Rom's Rants

Saturday, February 07, 2009

SiN 1 in SiN: Episodes

Before we started working on SiN: Episodes, one of the things we started working on to properly learn Source was a Source engine version of the original SiN ala Half-Life: Source.

It didn't get very far and barely functions, but there's enough here that some Source engine modders might get a kick out of it.

What is here requires S:E1 to work. Use at your own risk. No warranties are expressed or implied.

http://hosted.romsteady.net/S1inSE.zip (64.8MB)

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 2/07/2009 02:25:00 PM | 6 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Friday, December 19, 2008

Cryptic clues...

Because of this...a start while I scribble the rest down.

Her pod split into four parts. One part was found in game, two were found elsewhere (one by Blade) and the fourth part was never found but the contents were in front of the player for a large part of the game. A single bullet was at fault.

There were two different substances for two very good reasons, but there were two of one separate people working at cross purposes.

Radek survived...again.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 12/19/2008 07:27:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Source Mod Preview

When some people slack off, others try to step up...


Starting with HL2MP as a base, but should not require HL2MP, only SE1. It's taking some time to wrap my head around everything because I'm used to testing in Source, not coding, but this should work out in the end. After all, I've got help.

If you want to help, reply to this post.

(Note: Right now, the mod code only works with the rest-of-world version of SE. I've almost got it working against the USK version as well, but getting it to work and still work with VAC is a trick.)

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 2/13/2007 07:58:00 PM | 3 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Sunday, January 28, 2007

What failed?

Let's start this discussion by defining the term that will be used throughout this post. Burn rate is the rate per month that a company spends money. This covers all expenses for this company, including rent, payroll, employee benefits, utilities, etc. Usually, this burn rate is split up between projects if a company is working on multiple projects, and is generally quoted on a per-head basis. For example, a company with a burn rate of $100,000 per month and ten employees is said to have a burn rate of $10,000 per head.

Now, I'm not going to be giving specific figures at all, but I'm going to try to lay out what was going on.

When we started on "SiN Episodes" in 2005, we were working on two other projects: "25 To Life" and an unannounced project. As a result, we were able to split the company burn rate between three seperate projects, two of which had milestone money coming in on a fairly regular basis.

At the end of 2005, "25 To Life" was supposed to be ending, and the staff on that project was supposed to split between the unannounced project and "SiN Episodes." However, the unannounced project was cancelled, so everyone in the company moved onto "SiN Episodes." This increased the burn rate significantly, because instead of only having 15-20 heads on the project, we had almost 40 heads on the project. However, it was helping bugs get fixed faster and helping to improve the overall quality of the project.

While this was going on, upper management was trying to sign other deals to work on concurrently with "SiN Episodes." Especially near the end of the project, we had many people who weren't being used to their full potential who could have easily worked on other projects. Unfortunately, having to continue to cover that burn rate led to cost cutting in other sections, like the five-figure testing budget and the even smaller marketing budget.

We were in final negotiations on one project when "SiN Episodes" went gold, so 15 people started working on "Episode 2," and the rest started getting up to speed on the new technology that this other project would require. "SiN Episodes" was selling well enough to fund those fifteen people during the development process. However, there was still the matter of these other 25 people. If enough money is coming in to cover the burn rate for fifteen heads, but your burn rate is forty heads, it isn't a good thing. This is definitely the case when you start talking about critical path items that cannot be shortened by throwing headcount at it, like the code merge.

Several project deals fell through. After five months, when a short-term development deal came along that didn't fall through, it required almost everyone in the company. The few remaining individuals were working on either new pitches to get additional projects, or trying to get alternate sources of funding to finish "SiN Episodes."

Obviously, the ending of this story wasn't a happy one. Ritual was acquired by MumboJumbo, and all signs point to the untimely death of the series. The sad part of this was that the first episode was a success. It sold well enough to pay for the burn rate for the team for the second episode...but not well enough to cover the remainder of the team. It's ironic that for all of the companies that died because of a commercial failure, this one was mortally wounded by a game that could have been considered a success in spite of itself. (Minor update: This may be premature, but my prediction on the fate of "SiN Episodes" may have been off by a small factor. Remember, I've been gone for eight weeks...)

