it ever did come about, would simply be something we did as a mod hobby in one of the more recent (and amazingly modifiable and well-supported) engines. The technology is to the point where nobody should really have to write a single line of graphics/physics/ai code anymore, just concentrate on making the damn game.
Anox 2 would be story-driven, in any case.
There's been talk flitting about every 6 months or so, when somebody emails a member of the dev team and says "hey make anox 2 dammit i love ur game ur so uber" and the rest of us tell each other, yah, it would be cool, but I like my job now at epic/id/unemployment and too bad we're all spread out all over the country gee we had a great time at ion huh see you guys at e3 ok cheers yeah anox2 would be cool yeah it would ok peace out.
As far as I know, Tom still owns the rights to the game. He's still got the second half of the game sitting on the table. Our cinematographer, writer, and myself love the project like a little baby, but we've moved on and put Anox behind us. But, the three of us still keep in touch (in fact we're getting together next weekend for mario tennis/halo2 marathon) but we've got so many other obligations, it's nothing much more than a distant pipe dream right now.
My personal impossible wish is to make an automatic content exporter to see anox rendered in half life 2 and maybe get leedot to update some of the old textures and fix the stupid scripting bugs by having an ai convert the gameflow code into C. I need to put that $120000 college education to use somehow, right?
But, I doubt I'd find the time to work on something like that, while still getting enough money to be able to live/eat in the bay area, and still grow at the same time. Knowwadimean?
Anyways I've rambled enough. See you guys around, and thanks for the amazing continued support. My advice to all of you who want to write mods for Anox is, you would probably learn more/grow more as game developers by making content with the latest and greatest engines, and if you want to base the content on an Anox theme or rip out Anox content, that's great too.
Think about it this way. As a programmer, you ought to be keeping up with what's new (only the patch stuff I added later is written in C++ for example, and god forbid anybody write another full game in C). And check out the latest examples of scripting languages / ai programming / physics interaction / shader languages / network code etc. etc. Game development, at least in senior positions, I think is the ultimate test and job for a game programmer, because you have to draw upon all disciplines of computer science and put them together into a real-time application with 99.9999% uptime. I think maybe people in the military/space programs also have a similar level of interesting cross-disciplinary actions (although half the time they are writing multiplayer game simulators anyways). I mean, who wants to write SQL for a database team in a fund management corporation. Christ.
As an artist, you would get more practice and marketable skills by using the latest tools required by modern games. Anox uses one or two-pass 128x128 textures for the main characters, nowadays you need to make 4 or 5 textures at much higher resolution to make anything look competitive. And doing bumpmaps is a new skill that is extremely important for artists to know how to do well right now but you'd learn nothing about it working with the Anox/q2 engine. Plus, you should go out and make some highpoly characters in some good toolset. If you love the Anox content, you could for example get better as an artist by remaking/retexturing Boots as a 100K-poly model in 3DS and import it into Doom3. Making art is becoming harder and harder nowadays that the engines/graphics are becoming so powerful some stuff can't even be made by hand anymore (for example, they digitized real people's heads for HL2).
As a sound engineer, well, you've got DirectMusic to play with nowadays, which is a cool concept but not many people have really been getting good at it. And of course, the technology isn't really going to improve much in your department besides slightly higher fidelity, we've already reached the point where our ears can't take much more, now it's up to you to make the quality samples and record dialog, but it doesn't really matter much for you what engine is being used.
And as a game designer, well, those never go out of style, right? We're still a long ways off from fully-ai-grown game universes, but as a game designer you ought to be concentrating on content, and the technology/infrastructure supporting it be damned. Every single engine out there right now on the market supports everything anybody would want to do. It's all content anyways.
I loved Half-Life 2, but because it's an engine demo. Same for Doom 3. There's no story. I could fit the main dialog on a single sheet paper. I think Miyamoto was like (I'm just paraphrasing here), yeah, with the Gamecube, I don't really care what technology comes in later generations, we already have all the power we need to make the games we want. The rest is just fluff.
Final thoughts on what made Anox so cool, and what you can take from it with you in the future as possible game developers. I think it boils down to the fact that it's a game about humanity, it's a game about you and me, it's a game about the people around us, and the player can relate to it, fall in love with it.
For example, we tried to put in real character development. Not something artificial like, now your rpg character has the uber armor of the universe, but more like stories of people overcoming or coming to terms with their own flaws to become something greater. This human element is what is so essential.
This totally ties in with the facial deformations. I think the fact that we had a really quality lip sync mechanism ahead of its time, in the end makes up a huge chunk of why the cinematics feel so "good". In half-life 2, the beautifully rendered and controlled eyes in people's heads, that move around and stare directly at you, and shift around realistically, that's another example of humanism in a game that's ahead of its time and totally draws you in (this is what makes the first level so gushingly gorgeous, but then you discover there is no story).
Look at Halo 2, the game is beautiful and the vehicle action superb, but you never even see the Master Chief's face. I don't feel anything for that. Cortana, you see her, she's cute, she says quirky lines, ok, better. Now compare the lip sync and eye movements of the prophets, which are amazing, it really draws you in when they talk. Then you see the fleet admiral move his one-piece mouth like a 2 dollar mannequin and his face textured like a mummified zombie, and you're like wtf, mate?
The last point about Anox is the immersion capacity. Wolfenstein (the original shareware that made id amazing) was so popular because it was the first time many people had seen interactive 3d realtime rendering. That 'immersion' into an alternate reality is what we're going for. In Anox, I think the biggest immersion factors came about from all the varied, interesting, funny, and 800 billion pages of NPC dialog and the cleverly placed ambient level sounds (sound is by the way a full 50% of a game or movie, but nobody realizes this). It had nothing to do with how many shader passes we had on the bosses or how many polys we could draw from the level per frame. It's all about content. Half-Life 2 cheats in the immersion arena similarly to Wolfenstein, it's the first time we've seen a lot of things in a game (or at least, done so well), for example the facial deformations and the physics, so that's why people will gush about the game (when they are really gushing about the technology for the game) and eventually somebody will use it to make something meaningful, a story with life and characters you care about and a journey you can take something away from and feel good about. Right? Didn't you have those moments in Anox where you said, "wow, that is so cool that that character achieved that, because that speaks to me." This, to me anyways, is so much more than "well, i killed the boss, so, i guess i won, oh and i rescued the chick, yipee."
Now as a caveat, I don't want you guys to think I am crapping on Halo 2 or HL2. They are what they are. Mario64 is one of the greatest games ever made, and it has no story whatsoever, but it's about the mechanics and puzzles. Same with HL2, it's a great game for what it is, what it is trying to be and nothing more, and Halo 2 is just about the adrenaline. But, I think for fans of Anox who would be on this board and reading this, what we want is something more.
So there it is. My four cents, considering the length of this post. I think I wrote too much because I forgot even what the main point of this post was. Oh yeah, it was to procrastinate studying for finals.
Sorry to those of you who have emailed me and I never got back to you. Partially I'm inundated by spam all the time, and partially I'm barely keeping up with school as I took a ridiculous courseload this quarter. Anyways, I'd be happy to answer people's questions on being a game developer, or being in college, or why I went back, etc. when I get the time to read and post more here, but until then, best of luck to all. The team thanks you for all the love. Most of us still agree that working on Anox was the best experience in the industry we've ever had, and all the great feedback from the community (that's YOU) was definitely a big part of it.
--joey
http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
At least Tom Hall still owns the rights. I wonder how he kept them out of range from eidos' greedy claws.