Many people wondered why I was so harsh on the warez monkeys who grabbed illegal copies of the game. Well, if all of the people who pirated the game and contacted Ritual for tech support had actually purchased the game, it would have paid for the burn rate for two additional people from ship to date. That alone may not have changed the tide for "SiN Episodes," but it would have made the landing a lot softer for a few people...myself included.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 1/28/2007 03:49:00 PM | 14 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Monday, January 22, 2007

SiN and USK (Part 6)

This is the sixth and final part of the "SiN Episodes" USK dissection. Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

For the final installment, I'd like to talk about the last high-profile change made between the rest-of-world version and the USK version: applied physics forces.

In the rest-of-world version of "SiN Episodes," when someone is killed by a weapon, their body is propelled fairly significantly by the force of the weapon. Even the regular pistol hits someone like they were hit by a ton of bricks at the point of impact. In the "Blown Away" myth on "Mythbusters," they proved that it wouldn't happen like that, but the "SiN" universe is fairly obviously based on anime, and in anime, physics be damned! Well, for the USK release, we were told that the amount of pushback on all of our weapon damage seemed a bit excessive. Note: it wasn't the damage that was excessive, just the pushback.

You may have noticed that in the final game, there were a couple of physics items based off of the destruction of an object, but not much related to the movement of an object by a weapon. Well, there's a simple explanation for that. In the USK version, physics forces caused by all weapons (friendly and enemy) were reduced by 50%. This had two side effects.

The first side effect was a 75% reduction in the amount of movement on ragdolls when they could be affected by physics. Why 75%? Well, physics movement is exponential in the engine.

The second side effect is what I really hated, and it's the only change that could be seen as materially affecting gameplay...but it only affects gameplay for people who played the rest-of-world version before the USK version. Because of the minimized movement, the cues that someone has died are significantly different between the two versions. As a result, someone used to the rest-of-world version who is playing the USK version is very likely to empty additional bullets into their now-deceased quarry than someone who hasn't, and because the ragdolls are client-side, that means that player accuracy drops and the game gets slightly easier as the game goes on (more ammo, etc.)

That's it for this series. There were other changes that were made for the USK version, but part of the arrangement with the USK is that if a change is made, information on how to undo that change cannot be distributed. That said, information was released on how to piggy-back on one of the changes...but I wouldn't recommend undoing that change in Germany anyway...you'd cause the game to crash.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this look into the changes required to ship "SiN Episodes" in Germany. It's been two months of drama, but it's over now.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 1/22/2007 05:29:00 PM | 3 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

SiN and USK (Part 5)

Well, here we go again. Previous installments are indexed over at Ritualistic.

Since the science fiction movies of the 1950's, everyone has wanted their own personal jetpack. In the "SiN Episodes" universe, some SiNTEK soldiers are lucky enough to have some of their very own.

A few notes about the jetpack grunts for you. First off, the jetpacks are physics objects. The grunts are tied to them via some funky constraints. This, in part, led to a bug in Arena Mode where if you added jetpack grunts to your maps, they would T-pose during demo playback.

The jetpack grunts have many different types of death animations. The server tells the client, "Hey, this dude is dead," the client randomly picks one of the animations, and plays it. I think everyone remembers the classic twirl-around-screaming-pack-explode-fall-with-a-crunch animation from the last trailer before release. Well, that animation is what directly led to this change.

The USK had an issue with several of the death animations for jetpack grunts because it seemed like they were being made to suffer prior to death solely for the amusement of the player. That's probably because their digital forms were being made to seem like they were suffering prior to death solely for the amusement of the player. Come on, a dude's jetpack malfuntioning prior to his death is funny...

We tried negotiating, but this was one item on which the USK would not budge. As a result, in USK-rated copies of the game, there is a single jetpack death present: the jetpack explodes, and the ragdoll falls straight down. Again, this was a client-side effect only, so if Ritual ever manages to get cooperative play of any sort going, while the result may appear slightly different when a US player plays with a USK player, the server will still be seeing the two as idential.

This is one of the changes that I'm not particularly fond of. The jetpack deaths were one of the items that Ritual received a lot of positive feedback for, and having to remove it just seemed...excessive.

Hopefully, I'll have part 6 up this weekend assuming the next 48 hours don't turn me into a drooling zombie.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 1/17/2007 01:52:00 PM | 5 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Friday, December 29, 2006

The Pirate's Plank

Okay, let's talk about the number one issue that has come across on the tech support forums and E-mails for "SiN Episodes: Emergence," the Radek office trap.

Issue: Player trapped after Radek leaves office
Severity: 1
Repro Steps: There are two ways that this could happen with the initial release of the game.

1. The player is on a very slow machine, and does not watch Radek go through the door. (28 reports)
2. The player made a massive mess in the crane control room, and Radek has to teleport past some debris. (11 reports)

Cause: If Radek was either unable to cross through the doorway or unable to find a path to his final pathnode, he would teleport from the doorway to his final pathnode, skipping the trigger that he had to pass through to trigger the appearance of Elexis.

We didn't see that behavior at all during testing. Even with less than .1% of our customers at the time experiencing it, we still went through and got it fixed in the first update over Steam.

After that update, we were still getting reports of this behavior. Obviously it shouldn't happen, because the trigger was grown to encompass Radek's final pathnode, so there was absolutely no way that the Elexis trigger brush wouldn't be tripped.

We managed to track down a copy of the warez version of the game, and used that to isolate out the problem. In this case, the same behavior as above was still happening, but the cause was changing because of how the warez morons decided to crack the game.

The last four months of testing on the game were spent using an internal Steam server. The reason that we were testing over Steam was that Source and Steam act differently when shown loose files as opposed to files inside GCF's. When a file is inside a GCF, it is considered an official release. When it's a loose file, it is considered a mod. The warez morons unpacked the files from the GCF's and modified a DLL file. As a result, it triggered the behavior change in the engine.

Here's what happened. "SiN Episodes" loaded up SE1_U4Lab02 and tried to load the pathnode file. The pathnode file was missing some file system metadata, so the engine thought that the pathnode file was out-of-date. The engine loaded the pathnode file, but then created a new "quick" pathnode file. The "quick" pathnode file is there so that map authors can quickly test their maps before building the full pathnode file. Because of how the map was constructed (dynamic bridge, sealed doors, etc.), the "quick" pathnode file had no link between Radek's start point and his end point.

As a result, if someone using the warez version plays the level and does not die, Radek uses the "out-of-date" pathnode file and completes his path, but is still subject to the previously mentioned potential causes. However, if the player exits the game after loading the level or restarts, or dies on the level and reloads, or starts a new game after getting to U4Lab02 once, Radek will never trigger the Elexis portion of the cutscene, and the player will be trapped.

In this case, a bug was introduced by the pirates because it was causing a codepath to be executed with the production data that would never be executed with production data.

On the upside, because of how the savegame files work, we could tell by looking at the savegame whether or not the player was using a legitimate copy of the game. On the downside, the vast majority of the people I spoke with who were asking for support for this issue knew that they were using a pirated version of the game...they just didn't care.

And with that, I weep for the future of the PC games industry. People felt that they were entitled to support, even for a copy of the game that they didn't buy. Once a sense of entitlement falls on a crowd, no amount of education will change their ways.

Labels: Piracy, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 12/29/2006 09:30:00 AM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Thursday, December 28, 2006

The Nerve...

Okay...it's been almost a month since I was laid off from Ritual. Almost a month of not having to deal with idiots asking for support for the pirated version of the game. Aside from still not having my personal belongings back, my time at Ritual was starting to fade from my memory...until 15 minutes ago.

What do I receive in my E-mail box?

From: wilton wilfred [address removed]
how can i get pass through the office of viktor radek? i've been standing for half an hour after he spoke and i realise that something wrong here. after searching for an answer, somebody said that i have to install steam. is this required? heck,i just want to finish this game.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

My reply:

I'm glad that you want to finish the game.

However, the issue you are encountering was introduced by the pirate group Provision when they broke the Steam copy protection on the game.

If you want to finish the game, please purchase a legitimate copy. If you purchase over Steam, it is available for $14.99, or if you want a copy at retail, it's $19.99.

Perhaps if more people had bought the game instead of pirating it, I wouldn't have been laid off from Ritual.

Sincerely,
Michael

I'd been trying to decide whether or not to post my post-mortem of this particular issue or not. Guess I should finish writing that fucker up so I'll stop getting E-mails like this one.

And people thought I was making shit like this up...

Labels: Piracy, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 12/28/2006 01:27:00 PM | 5 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

SiN and USK (Part 1)

We're going to start out this discussion with the living: civilians and unarmed enemies.

For the U.S. release, we had a couple of set behaviors for anyone who wasn't armed if gunfire went off near them or they witnessed an attack. They would run to safety, crouch and express fear. If they had no "safety zone," they would just crouch and express fear.

For the most part, our playtesters left the unarmed people alone. One person made a concerted effort to kill everyone, armed or not, but that was an anomaly.

In the final iteration of the game, there was only one civilian in the game after you received your magnum, and he is run over by a semi truck within a few moments, so very few people get a chance to try to kill him.

When we got our USK report back, one of the items discussed was that you could kill people who have expressed fear. The logic behind this being that they felt that it was inhumane to kill someone who was obviously afraid of you and was not attacking you.

At this point, we had two choices. We could take the easy road and just make civilians and unarmed enemies (like the U4 technicians) invincible. Had we done this, people who purchased the USK version would get an experience similar to other games where when they come across a civilian, they can't really do anything…the civilian is just for show. The second choice would be to make it so that civilians don’t express fear to the player.

We decided to go the second route. We did this for two reasons. First, it seemed really dumb to us to have something in the game that couldn’t be shot, especially given how important gunplay was in "SiN Episodes." Second, there was one place in U4 Labs 02 where if you were unable to shoot the lab workers, the player could be blocked from progressing through the remainder of the game.

The final result for owners of the USK version is that civilians ignore threats caused by the player. They’ll still fear mutants in cutscenes, but they no longer beg for their lives before you kill them.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 11/29/2006 10:45:00 AM | 0 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Monday, November 27, 2006

SiN and USK (Intro)

As some of you may know, we went through a fairly painful process of getting "SiN Episodes: Emergence" ready to ship in Germany.

Our initial submission was denied a USK rating, which essentially meant that USK felt that BPjM would have indexed it, and as a result, we had to go back to the drawing board and try to find the smallest possible changes that we could make that would get the game passed USK.

There were very few changes made to the USK version, and I'm going to be discussing six of those changes over the next few weeks. I'll be discussing the change itself, the reasoning behind the change, and show that there are no gameplay ramifications from the changes.

The six changes that we are going to be going over are ragdoll physics, fire, gibs, jetpack deaths, civilians/unarmed characters and applied forces. Saddle up, this is going to get interesting...

A few ground rules. First, I will not be posting any instructions on how to revert these changes. Second, comments linking to instructions on how to revert these changes will be deleted immediately. It's unfortunate, but these are the rules that I have to abide by in order to bring you this list.

Labels: SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 11/27/2006 06:53:00 PM | 0 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Sunday, September 03, 2006

[SiN] Vista and SiN

(Note: All of the information here is accurate as of Vista build 5536 [Pre-RC1]. This information may change in later builds.)

(Update: For updated information, go to VistaGameDoctor.com. You'll need three seperate articles: Steam, SiN (Steam release) and SiN Episodes: Emergence.)

Here is the compatibility information that you are going to need to get "SiN" and "SiN Episodes: Emergence" working in Vista.

Steam: In a default configuration, Steam does not work on Windows Vista. In order to get Steam to work in Vista, you must right-click on your desktop shortcut for Steam and select "Run as administrator," even if you are running in an administrator-level account. If you do not, Steam will either error out after the next Steam update, or will fail to update your GCF's when a patch is released.

If you do elevate it to administrator privledges, you will not be able to close Steam by right-clicking on the tray icon and picking "Exit." After doing that, you will have to open Task Manager, list all tasks for all processes, and end-task Steam.exe manually.

Clarification: Steam will work fine until either the Steam client is updated, or you restart Steam to get an update to a game. At that point, you'll encounter issues due to the way that Vista handles file system security for the Program Files folder.

SiN Episodes: Once Steam is working in Vista, "SiN Episodes: Emergence" works fine using the built-in drivers for nVidia and ATI. In other words, as long as you have a DX9.0c-level card, you should be fine.

SiN: At the moment, "SiN" will not work in Vista without a driver update. Vista only ships with installed support for OpenGL v1.1 (driver: Microsoft Corporation GDI Generic version 1.1.0). You will have to update to the latest Vista drivers for your video card in order to play "SiN" either from the original disc or from Steam.

Labels: SiN Episodes, Vista

posted by Michael Russell at 9/03/2006 12:58:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Saturday, July 22, 2006

[Games] The Hidden Cost Of Piracy

I don't think it's any secret that a warez group called Provision pirated "SiN Episodes: Emergence" about three hours after it was released over Steam.

There are lots of comments that people make trying to justify piracy. "A person who pirates wouldn't buy it anyway." "It's try before you buy, so you only support people who deserve it." "I'm poor and can't afford $20." "We aren't stealing from you, we're stealing from the faceless corporation." "We're only stealing the bits, not the merchandise."

Even if you buy all of those, I can still say that you're stealing resources from me. Why? Because you're stealing my time.

When we shipped "SiN Episodes: Emergence," we had two small config bugs that slipped out and affected a small percentage of our users. We spent the next week working on fixes for that bug and others, testing the fixes, and getting the fix up over Steam so that people wouldn't be affected by it. During that first week, I received about 230 support complaints specifically regarding these two config bugs.

The fix was released on May 17, along with several other miscellaneous fixes. The patch was released over Steam and people who owned legitimate copies were updated and were happy.

Between May 17 and May 24, I still had over 200 support complaints about the config bug. It was fixed, the fix was out and released, but I was still getting support complaints.

I E-mailed each one back individually, trying to get additional information. The responses I got back from the people who replied were insane.

"Did you let Steam install the update?" "What's Steam?"

"Where did you buy the game?" "Over Steam." "What is your Steam ID?" "I don't have one."

"Have you tried running the installer?" "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer. It's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game."

For the last five weeks, support requests for the pirated version of the game outnumbered support requests from legitimate purchasers. Last week, the pirates outnumbered the true customers by almost five to one. It takes time and resources to track down solutions to people's problems. I spent seven hours searching for answers to one guy's problem just to find out that when I asked him a question regarding a setting, he was checking on his friend's machine for the "right" answer and then on his machine and if the two didn't match, he was reporting the "right" answer so I wouldn't know he had a pirated version.

I really pride myself on the level of service I have been able to provide to our customers, but it is really disheartening to see the number of people who not only stole our game, but then steal my time in an effort to truly get something for nothing.

Mind you, I'm one guy that's been handling support for what could be called a niche product. Since release, I've spent more time handling customer service than I have handling the responsibilities that I have in my department. If I'm getting overwhelmed by the freeloaders, can you imagine what it's like for other companies with more pervasive products?

Support isn't free. Support personnel have to get trained, get paid, get benefits, etc.

The copies of "SiN Episodes: Emergence" that you buy pay my salary. Retail copies of Windows are more expensive partly because Microsoft has to factor support costs into those sales. More and more companies are moving to console games, not only because they make more money (they do because there's less piracy in the console space), but because they save major bank on support costs.

There are companies that love the PC and will stick with it for richer or poorer, but until we can find a way to better reduce piracy in the PC space, I'm afraid that it's only going to be for poorer.

(Edit 7/24, 6:22pm: Fixed typo. Edit: 10/24, 9:20am: Added sponsored links, tags.)

Labels: Game Development, Piracy, Rant, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 7/22/2006 09:40:00 PM | View blog reactions

Thursday, May 11, 2006

[Piracy] SiN: Ep (Not Work Safe)

[ temper on ]

Evidently, this lame-ass pirate group going by the handle of "PROViSiON" decided to dedicate some hours so that episode one of "SiN Episodes" would be what is known as a "0-day warez release." Fucking smacktard pieces of shit.

The game is $20. $20. All this industry has been hearing from fuckers like this is "Oh, drop the price and we won't pirate because we poor people won't have to." So, we self-fund the game entirely, drop the price to something to a level where we stand a chance of breaking even, and what do you know! They pirate our game anyway!

So if you know any members of this "PROViSiON" group, do me a favor...kick them in the fucking nuts and piss on their face. When they ask why, just say, "Well, normally I have to go to a fetish club and spend $20 to do that to someone, but you walked by and I figured, 'What the hell, I'll do it for free.'"

Assholes.

[ temper off ]

By the way, if anyone who downloads the warez version comes to one of the sites and asks for support and I find out that you warezed the game, just be warned that you haven't seen temper yet.

Labels: Piracy, Rant, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 5/11/2006 07:17:00 PM | 10 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

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